MattMaroon.com

I’ve been enjoying watching John McCain’s attempts to turn the tide in the election. It’s interesting to see the strategy of someone who is clearly down, and slipping, but not entirely out. Rather than the usual well-planned, well-executed Republican strategy, he seems right now to be in “throw some shit at the wall and hope something sticks” mode. That’s maybe not the best play when you’re already perceived as erratic. In a post later, I’ll write about the mistake he’s made that led up to this, and why I think he could be in better shape, maybe even winning. What can I say, I get off on strategy.

First there was the David Ayers story, which is humorous because it came up before in the primaries and didn’t stick then. The Jeremiah Wright story went much further (though I’m not sure it would fare any better if it were rehashed now, since it got so much play the first time) but for some reason McCain swore some time ago not to mention it, and he’s abided by that promise.

The Obama campaign came back with the Keating story, which wasn’t any better. McCain’s been in politics for a very long time, and he has one somewhat unethical blot on his record. That might have been career-ending for a CFO, but for a politician, especially one who’s been around for decades, that’s nearly worthy of canonization.

The first time I got the email from the McCain campaign (I get them from both) about Ayers I thought “that’s just going to hurt Johnny Boy.” But then what seemed like only a few minutes later I got the Keating email from the Obama camp and realized they had just given McCain the ball back. If anything, that turned out to be the bigger mistake because neither were well-received by the public (in no small part because the Dow was still cratering while the saga unfolded) and he passed up a golden opportunity to take the high road.

Then there was the quote by Biden that America’s enemies will test Obama, which McCain keeps bringing up aghast. Of course they will. They’ll test McCain too. That’s what they do, they test us, especially while we’ve still got the egg on our face from the Iraq war. In fact, that’s possibly the most disastrous thing about that war, it gave them carte blanche to push us around. See Iran.

(For what it’s worth, I have a feeling that no matter which candidate gets elected, Iran will push them too far and end up regretting it. Obama will try harder to resolve it peacefully than McCain would, I think, but I’m more sure than not that that is impossible, and neither would let Iran build the bomb.)

So now there’s ACORN. Wow, is all I can say about that one. I never thought I would see a Republican complaining about the Democrats committing election fraud, let alone a mere week after the Michigan Republican party admitted to doing so themselves. That’s right, people on McCain’s own team were caught, according to the words of the settlement, in “an illegal scheme by the Republicans to use mortgage foreclosure lists to deny foreclosure victims their right to vote.”

Seriously. Unlike ACORN, which is not affiliated with the Democratic Party (though they often advocate its politicians), this was the Michigan Republican Party. Note to politicians, don’t try to commit voter fraud if your opponent is a constitutional law professor.

In both of the last two elections we saw Republicans pursue a strategy just like the one they admitted to in Michigan this month of disenfranchising likely Democrat voters. I’m not going to say that either definitely subverted the will of the people, but both certainly tried and may have succeeded.

From 2000:

In 1999, shortly after Jeb Bush became governor and Katherine Harris took over as secretary of state, Florida embarked on a project to produce a master list of anyone who conceivably might have been a former felon, who would then be scrubbed from voter rolls.

Florida devoted unprecedented resources to the task. In 1998, under the purview of Katherine Harris’s predecessor, the Florida Department of Elections gave Database Technologies Inc. (DBT) a contract for a first-year fee of $2,317,800 to scrub the voter rolls. (The firm previously doing the work for the Florida Board of Elections had been awarded the job for a bid of $5,700.) The terms of this contract were not publicly disclosed.

Greg Palast reports that even for an ambitious effort, this payment on a per-record basis was more than ten times industry norms. The state and DBT justified this unusually high figure based on contract requirements that called for “manual verification using telephone calls and statistical sampling.” However, it appears that DBT was paid such a grand sum precisely not to verify names. One list from DBT included 8,000 names from Texas supplied by George Bush’s state officials. These 8,000 Florida voters were all listed as having been felons in Texas, and serious criminals are barred from voting. As it turns out, almost none were. Nearly all had committed only minor violations and misdemeanors. Typical was Reverend Willie Whiting, who was removed from the voting rolls for a speeding ticket twenty-five years earlier.

