At the time, the story of the party’s demise made headlines larger than those for the sinking of the Titanic, because the elements of the story, interpreted in an ever-so-slightly-post-Edwardian way, made for a tragic tale in the heroic literary tradition.  In many ways, those elements still do, but with a twist that is both modern and at least as ancient as Sophocles.

Terra Nova is an utterly marvelous but rarely performed play about the Scott Expedition written by Ted Tally, who won an Academy Award for his screenplay for Silence of the Lambs.  Tally wrote Terra Nova as a graduate project at Yale, and it went on to win the Obie Award for best Off-Broadway play — a nearly unheard of accomplishment for a first-time effort.  The play is currently being produced in Longmont, Colorado through January 24, and this trailer provides some insights into the history, production, and script.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Tally’s approach to Scott’s story would hardly be embraced by pre-Great-War English.  The newspaper articles from the day focus on self-sacrifice, courage, and refusal to do things the “wrong way.”  Tally turns that into a tale of hubris:  the mistaken ideal that Nature plays by rules recognized by humans, and that sheer force of will can overcome physical realities.  In the heroic, tragic tradition, he raises the question of the hero’s fatal flaw and the role played by fate, or mere chance, in the hero’s demise.

As the story goes, Scott decided that his party would walk to the South Pole and back, eschewing the use of dogs, covering roughly 1,600 miles over ice, rock, crevasses, and deep snow, while rising over 9,000 feet in elevation on the southbound leg, wearing clothing that was mostly wool covered by wind breaking canvas.  His party hauled sledges, sometimes weighing as much as 1,000 pounds, loaded with paraffin oil (for heat in the tent and for melting ice for drinking water), tins of food, shelter, extra clothing, scientific and navigational instruments, and the like.  According to Susan Solomon, author of The Coldest March, Scott and his party ran into the worst weather imaginable.  It was substantially colder than normal, and the following wind Scott expected to help move the sled by sail on the return march never materialized, as the best weather research of the day suggested it would.

Scott’s party endured day after day of temperatures in the -30F to -40F range on its return home, which turned what should have been an easy surface for the sled into a rough, unyielding, high-friction drag on the men.  Snow so cold that the men felt it had the properties of sand slowed them, as did ridges of ice formed by wind that ran perpendicular to their path.  An injury to Edgar Evans, the largest and strongest man in the party, also retarded their progress, as did the later deteriorating condition of cavalryman Titus Oates.  Both died on the march, Oates in spectacular fashion as he ran out of the party’s tent into a blizzard, sacrificing his life to avoid continuing to slow his companions.

Tally does an admirable job of balancing the realities of modern cynicism with the essential nobility of what Scott and his companions attempted to do.  The Great War (WWI) changed Europe in a very fundamental way.  To a large degree, post-war Europe (and Great Britain in particular) traded its unbridled optimism for persistent skepticism about behaviors it once would have lauded as being driven by the most admirable of human traits.  Scott’s reputation, once sterling, has been eroded by modern weighting that tends to value ends over means.

And it is means and ends that are at the center of Tally’s play, as they are the center of so many others.  Tally’s Scott is a classically heroic figure, endowed with both larger-than-life qualities and with a fatal flaw.  Unlike most other heroes, though, Scott’s primary flaw is an insistence on doing things the right way and, secondarily, the hubris that the right way will lead to the right outcome.  Lear’s flaw is foolish vanity, Macbeth’s unbridled ambition, Hamlet’s intellectual paralysis, and Oedipus’ willful ignorance about killing his own father in the face of a prophesy saying he will do just that.  None of those flaws are qualities we tend to admire the way we can admire Scott’s, and like Macbeth, Scott is beset by outside forces beyond his control — the weather and a fatal injury that party member Evans covered up — that beg the question of just how responsible Scott is for his and his party’s demise.  Should he have abandoned the sick and injured members of his party that slowed the others down and, ultimately, cost all of them their lives?  Should he have had dogs haul him to the South Pole, eating the dogs as the sled load lightened, the way his antagonist, Amundsen did?  For that matter, should our soldiers abandon their wounded?  Should we fire the disabled in our businesses, so that the rest of us can prosper?

Where, exactly, does the “entire thing become worthless,” as Tally’s Scott asks of himself?

Terra Nova is an ambitious play for an ambitious ambiguity.  It is not produced often.  Plays that have little name recognition rarely are, regardless of their merit.  If you live in Colorado, or will be visiting before the play closes on January 24, you might be well advised not to miss it.  You can buy tickets by visiting this site or by calling 303-772-5200.  A review of the show is available from the Denver Post.

Bud:  Well, the Bumblin’ Bombers are down by 15 with just under two minutes left, Clint, but the game is far from over.

Clint:  That’s right, Bud.  They have no time-outs left, but if they run their two-minute drill effectively, they can certainly move the ball down the field, get the touchdown, make a two-point conversion, then cover an onside kick, drive for another touchdown, and send the game to overtime.

Bud:  Though the Bombers have been held to only 42 yards in total offense in the second half, this is an explosive team, and they’ve come back from situations like this, before, right Clint?

Clint:  Right you are again, Bud.  Why, just five minutes ago, the Raiders were down by 18, recovered a fumble on the Kickin’ Keesters’ 15-yard-line, and put the game within reach with a field goal.  So, don’t go away folks!  We have an exciting finish coming up right after these messages from our sponsors.

Give me a break.  Sure, I have seen amazing comebacks in many sports (or at least their reruns), but they are extremely rare, and election comebacks of that magnitude are even rarer.  We’re not talking about the Heidi Bowl, here.

Why is this one over?  Let me count the ways.

The polls

Has there been some tightening in the race in recent days?  Yes.  A bit.  But the tightening is well within what’s expected at the end of a campaign.  The Real Clear Politics national average stands at +6 for Obama as I write this, and that’s down from a high of +8 on October 14, which is an average gain of a bit over a tenth of a point per day for McCain — and there are only four days to go before Election Day.

The range (standard deviation) among the major polls is quite wide, and that gives many people pause.  I have pored over the cross tabs and polling methodologies of those polls that publish such things (and not enough do), and it is clear that the discrepancies come from two pollster assumptions:  (1) the number of Democrats vs. Republicans that are interviewed and/or weighted, and (2) a further screen to determine “likely voters.”  Even the polls with the most favorable (for McCain) D vs. R assumptions and the most favorable likely voter screens still have Obama with at least a +3 lead, and those polls anticipating record Democratic turnout and much-heavier-than-normal turnout among African Americans and young voters are producing Obama leads as high as +15.

In other words, it’s highly unlikely that the +3 national number is correct and just as highly unlikely that the +15 number is the right one.  The real number is most likely somewhere in between, and the RCP +6 poll average is a realistic guess.

Ground game

Virtually every story in the media, from Sean Quinn’s excellent series of on-the-road observations on FiveThirtyEight to Liz Sidoti’s piece on the resources both campaigns are putting into the ground game lauds Obama’s organizing effort.  It seems very likely that the Democrats will out hustle the Republicans in getting their voters to turn out come election day, and there is evidence that, in some states, they are already successful in turning out large numbers of Democratic leaners in early voting.

Advertising

Obama has an enormous financial advantage, and has been spending as much as four times what McCain is spending on advertising in battleground states for weeks.  McCain has husbanded his limited resources until the last weeks of the campaign, and is now matching, or is closer to matching, Obama’s ad expenditures in key states.  Still, the Obama campaign announced today that they are taking out new advertising time in Georgia, North Dakota, and McCain’s home state of Arizona. They feel they have an outside shot at winning in those states, and have so much money available, and so much confidence, that they feel they can devote resources to outside shots.

In the meantime, the GOP is changing its message strategy to try to convince voters not to let the Democrats “have it all.”

Clearly, despite public pronouncements to the contrary, both campaigns think this presidential contest is over, and the GOP is trying to salvage what it can.

The Electoral College

According to RCP’s electoral map, Obama currently has 311 votes either solidly in his camp or leaning towards him, and McCain has 142 votes.  Much has been said about how important Pennsylvania is to this election, since this is the only state Kerry took in 2004 that he is now trying to capture.  Sure, Pennsylvania is important, but ONLY if McCain can win ALL of the toss-up states (which gets him to 227 of the 270 votes he needs) and then takes states away from Obama to get the other 43. Without running the table on toss-up states, Pennsylvania is very nearly irrelevant.  IF he runs the table and IF he can take Ohio and Pennsylvania away, he’s still two votes away from victory.  If he  takes only Ohio away (more likely than taking Pennsylvania), then he needs to find a way to get 23 more votes, and that would require taking one of the following combinations:  Virginia, New Mexico, and Nevada; or Virginia, Colorado, and either New Mexico or Nevada.

