You couldn’t say it any better than did Atlanta Journal-Constitution columnist Jay Bookman, when he responded to the shared lament of Rush Limbaugh and Sarah Palin while she was being interviewed on his radio program that the MSM was trying to shut her up. Bookman replies:

No, Gov. Palin, the media don’t want you to shut up. To the contrary, every media outlet in the country is begging you to appear on their show. If you want to go on Meet the Press, Face the Nation, This Week, Late Edition, if you want to hold your first actual press conference, if you want to join the free-for-all tomorrow night spinning the aftermath of the presidential debate, the media would welcome you with open arms.
Speak, Sarah. Speak. If you care so much about this great country, tell the McCain campaign to stop stifling you and speak.
And yet she doesn’t. The “pitbull with lipstick” runs and hides.

There may well be some discussion about Senator Obama’s relationship with former domestic terrorist William Ayers in tonight’s presidential debate. McCain has said as much, although he would be smart not to bring it up, contrary to the sage advice of Rudy Giuliani, whose political judgment earned him a poor showing in the primary season early on. Better for McCain if debate moderator Bob Schieffer brings it up, if it must come up at all.
No doubt, McCain’s prep team is hard at work on creating an Ayers zinger or a ‘Have you stopped beating your wife?’ type question for Obama. Senator Obama’s prep team is undoubtedly working on possible responses. But it shouldn’t be too hard. Their candidate has handled the Ayers distraction exceptionally well thus far, pointing out that he was eight years old when Ayers committed his crimes and quickly adding that the Ayers fuss is just another irrelevant distraction to get voters off the economy, health care Iraq and other issues that actually affect their lives.
I agree with TNR‘s Christopher Orr that it’s hard to envision a scenario in which McCain gets much leverage out of talking about Ayers. It’s already been discussed ad nauseum, and the shrinking pool of swing voters left — at least the thoughtful ones — could not be blamed for going to the bathroom during that part of the debate. If McCain goes on too long about it, he will look trifling, stuck in the past and even more desperate.
McCain might even pass on it altogether, on the theory that he will get some respect from fence-sitters for sticking to the important issues and getting back on the high road. Recent polls have shown that his attacks on Obama have been counter-productive. Letting the ads do the dirty work might be his preferred strategy going forward. It’s likely that the sort of voters who think Ayers is still relevant are already supporting McCain anyway.
Schieffer may also pass on asking an Ayers-related question. He has expressed an eagerness to make this debate the most substantial one yet held, with more detail on policy. That would leave very little time for distractions, especially given the complexity of issues like the economy, Iraq and health care, which voters care more about. The more interesting question is whether Schieffer will be even-handed enough, if Ayers comes up, to ask McCain to account for his close relationship with G. Gordon Liddy, who has reportedly urged political violence. McCain is said to have received funds raised by Liddy on several occasions and he has complimented Liddy lavishly.
The Ayers “issue” is most likely a wash-out, helping and hurting both candidates in equal measure. Neither candidate will gain or lose much because of it. But the public will be a big winner if the time is more productively spent exploring solutions to improving health care, getting out of Iraq, restoring economic stability and creating prosperity for all citizens.
My one unsolicited bit of advice for Obama in tonight’s debate: I’ve noticed that he tends to tilt his head at a 45 degree angle in sit-down interviews, like Meet the Press. Tonight is also a sit-down format, so maybe make an effort to keep his head more vertical to help convey confidence.