Under orders from Harris’s office, DBT provided matches of anyone with a close name. Thus, for example, John Jackson is a black man who had served time in Texas, so Johnny Jackson Jr., a black man in Florida with the same birth date, was purged from the registration rolls. DBT used lists of former felons that included names and birth dates and race, but counted as a “match” names that were only approximate. DBT specifically wrote Harris’s office to say that their name-match criteria would include a lot of nonfelons, and Harris’s office advised them in writing to lower the name-match criterion further to 85%. All told, DBT generated a list of 82,389 voters to purge from registries.

DBT subsequently tried to defend their lists by claiming they were 85% accurate. But that would still mean that well over 10,000 mostly minority, poor, and Democratic Floridians were illegally disenfranchised — more than twenty times Bush’s margin of victory in the state. Plus, where verification was attempted, the accuracy of the list was nowhere near 85%. Officials in Leon County, Florida, tried to verify the 694 names on the list from Tallahassee and found only 34 to be a match—a 5% accuracy rate.

Robert E. Pierre reported in the Washington Post that responsibility for this faulty voter purge lies with Harris’s office, not DBT: From the beginning, Database Technologies raised serious concerns that non-felons could be misidentified. … “Obviously, we want to capture more names that possibly aren’t matches,” said Emmett “Bucky” Mitchell, who headed the state purge effort, in a March 1999 e-mail to Database Technologies product manager Marlene Thorogood, who had warned him of possible mistakes. … Clay Roberts, director of the state’s division of elections, confirmed the policy. … “The decision was made to do the match in such a way as not to be terribly strict on the name.” “We warned them,” said James E. Lee, vice president of communications for the company. “The list was exactly what the state wanted. They said, ‘The counties will verify the information, so you don’t have to.’”

Florida officials neither sought reimbursement nor penalty, but rather awarded DBT another contract renewal, bringing total fees to over $4 million.

Full article with sources here. Another fascinating article here about the recount stopped by the Supreme Court.

And in 2004? Fascinating article here by Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (also with sources) that states that Republicans stole the election once again. The most damning evidence would be the huge discrepancy between exit polls and final vote tallies, which is virtually unheard of.

The arguments for both are pretty convincing but I’ve read some pretty strong arguments that they were not as well, especially 2004. I don’t think the Bush administration had anything to do with either of them if they were. And on top of that, this sort of stuff is not endemic to the Republican Party, they just happened to be in charge of swing states when those particular races were so close and the opportunity arose. The Democrats possibly stole it in 1960, and we’ve heard allegations of it in every close race since.

But there’ve clearly been some serious shenanigans (a mix of willful intent and pure incompetence) from the Republican Party over the last eight years. There have, at the very least, been multiple attempts on their part to subvert the will of the people by disenfranchising likely voters from the other party, and there’s some chance they were successful at least once. There’s some chance they will be again.

So, with all that in mind, McCain’s allegations of voter fraud better have some pretty serious teeth. Unfortunately for him they don’t. ACORN, like many political organizations on both sides of the aisle, is engaged in voter registration drives. Theirs are generally targeted at registering voters who will vote Democratic, so lots of minorities, working class non-evangelical whites, etc.

To do this they hire workers who get paid based on quotas. Unsurprisingly, the workers sometimes come up short, and even less surprisingly, sometimes when they do, they make stuff up to meet the quota so they’ll get paid, even notably going so far as to register Mickey Mouse.

ACORN, like all organizations that participate in voter drives, is required by law to pass on all collected registrations. In fact, part of the 2004 Republican scandal involves a firm called Sproul & Associates that was hired by their national committee to run similar registration drives and was caught shredding Democratic ones. So ACORN passed the fraudulent registrations on, as they were required to by law, fired some offending workers, and even flagged them as likely frauds.

Moreover, making up fake registrations is nowhere near on the level of shredding real ones. Mickey Mouse presumably can’t walk up to a polling station, show a valid photo identification, and pull a lever, however a real person who thought their application was received can get there only to find he’s been disenfranchised by the opposing party.