Some pundits have called this an uphill battle and I suppose it is if, by uphill battle, one means climbing Mt. Everest in a howling blizzard at -50F without oxygen.

This one is over, folks.  Don Meredith, one of the original sportscasters on Monday Night Football, must have felt the same way I do about talking heads who try to make a game that’s over still seem exciting.  He used to sing a little song at the end of a game that seems apt for this presidential race:

Turn out the lights, the party’s over.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Dole, Jesse Helms’ protege and hand-picked successor for his North Carolina Senatorial seat, is facing a very difficult election most pundits think she will lose.  Summoning Helms from his benighted corner of Hell, where he was being repeatedly sodomized for eternity by 72 virgin African American men, Dole obtained the formula for Helms’ come-from-behind victory over African American candidate Harvey Gantt, in the ad shown here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

It remains to be seen if the dark magic Helms used to win against Gantt will work against Hagan; if North Carolina has grown up sufficiently to be immune to this sort of sorcery.  Clearly, Dole doesn’t believe that it has.

Nor does Helms, it would appear.

Or maybe not.

The Rasmussen Reports poll has been the steadiest of all the polls during this election, primarily because of its methodology.  Unlike most polls, Rasmussen’s is automated, meaning that the questionnaire items are always delivered in exactly the same way.  In addition, Rasmussen’s sample size is larger than most, reducing its margin of error, and this large sampling allows its weighting by Republican vs. Democratic responses to be more statistically meaningful.  Since my last post on the polls, Rasmussen has shown very little movement from the +5 to +7 or so for Obama that it’s been showing for over a month.  Other polls have been coming in with not-terribly-credible, outlying numbers (Obama +15 yesterday in a Pew poll and Obama +1 in an IBD/TIPP poll from last Thursday), but Rasmussen has been steady as a rock, and has tracked within a point or two of both the Real Clear Politics (RCP) average and the FiveThirtyEight trend line for at least a month.

This is why it’s so surprising that Rasmussen should move from +7 on Monday to +5 yesterday (a movement I attributed to normal margin-of-error fluctuation), to +3 today.  That’s four points in three days from what has been a rock-steady poll.

Is Rasmussen reflecting reality?  Well, there has been some movement toward McCain since last week.  Obama’s RCP average soared as high as +8 and was down to +6.3 yesterday (it’s down to +5.9 so far today, largely because of the Rasmussen results, so it will change during the day as new polls come in).  I think the +8 number was too high, but +7 certainly wasn’t, so it’s fair to say that McCain has picked up around a polling consensus point, or perhaps a bit more, from his low-water mark.  That would be normal tightening, but a move like the one Rasmussen is reporting — four points in two days — would be something else, entirely, especially since tracking polls reflect multi-day, rolling results, indicating that Rasmussen’s recent results show an even stronger-than-reflected trend for McCain.

Adding further to the confusion is that polls on the presidential race at the state level aren’t showing this sort of trend, at all.  I checked the dates on the most recent state polls to see if they could be lagging the data from the tracking polls and found that, if they are, it’s not by more than a day on average.  I don’t notice any strong movement toward McCain in the battleground states, but perhaps today’s new state polls will demonstrate some of that.

We’ll see.

So, what have we got?  No one knows.  Statistical noise?  A strong movement toward McCain in states so red or blue that no one is bothering to track them anymore?  A real movement toward McCain nationwide that will soon be reflected in the vital battleground states?

Stay tuned.  As polling results accumulate today, we should get a clearer picture of what’s really going on.

West:  “You may recognize this famous quote:  ‘From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.’  That’s from Karl Marx.  How is Senator Obama not being a Marxist if he intends to spread the wealth around.”

Biden:  “Are you joking?  Is … is this a joke?”

West:  “No.”

Biden:  “Is that a real question?”

West:  “That’s a real question.”

Biden, of course, being caught by surprise, could say little that would be of much use on a television screen.  He could have made the point that all taxation does, in some manner, spread wealth.  Even soldiers are paid from tax dollars and, while they earn their pay, there’s no question that they are being paid from taxpayer’s wealth.  Anyone being paid to serve taxpayers, from dog catchers to police, are part of a wealth spreading scheme of some sort.

What Biden should have done, had he not been blind-sided, was to make the point that all Obama is doing is adjusting the progressive income tax structure that was supported by none other than Adam Smith, the patron saint of free markets, and introduced to the US, originally, by Republican Abraham Lincoln.  Later, the progressive income tax was supported so heavily by Republican Teddy Roosevelt that the Constitution was amended to accommodate the income tax, and Roosevelt made it clear, in a speech delivered in 1910, why he thought a progressive tax was the right way to go.

No man should receive a dollar unless that dollar has been fairly earned. Every dollar received should represent a dollar’s worth of service rendered, not gambling in stocks, but service rendered. The really big fortune, the swollen fortune, by the mere fact of its size, acquires qualities which differentiate it in kind as well as in degree from what is possessed by men of relatively small means. Therefore, I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective, a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.

When it comes to redistributing wealth, good ol’ Republican Teddy was pretty clear, wasn’t he?  Maybe Teddy Roosevelt was a Marxist.

What about Republican Ronald Reagan, the modern patron saint of conservatism?  Reagan was a big supporter of the earned income credit (EIC), a distribution from wealthy taxpayers to less wealthy ones, saying it is, “the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress.”   Both Reagan and George Bush the First increased funding for the EIC.  Are they both Marxists?

But perhaps the most effective response might have gone like something like this:

Barbara, I’m glad you asked that question, because words like “socialist” and “Marxist” are getting tossed around by people who are afraid of losing an election, hoping that these words will sway enough votes to get them into the White House, riding on a lie.

The fact is, Barbara, that if there is a socialist or Marxist in this race — and I don’t really believe there is — then it has to be Sarah Palin.

In Sarah Palin’s state of Alaska, every citizen gets a check from the government every year for doing absolutely nothing.  Not for work.  Not for anything they’ve earned.  They get that check just for breathing and living in Alaska.  Last year, that check amounted to $3,269 per taxpayer.  And all for nothing.

Do you know where Alaska gets that money?  They get it mostly from the oil companies that pump oil from the state.  More than half of Alaska’s total tax revenues come from separation taxes, which are basically taxes on oil and minerals taken from the ground.  Another 25% or so comes from corporate taxes.  Because companies are paying so much, Alaska citizens pay no income or state sales taxes.

But they do get a check generated from the wealth those big companies generate.  And there is no other state in the Union that doesn’t require either a sales or income tax from its citizens, yet gives them a check every year from money those citizens didn’t earn.

I don’t really think Sarah Palin is a Marxist, Barbara.  I think that’s a word made up by desperate people who will do anything to win – even tear our country apart by demonizing their opponents.  But if there is a Marxist in this race, Sarah Palin would have to be the one.

Maybe we could get Michele Bachmann to investigate Sarah for being un-American.

So, little Christopher Bizilj is dead, dead, dead.  His father, Dr. Charles Bizilj, director of emergency medicine (if you can believe it) at a hospital in Stafford Springs, Connecticut, got to watch his son bleed out from a head wound on the floor.  And the people who put this little event together have to look at themselves in their mirrors and ask themselves the simple question, “What the FUCK made me think it was a good idea to put a submachine gun in a child’s hands?”

Look, I’m not anti-gun.  I own a lot of guns.  I keep them well out of the reach of any children, and it wouldn’t occur to me to let a child handle a firearm with that kind of power and kick.  I was a rural kid. I got my first Winchester .22 rifle at age 10.  It had a shortened stock to fit my arm, and was a bolt-action, single shot weapon dangerous only to someone who was too ill-trained or too careless to use it properly.  I was neither.

I went through a weeks-long gun safety course before I got that rifle, and even after I got it and took the course, my parents spent two years watching me carefully to make sure I understood that I owned a WEAPON that can kill people and has to be handled with the utmost respect before I could take it out on my own.

