In 2004, my sister Joannie and her husband Mike worked for the Barack Obama campaign for Senate in Illinois. Karen canvassed for Obama in Pennsylvania. I worked with a local Obama office here, smiling and dialing to voters in swing states, and then canvassed in Nevada.
Supporting our hometown boy Obama has been a family affair. So when I say "we did it," I am writing about how we feel, and how every Obama volunteer feels, as part of a much improved ground game, one I think can be even stronger the next time around.
Sure, McCain was behind the eight ball given how poorly Bush ran the Republican Party into the ground, but I feel no sympathy for those who elected Dubya a second time.
And so the United States of America has its first black President. Has a black man or woman ever been president of a country in which blacks are a minority?
President Obama, you can start measuring the drapes now.
The New Yorker examines McCain and Palin's criticism of Barack Obama as a socialist and finds in it a bit of hypocritical name-calling between pot and kettle. McCain himself came out in support of the same tax structure as Obama in 2000.
Of course, all taxes are redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,
We (I use the royal We now when referring to Hulu) added a section of our site for movie trailers today. More to come, but having not been to the movies recently, I feel out of the loop on what's coming. For example, this trailer for Valkyrie, apparently based on a true story. Tom Cruise tried to kill Hitler--who knew?
In watching the latest Harry Potter trailer, I was reminded of a recent talk given by Brad Bird at Skirball here in LA. They offer a series in which luminaries come in to speak and screen a movie of their choice. Bird had chosen to screen Dr. Zhivago, an epic romance, since he's writing and directing a live action epic romance of his own, 1906, about the earthquake and fire in San Francisco in said year. (Brad Bird moving to live action--who knew? Not me, I'm oblivious to all but the latest poll numbers. Nov. 5 can't come quickly enough)
Bird noted that he preferred the Lord of the Rings trilogy over the Harry Potter movies because the former honored the spirit of the books whereas the latter attempted to hew to the literal word. Movies and books are different mediums, something I strongly agree with, and have very different strengths.
His favorite of the Harry Potter movies was the third, the same choice as most every person I've spoken to. I have not read any Harry Potter books other than the first, and perhaps that's aided my enjoyment of the movies.
Something my old roommate and movie buff Scott said about trailers has always stuck with me: they are a brutish art form. That said, they are useful case studies in the art of condensed storytelling.
It's a bit hard to tell many of the new online music services apart, from Pandora to Last.fm to iLike and so on. Lala adds a bit of a twist. It's a streaming music service that lets you play any of its 6 million tracks once for free, and $0.10 to unlock it for unlimited future online playing. The twist is that it will also search your own music library, and if any of your tracks are in its 6 million track library, those will be unlocked for unlimited online streaming as well. So instead of having to keep your home computer on all the time to act as your music server, you can save some electricity bills and just stream your music from lala through a browser.
It's one step closer to the universal music locker online, an idea which has seemingly been batted around for years now. The main problem right now is that 6 million tracks is not that large a selection for anyone with reasonably diverse musical tastes, so it's far from an endgame. But the concept is appealing.
Alex Majoli is a Magnum photographer who has shot in China, the Congo, and Iraq, and he has won honors like U.S. National Press Photographers Association's Best of Photojournalism Magazine Photographer of the Year Award (boy do they need an acronym).
His tool of choice? A simple Olympus digital point and shoot.
Some of his photos and some elaboration on his techniques here.
Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.
During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.
"You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?"
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"Finally, the horrific misrule of the Democrats has been brought to a close," House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL) told reporters. "Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. Mercifully, we can now say goodbye to the awful nightmare that was Clinton's America."
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"We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."
To think I laughed at the time. Please let this long tragicomedy end.
In the NY Times op-ed piece Blue State Blues, Gail files the latest installment in what seems like a U.S. Presidential Election year tradition, the rant against the Electoral College. I agree. The marginal value of a vote in Ohio or Florida is worth too much more than a vote in states that nearly always go blue or red when deciding our future President. It's a wonder so many voters in those states, like California, New York, or Texas, even bother.
Jon Hamm hosted SNL yesterday, and to nobody's surprise participated in a Mad Men segment. The best bit was the moment spoofing Don Draper's legendary pitches, which are my favorite part of Mad Men. Here it is, complete with music lifted straight from the Kodak Carousel pitch from the final episode of season one.
McCain's campaign is running robocalls and TV ads in a variety of key battleground states. They are, if not sleazy, then at least dishonest. TPM has a good compilation of which ones are running in which states, along with audio or video files for some of them.
When asked to defend the robocalls, McCain said that they were absolutely accurate.
After having been savaged by robocalls by the Bush campaign in 2000, McCain has chosen to fulfill a screenwriter's dream by turning to the same tactic in his own bid for power. There is a Greek tragedy here just ripe for a made-for-tv movie in, say, mid-2009.
Sure, these robocalls appeal to some of his base, but most independent voters are seeing right through these for what they are, just as Colin Powell and others have in endorsing Obama.