A large number (somewhere up to 30%) ended up getting thrown out for things like being duplicate registrations, wrong districts, and the like which happen all the time and are the states’ job to prevent. Shockingly, the states seem to have actually done so. Who says government never does anything right?

Clearly some ACORN employees unrelated to Obama or the DNC were unethical, and maybe were even trying to register people to vote in multiple counties at once. I hope we find out. I’d rather my candidate lose the election honestly than win it via fraud (though I’d most prefer winning legitimately) and I’d certainly want that organization destroyed if this came from within.

But of the two parties, it isn’t the Democratic one that is “destroying the fabric of democracy” as the McCain camp loves to say. The fact that I can’t group theories about elections past and present being stolen in with 9/11 being a government conspiracy, bigfoot, faked moon landings, or other crazy notions scares me, and it’s mainly the fault of Republicans, if maybe only because they just had more opportunity and were the ones that happened to get caught.

In the end it makes you wonder, is the RNC somehow trying to disenfranchise voters yet again by striking from the roles all of the legitimate registrations that came through ACORN? Are they trying to set up a challenge to the legitimacy of the results if the race ends up close in swing states? Are they just genuinely concerned that people are trying to vote in duplicate counties, and that the states’ election boards will be unable to stop them? All of the above?

Or is it just a good old fashioned lob from half court with a second left on the shot clock?

I was talking to a Republican-leaning friend the other day and she was asking me why I agree more with Obama’s fiscal policy than McCain’s. I explained to her how, according to the Tax Policy Center, Obama would increase the national debt by $3.5 trillion over 10 years, whereas McCain would by $5 trillion. Both are, to me, not acceptable but less is clearly better.

So she gave me the current Republican talking point line of “so you support the government redistributing wealth?” This is something I’ve heard over and over from both McCain and conservative pundits, which isn’t surprising. When a political party’s entire strategy is built around populism, some serious rhetoric is needed to explain why they’re cutting taxes only for the wealthiest 5% of the populace.

They have to convince the other 95% that making the rich richer benefits them, or at least doesn’t hurt them and is the right thing to do morally, and that’s a tough sell. It’s like trying to convince someone who walked onto your lot asking to buy a used Corolla that what they really need is a brand-new F350.

Trickle-down economics, which used to be the phrase of choice, clearly failed and the populace knows it. Of the last 28 years, 20 of them saw Republican Presidents, and all 20 of those saw an unprecedented landslide of money away from the poor and to the wealthy. The people to whom the money was supposed to trickle down are still waiting for it to rain.

Of course, we all agree that the rich getting richer isn’t a bad thing if everyone else is too, and up until George W. Bush took office that was happening, if maybe not as quickly. But what we’ve seen over the last 8 years is the rich getting richer and the rest of America treading water. To quote Nobel laureate economist Paul Krugman:

Rising inequality isn’t new. The gap between rich and poor started growing before Ronald Reagan took office, and it continued to widen through the Clinton years. But what is happening under Bush is something entirely unprecedented: For the first time in our history, so much growth is being siphoned off to a small, wealthy minority that most Americans are failing to gain ground even during a time of economic growth — and they know it.

And over the last 4 administrations, how did the market as a whole do? Let’s look at the Dow Jones Industrial Average:

Exact numbers from the opening price on the day they took office to the closing price on the day they left:

Given all of the above, it’s not a shocker that McCain is fighting an uphill battle on the economy. So instead of trying to promote his own policy to the public he and his supporters are forced to use rhetoric and redefine it to be more palatable. The current buzzwords toward that end are “redistributing wealth” and “socialism”.

Like most rhetoric from either party, though, it’s largely hollow. McCain’s calls to pay people’s mortgages for them is no less socialist than Obama’s health care plan (and possibly more expensive, we don’t really know due to a lack of details). The same with the bailout that both candidates supported, which actually will have our government buying chunks of equity in private banks.  

As for redistributing wealth, any tax changes or large government actions do that. The Iraq war, for example, has redistributed wealth from civilians to the military industrial complex. Bush and Reagan’s cuts, Clinton’s increases, all moved money from one group of people to another. You can’t simply not change taxes or go to war or build roads when necessary just because money is going from someone to someone else.