Adults who treat guns as though they’re toys should be locked away for a helluva long time until THEY grow the fuck up.  I’m sick to death of hearing about children getting killed because those responsible for watching out for them — didn’t.  Lock ‘em up and throw away the damned key.

It won’t bring little Christopher back, but it would make me feel a helluva lot better.

Today’s polls may very well demonstrate that the GOP will have to make a decision soon, perhaps as soon as today or tomorrow, to either reinforce the McCain campaign with more dollars, or use those dollars to save as many down-ticket Republicans as possible.  It’s a high-stakes game.  Abandon McCain and you abandon the White House for at least four years.  Fail to abandon him until it’s too late, and you lose not only the White House, but extra seats in the Senate and House, as well.

So far today, the polling numbers are grim reading for McCain’s campaign:

• Zogby has Obama at +12 points; 52-40
• Research 2000 has Obama up 51-41
• The stable Rasmussen poll has expanded to a seven-point Obama lead; 52-45
• Gallup has contracted a bit to a six-point Obama lead; 51-45
• Hotline/Diageo is at a five-point Obama lead; 48-43
• GWU/Battleground has moved from a one-point Obama lead two days ago to a four-point lead, 49-45, today, representing Obama’s strength at the end of its three-day polling cycle

Perhaps worse for McCain are some stunning results from Ohio, where McCain simply must win.  Quinnipac gives Obama an astounding, 14-point, 52-38 Ohio lead and the University of Wisconsin puts the Obama lead there at 12 points, 53-41.  The University of Wisconsin also shows Obama with a 10-point lead in Indiana, another state McCain must have, 51-41.

At first glance, the results on Ohio and Indiana look ridiculously high, as do the Zogby and Research 2000 results nationally.  But the Ohio numbers came from separate polls, so if one is an outlier, so is the other.  The national numbers from Zogby are especially convincing, not because Zogby’s numbers have been all that accurate in the past, but because his sampling includes more registered Republicans than most.  That makes his numbers especially bad news for the GOP.  The fact that the Rasmussen poll has moved as much as it has is also telling.  Rasmussen has been the most stable of polls with its large sampling and three-day average.

There are other signs that the McCain campaign is beginning to crack:

On Tuesday, the campaign reduced its advertising in Colorado, Maine, Minnesota, New Hampshire, and Wisconsin.  Of those, Colorado is the most telling, because one of McCain’s two reasonable paths to victory went through Colorado.  If he has conceded Colorado (as it appears he mostly has), then his one remaining path to victory goes through Pennsylvania with its 21 electoral votes, and he is roughly ten points behind there.

Early voting trends in most states appear to favor the Democrats, and young voters, who heavily favor Obama, are turning out in record numbers so far, and anecdotal evidence about the strength of campaign ground games suggests that Obama is well ahead of McCain in turning out the vote on Election Day.

Polls usually ask the question, “If you had to vote today?” to measure voter lean.  Naturally, that lean can be very soft many months out from Election Day, but as November 4 looms nearer, decisions become firmer and voters less subject to persuasion.  It’s not just that McCain is running out of time, but that he’s trying to convince those who are less easily swayed than they were even a month ago to change their votes.

The signs of McCain’s imminent defeat are there for anyone to see.  Surely, even those who control the Republican National Committee’s funds must see them.  The GOP is running out of time and news cycles to cut its losses.  I predict the Republicans will abandon McCain and devote their funds to Senate and House races soon to save what can be saved in what is looking more and more like an impending Obama landslide.

First, the overall picture is that Obama has gained a bit.  The Real Clear Politics average is back up to a 6.9-point lead for Obama after dropping down to nearly four.  That’s the average.  But the spread on the most recent polls is stunning.

• The GWU/Battleground Poll has Obama with a one-point lead, 48% to 47%
• The Pew poll has Obama with a 14-point lead; 53% to 39%
• Gallup, which has taken the cowardly way out by publishing three poll results (“all registered voters,” “likely voters 1″ and (expanded) “likely voters 2″), puts Obama up by seven points in Ilikely voters 1″, and 10 points in “likely voters 2″
• Rasmussen, a high-quality and steady poll, maintains the Obama lead at four points
• Zogby, which tends to lean Republican because it weights its likely voters based on turnout in 2004, gives Obama an eight-point lead, 50% to 42%.

There are a number of other polls yielding various results, but the message is the same:  Obama appears to be gaining, but the standard deviation on these polls is bizarrely high and begs the question: What’s going on?  After spending much time going over as much data as are available on methodology for these polls, my answer is a simple “I don’t know.”

By all rights, Zogby should be showing a closer race than it is because it probably underestimates the percentage of Democratic voters this year.  Instead, it’s actually a bit higher than the median.  Apparently, GWU/Battleground recently changed its polling technique because it had been undercounting young voters, who tend to lean toward Obama.  So, one would expect this poll to actually be at least in the middle.  In addition, Battleground is reporting that the number of undecideds remains largely unchanged, so the implication of its results is that a large number of voters who had already decided for Obama switched to McCain quite rapidly – enough to cut Obama’s lead to one point.  That seems highly unlikely

Go figure.

I’m just going to assume that both Battleground’s one-point Obama lead and Pew’s 14- point-lead are anomalies.  The real Obama advantage is probably back up to where it has been for weeks:  a six- to eight-point lead.

The state races, which are what really count, show a tightening in Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio.  West Virginia seems to be solidly back in the McCain camp.  All these states voted for George W. Bush, so it’s not surprising that they would respond to McCain’s attack ads and begin to “come home.”  Virginia still appears to have around a six- to ten-point Obama lead, and while Virginia has been reliably Republican for a very long time, liberal Northern Virginia has expanded to the point that the state has elected a Democratic senators and two Democratic governor recently, and the Democratic candidate for the state’s other senatorial seat is expected to win easily this year.  Virginia is still an Obama lean.

State results tend to lag the tracking polls a bit, so the next few days could be very interesting

McCain still fighting in Pennsylvania

Ordinarily, a candidate trailing in the polls by ten points or more in a state this close to the election would abandon that state and focus on places where he has a greater chance to win.  That’s why so many people are wondering what the heck McCain is doing spending so much time and money in Pennsylvania, which has been considered solid for Obama for at least three weeks.

The answer is in the electoral college numbers and the probabilities.

To reiterate an earlier post, if McCain takes all the states that are solid or leaning towards him, AND he takes all the toss-up states, he will still be 18 electoral votes short of the 270 he needs to win.  That means he must take back one or more of the states currently solid or leaning towards Obama.

Currently, the only states leaning towards Obama that are not considered “solid” for him are Virginia (13 EVs), Colorado (9 EVs), and New Mexico (5 EVs).  If McCain has only the path through these three states open to him, then he simply has to flip Virginia and either Colorado or New Mexico.  If his odds of flipping Virginia are 35%, and Colorado and New Mexico’s odds are 40% each, then the probability of flipping Virginia and one of the others (which he must do to win) is only 14%.

Another path to victory is to lose Virginia, Colorado, and New Mexico but take Pennsylvania and its 21 EVs.  If the odds of flipping Pennsylvania are only 20% … well … those are better odds than flipping both Virginia and one other Obama lean, aren’t they?

James Carville has said about Pennsylvania that it’s “Pittsburgh on one end, Philadelphia on the other, and Alabama in between.”  McCain probably hopes that he can win Pennsylvania if turnout in the cities and inner suburbs is low and turnout in the “Alabama” part of the state is high.  Who knows?  It might work.  Regardless, McCain’s odds are still very long, and unless there is a substantial swing in his direction soon, election night’s only suspense will center around tracking the number of Senate and House seats the GOP loses.

In a word, “no.”  And here’s why.

The polls

There may have been a very slight movement of the national polls towards McCain, but it’s hard to be sure.   Some of the most widely reported polls in Obama’s favor were outliers to begin with and never should have been given much credence.  The high-quality polls — those that have tended to do a good job of predicting final results in the past — have been fairly steady for weeks.  Real Clear Politics is still reporting a +6.8 lead for Obama nationally; not that it matters much.

The only thing that matters, at this point, are the polls in battleground states, and those matter very much, indeed.  If there are white males in Alabama who have voted Republican almost every time in their lives, but weren’t quite sure who to vote for this time, and have now decided to vote for John McCain, it doesn’t matter a bit.  John McCain was always going to win big in Alabama and take its nine electoral votes.  If there are undecided voters in Massachusetts who have moved towards McCain, that doesn’t matter either.  Obama is going to win Massachusetts and its 12 electoral votes handily, and tightening the race by a few percentage points will make no difference to the outcome.

