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i got just want i wanted for my birthday: john mccain strapping on his bib and tucking into a big ol’ bowl of shit. today’s q-poll shows huge leads for obama in OH, FL and PA. the rest of us were playing it cool last week, but it looks like gray’s instinct was dead-on.

debate-night pundit commentary notwithstanding, viewers saw obama as the winner by a wide margin, and this week’s polling bears that out, along with reflecting voters’ apparent disgust with mccain’s “suspension” stunt. (the letterman thing probably didn’t help either.) it’s hard to see how the biden-palin debate reverses that dynamic. and don’t forget, voters still have two more opportunities to see mccain, cranky and up past his bedtime, behave like a petulant child as obama debates circles around him.

34 days to go. tick-tock…

So, John McCain’s campaign has been in trouble for the last week or so, as Palin’s popularity has plummeted, his bestest buddy turns out to be (surprise, surprise) collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars for nothing other than assuring that investment banks will have inside access to a McCain White House, and he and pretty much everyone around him have been vomiting gaffes as if their common sense had been up all night shotgunning ipecac. The economic situation others here have been covering well (and I’ve been avoiding, out of sheer terror) is turning into McCain’s worst enemy.

And now, he’s suspending his campaign until some sort of bandaid is signed into law. Nobody appears to be fooled by this gambit.

So now, I ask, with all due sincerity, is there any way in the world for McCain to win this election?

You’d think being a creative type and all that that I’d've gotten around to playing with iMovie much sooner than this, but… no. Anyway, it’s my firm belief after listening to the Dems keep repeating that McCain is “four more years of Bush” and focusing on the economy that the Obama campaign actually needs to take a page out of Bill Belichick’s playbook and go after his opponent’s strength, not his weaknesses. So I made this 30 second spot to make my point:

Took me most of this morning. Lemme know what you think… but be gentle, it’s my first time.

Check out John McCain’s latest 30-second spot, which is airing in here in New Mexico, other battleground states and on national cable:

They sure are grasping at straws; clearly the McCain camp has no new solutions to present — rather than discuss their own candidate they lob grenades at Obama, and the attack isn’t even particularly on-target. The Illinois senator is plenty vulnerable in a lot of areas, but singling him out for actually being likable is just ridiculous.

The best part is at the end, with the little hopeful musical chime and McCain sporting that far-off, wistful twinkle in his eye. It’s like someone decided to beat Obama’s “hope” meme to death with hackneyed gimmicks. Truly amazing.

This morning’s news of Iran testing missiles weighs a bit heavy on the mind as I write this. This story over on the Washington Post doesn’t help. When asked how he felt about increasing exports to Iran under the Bush Administration, McCain smirked as the reporter pointed out that the largest export was cigarettes. “Maybe it’s a way of killing them?”, he chuckled. Then, forgetting how many years it’d been since he done something for the umpteenth time, turned to his chief Internet officer for fact checking… (youTube videos below the fold) Read the rest of this entry »

two likely long-term political outcomes of the 2008 flood occurred to me while in the midst of sandbagging last week:

one, a lot more people are going to be open to the idea of global climate change after this summer. two 500-year floods fifteen years apart should be enough to convince even the most willfully ignorant skeptics that, at a minimum, something is up.

two, there’s vast political capital to be reaped by whoever is smart enough to grasp the magnitude of the disaster and respond accordingly. unlike louisiana, a state where democrats lost influence with the post-katrina exodus of african americans, there will be no diaspora here. instead, as is often the case in situations where normal life has been turned upside-down, the potential for change — and people’s appetite for it — are at a peak. the conventional strategies and demographic calculations that used to keep populations divided and neatly contained within predictable voting blocs are falling apart faster than a poorly constructed levee.

in the last week i’ve seen iowa city hippies working side-by-side with mormon and baptist missionaries, farmers holding bags for college professors to fill, black folks showing up to stack sandbags in exclusively white neighborhoods. it’s funny how little it resembles the red/blue america we’ve been told we were living in. the more people get outside, meet their neighbors, engage with them in common cause, the less interested they become in the old ideological wedges and abstractions: those who pitch in to help are friends, those who obstruct and drag their feet are not.