That’s just the nature of government, and the only true alternative is anarchy. While I’m certainly not in favor of the government redistributing wealth just for the hell of it, I realize that until our country is perfect, that’s going to happen. It’s part of the political process.

So the question isn’t really about whether or not money should be redistributed, it’s about who the money gets redistributed from, and who it gets redistributed to.

In both candidates’ cases, there’s a significant budget deficit, so much of the money is taken from America in the future. Who is going to pay that? It’s unclear. It won’t be the poor, because they won’t have it and you can’t squeeze blood from a stone. It will either be the rich or all of us collectively when the government is forced to print money to avoid bankruptcy and tremendous inflation ensues. My guess is it will be the latter, because nowadays even the common sense politician has a $350 billion deficit. The steps required to ending our budget deficit before it’s unsolvable are too politically unpopular to occur. Our government’s fiscal policy is much like mine was back when I was 19 and charged my college tuition and a computer to my first credit card, and I see no reason to believe that the eventual results won’t be equally disastrous.

But back to the present (and past). The Bush tax cuts (which McCain originally opposed, and which was one of the reasons I used to be a big fan of his) gave the money almost exclusively to the wealthy. McCain wants to make those (which are set to expire in 2010) permanent. Obama wants to take some money from the future, and some from
the today’s wealthy people, and give it mainly to the lower and middle classes.

So, when given the choice between borrowing from the future and giving to the rich, or taking the money from the wealthy now and (and borrowing less money from the future) and improving the middle class, I’ll take the latter. In fact, people say that voters decide with their pocketbooks, but if that were true, Obama would be leading by 90 points instead of 10-15.

Moreover, I believe we have a serious problem in this country whereby the wealthy are paying half the tax rate of the middle class due to capital gains. Obama is the only candidate addressing this. the lower capital gains tax was designed to encourage investment, inspiring people to start their own businesses and invest in others, which is good for the economy in many ways. It has probably accomplished that somewhat. But unfortunately, what it has also done is ensure that guys like Warren Buffet pay taxes at half the rate of their secretaries, despite making many times more money.

Obama wants to keep capital gains taxes at 15% up to $250k in income, and then increase them to a more reasonable 20% after. This will encourage people to start businesses and invest for their future, while also partially closing the largest personal tax loophole in the history of our country. I personally liked his earlier plan of bumping them all the way up to 28% at the top, which is still significantly lower than income tax, and that’s coming from someone who has worked over a year with almost no salary to start a company that will pay mainly capital gains if/when it succeeds.

So while I’m not happy that both candidates are fiscally irresponsible, I recognize that as an inherent flaw in democracy. It’s a large part of why I liked John Kerry, and probably part of why he didn’t win. So I’m going with the guy who is less fiscally irresponsible and crossing my fingers.

Does it ever seem to you that every argument Sarah Palin makes in favor of herself is actually in favor of Obama, or against McCain? Or that every bad thing she says about Obama is also a knock on her?

I’m certainly a Washington outsider, and I’m proud of that, because I think that that is what we need.

Who is more of a Washington insider, McCain or Obama?

We’ve got to remember what the desire is in this nation at this time. It is for no more politics as usual, and somebody’s big fat résumé, maybe, that shows decades and decades in the Washington establishment . . . Americans are getting sick and tired of that self-dealing, and kind of that closed-door, good-ol’-boy network that has been the Washington élite.

Wait, I’m confused, which Presidential candidate has decades of membership in the establishment? Which one is the goodest ol’ boy in the whole network? I’m getting confused.

I’ve never met him before, but I’ve been hearing about his Senate speeches since I was in like second grade.

You might think that quote was about McCain two days before she got chosen for VP, but it’s actually about Biden.

Voters don’t know the real Barack Obama

There’s the pot calling the kettle African American. Let’s see, whose existence has America known about for only 6 weeks? Whose entire political experience is being the governor of a state with a population roughly the size of Akron, OH, and even then only for a couple years? There’s definitely someone we don’t know here, and it isn’t the guy we’ve seen on TV every day for 20 months.