Given the national media’s coverage of Bill Ayers, Joe the Plumber, and other GOP attacks, it’s not surprising that Obama may have lost a few points in those states where he is not advertising and campaigning hard.  Absent national coverage of his own in attacks on McCain, that’s bound to happen.  But in those places where he’s spending a great deal of money and campaigning hard , namely in the battleground states, he’s doing very well.  Today’s polls suggest that:

• He has a lead in Missouri (+6 from Rasmussen).
• He is tied in a new battleground state:  North Dakota.
• He has either a four-point lead (Rasmussen) or two-point deficit (SurveyUSA) in Florida, with SurveyUSA noting that they are the only poll that has consistently had McCain in the lead.
• He is only six points behind in Georgia.

Polls from yesterday show Obama with a large lead in Pennsylvania, a six-point lead in Virginia, and a tie in Ohio.  In addition, traditionally red states like North Carolina and Indiana, and West Virginia (which voted for Bush) are in play.  The electoral realities are the same as they’ve been for weeks:  If John McCain takes all the states that are currently solid or leaning towards him, he must take all of the toss-up states (which now are expanded to include North Dakota). That would give him 252 EVs, so he needs to find another 18 EVs by taking states away from Obama.  He can do that by flipping Virginia and its 13 EVs back his way and then taking either Colorado or New Mexico, as well.  It’s hard to imagine there’s any other path open to him.

This is a monumental task, and the odds against it are staggering.  The Intrade Market odds now have an Obama win at nearly 84%.  Fivethirtyeight has the odds at 90%+ for Obama.  In other words, it will take a minor miracle for McCain to win.

Obama also has some other things going for him:

There is no Bradley Effect

Having done a fair amount of research on this topic, I’m now convinced that there was once a Bradley Effect (where white voters would mislead pollsters, telling them they were going to vote for a black man but then voting for the white candidate, instead), but that it has disappeared in recent years.  Sure, many voters will not vote for Obama because of his skin color, but they appear to be comfortable telling pollsters that they are voting for McCain.

Here’s an excellent article explaining why the Bradley effect is an illusion.

Cellphone-only voters are being undercounted

Young voters are heavily in favor of Obama.  Young people often do not have land-line phones.  Most polls do not survey mobile phone users because it’s too expensive to do so.  Nate Silver, statistical guru, believes the cellphone effect may give Obama another 2+ points on election day.

The ground game

The Obama campaign has more offices open in battleground states, more paid staff, and has managed to “bank” votes by getting them in early in states where early voting and mail-in ballots are allowed.  Everything about his campaign oozes competence.  It seems very likely that there will be heavy turnout on election day, and that favors Democrats.

Advertising

Obama is heavily outspending McCain in most of the battleground states, and the Republican National Committee is already starting to triage, pulling monetary support out of several key congressional races. This speaks to both the McCain and national party’s financial weakness.

In short, the race may be tightening ever so slightly nationally, but the electoral map, ground game, and available resources still strongly favor Obama.

He tells the candidate he’s trying to buy a business that brings in more than $250,000 a year, and that would mean he would have to pay more taxes, wouldn’t it?  The candidate probably should have probed Joe a bit about whether he meant that the business charged a total of $250,000 or whether that was the profit, but he probably figured that Joe was a businessman and didn’t want to insult his intelligence.  So, the candidate from Chicago told him it would, but that tax savings for those earning less than he does would benefit others who could then afford his services more easily, meaning he could make more money from getting them as customers in a Keynesian “spreading the wealth around.”

Joe’s encounter with Senator Obama was duly reported in the media, and as befits the news cycle in this time of rapid change, quickly forgotten.

Except by John McCain and his campaign staff.

McCain, you see, had a tough debate coming up soon, and he thought that Joe’s story and Obama’s “spread the wealth” comment could be used to advantage, so he went to the debate and constantly brought up Joe’s name in an attempt to hammer Obama on tax fairness, making the point that if a plumber who had worked so hard and earned enough to buy a business could be hurt by Obama’s tax plan, then so could other ordinary Americans.

There was just one problem:  Joe wasn’t exactly who and what he said he was, and the media quickly found out about it and published what they found.

It turns out that Joe is not a licensed plumber and has never gone through any plumbing courses, which makes his work in Ohio illegal.  His employer has a license, but not to do work in Joe’s county.  Uh oh.  Joe also owes nearly $1,200 in back taxes and there’s a lien on his property.  He almost certainly doesn’t have the money to buy a business (his last public report of income was only $40,000), doesn’t really know much about business, and if the business he’s dreaming of buying (his boss’s) earns $250,000+ as he says, it must be the only two-man plumbing business in the world to do so.  And, there’s an outside chance that Joe is related to Charles Keating’s son in law.  Charles Keating is the swindler John McCain got entangled with that earned McCain a reprimand from the Senate Ethics Committee.

So where does this leave Joe?  Well, he’ll almost certainly be told to cease and desist working as a plumber until he gets a license.  The tax people will come after him.  His employer is bound to be angry.  He’s about to become a national laughingstock.  There’s a good chance that all those TV interviews people have been wanting will be canceled.  Joe is about to lose his livelihood, his good name, and his dignity.

And what about John McCain?  Well, he’s not only crushed Joe with his maverickness loose cannon-ness, he’s also made himself look like a fool for running with a story that turns out to be just another Republican fairy tale (see “Reagan, welfare queen, the”).

And this is the overarching reason why Americans should run screaming from John McCain.

I can imagine that carrier jet pilots need quick reactions and must sometimes make split-second decisions.  I’m sure John McCain’s willingness to make those quick decisions was very useful to him in wrecking three aircraft.  But who earth wants a president who makes snap judgments on complex issues?  Do we really want a man who plays Lone Ranger, parachuting into delicate legislative negotiations to “fix” things, only to exit stage right (Heavens to Murgatroid) on a whim for a debate after those negotiations fall apart?  Do we really want a guy who makes a snap judgment on a running mate, and gives us a woman who is undereducated, underexperienced, underbrained, undercurious, and under Todd Palin (surely Paris Hilton has better taste)?  A woman who has spent enough time in beauty pageants and being a television sports announcer to give a professional look on camera, but who is stumped by that most difficult of questions:  “What publications do you read?”  Do we want a man who lurches from one campaign message to another every 32 seconds, hoping something, anything, will resonate?

This time, John McCain hurt only Joe the Plumber with his impulsive behavior.  Give him the reins of the executive branch, and there’s no end to the damage he can do.  We should know, shouldn’t we?  “Fire, ready, aim” has been the motto of the White House for eight long years.

And it’s been a great ride, hasn’t it?

Overall, given Rasmussen’s good past prediction record and softening from Gallup, it seems likely that McCain has made up some ground, and that’s probably the result of the fact that 100% of his ads have gone negative and media coverage of his and Palin’s campaign speeches has also emphasized the GOP campaign’s attacks on Obama.

So far today, few polling organizations have reported state races, though Muhlenberg is reporting a 53% to 37% Obama lead in Pennsylvania, a number that isn’t out of line with earlier polls that have shown Obama breaking away in that state.  State polls tend to lag national tracking polls by a day or two, but it would appear that Pennsylvania is almost certainly going to go for Obama.  Continued strength in swing states would probably indicate that Obama is doing well where he is advertising, but that McCain’s national publicity on Bill Ayers is, perhaps, reddening states that are already red and tightening races in blue states where Obama feels safe and is not advertising.

This remains to be tested.  If the next few days bring polling results showing that Obama’s support in battleground states is softening, then McCain may well mount a comeback.  If Obama’s resource advantage continues to make inroads, or even maintain ground already won, in battleground states, then McCain is likely to lose badly.

The debate

Polls are saying that John McCain “lost” last night’s debate.  A CBS poll of uncommitted voters gave Obama the win, 53% to 22%.  A CNN snap poll with demographics roughly mirroring the proportions of of registered Democrats to Republicans (but undercounting independents), gave the win to Obama 58% to 31%.  In addition, both polls indicated that slighly more voters seeing the debate would tend to vote for Obama than McCain.

