My Headline of the Day comes from no less a media behemoth than The New York Times: Second-Guessing the Vice-Presidential Pick A few thoughts: 1) Duh. 2) The Times is a bit late getting to this. The second-guessing has been going on for weeks. Some of it started right away. There aren’t any new revelations here, though recent comments from Ridge and Graham, critical of the Palin pick, are right up front. 3) Let the blame game continue. The article’s author, Adam Nagourney, notes, dryly,...

(Sorry, I meant to post this over the weekend. But, as far as I’m concerned, the story hasn’t gotten nearly enough attention.) From NYT’s The Caucus: A new e-mail making the rounds among Jewish voters in Pennsylvania this week falsely alleged that Mr. Obama “taught members of Acorn to commit voter registration fraud,” and equated a vote for Senator Barack Obama with the “tragic mistake” of their Jewish ancestors, who “ignored the warning signs in the...

Just like in St. Louis last weekend, Obama’s rally in Denver yesterday was another “wow” event on the campaign trail: over 100,000 people were there. And his speech, some of which was what we’ve heard before, was in part a direct response to Palin’s recent claim that there is a real America and, presumably, an un-real America: There are no real or fake parts of this country. We are not separated by the pro-America and anti-America parts of this nation – we all love...

With the race supposedly tightening, for so we are being told, McCain was on Meet the Press yesterday morning. Among other things, he … guaranteed victory? Here’s what he said: “I guarantee you that two weeks from now, you will see this has been a very close race, and I believe that I’m going to win it. We’re going to do well in this campaign, my friend. We’re going to win it, and it’s going to be tight, and we’re going to be up late. To be precise,...

In today’s Washington Post, former Bush speechwriter David Frum argues that the Palinization of the McCain presidential run, while igniting the base, has badly backfired: There are many ways to lose a presidential election. John McCain is losing in a way that threatens to take the entire Republican Party down with him. The race is basically over: “The very same campaign strategy that has belatedly mobilized the Republican core has alienated and offended the great national middle, which...

Believe it or not, Sarah Palin gave a “policy” speech yesterday in support of (and in support of full government funding of) the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). In her speech, Palin stressed that “the most valuable thing of all is information” and that “[e]arly identification of a cognitive or other disorder, especially autism, can make a life-changing difference.” However, she also criticized certain “pet projects,” such as fruit-fly...

Don’t expect the likes of Bill Kristol or Charles Krauthammer, or even David Brooks, to switch allegiance anytime soon, or ever, but the list of Republicans — and fairly high-profile ones — coming out for Obama is getting longer and longer: Colin Powell Ken Adelman Arne Carlson William Weld Now it’s distinguished conservative intellectual Charles Fried, solicitor general during Reagan’s second term and currently a law professor at Harvard — oh, and until just...

Does anyone care that Charles Krauthammer will be voting for McCain? Oh, no, he’s not one of those “wet-fingered conservatives leaping to Barack Obama before they’re left out in the cold without a single state dinner for the next four years,” as if that’s the only reason so many of them are lining up behind Obama, he’s the courageous, trend-bucking conservative who sees things as they really are: it’s Obama who’s gone negative, not McCain, and, yes,...

Question: Do you think you’re intellectual? Palin: Yehhh-sss. Now that’s freakin’ hilarious. (Even if, or perhaps precisely because, she wasn’t trying to be funny.) You can read the full interview, at People, here. ********** Bonus funny: McCain to Imus: “I think she’s the most qualified of anyone recently who has run for vice president to tell you the truth.” Hmmm. More qualified than Gore, Kemp, and Cheney? Even more qualified than McCain’s best pal...

It wasn’t all that long ago — actually, about two and a half weeks ago — that the McCain campaign pulled out of Michigan and set its sights on three key battleground states: Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. (Although he was behind quite decisively in all three.) Well, it now looks like it’s all about Pennsylvania. As Jim Rutenberg of NYT’s The Caucus reported yesterday, McCain is reducing his advertising in five heretofore battleground states: New Hampshire, Wisconsin,...

For those of you who can’t get enough Palin — I’ve pretty much had enough, though, obviously, I’m still paying attention — the L.A. Times has an interesting feature today on Palin’s five-year, four-school, three-state college career. In short, she is “barely remembered at all,” having “left behind few traces.” I don’t think you need to have attended, say, Harvard Law School to be president — and consider that Bush is both a Harvard...

As HuffPo is reporting, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis — he of Fannie and Freddie lobbying infamy — told Hugh Hewitt yesterday, in what was surely a meeting of minds for the ages, that “he is reconsidering using Barack Obama’s relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright as a campaign issue during the election’s closing weeks.” It is apparently McCain himself, taking the high road (or so goes the spin), who has rejected attacking Obama over Wright, given both...

