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Here is my audio commentary:  "Will there be a second Cuban Missile Crisis?"

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A reminder that daylight savings time ends at 2 a.m. tomorrow.  Clocks are to be set back.  Since Obama could win on Tuesday, you might want to set yours back to 1968.

SATURDAY,  NOVEMBER 1,  2008

THUMBS DOWN FROM DOWN UNDER

Posted at 10:26 p.m. ET

We've said here before that some of the most astute comments about American politics come from the English-speaking foreign press.  Today Greg Sheridan of The Australian, expresses his view about our campaign.  Don't expect raves.  Those you can get at CNN.

THIS has been the worst US presidential campaign I've ever seen. Vacuous, fatuous, misleading, dishonest, trivial, at times unhinged in its disconnect from reality.

The politics of the world's greatest democracy has taken something weird in its Kool-Aid.

Sheridan was never a candidate for the Australian diplomatic corps.

This election marks the triumph of celebrity as the essential organising principle of US politics. There were presentiments of this in John F. Kennedy and even Ronald Reagan. But Bill Clinton was the critical transitional figure who morphed from a traditional politician into a pure soap opera celebrity, with all the baroque plot twists and personal dysfunction.

Ah yes, we remember him well.  Didn't his wife just lose?

Barack Obama is the first pure celebrity presidential candidate. He is a superior celebrity, superbly in control of himself, masterful at presentation, effortlessly detached, as the best celebrities are, from the controversies that swirl around him.

Consider the arc of Obama's presidential rise. He was introduced by Oprah Winfrey on her non-political talk show. She is a clever woman, Winfrey, and she, before almost anyone else, saw Obama's crossover potential as a figure in her world - confessional celebrity psycho-babble - and the world of electoral politics.

Great way to select a president.  Maybe the next one will be runner-up on Donald Trump's next full-employment series.

It is typical to see Obama's life described as an incredible odyssey that could only happen in America. There was nothing incredible about it. His mother was a peripatetic academic researcher. He was reared mostly by his grandparents. His grandmother was a bank vice-president and his grandfather a furniture store manager and then insurance salesman. They gave him a sturdily middle-class life.

He went to Hawaii's best high school and America's efficient meritocracy later saw him attend Columbia and Harvard universities. This is all entirely admirable, but there is nothing the least incredible or odyssey like about it.

But Mr. Sheridan, think of the movie, the opera, the TV series.  How can you say the things you do? 

As celebrity material, McCain's memoir is slightly less user friendly than Obama's. This is because being a prisoner of war is not something most Americans can imagine themselves doing, whereas growing up in Hawaii and resenting your grandpa a bit and going off to New York and feeling the terrible but causeless burden of self, and then going to Chicago to live, these are things the average American can relate to.

But what a dismal and pathetic basis duelling memoirs are on which to vote.

Well, maybe the media could give us something else.  But celebrity is so much easier, and far more fun.  And the TV reports are great.

Although Palin embodied many of the dynamics of celebrity, because her life and beliefs so comprehensively repudiate the liberal consensus around which most media celebrities cluster she aroused a visceral hatred in the elite media. One of the ways in which celebrity has been so destructive of serious political debate in this campaign is that Obama and McCain have had plastic political identities, while their celebrity identities have been zealously safeguarded. This is the opposite of mature politics.

Correct.  Immaturity, a prolonged adolescence, has become an American political disease.

History tells us that either McCain or Obama could possibly make a good president. But this campaign, uniquely, has given us no basis for knowing whether this is likely. Electorates have always been concerned about character in political leaders, but the traditional proofs of character - steady commitment, solid achievement - have given way to the fraudulent tinsel of celebrity.

This is American politics as American Idol. And that's a giant step backwards.

Americans will understand that when Obama faces his first crisis.

November 1, 2008.      Permalink          

NOTE AT 7:31 P.M.   This is from an Associated Press tory, published today:

An Obama loss — or McCain comeback — would be a crushing disappointment for Democrats in a year tailor-made for the party. It would suggest McCain's experience trumped Obama's clarion call for change, and raise troubling questions about white Americans' willingness to vote for a black man.
Blacks, in particular, might be furious and deeply suspicious of an almost sure thing that slipped away.