Why would I vote for someone whose own VP pick seems to keep telling me that I don’t want to? If there’s one thing I’m surprised to see the Republican Party struggling with, it’s having a consistent message. Usually they’re pretty damn good at that.

This clip from The Daily Show highlights one of the most effective and, I think, insidious tactics conservatives in America use to stifle discourse, which is the notion that anyone who thinks that America is imperfect hates our country. In their mind, wanting to improve America equals loathing our nation and is unpatriotic.

But I guess that’s what conservativism has been reduced to in this country, the notion that life was better in the past and that change is scary and unnecessary.

From a comment on my last post that I felt interesting enough to warrant an entry:

"I thought you were making a claim about some inherent feature of social news which makes it right wing hostile rather than an empirical observation.

Do you think it would be possible to create a right leaning social news site?"

I think there is an inherent feature which makes social news websites lean left, which is that they are on the Internet. Internet traffic disproportionately represents people who are into technology, and those people are very left-leaning. Just look at the top Technorati blogs which are listed by an objective measure called Authority. In the top 10 you have one left-leaning political blog (Huffington Post) and then TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Engadget, Boing Boing, Life Hacker, Ars Technica, Daily Kos, Google Blog, and Smashing Magazine.

So you have a lefty politics blog, followed by 6 blogs aimed at techies, then another 1 lefty blog and 2 more techies. Right-leaning blogs, while sometimes large, are outweighed vastly in terms of traffic by the left. The first one I could find on Technorati was Michelle Malkin, which was number 45. There were at least 5 lefty blogs above it. And here’s the Compete.com traffic graph for the top progressive and the top conservative blogs:

(Neat coincidence that Compete.com colors them blue and red by default.) Note that while there are more registered Democrats in the U.S. than Republicans, it’s by a ratio of less than 1.5:1. I don’t have the time to add them all up, but there’s clearly over a 10:1 ratio  (and maybe over 20:1) in terms of blog traffic though, which shows disproportionate representation online.

I suspect it is primarily due to us techies flooding the Internet. We tend to be online all day. Many of us have jobs that have us in front of computers all day at work, and then we go home and screw around on the computer. You can see it in the inordinate amount of traffic to blogs about tech, a subject that only some small percentage of the population cares about.

This isn’t surprising really. Democrats have embraced science, technology, and intellectualism while Republicans have embraced religion and anti-intellectualism. And in politics, people tend to favor the politicians that favor them.

You can pretty much see the difference between the right and the left’s Internet usage in this post about Obama and McCain’s websites.

I’m almost positive you could create a successful right-leaning social news site. I don’t know enough about either political agenda to know where you’d find your initial audience, but I imagine through forums, existing popular blogs. There’s no shortage of conservatives on the web, as Michelle Malkin’s traffic (which is undoubtedly nothing to sneeze at) shows. They’re certainly there. There are less of them, by a big margin, but still a pretty high number.

You might have some problems though, especially if you got big. For one, expect shenanigans from left-leaning hackers and such. I don’t know that they’d have any more desire to DDoS your site than conservative Internet denizens, but they’d have 100x the ability to do it. Or they could simply flood it with Daily Kos stories and vote them up, either manually or with bots. If the front page of Digg is any indication, they’ll do it too.

But, I think you could do it. You might have to spend a good amount of time moderating, but it could still be done.

I was thinking about gay marriage a bit today. It seems to be the hot button issue of the last 4 years or so. When the Republicans needed to get George W. Bush reelected despite a low approval rating, their most powerful tactic (and the one that may ultimately have worked) was putting anti-gay marriage amendments on the ballot to drive the religious right to the polls.

Gay marriage is clearly the new abortion, the topic separating the red half of the nation from the blue. It seems that the social conservatives are more or less admitting defeat on abortion, at least as far as ballots are concerned, and moving on. They know they can’t do much about it other than to hope they can keep electing Presidents until they’ve stacked the Supreme Court in their favor, but that’s too long-term a plan to make much difference at the polls. So they had to go digging for another hobgoblin, and lo and behold, Massachusetts and then California dropped it into their lap.