as george bush arrives in eastern iowa today, more than a week after the need for help was greatest, nobody is particularly pleased to see him. nobody that i talked to was much impressed by michael chertoff’s mealymouthed, empty platitudes after last week’s tornadoes either. but barack obama filling sandbags across the river in quincy makes an impression:

even if it is a staged photo-op, it’s clear from his remarks that obama has at least spent enough time in the affected areas to have some idea what its like for people there, and more importantly, to understand the feeling in the air and the fluidity (no pun intended) of the political situation. that’s one reason why stories like this one are happening all over the region.

and where’s john mccain? who the hell knows, or cares? people here have been too busy to watch or read anything but local news. nobody’s paying attention to mccain or his 20th-century-style campaign. until he actually shows his face here, he’s a nonentity.

meanwhile, bleeding heartland reports on some iowa GOP bloggers who are objecting to state & federal flood relief on the grounds that it’s politically beneficial to democrats. i’ll give them this much: it’s true that actually, y’know, doing the work of government likely redounds to the benefit of those politicians who are doing it. but convening a special legislative session to address the worst natural disaster in our state’s history, they complain, constitutes pandering to special interests — in this case, the people of iowa. this, ladies and gentlemen, is the legacy of the bush presidency, in which nobody ever lifted a finger to help anyone but GOP cronies. from a post-bush republican mindset, any meaningful action whatsoever is only comprehensible as political payoff — why else would you bother?

so, my fondest hope for 2008 is that iowa republicans campaign hard on this theme, that democrats are only pushing the relief effort because they want your vote — as if rewarding effective leadership and punishing incompetence and venality weren’t the whole reason we vote in the first place.

i try to be tolerant of the elderly, but somebody should tell john mccain (bless his heart) about the 21st amendment.

Speaking about his use of the veto pen to eliminate wasteful spending, he declared, “I will veto every single beer, um, bill with earmarks.”

mccain and his allies in the temperance movement can take my beer when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers. this aggression will not stand, man.

you want to talk about hamas and appeasement, do you mr. 28% approval? great. let’s talk about hamas and appeasement:

“If George Bush and John McCain want to have a debate about protecting the United States of America, that is a debate that I’m happy to have any time, any place, and that is a debate that I will win because George Bush and John McCain have a lot to answer for,” Obama said in a campaign speech in South Dakota.

“They’ve got to answer for the fact that Iran is the greatest strategic beneficiary of our invasion of Iraq. It made Iran stronger, George Bush’s policies,” he said. “They’re going to have to explain why Hamas now controls Gaza, Hamas that was strengthened because the United States insisted that we should have democratic elections in the Palestinian Authority.”

“That’s the Bush-McCain record on protecting this country,” he added. “Those are the failed policies that John McCain wants to double down on.”

barack obama was raised in a briar patch, bitches!

in case it isn’t obvious, this is more good cop/bad cop bullshit on behalf of john mccain. from here on out, look for this pattern: outrageous and incendiary attacks made by irrelevant right-wing figures with low mainstream credibility, followed up by heartfelt statements from candidate mccain in which he clucks his tongue and loudly bemoans our divisive politics, conveniently neglecting to contradict or directly address the outrageous claims of the attacks.

credit where it’s due: clinton didn’t fuck around on this one, calling bush’s comparison “offensive and outrageous on the face of it, especially in light of his failures in foreign policy.” is this newfound emphasis on party loyalty a sign she’s beginning to accept the idea that obama has won? is it merely confirmation that she’s not, in fact, extraordinarily stupid and/or evil? or is it just more schizophrenic dithering? who knows, but hillary was a team player on this one, and it’s an encouraging sign. in fact, most of the big party leaders — pelosi, reid, emmanuel — have been impressively on-message and well synchronized lately in their efforts to shift the discussion toward john mccain and the clobbering he’s about to receive. is this what an organized and disciplined democratic party looks like? i’m not sure i’ve ever seen it before, but i could definitely get used to it.