What does this mean?  Hard to say.  There’s a fair amount of argument over whether debate performance actually makes a significant difference in voter behavior.  Some pundits are saying that McCain’s invocation of Joe the Plumber may give him a tax club to beat Obama over the head with, but it appears that Joe’s time in the sun may end fairly soon, since he may have overstated his potential income and his prospects.  Others are saying that McCain’s grimaces, eye-rolling, and even blinking on the split screen may have hurt his chances.

Regardless, there are 19 days to go until the election, and things are still quite … interesting.

Welcome to your 15 minutes of fame. It’s not everyone who gets his name mentioned 286 times in a presidential debate.  If you haven’t already, you simply must change your business’s name to Joe the Plumber.  That’s just good marketing.  Oh, and don’t forget to add the tag line, “As seen on TV!”

OK, Joe, so you had a conversation with Barack Obama and, while media reports are very sketchy about exactly what your circumstances are (not surprising), it appears you want to buy a business that “brings in” more than $250,000.  I have yet to find out if “brings in” means $250,000 in revenue or profit (a very important distinction, Joe), but let’s assume for a moment that it’s profit we’re talking about.  Under Barack Obama’s plan (as sketchy as it is on his website), a good guess would be that you would go into a higher tax bracket, paying about 3.6% more in taxes on every dollar you earn over $250,000, for a total marginal tax rate of 39.6% — exactly the same as it was in the 1990s.

But let’s take a closer look at your situation, shall we Joe?

You say you’re planning to buy this business, and it must be a very large small business, indeed, if it covers salaries, expenses, trucks, inventory and the like and still yields a $250,000 + profit.  I’m going to guess that you don’t have the cash to buy this business outright, Joe, and if you do, I think you’re holding back on us.  I think you’ve inherited some money.  But let’s assume that you’re borrowing a fair amount of money to buy the business, using its book value (what the business is worth if you sold all the assets and paid off all your debts) as security and using the revenue stream to pay off the loan.  Let’s also assume a business this size is incorporated.

Here’s what you do, Joe.  First off, you have your corporation pay you a salary of, say, $249,000 per year.  Now you’re not in the higher marginal tax bracket, right?  Payments on the loan you took out to buy the business are fully tax deductible, so profits will be reduced by that amount.  If you still have more than $250,000 in profit, we’re talking about a rather large business here, and probably a very large down payment (which suggests that you can manipulate your down payment to reduce your taxes, doesn’t it?)

But here’s the thing, Joe.  When you own a business, you can do all kinds of things to reduce taxable income (profit).  For instance, you can buy more equipment, which can then be depreciated over the years, providing a tax deduction and increasing the company’s book value and, thus, your wealth.  Even fully depreciated equipment can generally be sold, in the future, for something.  You can spend more money on advertising and hire on a new plumber or two.  The advertising costs and the employment costs are generally fully tax deductible.  Well, let me take that back.  If you provide your employees with health insurance, your costs for health insurance won’t be tax deductible under John McCain’s plan, but who’s counting, right?

By advertising and hiring on, you can drastically increase your revenues (the amount of money coming in) while keeping profits below the $250,000 mark.  The increased revenues will make the resale value of your business much higher than it already is, increasing your wealth without getting taxed on that increase.  If you want to take more wealth out right now without paying taxes, there is a cornucopia of tax-free or tax-deferred retirement options, benefits, and the like that can move money right around the IRS’s outstretched palm.

Eventually, Joe, your company will be so large, and you will be so wealthy, than an extra 3.5 pennies in tax on each dollar on income you earn over $250,000 will be chickenfeed to you (if it isn’t already).  But, hey, it’s up to you.  Increase the underlying wealth in your company without paying taxes, or take cash now and pay a few additional taxes on it.

But, please, don’t complain to me about paying more taxes.  All it says to me is that you’re not smart enough to run your business’s financial side.

All the best to you and yours,

JS O’Brien

UPDATE

It turns out that Joe is not a good businessman for a simple reason:  He doesn’t own a business, appears to have no immediate prospects to do so, has no plumber’s license, works for a small firm doing residential work (which means his employer is unlikely to be clearing $250k per year), and has occasionally talked to the owner about buying the business — someday.

Poor Joe.  He’s about to get ripped to shreds by the media, and he seems like a pretty decent guy.  I feel for him.

On the other hand, Joe is a great example of those who are so terrified that they’ll get rich some day and owe an extra 3.5 cents on every dollar over $250,000 that they spend a lot of time worrying about it.  Joe doesn’t know that he is unlikely ever to make that kind of money.

UPDATE #2

It just gets better and better.  Bloomberg is reporting that Joe owes around $1200 in back taxes, and there is an Ohio lien filed against him.

Today’s morning polls are out, including the Gallup daily tracking poll.  Overall, it appears that the race may be tightening a bit.  As expected, initial reaction to negative campaigning usually works against the attacker, but continued attacks tend to soften support for the victim.  Negative advertising works and both campaigns know it.  The issue is timing.  McCain may have waited too late, after most people had committed, to launch his attacks.  But maybe not.  Obama has a funny name and he’s black.  It’s possible that white people, who make up the majority of voters, will be more likely to turn on him than they would on a white candidate.

We shall see.

Let’s guess, for just a moment, that McCain’s campaign sees these numbers and decides that tonight’s debate is the time to really push home the Bill Ayers attack, even if they hadn’t already decided to raise the issue in the debate.  How should Obama respond?  Well, keeping in mind that Obama needs to continue looking and acting presidential, and that it appears to be his calm, steady presence that’s winning these debates for him (in the public eye), here’s the kind of response he may deliver.

I’d first like to thank Senator McCain for raising this issue to my face.  It’s been difficult to address it, because I can’t adequately respond to PR and advertising campaigns and anonymous e-mail blasts.  I think John is actually raising two issues, but let me deal with the most immediate one first:  What is my relationship with Bill Ayers?

Bill Ayers is a former Weatherman, a terrorist from the 1960s, who attempted to bomb some buildings in Washington when I was eight years old.  What he did was absolutely reprehensible and criminal.  He could have hurt or killed someone, and we can all thank God that he didn’t.

When I first started getting involved in my community, I was appointed to a board of directors that Bill Ayers was on and met him there, the way I met all the other people on that board.  Subsequently, Mr. Ayers did what many politically active people do at the request of the party:  He held a small fund raiser at his house for one of my campaigns, one of hundreds of small fund raisers held for me over the years and one of millions of such things held for other candidates running for everything from the US Senate to the local school board.  Mr. Ayers lives in my neighborhood of Hyde Park, which is roughly 100 blocks of Chicago.  I don’t recall ever seeing him outside the board meetings and that fundraiser except maybe to see him pass by in his car.  That’s it.

I think what Bill Ayers did in the ’60s was as wrong as it can be, and I condemn it the way I condemn all people who would substitute violence for rationality and hate for reason, and as president, I intend to root them out of the world, whether their names are “Osama bin Laden” or “Timothy McVeigh.”

The second, and larger, issue is about campaigning and negative attacks, in general.  I think it’s true that character matters, and I welcome any questions anyone might have about mine.  But I don’t believe that unfounded attacks are appropriate.  John knows what it’s like to be in public life.  John and I meet many, many people, most of whom are upstanding citizens, but some of whom are bound to be scoundrels just from the law of averages.

For instance, John had a ten-year friendship with Charles Keating, the swindler from Lincoln Savings and Loan who sold worthless junk bonds to investors and cost the US taxpayers billions to clean up his mess.  John took nine vacations with Keating, some of them all-expenses-paid, accepted $112,000 in campaign contributions, and was reprimanded by the Senate Ethics Committee for his part in shielding Keating from federal investigators who wanted to put him in jail where he belonged.  But I just cannot bring myself to believe that John was on the take.  I think he just made a mistake.  I also don’t think he’s a Nazi and death squad sympathizer just because he was on the board of the Council for World Freedom, a front group for Nazis and murderers.  I don’t think he knew about that.  And I don’t think that John believes in election fraud just because he was the keynote speaker at an ACORN convention two years ago.

And I don’t believe that John really thinks I’m a terrorist, or hang around with terrorists, because there’s something morally wrong with me.  He’s said as much on his campaign, calling me a good family man, and I thank him for that.