In this frantic stage of the presidential contest, there have been some significant conservative opinion-leader defections from the McCain-Palin ticket. George Will all but condemned McCain in the midst of the financial market crisis. David Brooks (a 2000 McCainiac, lest we forget) has gone south. Christopher Hitchens, though hardly a conservative, made some waves with his endorsement of Obama, given his previous monomania about Islamofascism and the Iraq War Cause (a holy cause to some, but something different to the militant atheist Hitchens).
But from a symbolic point of view, the most remarkable defection has been that of Christopher Buckley, humorist, novelist, son of WFB, and until this week, a columnist for WFB’s magazine, National Review. At the Daily Beast blog (a creation of the irresistable lowbrow Tina Brown, alluding to the equally irresistable highbrow Evelyn Waugh), Buckley endorsed Obama. In a follow-up post, Buckely disclosed that he was resigning from his NR column.
Symbolism aside, Buckley’s rationale for endorsing Obama is interesting, particularly since he (like David Brooks) used to be a McCain enthusiast, and even a McCain speechwriter:

John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

Citing Barack Obama’s “first-class temperament” and “first-class intellect,” Buckley concludes:

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for

Christopher Buckley’s defection is signicant because he’s precisely the sort of conservative public figure that would normally tow the party line with no enthusiasm, or remain sllent or neutral, in this sort of election cycle.
Buckley is already one of those rare conservative writers with crossover appeal. He didn’t need to take a walk on the wild side by endorsing Obama. He seems to believe what he says, and his willingness to say goodbye to his father’s magazine is another sign that heresies abound in the ramshackle political party represented by John McCain on the ballot.

Note: This item is cross-posted from TPMCafe, where it appeared in response to a Todd Gitlin post urging Democrats not to get overconfident about victory
Todd Gitlin is right, of course, in suggesting to progressives currently giddy about polling trends in the presidential campaign that overconfidence is a bad idea in politics, as in any other competitive endeavor. And every Democrat of a certain age remembers past elections where we managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
But though Todd doesn’t come right out and say it, I suspect much of his fear is from the most immediate bad memory: Election Night 2004, when many of us were half-convinced we’d already won a week or so out, and then, on reading those first exit polls, threw caution to the win and declared victory.
It’s important, though, to remember why those expectations turned out to be unrealistic, and distinguish caution from superstition.
In the home stretch of the 2004 campaign, expectations of victory among progessives were partly attributable to a projection of our own belief that George W. Bush was a failed president pursuing failed policies which no reasonable person could support. We rationalized the terrible midterm election results of 2002 as an aberration attributable to the proximity of 9/11, and whatever we thought of John Kerry (I happened to like him a lot), figured he was a sufficiently acceptable candidate to harvest the inevitable backlash against Bush.
On a more analytical level, the factor many of us fixated on was the political science truism that undecided voters in the late stages of a campaign tend to break decisively against incumbents, particularly if they are sour about the condition of the country. With undecideds exhibiting very high levels of “wrong track” sentiment at this point four years ago, the thinking was that Kerry would win if he could keep the contest close in the polls, which he did. And that’s why those flawed early exit polls had many of us calling friends and relatives and fatuously urging them to ignore the red tide on their television screens, because we had actually won. We were predisposed to ignore adverse evidence, even in the face of actual returns.
Sure, there are three weeks to go in the current campaign, and weird stuff can still happen. But unless you believe in the Bradley Effect (which as Todd notes, is mostly a myth or an anachronism), or really do think the GOP can contrive a terrorist attack or get away with voter suppression or vote-stealing on a vast scale, the situation for Democrats is undoubtedly better than it was in 2004. Polls aside, the “fundamentals”– including the issue landscape, party ID and registration trends, the unprecedented levels of unhappiness with the incumbent, and the political impact of the economic crisis–are decisively better. And even if you don’t drink every drop of koolaid about Obama’s “ground game,” I don’t know a single person in politics who thinks McCain’s operation is superior to Obama’s. That’s totally aside, of course, from the dynamics of the campaign itself, wherein the central contradiction of the McCain candidacy–his effort to simultaneously pose as a supra-party “maverick” while bending to the conservative “base” on every major subject–is blowing up spectacularly almost every day.
Does that mean Democrats can or will start “coasting” and giving the GOP an outside chance to catch up? I don’t think so.
We should focus relentlessly on the fact that there’s all the difference in the world between a narrow Obama win and mixed “downballot” results, and a big Obama win with House and Senate gains that give Democrats an actual working majority in the former chamber, and a filibuster-proof majority in the latter. It could well be the difference between a successful and unsuccessful Obama administration, and its ability to reverse some of the more toxic Bush-Cheney policies. If you want to dwell on bad memories of elections past, save some mental space for 1994, when the Clinton administration”s early struggles contributed to a disaster that we are only now beginning to overcome.
Avoding irrational optimism is essential right now, but so, too, is avoiding a superstitious pessimism that could obscure the big challenges just ahead.