We wrote here last night about intimidation in this campaign.  Intimidation doesn't have to be direct.  It can be implied.  It may not come from the source of the threat.  It may come from a sympathizer.  Read the last paragraph of that quote again.  Note the word "furious."  What does it imply?  When Americans go into the voting booth on Tuesday, how many will think, "Maybe I'd better vote for Obama. Avoid trouble."  That is the fruit of intimidation.  It's been an undercurrent throughout the campaign, and it is tragic.

UPDATE AT 3:47 P.M. ET:  The IBD/TIPP tracker, just out, has Obama up five, a gain of one since yesterday.  There is absolutely no evidence in the five trackers we've published today of any surge toward McCain, except in the Zogby poll.  It can still happen, but there are only two full days of campaigning left. 

UPDATE AT 2:13 P.M. ET:  Several new trackers are now out.  Unfortunately, they do not confirm Zogby's finding of a late surge toward McCain.  Hotline has Obama up seven, 51-44.  And Gallup, in a disturbing report, has Obama up ten using either its traditional or expanded model.  Both show a 52-42 race.  The lead was eight and nine points yesterday.  With the exception of Zogby, all trackers reporting today have Obama above 50 percent. 

COMMENT:  Gallup swings more than the other polls, and I have my doubts about this result.  Also, it's hard to believe that the traditional and expanded models are showing the same thing...unless you crank in the margin of error.  Gallup's published margin of error for the traditional sample is three points, for the expanded it is two points. 

However, the cold reality is that, in the four trackers published today, only Zogby shows a gain for McCain.  We await the IBD/TIPP result, to be published later today. 

UPDATE AT 9:57 A.M. ET:    Rasmussen is now out, and has Obama up five, 51-46.  Unlike Zogby, Rasmussen detects no late surge of support for McCain, and describes the race as "remarkably stable."  Three more trackers will report later today. 

OUR EYES AND EARS.  SURE.

Posted at 8:47 a.m. ET

Ed Lasky at American Thinker alerts us to an excellent piece by Victor Davis Hanson on one of the biggest scandals of this political year - the reckless bias of the news media, a bias that will further erode the confidence of the American people in its self-appointed "eyes and ears."  But what do you do when the eyes refuse to see and the ears refuse to hear?

There have always been media biases and prejudices. Everyone knew that Walter Cronkite, from his gilded throne at CBS news, helped to alter the course of the Vietnam War, when, in the post-Tet depression, he prematurely declared the war unwinnable.

Sadly, everyone didn't know.  Only informed, probing people knew.  And today, students learning the history of that war aren't taught the truth, only the approved "narrative."

Yet we have never quite seen anything like the current media infatuation with Barack Obama, and its collective desire not to raise key issues of concern to the American people.

That is correct, without qualification.  Consider financing of elections.

Imagine the reaction of the New York Times or the Washington Post had John McCain renounced his promise to participate in public campaign financing, proceeded instead to amass $600 million and outraise the publicly financed Barack Obama four-to-one, and begun airing special 30-minute unanswered infomercials during the last week of the campaign.

Reaction?  More like hysteria.  There are essentially no media questions about the vast sums Obama has raised, how he has raised them, and from what sources.

What about the vice presidential choices?

We know now almost all the details of Sarah Palin’s pregnancies, whether the trooper who tasered her nephew went to stun or half stun, the cost of her clothes, and her personal expenses — indeed, almost everything except how a mother of so many children gets elected councilwoman, mayor, and governor, routs an entrenched old-boy cadre, while maintaining near record levels of public support.

And Biden?

By accepted standards of behavior, Biden has sadly proven wanting. He has committed almost every classical sin of character — plagiarism, false biography, racial insensitivity, and serial fabrication. And because of media silence, we don’t know whether he was kidding when he said America would not need to burn coal, or that Hezbollah was out of Lebanon, or that FDR addressed the nation on television as president in 1929 (surely a record for historical fictions in a single thought), or that the public would turn sour on Obama once he was challenged by our enemies abroad.

But Joe has the most important qualifications of all - he works in Washington and knows reporters.

The respective coverage of the two candidates is ironic in a variety of ways, but in one especially — almost every charge against Palin (that she is under wraps, untruthful, and inept) was applicable only to Biden.

So we are about to elect a vice president about whom we know only that he has been around a long time, but little else — and nothing at all why exactly Joe Biden says the most astounding and often lunatic things.