I do think that John has been misled by his campaign managers who came from the Karl Rove school of “win at any cost, tell any lie.”  And their brand of politics, the politics of George W. Bush, is tearing our country apart.  I don’t think we Americans could ever afford those politics, but we certainly can’t afford them now when we simply must, must work together to dig ourselves out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The campaign spending mismatch

Democrats have long been the ones whose campaigns were under-financed, but not this year.  McCain is being badly outspent in several key states, and is being forced to spend time and money on states like Indiana and North Carolina where most Republicans have won easily in the past.  One place he’s being badly outspent is Northern Virginia, the most populous area of a state he desperately needs if he’s to have a chance of winning.  Check out Jean Cummings’ story on Politico.

Are Obama’s most favorable polls actually the most accurate ones?

One of my favorite election websites, fivethirtyeight.com, has a great story on Ann Selzer, her very high-quality polls, and how those polls are showing an Obama lead greater than most other polls.  Like many pollsters, Selzer tries to decide which respondents are “likely voters” and which are not.  A lot of the current differences in the polls reflects various methods of doing this.

Selzer feels that most polls are vastly underestimating youth voter turnout, especially considering that voters ages 18-29 increased 52% during the Democratic primaries leading up to this election.  That stat would tend to make one think that youth voter participation would be higher this year than in the past, which would favor Obama.

Ohio is still very winnable.

Yesterday’s results don’t look much better for the Republicans.  The FOX News/Rasmussen poll (also high-quality) gave Obama a two-point lead in Ohio, five-point lead in Florida, three-point lead in Virginia and Missouri, and a tie in North Carolina.  Only the five-point lead in Florida is outside the statistical margin of error, but the probability is that McCain trails in all the other states except for the tie in North Carolina.  Bizarrely, a first-time effort from Forum Poll gives Obama a two-point lead in North Dakota, a state so red it’s almost off the visible spectrum.  I think that poll should be taken with a golf-ball-sized grain of salt.

West Virginia, with its five electoral votes, now appears to be in play. Georgia is still in McCain’s camp, but support is softening (Georgia!).  National polls are holding relatively steady at a combined five- to-eight-point Obama lead, which may reflect undecided voters in very red states migrating heavily to McCain, offsetting Obama’s gains in swing states.

McCain’s path to the presidency is getting much, much narrower.  According to Real Clear Politics’ electoral map, McCain now has 158 electoral votes (out of the 270 he needs) solidly in his camp or leaning towards him.  There are 67 EVs in toss-up states.  IF he wins every toss-up state, that would give him 225 EVs.  He has to find another 45 EVs by flipping current Obama leans his way.  If he flips formerly red states Florida and Virginia, and takes either Colorado or New Mexico, that would do it for him.  If he takes Virginia and loses Florida, he would have to win Colorado, New Mexico, Minnesota, and some other state with 8 or more EVs  to win, which is highly, highly improbable.  Almost as improbable is winning without Virginia.  To do that, he would have to take Colorado, New Mexico, and some other state.

In other words, McCain must have all the toss-ups, must flip Florida back his way, and almost certainly must flip Virginia back his way.  If he does that, he has to take either Colorado or New Mexico to put himself over the top.

McCain’s strategery

Naturally, McCain’s campaign knows all this.  Or do they?  Given the polling consensus and the electoral math, one would think that McCain and Palin would be splitting up and spending a lot of time in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, and Colorado, while spending at least some time in North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri, West Virginia, and Nevada.  Instead, they are spending a lot of time campaigning together, with the occasional separation (Palin made a five-minute, hand-wave whistle stop in West Virginia yesterday) for short speeches.  They are spending a great deal of time and money in Pennsylvania, a state the polls say they have almost no chance of winning.  Last week, McCain spent time in Iowa, another state he appears to have lost.  Following the debate, McCain’s campaign says he is planning to spend Thursday and Friday in New York, a state he will certainly lose, though he will probably rest there instead of campaigning.  (Rest?  Now?)

In the meantime, Obama is going door-to-door while spending five days in Ohio (one of those toss-up states McCain can’t afford to lose).  He and Biden have split up to cover more of the country, and he has enlisted both Clintons to rally the troops in Pennsylvania and Virginia.

Obama clearly has much more money than McCain.   Some media reports have the Obama campaign outspending McCain more than two to one, with much higher disparities in swing states.  McCain made inroads in Minnesota for a while by outspending Obama three to one, but the state appears to have swung strongly for Obama.  The Republican National Committee is helping out with its attack ads but, even so, the Republicans are being outspent, and McCain’s campaign has no means of raising more money, having accepted public funds.  Obama has no such restrictions, and the buzz around the campaign is that his September fund raising (which won’t be reported until October 20) has beaten all previous fund raising records.  In fact, Obama seems to have so much money to burn that he is reported to have bought 30-minute, prime time slots on October 29 from three networks.

Indications are that some Republican politicians are jumping ship.  Minnesota Senator Norm Coleman, in a fight for his political life against Democratic challenger Al Franken, has declined to campaign in Minnesota with McCain.  Charlie Crist, Florida’s popular Republican governor, reportedly blew a McCain function off to visit Disney World, and has said he’ll campaign for McCain “when he has time.” Obviously, polls are telling these men that McCain’s brand in their states is not something they want to associate themselves with.

McCain appears to be squandering his resources (money, time, and people) on lost causes while spending too few resources on states he simply must carry.  His message strategy is all over the board, seemingly changed every day based on overnight focus groups and polling.  He is supposed to announce a new economic strategy today, a day after Obama when he desperately needed to beat his opponent to the punch.  He has been widely criticized for inflaming his base, leading to television images of angry, shouting crowds spouting ugly language at his and Palin’s stops.  His and Palin’s negative ratings are going up.

The media are saying that McCain has 21 days (including today) to turn things around, but that’s not strictly true.  The Republican National Committee will soon have to make a determination:  Do they continue to spend alongside McCain, propping up his campaign, or do they divert their resources into Senatorial and House races to try to minimize the number of seats they lose this cycle?  I suspect that, if the polls don’t start showing some positive news for McCain by the weekend, taking his Wednesday-night debate performance into account, the RNC will cut back drastically on its aid to McCain and play triage with Congressional races.

I suspect that the train wreck that is the McCain campaign has less than a week to get back on the rails.

The media is wrong about AIG.  The $400,000-plus retreat that has everyone so outraged was not for failed executives, but for top-producing salespeople.  Events like this one are common across the US for top salespeople, and there’s a very good reason for it.

I’ve been around way too many salespeople in my life.  They aren’t the most likable bunch unless your idea of a good time is hanging out with greasy gladhanders wearing outsized jewelry who’d sell their children into slavery for a $1.95 order of paper clips.  But I don’t have to like them to understand that they are necessary to keep the money coming in, the economy humming, and the rest of us employed.

I have designed many, many sales incentive compensation plans over the years.  You see, one really great thing about salespeople is that it’s easy to motivate them.  Dangle enough money in front of them and they’ll crawl on their bellies naked through broken glass for you.  It’s like waving a kibble at a starving Rottweiler.  The funny thing, though, is that money, in itself, is not the primary motivator for them.  Prestige, power within the company, and the reputation as a winner are the things they’re really after.  Money is a means of demonstrating that to their peers, who understand this little game all too well (or else they generally get out of sales).

Like most firms, AIG understands that these sales reward junkets — where the company makes a big deal out of salespeople, lavishes praise on them, singles them out from their peers, allows them to hobnob with bigwigs who constantly tell them how important they are to the company — are far more motivating than cash.  AIG could pay cash bonuses to them in lieu of a big get together at a fancy hotel and no one would bat an eye.  But cash bonuses wouldn’t work as well, and AIG (and I) know it.

So, don’t blame AIG for continuing to do business the way business is done.  Meetings like these are a cost of doing business.   Hey, I’m all for firing AIG executives who got the taxpayers into this mess.  But I’m not for firing anyone who understands how salespeople think and is trying to get them to sell more.  Making them stop having these meetings will just force them to increase sales incentive compensation, which will fly under the media’s radar.

And that’s a stupid solution to a non-issue.

So, let me explain what she wants to do.  Currently, accounting rules require banks to value assets (like mortgage-backed loans) at their current market value.  Miller wants to allow banks to … well … value them differently … somehow.  I mean, it’s not what you can actually sell those assets for, it’s what you can … ahm … pretend you can sell them for!  If you can pretend those assets are worth more than they are,  you can make the bank look as though it’s more solvent than it is.  Then, if the other lenders are butt stupid, they’ll lend money to you based on what you say about your bank’s solvency instead of what the situation really is.