One of the fascinating things about this late phase of the campaign cycle is that you can already begin to see the lines of reasoning form for the inevitable post-election arguments about what happened and why. And as always, many of these arguments will revolve around ancient disputes about the nature of the electorate and the effectiveness of various campaign strategies.
Perhaps the hoariest dispute–so fundamental that we devoted a roundtable discussion to the topic back in March–is over the relative significance of “base” and “swing” voters, however they are defined. If Barack Obama wins by a modest margin amidst signs of a huge turnout of pro-Democratic electoral groups, this argument will hang fire with particular heat.
There has always been a small but vociferous faction of analysts who–for both ideological as well as empirical reasons, I suspect–insist that swing voters really don’t matter at all. And it was interesting to see this faction’s reasoning reflected, if not completely embraced, by the esteemed Ezra Klein in an LA Times column on Sunday.
Meditating somewhat sourly on the vast attention being paid to inexplicably “undecided” voters, a subset of “swing voters,” Ezra cites SUNY-Buffalo Professor James Campbell’s study suggesting that swing voters really don’t much matter in presidential elections:

[C]ampaigns need something to do in September and October. Most of the electorate has chosen a side, and the small sliver that claims still to be puzzling over the pronunciation of the Democrat’s last name could prove decisive.
Or could it? A provocative paper from James Campbell, a political scientist at the State University of New York at Buffalo, comes to a different conclusion. Examining nine presidential elections, Campbell compared the size of the swing vote (defined here as voters with weak leanings before the heat of the campaign) with the size of the non-swing vote. Swing voters are known to be a minority of the population, but it turns out that they’re not a particularly decisive minority. “In only one of the nine elections, the 1976 race between Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter,” writes Campbell, “did the swing vote majority override an opposite majority among non-swing voters.”
In other words, in eight of the last nine elections, the winner could have lost swing voters but won the race…
Campaigns now raise hundreds of millions of dollars. They can afford both ads aimed at swing voters and “get out the vote” operations meant to motivate base voters. And why begrudge them their efforts? The campaign is long, and people need to keep busy.

I’m sure Ezra isn’t completely serious about the idea that voter persuasion efforts are just busy-work for campaigns, relevant to victory only in the sense of providing a diversion from the really critical base-motivation operations. But still, the underlying contempt for swing voters and swing-voter efforts is unmistakable, so the Campbell hypothesis–which has been discussed here before–is worth reconsidering.
When you really think about it, all Dr. Campbell demonstrated was that “winning” the swing vote won’t win you an election if your base is significantly smaller or less motivated than that of your opponent; and inversely, it’s possible to win an election without “winning” the swing vote. To jump from that observation to a general dismissal of swing voters, however, makes no sense. There’s a lot of distance between zero percent of swing voters and 50%. To ignore that is exactly like suggesting that because John Kerry won independent voters in 2004 while losing the election, it was a waste of time for his campaign to think about independents at all. A vote is a vote, and “winning” this or that category of voters doesn’t matter so much as the contribution every voter makes to an overall victory. If the most efficient way to win is to reduce your margin of defeat in some voter category, whether it’s swing voters or white men or women-with-kids, that’s what you should do.
Moreover, and this is a point that should never be forgotten, swing voters do have more pound-for-pound electoral value than base voters in the sense that so long as they are certain to vote, every vote you win comes out of your opponent’s totals as well, and thus counts twice in terms of the net effect.
Campbell does also provide analysis suggesting that in the two most lopsided landslides in modern history, 1964 and 1972, the winner could have prevailed without a single swing vote. That’s interesting, but hardly any more significant than observing that the landslide winners could have won without a single vote from any number of other voter categories.
What Professor Campbell actually refutes is the idea that swing voters are the only thing that matters in presidential elections. But that’s a straw man, since nobody really believes that. Even my old buddies at the DLC–who’ve devoted an enormous amount of attention to the tasks of identifying swing voters and developing ways to appeal to them (viz. their most recent study of the issue)–are always careful to say that it’s critical to simultaneously energize your base while reaching out to swing voters. And I don’t know a soul in the Democratic Party who doesn’t realize the importance, to some degree or another, of Barack Obama’s “ground game” in this election.
In the end, if Obama wins, it will be interesting to dissect the contributions of various voting groups to victory, and then analyze the actual return-on-investment of various strategies, including swing-voter-persuasion. But let’s keep an open mind on the subject until the votes are in and the dust settles.