Obama's past:

In 2004, few Americans knew Barack Obama. In 2008, they may elect him. Surely his past was of more interest than his present serial denials of it. Whatever the media’s feelings about the current Barack Obama, there should have been some story that the Obama of 2008 is radically different from the Obama who was largely consistent and predictable for the prior 30 years.

Wait.  Can we ask about his past?  Isn't that McCarthyism, or pastism, or one of those isms they teach at Harvard?

Name an issue — FISA, NAFTA, guns, abortion, capital punishment, coal, nuclear power, drilling, Iran, Jerusalem, the surge — and Obama’s position today is not that of just a year ago.

Oh, but he's an intellectual, always thinking, always evolving.  Or is it just that he's always running.

Imagine the reaction of CNN or NBC had John McCain’s pastor and spiritual advisor of 20 years been revealed as a white supremacist who damned a multiracial United States, or had he been a close acquaintance until 2005 of an unrepentant terrorist bomber of abortion clinics, or had McCain himself sued to eliminate congressional opponents by challenging the validity of African-American voters who signed petitions, or had both his primary and general election senatorial rivals imploded once their sealed divorce records were mysteriously leaked.

These conservative historians like Hanson - always dredging up embarrassments.  Aren't we supposed to look forward to change we can believe in?  Aren't we the ones we've been waiting for?  Hmm.  Maybe not.

The media has succeeded in shielding Barack Obama from journalistic scrutiny. It thereby irrevocably destroyed its own reputation and forfeited the trust that generations of others had so carefully acquired. And it will never again be trusted to offer candid and nonpartisan coverage of presidential candidates.

Worse still, the suicide of both print and electronic journalism has ensured that, should Barack Obama be elected president, the public will only then learn what they should have known far earlier about their commander-in-chief — but in circumstances and from sources they may well regret.

But who will be there to tell us to regret it.  Chris Matthews?   The publisher of The New York Times?  Katie Couric?  Jon Stewart?  Al Franken?

And those are the intellectuals.

The alternative media is here, and we're ready.

November 1, 2008.      Permalink          

UPDATE AT 7:33 A.M. ET:  Zogby has Obama up five, 49-44, a decline of two since yesterday.  Zogby notes that McCain had an especially strong day yesterday.

COMMENT:  One poll, one opinion.  Four other trackers will report later today.  Be cautious. 

FRIDAY,  OCTOBER 31,  2008

IMPLIED THREATS

Posted at 8:09 p.m. ET

Threats in politics usually happen at the local level. Political machines, and local politics generally, can be very tough, very personal, very demanding.  But this year, to a degree greater than anything I've ever seen, we have intimidation at the national level.  I cannot claim that Barack Obama himself is sponsoring it or even condoning it, but I have yet to hear him speak out against the often-subtle, and not-so-subtle implied threats that surround his campaign.

Just in the last few months we've seen WGN in Chicago inundated with hostile calls because a program host dared interview a reporter digging into Obama's relationship with used-up terrorist Bill Ayers.  The calls were organized by pro-Obama forces.

We've seen a Florida anchorwoman trashed and humiliated because she dared ask some tough questions of Joe Biden.

Just today, reporters for papers that endorsed John McCain were thrown off the Obama aircraft.  At least the plane was on the ground at the time.

We're told that questions surrounding ACORN, that great "community" organization, are inherently racist.

Those aren't the worst things.  There's been an undercurrent of talk suggesting that there could be "trouble" if Obama loses.  We reported earlier today how borderline nutbag Erica Jong predicted a new civil war if The One doesn't make it to the White House.  Some have suggested that if McCain pulls it out, the African-American population will believe it had been cheated, and that violence could erupt.  Some commentators openly say that only racism could explain an Obama loss.

Some may shrug at these tactics, but I think they're far more serious than we'd prefer to think.  I've heard several voters say that they'll vote for Obama "to keep the peace," or some such phraseology.  There could be real fear in the voting booth, especially among those who believe their ballot isn't really secret.  Some voters may be apprehensive over foreign reaction, especially in African and Middle Eastern countries, if McCain wins.  After all, we don't want to show that we're a racist country, do we?

We've been told by the Obama side that John McCain and Sarah Palin practice "the politics of fear."  I haven't seen that.  I don't think discussing the threat of terrorism, or reviewing the choices of allies that Barack Obama has made over the years, are inappropriate in the least.  But the politics of fear is being practiced by forces loyal to Barack Obama.  The proof is this simple question:  Do you have any fear of "trouble" if John McCain loses the White House? 