Colin Powell’s recent endorsement of Obama may not have come as much of a surprise — and I’m generally not surprised that Obama has found supporters among Republicans, given the pathetic state of McCain’s vicious and dirty campaign and the extremist state of the GOP these days — but Ken Adelman… well, that’s a different story altogether. If you don’t know him, and not many do, Adelman is a long-time stalwart of the neoconservative foreign policy movement,...

Needless to say, the political world is all abuzz today over Colin Powell’s endorsement of Obama this morning on Meet the Press. Mustang Bobby posted the clips — Powell on MTP, then outside the studio. ********** Needless to say, conservatives are going nuts — or, rather, getting even nuttier — in response: Take Michelle Malkin, for example, who calls Powell’s endorsement “a triumph of hope over reality.” Of course, “reality” for Malkin is a fantasyland...

Barack Obama. No surprise there, though The Washington Post is hardly a bastion of liberalism and pro-Democratic sentiment, regardless of what the finger-pointing self-victimizers of the right may have to say about it. It’s actually not a bad endorsement — well, actually, it’s quite good — with most of it focusing on Obama’s many positive qualities and policy positions, including praising him on foreign policy, health care, education, and the economy. And this is especially...

I actually don’t have a great deal to add today to what I wrote last night about the debate in my long and occasionally rambling live-blogging post. Obama won. Pretty easily. That’s about it. And that’s pretty much the consensus today. One of the best summaries comes, as usual, from TNR’s Noam Scheiber: “[T]he debate in a nutshell: McCain fulminating angrily, if sometimes effectively; Obama yielding more than he should at times, but still deadly on bottom-line differences....

We’ll have a lot of reaction to the debate here at TMV, but, if you’re interested, I’ll be live-blogging it over at my place: Click here. I’ll be updating frequently over the course of the debate and then well into the early morning hours. Come drop by, and, should you feel so inclined, let us know what you think. And of course keep checking back here at TMV. It’ll be a busy evening and night.

I missed this on Monday — so stuffed was I from Canadian Thanksgiving — but Beltway staple Dan Balz wrote a post for WaPo’s The Trail in which he argued that “the real focus now ought to be on Barack Obama. Why? Well, because, “at this point, Obama has a better chance of becoming president than McCain.” Praising McCain for offering “substantive” criticisms of Obama in a recent stump speech and for being his old fighting “underdog” self again,...

For reasons related to my work, I generally don’t blog about Canadian politics. I don’t even think I’ve mentioned the 2008 federal election at all, here or anywhere else. But today, October 14, Canadians went to the polls to vote for their representatives to the federal House of Commons, the lower house of our federal Parliament. Again. For the fourth time in less than eight years. And for the 40th time in our history. I voted several hours ago in my suburban Toronto riding. For...

So McCain and Palin want to smear Obama with guilt by association over his non-relationship with Bill Ayers, eh? Well, perhaps more attention ought to be paid to Palin’s long and ongoing relationship with the extremist Alaska Independence Party (AIP) and its leaders. And perhaps Palin ought to be asked why she has associated — and rather closely (she was a card-carrying member of the AIP) — with extremists who not only support secession from the U.S. but who have “[forged]...

I mentioned the other day that, for McCain-Palin, it has now all come down to Ayers — but that, with desperation deepening, it could be Wright again before too long. As the WSJ reported yesterday, however, despite all the negativity coming out of the McCain-Palin campaign, the Wright card may not be played after all: Top McCain campaign officials are grappling with how far to go with negative attacks on Sen. Barack Obama in the final weeks of what is turning into a come-from-behind effort. Sen....

As I have mentioned before — and it is hardly a radical observation — the McCain-Palin campaign is trying to shift the race away from the issues, and specifically the economy, and towards “character” and “values,” an all-too-common Republican strategy. More specifically, what they want is for the race to be sort of culture war in microcosm: – On one side are McCain the war hero POW and Palin the gun-slinging hockey mom. This is the real America, the Heartland,...

Far be it from me, your humble blogger, to disagree with the great David Brooks, distinguished New York Times columnist and leading conservative intellectual. On Monday, at an event celebrating the redesign of The Atlantic magazine, Brooks said this, among other things: [Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names...

Following up on a recent Gallup tracking poll that has Obama ahead of McCain by 11 points — I want to pick up on a question posed by Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight: What is Obama’s ceiling? Basically, Nate says, “[i]f Obama is ahead by something like 7-8 points ahead nationally, that means that he has persuaded just about all of the persuadables.” In other words, he’s pretty much at or very near his ceiling already, with the Gallup poll something of an outlier, as there...

If you’re interested, I’m live-blogging the debate and its aftermath (media reaction) over at my place tonight: Click here. Feel free to offer your comments. (Obviously, we’ll have a lot of reaction here at TMV, too.)