AT MSNBC.com‘s politics web pages, New York Times reporter Rachel L. Swarns discusses the increase in black elected officials representing predominatly white districts and constituencies across the nartion, and the good it has done for the nation, as well as Democrats and Obama.
Thomas Frank’s Wall St. Journal op-ed “The GOP Peddles Economic Snake Oil: Suddenly Republicans Are Against Market Values” is a useful read for Dem candidates at all levels. Frank captures the irony of the GOP scam: “Conservative misrule, prompted by conservative disdain for government, proves that government cannot be trusted — and that the only answer is to elect another round of government-denouncing conservatives.”
At HuffPo, Pulitzer Prize recipient Carl Bernstein sheds some fresh light on the question “Does John McCain pal around with terrorists?” in view of McCain’s controversial friendship with Watergate burglar and advocate of political violence G. Gordon Liddy. (See also James Vega’s TDS post on the topic)
CNN political editor Mark Preston takes a look at the increasingly important role of independent groups in the political ad wars of the presidential campaign, noting that pro-GOP expenditures now match Dem outlays.
Christopher Hitchens makes the case for Obama, or at least against McCain-Palin at Slate. Best line: “It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.”
Alex Green and Rick Klein have an ABCnews.com update on the Dems’ quest for a ‘super-majority’ in the U.S. Senate, including a focus on prospects to unseat Senator Elizabeth Dole in NC.
And Over at the Princeton Election Consortium, Sam Wang reports on Republican activists’ “Save the Filibuster” campaign and their call on the RNC to redirect $15 million from the McCain campaign to key senate races — and Wang challenges Dems to “get on the bus” and invest some dough down ballot as well.

Some nervous Democrats, watching as Barack Obama’s lead in the polls slowly grows, may be concerned that a lead of five points or so may not be enough, thanks to the notorious “Bradley Effect”–the phenomenon, named for Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s losing gubernatorial campaign in 1982, whereby white voters lie to pollsters about their willingness to vote for an African-American candidate.
They should probably relax. FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who’s long argued that the Bradley Effect seems to have expired in recent years, offers a recapitulation of his arguments (now reinforced by Bradley’s own pollster from 1982), along with speculation about why this has happened.
All along, Silver’s argument has been very simply that during the primary season, Barack Obama generally outperformed his poll standings, which shouldn’t have happened if the Bradley Effect was operating. In retrospect, it’s clear that much of the talk about the Bradley Effect was spurred by the one primary state, New Hampshire, where Obama narrowly lost despite pollster predictions that he was ahead. Absent any fresh evidence–and the ability of pollsters to “push” respondents for honest answers should have produced some by now if it existed–it’s time for Democrats to stop worrying that racist voters will revert to type in the privacy of the voting booth. Racism, of course, still exists, and may be hurting Obama, but not in the sort of secretive, poll-refuting manner that is suggested by the Bradley Effect. As Silver points out, there are plenty of more socially acceptable reasons voters could offer for deciding to vote against Barack Obama, no matter what’s actually going on in their hearts and minds.