When you really think about it, you realize that something like 95% of the population doesn’t have a vested interest in the outcome, so it’s clear that it isn’t the issue itself that’s bringing people to the voting booths. At least with abortion, there was a clear rationale for wanting it to be illegal. Many of us disagree with the premise (that life begins at some definable point, such as conception) and prefer to err on the side of civil liberties, but at least we can sort of understand where the opposing side is coming from. They believe, for whatever reason, that a fetus is still a human, and therefore abortion is murder, and that our government has a responsibility to protect unborn babies from murder just as they do born ones. Again, many of us may disagree, but we get the argument.

Not so with gay marriage really. The actual issue is a little esoteric, because it’s always being danced around. Separation of church and state forces those in favor of such amendments to come up with some justification beyond “The Bible says so” for outlawing it, but the ones they come up with are flimsy and weak, obviously a ruse to hide some deeper motivations.

The first of the big two justifications is that “marriage is between a man and a woman”, which is really nothing more than semantics. A lot of people say they’re ok with gay people having “civil unions”, which are just marriages but called something different, which essentially means they want the government to take over Merriam Webster’s job of defining words.

The second is that we need to “protect the institution of marriage.” That’s such bullshit that even most of the social conservatives I’ve talked to laugh at it. We have a 50% failure rate for first marriages, which climbs to 67% and 74% for the second and third, respectively. Any “institution” that fails more often than not doesn’t need protection, it needs life support. And nobody but Pat Buchanan could possibly blame gay people for the current state of affairs there.

So what it really comes down to, what really drives people to the polls to vote one way or the other, is epistemology. What we’re voting on isn’t whether or not gay people should be able to file a joint tax return. It’s whether we’re going to make our decisions based on science and reason or religion and fear of what we don’t understand.

As Bill Maher said in the first video from my recent post:

“It is two Americas. There’s like a progressive European nation that a lot of us live in, or would like to live in, and it’s being strangled by the Sarah Palins of the world. It can’t quite be born because this other stupid redneck nation won’t allow it.”

It’s pretty clear which nation I’d like to live in, of course. My heart lies with science. And scientists say that homosexuality isn’t a choice but rather a genetic disposition. And therefore, it cannot be wrong, any more than being tall or having brown hair can. (Science also says that there isn’t a black and white distinction between homo and heterosexuality as we tend to view it, but rather it’s a continuum and we’re all some shade of grey, but that’s beside the point I suppose.)

So that’s why I could never pull the lever for a candidate who was opposed to gay marriage. It isn’t because I care one way or the other about the outcome. It doesn’t really affect me either way. I only know a few gay people, and they don’t really seem to care. What does affect me is having leaders who base their decisions on 2,000 year old mistranslated folk stories, and irrational fears that if we let gay people be openly so, our moral fabric will somehow be ripped to shreds.

It’s a bad epistemology, and it’s one that’s threatening the very future of our country. It’s what’s allowing the redneck half to hold the progressive half back. And it’s why I find myself so often voting for a party that I consider the lesser, by far, of two evils, and lamenting that there hasn’t been a truly conservative candidate on the ballot since 1964. And don’t say Reagan or I’ll punch you in the teeth.

So the question is, where do we go from here? I really don’t know. I don’t see much of a way out of our current predicament beyond education, and that’s nearly non-existent in the red half of the nation. The differences in average wealth and education between the red and blue states are astounding, and it’s not a coincidence. It all goes back to the epistemology.

But the very policies of those kept in power by the religious right keep their base poor and uneducated. Our nation is already a statistical outlier in terms of religion, but it’s also very young, and it can’t stay that way forever. Nothing ever does. In the end, science and reason always have their way. It’s just a matter of time.

Perhaps if the progressive half of our nation wants the redneck half to allow it to be born, it should focus on educating them. Fear and religion are both predicated on ignorance. Maybe we should be donating to their schools and scholarship funds. Surely there are loads of intelligent people even in those states, give them the tools they need to stamp out fear and ignorance through education. It sounds a little counterintuitive to give money to the very people who are preventing you from fixing our nation, but it might build a progressive dynasty.

Or maybe not.