If there has been a positive result in this election it's that the crucible of the campaign trail has revealed the characters of both candidates and drawn a sharp contrast between them. This election has shrunk McCain before our very eyes. The wisdom of the Palin pick has followed a Flowers for Algernon trajectory.
My other curiosity about robocalls: people sit through these? I detest being bothered by human telemarketers but ironically feel insulted when they can't even pay for a human to do the job, leaving it to a recording. As soon as I detect the unnatural pause that indicates a recording kicking in, I hang up.
If you think today's political ads are negative, check out some historical political tv ads. Here, for example, is perhaps the most famous ad of all time, the Daisy Girl ad, created by the ad agency DDB and run just once on TV by Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater.
LBJ crushed Goldwater in the election.
Of course, while McCain hasn't shown an ad with Obama flying a plane into the Empire State Building, we still have a week and a half to go and McCain just had his worst polling day yet. If the McCain campaign goes that route, I suggest Obama run an ad of McCain wandering around the White House in his pajamas, drooling and mumbling incoherently, while elsewhere Palin stands in her enormous walk-in closet flipping through one of several hundred designer suits mumbling, "Ooh, you betcha!"
As usual, a voice of sanity with the credibility of billions of dollars behind him.
Today people who hold cash equivalents feel comfortable. They shouldn’t. They have opted for a terrible long-term asset, one that pays virtually nothing and is certain to depreciate in value. Indeed, the policies that government will follow in its efforts to alleviate the current crisis will probably prove inflationary and therefore accelerate declines in the real value of cash accounts.
Equities will almost certainly outperform cash over the next decade, probably by a substantial degree. Those investors who cling now to cash are betting they can efficiently time their move away from it later. In waiting for the comfort of good news, they are ignoring Wayne Gretzky’s advice: “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been.
I am as exhausted as I've been in a long time having just returned from a long weekend of canvassing and rallying for Obama in Las Vegas. Nevada has traditionally leaned red, and it went to Bush in 2000 and 2004. Polls shows a near coin toss right now in Nevada. Its five electoral votes may not mean much, but just as a symbol, we (I use the royal we, my support for Obama being no secret) would desperately love to win it this time around.
It was an eventful and exciting weekend for team Obama:
The Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama. Growing up in Chicago, I was used to seeing their blue masthead bleed red election after election, so this endorsement is a pleasant surprise.
Many Americans say they're uneasy about Obama. He's pretty new to them.
We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party's nominee for president.
We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.
The change that Obama talks about so much is not simply a change in this policy or that one. It is not fundamentally about lobbyists or Washington insiders. Obama envisions a change in the way we deal with one another in politics and government. His opponents may say this is empty, abstract rhetoric. In fact, it is hard to imagine how we are going to deal with the grave domestic and foreign crises we face without an end to the savagery and a return to civility in politics.
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This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party's nominee for president.
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McCain failed in his most important executive decision. Give him credit for choosing a female running mate--but he passed up any number of supremely qualified Republican women who could have served. Having called Obama not ready to lead, McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. His campaign has tried to stage-manage Palin's exposure to the public. But it's clear she is not prepared to step in at a moment's notice and serve as president. McCain put his campaign before his country.
Obama chose a more experienced and more thoughtful running mate--he put governing before politicking. Sen. Joe Biden doesn't bring many votes to Obama, but he would help him from day one to lead the country.
Colin Powell endorsed Obama this morning. It was once thought that he might be the first African-American to be President, but it was not to be. But his part in this saga was still to be played, and today was that day. Ken texted me from the East Coast at around 9am PST: "Powell endosed Obama on MtP." It was the perfect start to the morning and fired up the volunteer team for the morning rally in Chinatown.
Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich said on ABC's "This Week": "What that just did in one sound bite -- and I assume that sound bite will end up in an ad -- is it eliminated the experience argument. How are you going to say the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, former national security adviser, former secretary of state was taken in?"
Someone was indeed trying to manipulate the prediction market Intrade to boost McCain's numbers.
It's often written that the Republican ground game won them the White House in 2000 and 2004. The terminology similarity to football is not the only apt comparison. As in football, where the ground game tends to grind out yards, three, four at a time, the ground game in politics is hard work.
This was more vivid for me this weekend in the Vegas desert heat as I strolled from house to house in various Clark County neighborhoods. But while economists wonder why people vote because it's irrational (one vote is so unlikely to make a difference), volunteering feels more sensible. If each of us can reach ten, twenty, fifty people, and if we can encourage a few extra people to get out and vote, or convince a few undecideds to vote for Obama, then the multiplier effect lends our efforts feel numerically significance.
Andrew Sullivan, writing about the ground game, says Obama's "major enemy is complacency among the young."