There’s a lot of talk today about John McCain’s campaign being in a state of disarray, amidst all sorts of strategy sessions and diverse advice about what he should do to halt the steady drift of public opinion towards Barack Obama. The one clear thing that’s emerged is a new stump speech in which he heavily hits one new note: the idea that Americans need to elect him president to prevent one-party domination of Washington:

“Senator Obama is measuring the drapes and planning with Speaker Pelosi and Senator Reid to raise taxes, increase spending — take away your right to vote by secret ballot and labor elections, and concede defeat in Iraq,” [said McCain]….
The reference to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) is part of a new Republican effort to warn voters of the consequences of having one party dominate all of Washington, as Democrats would if Obama won in a landslide that helped his party rack up wider congressional margins.

Now you can understand why McCain is taking this tack. He’s yoked with a horribly unpopular Republican brand, and horribly unpopular conservative policies. The issue landscape is tilting decisively against him. All his “maverick” talk hasn’t convinced that many people to forget about that (R) next to his name. But the Democratic-controlled Congress is unpopular, too (even though there’s every indication that Democrats will make major gains in House and Senate races), and trust levels for the federal government in general are very low. So why not try to play on “a plague on both houses” sentiment by suggesting yourself as a personal counter-balance against excessive Democratic power in Washington? Such implicit split-your-ticket talk won’t make GOP candidates for Congress very happy, but that’s a small price to pay if it could actually help close the gap with Obama.
But could it actually work?
It’s an article of High Broderist faith to some pundits that because Americans don’t much trust either political party, or think them “extreme,” vast numbers of them may actually prefer divided government. The main data point for this belief is the preponderance of divided government over the last few decades (the situation for 29 of the last 40 years), buttressed by occasional direct polling evidence that people say they prefer it.
But a quick review of the political science literature on this subject produces a whole lot of skepticism. One good 2005 summary of the academic debate goes through the various reasons divided government is produced (e.g., midterm trends away from White House incumbents), and also why people who say they favor divided government often really don’t (e.g., they simply want their own party to win the branch of government most within reach at any given moment). Most academics definitely challenge the idea that large numbers of Americans vote tactically, with an eye towards complicated balance-of-power results.
Moreover, the most obvious conscious voting decision that could lead to divided government–ticket-splitting–has by all accounts been in a more-or-less steady decline in recent decades. And that in turn reflects the universally-recognized ideological sorting-out of the two major parties since the 1960s, which has made partisan choices clearer while reducing regional anomalies (such as the conservative Solid Democratic South of yore).
But aside from the questionable evidence supporting “divided-government” voting, one thing is pretty clear: support for “gridlock” is naturally associated with high levels of satisfaction with the national status quo. If things are going well, why risk the sort of changes that a single-party dominated federal government might enact? Pro-gridlock thinking is also typically associated with a libertarian attitude towards government (indeed, economist Milton Friedman may have been the first major figure to articulate the advantages of gridlock).
Since “right track” numbers are currently dipping into the single-digits, and the leave-me-alone coalition isn’t heavily represented among swing voters today, this doesn’t strike me as the best time for a presidential candidate to say he wants to block action in Washington.
Perhaps a full-engines-reverse, break-the-Democratic-monopoly message could work for Republicans in 2010, if an Obama administration and a Democratic Congress produce unsatisfactory results. But for now, this may just be another example of a McCain campaign desperately trying out various themes, in hopes of regaining traction.