What a great idea!  Let’s convince lenders to lend money based on underlying value that isn’t there.

Oh, hey, haven’t we done that already????

Today, American politics passed a threshold.  If anyone thought that our politicians, especially in the GOP, still care more about America than their own re-election campaigns; if anyone thought they still had a core of political courage that could, in extremis, overcome their own, petty rivalries; if anyone thought there was still a kernel of greatness in an American political landscape that produced the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln, I doubt they still believe today.  Their OWN PRESIDENT, their PARTY LEADER, came to the House Republicans and told them that this is a grave crisis, and even then they scuttled the agreement.

America is badly, deeply broken.  I’ve resisted this conclusion for some time.  Naively, I have believed that there were still enough politicians and leaders (I almost choke over that word) and freakin’ patriots to come together at a time of crisis and do what has to be done, odious as that may be, to do what’s best for all of us.

Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.  How naive those words sound now.  How … utterly laughable.  How cynical we’ve become.

Today, I learned that my Uncle, a man who fought at Tarawa and Leyte and flies the US and Marine flags every day, is dying of bladder cancer.  I have shed many tears this morning, but perhaps it’s fitting that, as he dies, the US I once knew dies with him.

Senator McCain, Senator Obama, President Bush, and congressional leaders met yesterday afternoon with the congressional leaders thinking they were near a deal.  By the end of the meeting, there was no deal, participants were visibly upset, and an attempt by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson to convene an evening meeting failed, as the House minority leadership refused to send a negotiator.

This morning the outline of what happened yesterday is beginning to emerge. Members of the House minority leadership, and specifically House Minority Leader John Boehner of Ohio, are rebelling against the administration’s plan, apparently even in its original form.  Their alternative plan involves insuring bad loans and providing tax cuts to infuse the market with private-sector money.  According to the AP, there was “sudden momentum” behind the alternate plan, presumably when John McCain said he was returning to Washington and, in fact, the AP is reporting that a “Republican source” quoted John McCain as saying in the high-level meeting that “I support the principles that House Republicans are fighting for.”

The as-yet-incomplete picture suggests that McCain returned to Washington not to smooth the process, which was already near completion, but to support House Republicans in their revolt against the administration’s plan.

The implications of this turn of events are astonishing.

1. Democrats accepted the administration’s baseline plan, presented by the leader of the Republican Party, negotiated changes in order to obtain the necessary cover of bi-partisan support, and then were blind-sided by rebel members of the president’s own party.
2. The president must be very, very politically weak indeed if he can’t marshal his own party members to support his plan.
3. John McCain may be using the public outcry at “rescuing” Wall Street to derail the process, calculating that, at worst, he can claim that he stopped the Democrats (and his own president, presumably) from giving taxpayer money away to those who don’t deserve it.  This would help distance him from the very unpopular president, improving his “maverick” status.
4. In the process, he is supporting a plan that offers more tax cuts to investors, opening himself up to charges of further tax favoritism to those who don’t deserve it.
5. McCain is also in mortal danger of being perceived, by the electorate, as a dangerous loose cannon (the flip side of the “maverick” coin) whose leadership style is more destructive than helpful.

The next few days will be fascinating, and undoubtedly maddening.  If the Democrats wanted to, they could probably drag the entire economy down by killing any deal, say it’s John McCain’s and his Republicans’ faults, and use the shield President Bush gave them, and their cooperation with him, to deflect criticism from themselves.  Presumably, if it’s managed right, the Democrats could trade something close to an economic depression to win the White House and take large majorities in both houses.

Will statesmanship win out?

Stay tuned.

*******************************

UPDATE: John McCain has announced that he will attend tonight’s debate, which means that this entire thing just gets stranger and stranger.  He parachutes in, making a big deal out of bringing parties together and bipartisanship, leadership, and the like, disrupting a process near completion.  Then, when everything is up in the air again and it seems that the deal won’t get done, he decides to leave and go to the debate.

What am I missing, here?  How is he going to sell this behavior to the American public?  Are they really too tuned out and/or stupid to see what just happened?  How can he claim to have provided leadership when he bails out and leaves with things still unsettled?

Is he just so brilliant that I don’t get it?  Or is he truly, truly deranged?

In the fever sweats over which candidate has posted a 2% lead across the nation today, it’s all too easy to forget that presidential elections are won in the Electoral College.  Candidates must win states.  They can win most states by a single vote (theoretically) and take all its electoral votes.  They can lose the popular election count and win the White House, as George W. Bush did in 2000.  What really counts is how the polls add up to enough electoral votes to win.

So, today, I take a close look at what Obama and McCain must do to win sufficient electoral votes (270) to take the White House, some of the scenarios that can get them there, the odds, likely campaign strategies going forward, and who is really in the lead.

Take a look at the electoral map from FiveThirtyEight, above.  It’s a pretty fair representation of how the races in various states look today.  Using data from Real Clear Politics, which is a bit more conservative in assigning leans, we convert Virginia, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Indiana, and North Carolina to “toss-up,” which gives us 228 electoral votes solid or leaning towards Obama, and 174 solid or leaning towards McCain.  I’m going to use these electoral numbers as starting points, recognizing that some of the remaining leans may flip to the other side, but one needs to start somewhere or the possibilities become endless.  I’m also going to make the assumption that, of the “toss up” states in gray on Real Clear Politics’ map, there’s no way on God’s green earth that Indiana is going to vote for a Democratic candidate, no matter what the polls say.  (According to news reports, McCain is so concerned about Indiana that he has no campaign staff there and is buying no advertising.)  This puts Indiana’s 11 votes in McCain’s column, raising his current number from 174 to 185.  I’m also going to assume that North Carolina, home of favorite son Jesse Helms, will vote for McCain, bringing McCain’s number to 200.

With the map in mind, and adding North Carolina and Indiana to McCain, let’s look at several election-night scenarios and what they mean for both campaigns.

For Obama

The solid South goes for McCain: This scenario assumes that Florida, North Carolina, and Virginia all vote for McCain, which is not at all far fetched, since these states have voted for the Republican candidate in the last two elections.  If this happens, then Obama must win Pennsylvania or Ohio, plus Minnesota and Wisconsin, and either New Hampshire or Nevada, to win.  If he wins Pennsylvania with its 21 votes, but not Ohio with its 20, then Obama can force a tie (which would most likely make him president) at 269 votes by winning Wisconsin and Minnesota.  If Obama loses BOTH Pennsylvania and Ohio, stick a fork in him.  About the best he can hope for is matching Al Gore’s 267 votes by winning both Nevada and New Hampshire.  In other words, if he loses both large states, he has to win Indiana (start the hysterical laughter here) to have a chance.

So, on election night, if it’s a solid South for McCain, it’s all about Pennsylvania and Ohio. Obama has to win one of those states, and preferably Pennsylvania.

The solid South goes for McCain except for Florida: If this happens, Obama’s chances of winning the election bump up close to 90%.  Florida’s 27 votes would leave Obama only 15 votes short of the 270 he needs, and there are so many scenarios that give him these 15 votes that it’s hard to imagine a way in which he doesn’t get them.  If Obama takes Florida, it’s pretty much over.

The solid South goes for McCain except for Virginia: This scenario leaves Obama 29 votes short of the 270 he needs, which means it becomes possible to tie the election while losing both Pennsylvania and Ohio.  He can do this by winning Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nevada, and New Hampshire, which is difficult but not impossible.  This means that it’s a good idea to keep an eye on New Hampshire early on election night, since a McCain win there and in Florida means that Obama must still win either Pennsylvania or Ohio, even IF he takes Virginia.  Of course, taking Virginia would mean that a win in either Pennsylvania or Ohio, coupled with a win in either Wisconsin or Minnesota, allows him to take the election outright.

The solid South goes for McCain except for Florida and Virginia: This scenario puts Obama only one toss-up state from victory.  Any state.  He’ll get that.  If Obama wins both of these Southern states, look for an electoral landslide.