I’m starting to think I may have been wrong about Sarah Palin being a disaster on McCain’s part. I’m not sure. It’s hard to tell. The betting markets have shifted a few percent his way, but then that was to be expected after the Convention. They shifted toward Obama after his.

Winning elections seems to come down to doing two things. The first is swaying independents to your side. The second is getting the people already on your side to actually head out to the polls and vote for you. My rationale in thinking she was an awful choice was that she’s probably very damaging for McCain amongst moderates. I still believe she is, though maybe a little less than I had initially thought due to her charisma and looks, and the media’s obsession with her. The jury is still out on that one.

What I may have overlooked was just how good she is for inspiring the knee-jerk Republicans. Both parties have a large number of reflex voters. The fact that George W. Bush’s approval rating is hovering just below 30% while 61% of historians rate him the worst President in our nation’s history shows how many of them there are on the right. I don’t know how many there are on the left, but I’d guess the numbers are equaling out as the environmental movement grows.

I overlooked her appeal, of course, because I knew little about her and assumed from appearances that she was a reasonable human being. She looks a little like Tina Fey, and everyone loves Tina Fey. She even seemed maybe a little yuppyish, called herself a hockey mom, and having named her children Bristol, Willow, Trig, Track, and Piper. (Good luck guessing which of those are girls and which boys.)

But as time goes on, it’s turning out that she’s actually less Tina Fey and more Anne Coulter. She’s an evangelical who can’t tell the difference between Creationism and science. She doubts global warming, is anti-abortion in every circumstance, and wants to drill for oil and ban gay marriage. She is, to the far right, everything they want, and everything McCain is not.

And she’s gotten him more press coverage in one week than he’s gotten himself in the last year. It’s generally not positive coverage, but they say all press is really good press. So even though she’s about as appealing to a moderate voter as a poison ivy sweatshirt, she’s basically George W. Bush in a miniskirt to the far right, who was previously ambivalent about McCain.

My only question is how much better could he have done? Could he pick someone who the far right liked and who moderates could get into? A lot of moderates are against abortion or gay marriage, but don’t want to see Creationism in classrooms and don’t trust anyone who thinks they are more qualified than geologists to comment on the causes of global warming. Many of those moderates have some serious misgivings about Obama, like his stance on universal health care or raising taxes.

I still think his best move would have been to get someone with some experience, though not necessarily a lot, someone you’ve heard of before, someone whose speeches aren’t a passable substitute for Lunesta, and whose views, while still right-leaning, aren’t so reprehensible to the other 70% of America.

Just my thoughts. It will be very interesting to see how it plays out.

I’m starting to think McCain’s vice presidential choice of Sarah Palin might go down as one of the biggest blunders in the history of elections. I’m not sure, but I think it’s that awful.

It seems like his camp has been watching too much T.V. The media has been focused for some time on how "fractured" the Democratic party is. Stories are always accompanied by sound bites from a 250 lb. soccer mom wearing a size XXL Hillary ’08 shirt talking about how she just doesn’t know who she’s going to vote for now. The problem for McCain is that the media was focused on it because it makes for a good narrative, not because a large number of dejected voters are actually up for grabs. They’re not.

His choice of a virtually unknown female is clearly a ploy to pick up what he perceives as a large swing demographic, but I think he’s horribly mistaken for the following reasons:

1. Those soccer moms love Hillary not just because she’s female. They love her because she’s a female who has a very long track record of succeeding at a man’s game. Regardless of what you think of her politics, she’s an American success story. She grew up in a fairly typical home, worked hard as hell and got a law degree from Yale, and had a fairly successful career (including a spot on Wal-Mart’s board) before turning to public service where she was a popular First Lady and then Senator. And she did the latter half while raising a kid that, as far as we can tell, turned out pretty well.

So every night those 18 million soccer moms finish watching their TiVoed episodes of Lipstick Jungle, put the remaining half of the Cherry Garcia back in their freezer, and then go to bed and dream of being Hillary.

Sarah Palin, not so much. She’s too good looking, too young, and too inexperienced. Her only significant accomplishment is winning an election in a state that’s about as populated as Toledo, Ohio. And worse still, she’s pro-life, or as feminists call it, anti-choice. That’s a deal breaker in and of itself to most of the Hillary fans.