Sarah Palin no longer seems to be at the center of the presidential contest. But if the McCain-Palin campaign, or its media and advocacy-group allies, persist in making Barack Obama’s alleged “radical friends” a regular talking point, it’s worth remembering that Palin, in contrast to Obama, has had regular, politically significant, and very recent association with some pretty scary folks in Alaska.
During the initial frenzy over Palin, some pro-Democratic political observers noted her cozy relationship with the Alaska Independence Party (AIP), a group characterized by a deep hostility to the United States of America, and with close links to Radical Right organizations (e.g., the theocratic Constitution Party, and various other “secessionist” and sometimes white supremacist groups) in the lower 48. But inaccurate claims that Palin (as opposed to her husband) had actually been a member of the AIP enabled the McCain campaign to discredit this entire line of inquiry.
Now a nuanced and knowledgeable assessment of Palin’s relationship to AIP and other Alaska extremists is available at Salon, by Max Blumenthal of the Nation Institute and Seattle freelance journalist David Neiwert. It carefully documents the role that former AIP chairman Mark Chryson and John Birch Society stalwart Steve Stoll, both from Wasilla, played in her rise in local and then statewide politics. One key incident in this story was Palin’s unsuccessful effort to appoint Stoll (whose nickname was “Black Helicopter Steve”) to an opening on the town’s city council.
More recently, Palin has taken a variety of positions in Alaska politics closely associated with AIP’s, particularly on gun issues, taxes, and environmental regulations. She attended the AIP’s convention the year she ran for Governor, and also appointed as her campaign co-chair Alaska legend Wally Hickel, once elected Governor on the AIP ticket. And nobody seems to dispute her husband, Todd’s, AIP membership and party registration, which he continued at least through the 2002 election cycle. To state the rather obvious, the First Dude is a more central figure in Palin’s political world–appearing on the campaign trail for McCain-Palin regularly–than any of Obama’s “radical friends.”
I think there’s a tendency among political observers to think of phenomena like AIP–and the Palins’ relationship with it–as just some sort of quirky, almost charming Northern Exposure-type feature of the Alaska landscape that doesn’t really matter. It’s true that AIP’s relative respectability in Alaska reflects the state’s strange quasi-colonial political culture, in which anti-American gestures that would carry a political death sentence elsewhere are accepted with a shrug. But there’s nothing charming about AIP’s racist and generally wacko confederates (pun intended) in other states, or even its wildly pro-development and gun-crazy posturings in Alaska.
So those who want to make a big deal out of Obama’s marginal and long-past dealings with Bill Ayers or the Democratic Socialists of America or whatever, should be told to take a longer look at Palin’s undoubted fellow-traveler relationship with the Far Right back home in Alaska.

As the Noteworthy box at the top of this site indicates, a long-awaited Brookings Institution briefing by TDS Co-Editor Ruy Teixeira and the University of Michigan’s William Frey–two of America’s top political demographers–on trends in the “purple states” occurred on Friday. The PowerPoint from the presentation is out, along with the third and fourth installments of Teixeira and Frey’s detailed regional analysis of purple states, on Florida/Virginia and Michigan/Ohio/Missouri.
You should read all this material yourself, but here’s a summary of the five big purple trends that Teixiera and Frey talk about in both the overall summary and the regional analyses:
(1) The struggle for Democratic gains in the shrinking but still critical white working class vote;
(2) Definite Democratic gains (against a persistent Republican advantage) in the expanding white-college-educated segment of the electorate (including those with some college);
(3) Significant increases in the number of pro-Democratic minority voters–especially Hispanics and Asians–in many purple states;
(4) The continued and enhanced domination of battleground states by voters in metropolitan urban areas; and
(5) The relative strength of Democrats in the faster-growing metro areas among the purple states.
These trends help explain some of the more subtle trends in the national political landscape. Those familiar with the 2000-2004 political “map” may have been puzzled this year by polls showing Barack Obama doing as well or even better in “red states” like VA and FL than in midwestern “purple states” like OH. The less-dynamic midwestern states remain dominated by white working class voters, among whom Democrats are doing better, but are still losing by significant margins. VA and FL, on the other hand, are going through significant demographic and political changes thanks to the steady growth of metro areas with major minority voting blocs and rising levels of college education, such as Northern Virginia, Miami, and the I-4 corridor.
There’s a natural tendency among political journalists to forget demographic factors in the daily swirl of candidate competition and real-life events, or, more often, to isolate one demographic group–soccer moms, security moms, “values voters,” etc.–as all-important. Teixeira and Frey help remind us that this is a very complicated country, and that campaigns play out on a constantly changing landscape that can itself make history.