Only one man can remove fear from this election, and that's Barack Obama.  So far, he's remained silent.  That may tell us more about his true political character than anything else he's done in his quest for the presidency.

October 31, 2008.      Permalink          

UPDATE AT 4:02 P.M. ET:  Preliminary Dow close, up 167.

UPDATE AT 3:53 P.M. ET:  The IBD/TIPP tracker, which was the most accurate poll in 2004, has Obama up a bit over four points, 48.2-43.8.  There is absolutely no evidence, thus far, of any last-minute surge for McCain.  But note that Obama, in this poll, is still under 50 percent.

UPDATE AT 3:34 P.M. ET:  The Dow is up 109.

UPDATE AT 2:52 P.M. ET:  The Dow is up 196.

BULLETIN AT 1:32 P.M. ET:  The Gallup tracker, just released, has bad news for our side, I'm sorry to report.  Using its traditional model, Gallup has Obama up eight, a gain of three since yesterday.  Using Gallup's "expanded" model, Obama is up nine, a gain of two since yesterday.

COMMENT:  Caution.  This is indeed grim news, but the Gallup tracker tends to swing more wildly than some of the others.  However, the truth cannot be denied:  The polls thus far today do not show the needed shift toward McCain.  They may in fact be hinting at a swing in the other direction.  We still, though, have a weekend ahead of us.  And we don't know exactly who'll vote.     

UPDATE AT 12:59 P.M. ET:  The Dow is up 91.

UPDATE AT 12:48 P.M. ET:  Two new trackers are out.  Hotline has Obama up seven, 48-41, a gain of one since yesterday.  Battleground has him up four, 49-45, also a gain of one.  At least for now, the race is stable, with only four days until the election.

COMMENT:  Please note that Hotline and Battleground both have Obama at below 50 percent, Rasmussen has him at 51 and Zogby at 50.  If there is a last-minute, weekend surge for McCain, he could still squeeze this out.  And remember that Obama traditionally polls better than he delivers.

UPDATE AT 9:39 A.M. ET:  Rasmussen has Obama up four, 51-47, a loss of one.

MA JONG

Posted at 7:57 a.m. ET

I once sat next to this lady at a cultural event. I never want the pleasure again. 

Erica Jong, noted feminist writer, speaks once more.  And once more she's thoughtful, reasoned, moderate, and a pile of good fun:

It seems that the final days of the presidential campaign have made Erica Jong and her friends more than a little anxious.

A few days ago, Jong, the author and self-described feminist, gave an interview to the Italian daily Corriere della Sera, the choicest bits of which were brought to my attention by the reliably sharp-eyed Christian Rocca, the U.S. correspondent of Il Foglio, who published excerpts on his Camillo blog. Basically, Jong says her fear that Obama might lose the election has developed into an "obsession. A paralyzing terror. An anxious fever that keeps you awake at night." She also says that her friends Jane Fonda and Naomi Wolf are extremely worried that Obama will be sabotaged by Republican dirty tricks, and that if an Obama loss indeed comes to pass, the result will be a second American Civil War.

I understand they were massing at Gettysburg this morning. 

"My friends Ken Follett and Susan Cheever are extremely worried. Naomi Wolf calls me every day. Yesterday, Jane Fonda sent me an email to tell me that she cried all night and can't cure her ailing back for all the stress that has reduces her to a bundle of nerves."

Forget the starving children of Africa.  Help these wounded souls!  We're setting up a fund. 

"My back is also suffering from spasms, so much so that I had to see an acupuncturist and get prescriptions for Valium."

Well, dearie, I assume you have your Medicare card...

"If Obama loses it will spark the second American Civil War. Blood will run in the streets, believe me. And it's not a coincidence that President Bush recalled soldiers from Iraq for Dick Cheney to lead against American citizens in the streets."

"Bush has transformed America into a police state, from torture to the imprisonment of reporters, to the Patriot Act."

In police states, Ms. Jong, they don't have elections.  Did you notice?

There are still people who take this woman seriously.