McCain’s best hope, all along, has not been that he could persuade them to vote for him. They won’t, even now. It’s that they wouldn’t care enough to vote at all. Insulting them won’t help.

2. It’s too obvious. The Hillary supporters were behind her because they thought she could actually win on her own merits. Palin, on the other hand, is just too blatantly being used as a token female to get their votes. That’s counterproductive to what the Hillary supporters were hoping to accomplish. In fact, it’s insulting their intelligence.

Women would still be glad to see one of their gender in the White House if she wins, but it just wouldn’t feel right this way because it wasn’t earned. It’s too cheap. It would be like losing your virginity to a hooker. Technically it still counts, but you’ll always feel a little slimy when you think about it. There would always be an asterisk next to it in America’s mind, like some feminist equivalent of Barry Bonds’s home run record.

There has to have been some Republican female somewhere who McCain could have at least pretended to choose on merits other than gender. I don’t really know who, but someone better must exist. Palin’s choice gives you the feeling that the vice-presidential questionnaire he sent out to his short list looked something like this:

3. It’s too hypocritical. So far the campaigns have come down to McCain saying Obama is inexperienced, and Obama saying McCain is George W. Bush II. But now McCain’s going to have to find a new approach, because every time he pulls the experience card some reporter or audience member is going to say "Well, if it matters so much, how come you chose a running mate who has spent more time in beauty pageants than public office?"

Still, in fairness to McCain, Palin has to at least be a better campaigner than Mitt Romney. He reminds me of a used-car salesman, except unlike most politicians, he reminds me of a bad one. Every time I heard that he was the most likely pick I chuckled a little. Anything is better than the guy who, upon seeing black people (apparently for the first time in real life) yells "WHO LET THE DOGS OUT!".

Even a token female is better than that.

(I know I said no more lolcats, but I didn’t say anything about lolpoliticians)

As I mentioned in my last post, I really get off on all of the character assassination flying around this time of the election year. Two of my favorites, one about each are as follows.

People on the left are slinging some mud at John McCain’s values, as they have for years, because of his marital history. They’re saying his aren’t the same as ours. I don’t get this one. The guy traded one wife for another that was younger, richer, and far better looking. I don’t know what country the critics are from, but here in the good old U.S.A we call that the American Dream. If you haven’t ditched your wife for a 20 year old millionaire blonde bombshell, it’s only because you haven’t had the opportunity.

McCain’s camp, in an effort to unbury themselves from his revelation that he doesn’t know how many homes he has, is hurling some real-estate related trash over the fence. “”Does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses?”

Wait, so what did Obama do wrong here? I’ve watched enough HGTV to know that when it comes to buying a house, it’s all about saving as much dough as you can. I don’t care if Barack let Michael Vick run dog fights there, if it got the seller to pay his closing costs, I say more power to him. If you weren’t allowed to buy things that were connected to a convicted felon, Escalade sales would drop 90%. Thankfully you are, so you can pick one up for $15,000, already bulletproofed, at your local police auction.

While I’m here, I just want to thank everyone who participated in my poll. 66 people voted, and only 3 said they didn’t know how many homes they own. I suspect at least 2 of them were joking, but even if you take that at face value, 95.45% of American’s don’t seem to have John McCain’s problems.

In honor, I decided to make what I promise you is both my first and last lolcat ever:

There’s nothing I love more than a good bit of trash talking, which makes election season as much fun to me as Free Burrito Day at Chipotle is to a morbidly obese housewife. The only thing better than a politician talking trash is when it blows up in his face.

Enter John McCain. He’s been harping on how out of touch Obama is with the average American. Imagine his chagrin when he realized, in front of the camera, that he didn’t even know how many homes he owns.

I know a lot of people, and as near as I can tell all of them know how many homes they own. But just to make sure my small sample isn’t subject to some sort of observational bias, I’d like to get your feedback. So if you could spare a couple seconds, please fill out this simple poll off the top of your head. No peaking at last year’s tax return!

*If you’re in an RSS reader, click here for the poll.