Rumours that Obama will pick Congressman Rahm Emmanuel to be his Chief of Staff. That's surprising and not a little controversial given that Emmanuel is, well, intense:
And there's the story of how, the
night after Clinton was elected, Emanuel was so angry at the
president's enemies that he stood up at a celebratory dinner with
colleagues from the campaign, grabbed a steak knife and began
rattling off a list of betrayers, shouting "Dead! . . . Dead! . . .
Dead!" and plunging the knife into the table after every
name. "When he was done, the table looked like a lunar landscape,"
one campaign veteran recalls. "It was like something out of The
Godfather. But that's Rahm for you."
...reached at his home by CNN's Mary Snow, Wurzelbacher said it was "news
to him" that he was supposed to be at the McCain rally. Wurzelbacher
said nobody from the McCain campaign confirmed he was attending the
event and called the incident a "miscommunication."
I sincerely hope that this will be my last post about Joe the Plumber, so this may be the final chance to share this rather amusing Daily Show segment:
The Economist has endorsed Obama for President. That's probably a good sign - the Economist is due a win, having picked Kerry (loss), Bush (win), Dole (loss) and Clinton (win).
The Obama-mercial was fairly highly rated across the three broadcast
networks (CBS, Fox and NBC) in the early metered market numbers.
Between the three networks it scored an impressive combined 17.8/29
(household rating/share).
17.8/29 - awesome! No, I'm sorry. I don't understand what that means.
More than 20 percent of American households watched Barack Obama’s 30-minute campaign commercial on Wednesday night, according to preliminary ratings.
Obama's full 27-minute long infomercial [via Marc Ambinder]:
Tom Shales in the Washington Post describes it thusly:
As political filmmaking, "Barack Obama: American Stories" was an
elegant combination of pictures, sounds, voices and music designed not
so much to sell America on Barack Obama as to communicate a
sensibility. The film conveyed feelings, not facts -- specifically, a
simulation of how it would feel to live in an America with Barack Obama
in the White House. The tone and texture recalled the "morning in
America" campaign film made on behalf of Ronald Reagan, a work designed
to give the audience a sense of security and satisfaction; things are
going to be all right.
Look, the performance was scripted, so I won't extrapolate too broadly on Obama's actual character from it, but the person he presented
himself as tonight was a listener, a gatherer of stories, a reporter,
somebody who's interested in the pure, gritty texture of his
interlocutors' lives, and not merely in the way their lives happen to
illustrate his abstract positions. At one juncture, he gave a shout-out
to a woman he'd met in Iowa whose son had recently deployed*. The
reminiscence didn't even entirely have a point. Its goal was to
telegraph that he was listening, even to the random people on the trail
who -- unlike, say, Joe the Plumber -- were never destined to become
symbols.
I love this Joe Biden comment, about the technical excellence of the cut to the live rally:
Mr. Biden, who left the Democratic primary in early January after
finishing fifth in the Iowa caucus, told a close aide afterward, “If I
had known they were that good, I would have dropped out earlier.”
There's been a slight drop-off for Obama, but he's still at just under 50% (49.3%, to be exact). What about Florida?
It's a closer race, but there's little evidence in public polls that McCain is actually gaining on Obama. Note also that Obama could quite plausibly win without Ohio and Florida, if he takes Virgina, Colorado, Iowa and New Mexico (all states where he's leading by six points or more).
So, unless the author of this memo is just inventing this out of whole cloth, it much be the case that McCain's internal polling is based on an electorate model that differs from that of the major polling agencies. This line in the memo has a clue to what the variation might be:
My own view ... and our own weights in our surveys
... reflect a belief that African American turn-out will be at historic
levels, there will be a significant boost with voters 18 to 29 years old, yet
the overall high level of turn-out will begin to mute the increase in the
percentage these sub-groups represent in the overall electorate.
It's an interesting argument, though what I think it ignores is that fact that some groups, particularly younger voters, have much more scope to increase in number, given that their turnout has been so low in the past. From 2004:
The agency also found that turnout rates were closely correlated to a
voter's age. A little more than 73 percent of those between 65 and 74
said they voted, the highest rate for any age group. Those between the
ages of 18 and 24 had the lowest, with 47 percent reported going to the
polls.
And, there are some national polls that show some level of tightening.... Yet, it is important to remember that the presidential election is a
state by state race -- not a national one -- and there remains scant
evidence of a McCain boomlet in key states.
So the two things to watch for are i) whether movement towards McCain in the national polls gathers momentum, and ii) whether this translates into movement in state polling. Only six days left though, so if the race moves, it'll have to move a lot to really put Obama in danger.
An entertaining perspective on the fear of voter fraud by former McCain staffer-turned-pundit Mike Murphy:
Republicans think the Democrats--aided by ACORN, the AFL-CIO, organized
crime, the Comintern and the New York Times--are going to stuff every
urban ballot box from Miami to Chicago with fraudulent ballots cast by
phony, made-up repeat voters. The Democrats fear that the
Republicans--aided by the League of Snarling 'n' Sweaty Southern
Sheriffs, Wal-Mart, Fox News, Dick Cheney and the ghost of J. Edgar
Hoover--are going to use legal shenanigans, menacing hired goons and a
vast army of pseudofascist Christian activists to deny millions of
innocent Americans their right to vote.