For McCain

The solid South goes for McCain: McCain’s campaign staff will be breathing a sigh of relief if this happens.  If McCain’s chance of winning in Florida is 70%, and in Virginia is 70%, then the probability of winning both is only around 50%.  Even if McCain does win the solid South, though, he still has his work cut out for him to get the additional 30 votes that he needs.  Of course, one way to do this is to take BOTH Pennsylvania and Ohio.  That would be more than enough.  But if he loses, say, Pennsylvania, then he needs to find 10 more votes from Minnesota, Wisconsin, Nevada, and New Hampshire.  That means he needs either Minnesota or Wisconsin, neither of which have voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988.  If he loses those two states and wins New Hampshire and Nevada, he would tie at 269, but probably lose the presidency in the House.

Put another way, the electoral map doesn’t look good for John McCain unless he wins the entire South plus Pennsylvania and Ohio, or one of two states that almost never votes for the GOP candidate.  That’s a tough row to hoe.

The solid South goes for McCain except for Florida: That would mean that McCain has to find 57 votes from the remaining toss-up states, and that means winning Pennsylvania and Ohio, either Minnesota or Wisconsin, plus Nevada and New Hampshire.  Of course, he could win Pennsylvania, Ohio, Minnesota and Wisconsin, which would mean he wouldn’t need Nevada or New Hampshire, but that seems a remote possibility. In other words, McCain simply must have Florida.  If the numbers hold up as they are now, Obama can win without Florida, but McCain almost certainly can’t.

The solid South goes for McCain except for Virginia: McCain would need 43 additional votes to win in this case.  He would have to win both Pennsylvania and Ohio plus one other state, or either Pennsylvania and Ohio, both Minnesota and Wisconsin, and either Nevada or New Hampshire.  That’s a tall order.  McCain can win without Virginia, but the odds begin to work heavily against him.

The solid South goes for McCain except for Florida and Virginia: In this case, McCain is cooked.  He would have to win every other toss-up state, which is a miserably small probability.

What to expect from campaign strategies going forward

McCain must win Florida and either Pennsylvania or Ohio to have any kind of shot at victory.  To have a good shot, he needs to take all three. Of the three states, Florida is the most important.  It’s hard to imagine, in even the most treasured GOP daydreams, that McCain can win without Florida.  He has an outside shot at winning if he loses either Pennsylvania or Ohio, but not Florida.

Obama, on the other hand, must win only one of those three.  That’s the reality both campaigns understand, and it will drive spending and appearances for the rest of the election.  Obama will attempt to make Florida so competitive that McCain will have too little time for Pennsylvania and Ohio, and almost no time for Minnesota and Wisconsin.  He will try to force McCain to spend so much time and treasure in Florida that he is bound to lose either Pennsylvania or Ohio, and maybe both.

McCain will hope for enough of an opening to try to make Michigan more competitive to force Obama to spend time there, but it seems unlikely that he’ll be able to spare the time and resources.  In essence, he’s on the defensive, and Obama knows that.

Since Obama doesn’t have to win Florida, he probably won’t.  If he can force McCain to overspend in Florida, he’ll concede a close race.  He can then spend more resources than McCain solidifying Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, go hard after New Hampshire and Nevada, and have a decent shot at taking Ohio.

Of course, this can all change.  If Michigan tilts back towards McCain, if North Carolina starts showing a legitimate opportunity for Obama, if Wisconsin and Minnesota begin to appear as though they won’t stay in the Democratic camp, then the probabilities and strategies change.  But for now, given the current polls and electoral map, it appears that Obama is in the catbird seat.

They’ve started lying.

Lying in campaigns isn’t new, of course. The GOP has made big lies central to their campaigns since Nixon and Harry Dent, refining the technique with Reagan and his campaign manager, Lee Atwater, and have since kicked it up 20 or so notches in the Rove era. Most of us know about Rove, but he learned at Atwater’s knee, and it’s Atwater who accused Kitty Dukakis of burning an American flag and Dukakis, himself, of being treated for mental illness.

Generally, campaign lying works. The GOP knows that. The Democrats know it, too, and they’ve done some lying of their own. Unfortunately for them, they’re just not as good at it as the Republicans, so their lies tend to be smaller and less prolific, aimed at a constituency that is very different from the GOP one. In other words, lying doesn’t work as well for them.

Election campaigns are a bit like set-piece battles. There may be a central set of tactics that work for an army in most battles, but they may not work for all because conditions change (see Custer, George Armstrong), and a really brilliant commander, knowing the tactics his opponent is likely to use, can turn those predictable and time-worn tactics against him. We are now at a point where Barack Obama can do just that.

John McCain is running on integrity, putting nation before himself, being a maverick in a Republican Party that has seen more than its share of scandals during the W years. His questionable reputation for integrity and being his own man is his strength, and if Karl Rove has taught us nothing else, swiftboat tactics proved that attacking an opponent’s strengths can work if the opponent has difficulty fighting back (or won’t fight back, in John Kerry’s case) on that ground.

McCain’s campaign has given the Obama campaign the perfect opportunity to attack John McCain where he is strongest. The fact is, the McCain campaign has lied. No question. Whether they are direct lies or lies of omission, the lying has been pernicious, egregious, and unrelenting. Here are just a few of them, from FactCheck.org:

• McCain makes a lie of omission by saying that Obama supported comprehensive sex education for children in kindergarten. In reality, that part of the “sex education” was teaching them how to avoid pedophiles.
• The campaign says that Obama’s health care plan would force small businesses out of business when, in fact, the plan exempts small businesses.
• Palin says she didn’t support the infamous “bridge to nowhere” when, in fact, she supported it right up to the point that Congress killed it.
• McCain says that Obama gave big oil billions in subsidies when, in fact, the bill in question slightly raised taxes on the oil companies.
• The campaign keeps repeating lies about Obama’s tax proposals, prompting FactCheck.org to call it a “pattern of deceit.”
• McCain has a history of, at the very least, questionable judgment and implied corruption when he helped delay and investigation of Charles H. Keating, became one of the “Keating Five,” and helped cost taxpayers about $5,000 per family of four in the subsequent S&L bailout.
• While not exactly a lie, McCain called Falwell and Robertson “agents of intolerance,” then embraced them, has flip-flopped on tax cuts, etc. which demonstrates that he tend to talk out of both sides of his mouth.

This is not the sort of thing smart campaign managers do when their candidate is running away from his party’s current reputation for corruption and (at best) obfuscation, and is trying very hard to position himself as the anti-Republican Republican in charge of change. In fact, he has just demonstrated that he is exactly like the Republicans he is following up. In a sense, he as just thrust his jaw forward towards Barack Obama and said, “C’mon son. Give me your best shot right in the old kisser.”

But will Obama do it and, if he does, will he do it right?

Let’s take the second question, first. In order to do it right, he has to put four things into his ads:

1. The accusation of untruth along with a proving example (using moving pictures, preferably, but pictures and words on a screen from a reputable source if that’s all he’s got)
2. Demonstration of untruth (moving pictures of McCain and Palin giving themselves the lie with earlier words would be best)
3. Demonstration of how it applies to lies from the Bush Administration (“mission accomplished,” testimony that the Iraq War would pay for itself or be over in months, etc.)
4. A wrap-up message that ties McCain/Palin to the George W. Bush and Republican corruption.

Done well enough, and with a large enough ad buy, Obama’s campaign can shift the election campaign away from the Palin/female voter connection toward where he wants it to be: squarely linking McCain’s own dishonesty with dishonesty and corruption in McCain’s own party. Obama has the media behind him on this issue. What he needs to do is to is to get very, very honest, himself, make the point over and over that he will not stoop to making false claims (and he’s stretched some truths, so far), and attack McCain on his newly demonstrated, doubtful character.

Will Obama do this?

I’m going to guess that he will, but only when it’s too late. Making this message work requires repetition, and there’s enough time to get sufficient repetition prior to the election if he starts now, but not if Obama waits until he’s eight points behind in the polls on October 22.

On the political battlefield, there are commanders who see an opportunity and move swiftly to exploit it, risking much but with a commensurate reward should they be right. There are commanders who prefer defense, risk little, rarely are defeated, but rarely register outright wins, either. One can make an argument that the latter sort could be a good president, but is rarely an excellent election campaigner.

I think Barack Obama will stick to what he’s doing now, saying “no I didn’t” to everything McCain says he did, and losing ground inch by inch as more and more people come to believe McCain’s big lies. He could go on the attack and turn the tables on McCain’s strategy, and I hope he will, but nothing I’ve seen so far suggests that Obama is that type of man.