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.)

I’m live-blogging the Biden-Palin debate over at The Reaction. I’ll be updating frequently over the next couple of hours. If you’re interested, click here.

Here’s a sample of some of what the media was saying yesterday: WSJ: “Palin Proved to Be Formidable Foe in Alaska Debates.” NYT: “Past Debates Show a Confident Palin, at Times Fluent but Often Vague.” LAT: “Underestimate Palin at your own risk, former rivals say.” ABC: “Sarah Palin, Debate Champ.” HuffPo: “Why Sarah Palin Is A Better Debater Than You Think.” Politico: “On small stage, Palin scored big debate wins.” You...

I was going to write a post debunking Palin’s response to Katie Couric’s question about the separation of Church and State, but my friend Steve Benen, who knows a lot more about this than I do, beat me to it. Make sure to read Steve’s post here, as well as this interesting article by his former colleague from Americans United for Separation of Church and State, Rob Boston, on Jefferson’s famous letter to the Danbury Baptists, from 1802. In brief: While Biden takes a firm stand...

(Am I spending too much time on Palin? Maybe. But it’s important for voters to keep in mind not just what a joke she is but what it says about McCain that he picked such as joke as his running mate. Plus, you know, there’s the debate tomorrow.) My “Painful Palin” series — for the first two installments, see here and here — looks at the Palin-Couric interview, parts of which are still being aired on CBS. Here’s the deal with Part 3 (transcript and video here):...

According to the Politico’s Jonathan Martin, Sarah Palin is about to be re-introduced, “tak[ing] a more forward-leaning approach and do[ing] additional interviews in the weeks ahead.” First, though, she’s spending some quality time at “McCain’s cabin in Arizona” prepping for Thursday night’s veep debate. And “do[ing] a round of conservative talk radio interviews.” After all, since she can’t quite cut it with Gibson and Couric, and...

The House of Representatives a short while ago voted 228 to 205 against the bailout compromise worked out over the weekend. (It needed 218 votes to pass.). As CNN is reporting, “[a]bout 60% of Democrats voted for the measure, but less than a third of Republicans backed it.” Quick notes: – Kucinich was right. – Bush is apparently “very disappointed” with the result. Presumably much of his disappointment is directed at the renegades in his own party. – Boehner:...

An AP investigation has found that “[t]hough Sarah Palin depicts herself as a pit bull fighting good-old-boy politics, in her years as mayor she and her friends received special benefits more typical of small-town politics as usual.” There are simply too many examples of corruption and cronyism to repeat here. Many of them are fairly small-time, but they fit in with the pattern we’ve seen so far, the pattern that includes Troopergate and her lobbying to secure earmarks both for...

In general, I thought, McCain looked and sounded bitter, vindictive, and small. While Obama was presidential throughout, agreeing with McCain on occasion, exuding generosity and expansiveness and, above all, presenting a substantive articulation of his policies and positions, McCain dismissed him repeatedly as “naive,” turning much of the debate into an ad hominem assault. He never even looked at Obama. Which is not to say that Obama won, let alone won easily. I’d say it was roughly...

In a column published yesterday on McCain’s “fundamentals,” the NYT’s David Brooks delved into the myth of McCain and came out with all the usual drivel. “I still think of him first in the real world of governing, not in the show-business world of the election,” Brooks wrote. McCain is “a humble man,” “an unfailingly candid man,” a man of far too many accomplishments to list in a single column. Oh, Brooks isn’t at all happy with “the...

Well, there was more disturbing hilarity last night during Palin-Couric II, with Couric trying to be nice and Palin getting lost here, there, and everywhere. (For my comments on some of Palin-Couric I, see here.) It’s so bizarre, in a way. Here’s Palin, running for vice president, on the national stage, saying silly and stupid things and at times unable even to answer Couric’s questions in any coherent, let alone meaningful, way, while showing a complete lack of experience, engagement,...

It’s amazingly insane, not to mention insanely amazing, how appallingly low the expectations are for Sarah Palin. But that’s what happens when she’s kept away from the press and restricted to partisan rallies, when she’s only allowed to speak for herself, or rather to recite the lines that have been programmed into her, during controlled interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric, not to mention during an idiotic infomercial with Sean Hannity. And it’s what happens...