October 31, 2008.      Permalink          

CROWD SENSE

Posted at 7:20 a.m. ET

Fouad Ajami, writing in The Wall Street Journal, cautions against Barack Obama's capacity to appeal to crowds.  Ajami, who is Middle Eastern, knows about crowd appeal from his youth, and he applies his knowledge here:

There is something odd -- and dare I say novel -- in American politics about the crowds that have been greeting Barack Obama on his campaign trail. Hitherto, crowds have not been a prominent feature of American politics. We associate them with the temper of Third World societies. We think of places like Argentina and Egypt and Iran, of multitudes brought together by their zeal for a Peron or a Nasser or a Khomeini. In these kinds of societies, the crowd comes forth to affirm its faith in a redeemer: a man who would set the world right.

Ajami quotes a theory of crowd appeal:

As the late Nobel laureate Elias Canetti observes in his great book, "Crowds and Power" (first published in 1960), the crowd is based on an illusion of equality: Its quest is for that moment when "distinctions are thrown off and all become equal. It is for the sake of this blessed moment, when no one is greater or better than another, that people become a crowd."

I feel chilled already, and that's only the start.  But how does Obama appeal to these crowds?  What is his secret? 

The political genius of the man is that he is a blank slate. The devotees can project onto him what they wish. The coalition that has propelled his quest -- African-Americans and affluent white liberals -- has no economic coherence. But for the moment, there is the illusion of a common undertaking -- Canetti's feeling of equality within the crowd.

Somehow I think I've seen this movie before.  But the characters were always speaking foreign languages.

Ambiguity has been a powerful weapon of this gifted candidate: He has been different things to different people, and he was under no obligation to tell this coalition of a thousand discontents, and a thousand visions, the details of his political programs: redistribution for the poor, postracial absolution and "modernity" for the upper end of the scale.

And the working people?

It was no accident that the white working class was the last segment of the population to sign up for the Obama journey. Their hesitancy was not about race. They were men and women of practicality; they distrusted oratory, they could see through the falseness of the solidarity offered by this campaign. They did not have much, but believed in the legitimacy of what little they had acquired. They valued work and its rewards.

What strange concepts.  Are they still allowed?

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the late Democratic senator from New York, once set the difference between American capitalism and the older European version by observing that America was the party of liberty, whereas Europe was the party of equality. Just in the nick of time for the Obama candidacy, the American faith in liberty began to crack. The preachers of America's decline in the global pecking order had added to the panic. Our best days were behind us, the declinists prophesied. The sun was setting on our imperium, and rising in other lands.

A younger man, "cool" and collected, carrying within his own biography the strands of the world beyond America's shores, was put forth as a herald of the change upon us. The crowd would risk the experiment. There was grudge and a desire for retribution in the crowd to begin with.

Why am I not looking forward to the age of Obama?  Can you guess?

Save in times of national peril, Americans have been sober, really minimalist, in what they expected out of national elections, out of politics itself. The outcomes that mattered were decided in the push and pull of daily life, by the inventors and the entrepreneurs, and the captains of industry and finance...

...that American sobriety and skepticism about politics -- and leaders -- set this republic apart from political cultures that saw redemption lurking around every corner.

In other words, we never exactly dug the cult of personality...until now.

My boyhood, and the Arab political culture I have been chronicling for well over three decades, are anchored in the Arab world. And the tragedy of Arab political culture has been the unending expectation of the crowd -- the street, we call it -- in the redeemer who will put an end to the decline, who will restore faded splendor and greatness.

And America?

America is a different land, for me exceptional in all the ways that matter. In recent days, those vast Obama crowds, though, have recalled for me the politics of charisma that wrecked Arab and Muslim societies. A leader does not have to say much, or be much. The crowd is left to its most powerful possession -- its imagination...

...The morning after the election, the disappointment will begin to settle upon the Obama crowd. Defeat -- by now unthinkable to the devotees -- will bring heartbreak. Victory will steadily deliver the sobering verdict that our troubles won't be solved by a leader's magic.

How much wiser Ajami is than the "pundits" and news analysts who've never thought carefully about the negative side of Obama's crowd appeal.  The TV pictures were too pretty, the young crowds too alluring. 

A week from today, the president-elect will be settling into his new routine.  Then the shock will set in - the realization that he must govern.  Will he govern wisely, or simply play, again, to the roar of the crowd?  On that may depend the fate of this nation.

October 31, 2008.      Permalink          

UPDATE AT 6:30 A.M. ET:  Zogby, always the first tracker to be published, has Obama up seven, 50-43.  The seven-point spread is the same as yesterday's.  Please note, though, that Obama barely reaches the 50-percent mark.