That's fair given weak youth turnout historically, but my generation (X) and generation Y are not happy about the label, and I believe the pundits are severely underestimating the youth vote and impact. I can't remember an election in which more people my age and below have been so active, not only contributing money but flying all over the country to do phone banks, voter registration, canvassing, rallying, and everything in between. If the Republicans are counting on youth complacency this time around, they are going to be disappointed. We don't just want to win the election (what Obama dismisses as the 50-plus-1 governing model, referring to the idea that it's enough to win 50% of the country's support plus one additional vote), we want to make states that have always gone red go blue.
Did our efforts this weekend make a difference? Saturday was the first day of early voting in Nevada. After a rally this morning, a local Obama organizer shared some figures with us. ~15,000 early votes were cast on Saturday, and 64% of them went Obama.
Barack Obama is going to air a long-form 30 minute(!) ad on Fox on Oct. 29, and MLB has agreed to shift the start of Game 6, if it's needed, by 15 minutes from 8:20pm to 8:35pm EST to accommodate it. The ad will also air on NBC and CBS. Lest anyone think it was all altruism...
The blessing from MLB clears the way for Fox to air the promo and collect upward of $1 million in ad revenue for the half hour, more than what either CBS or NBC was charging.
Lest any Republicans out there think this is favoritism, note that the NFL moved this season's opening game so it wouldn't interfere with McCain's acceptance of the Republican nomination at the RNC.
I can't recall ever seeing a 30 minute political ad. Very curious. What will the format be? One long speech? A mix of edited footage and talking heads?
I don't recall watching the Alfred E. Smith Foundation Dinner before, but it surprised me to see McCain and Obama making jokes about issues that seemed to have them exasperated with each other just a day earlier at the final debate.
Both candidates are quite funny, more so than the Thursday SNL in which, on one day turnaround, the SNL crew seem content to re-enact the debate and read most of the same lines that were actually spoken in the debate.
Check it out.
It's all in good fun, but there is some political scoring going on. When Obama jokes around about things like his middle name, or where he was born, or who he pals around with, and when McCain laughs at said jokes, those lines of attack lose a bit of heat.
McCain can be charming when he's willing to use a bit of humor which is why it's been so surprising that he's been so churlish in the debates.
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McCain finally kept his appointment with David Letterman.
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Joe the Plumber's story doesn't really check out. He's not a licensed plumber, he's not earning $250K+ (he'd actually save more money under Obama's tax plan under his current income), and he has no specific plans to buy that business he spoke of. He was vetted about as well as Palin.
Not that it's a big deal. Whether Joe the Plumber's story was true or not, he was entitled to ask the question, and Obama answered it. If he was making the $280K he claimed, he would be paying higher taxes on the marginal $30K under Obama's tax plan. I don't think it's a great loss for Obama as most middle class voters aren't worrying about their surplus income above $250K.
NY Magazine profiles Nate Silver, whose hobby has now made him more famous than his day job, at least to the public at large. To me, he's been the guy that's built PECOTA, a baseball forecasting tool, for Baseball Prospectus, a site I've been reading and subscribing to pretty much since it started. But to most people now, he's the guy who built the models powering FiveThirtyEight.com, the thinking man's go-to site for electoral projections.
Silver’s site now gets about 600,000 visits daily. And as more and more people started wondering who he was, in May, Silver decided to unmask himself. To most people, the fact that Poblano turned out to be a guy named Nate Silver meant nothing. But to anyone who follows baseball seriously, this was like finding out that a guy anonymously running a high-fashion Website turned out to be Howard Cosell.
The key insight that led to his unique spin on interpreting the polls:
As the primaries went on, however, Silver, who had been writing an anonymous diary for the liberal Website Daily Kos, made an observation about this year’s voters: While the polls were wobbling wildly state-to-state, the demographic groups supporting each candidate, and especially Clinton and Obama, were remarkably static. He wasn’t the only one who noticed this, of course—it was a major narrative theme of the campaign. One pundit summed it up by saying that Clinton had “the beer track
I went to the re-opening celebration concert for the Hollywood Palladium tonight. Jay-Z performed with an assist from DJ AM and a special guest cameo by T.I.
Between songs, mid-concert, Jay-Z stopped to talk politics. He's clearly an Obama supporter, and he offered his "homeboy" some advice (paraphrased from memory):
"I shouldn't talk about this...but f*** it, I'm an American citizen. Free speech and all that. If I were to give my boy some advice on how to deal with homegirl -- you know, 'you betcha' -- I'd tell him..."
And he jumped straight into "99 Problems":
"If you're havin' girl problems i feel bad for you son
Jerry Jones said of Cowboys cornerback Adam "Pacman" Jones, who got in a fight with a bodyguard despite already have been suspended by the NFL previously for misbehavior: "He’s literally on a high wire without a net."
Which sounds dangerous indeed, more so than tempting the NFL to slap him with a further penalty. Though perhaps suspension is a welcome thing, if he was indeed on that high wire without a net.
Read: "He's figuratively on a high wire without a net."
