After Lobbying To Select Palin, Top McCain
Adviser Can’t Bring Himself To Say She Was A Good Pick

post from Think Progress on 05 November 2008 10:15:00 AM. © Think Progress

In his recent New York Times Magazine piece on the McCain campaign, Robert Draper reveled that Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) pick of Gov. Sarah Palin (R-AK) “may have been even more impulsive than initially thought.”

Draper explained that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) was strongly urging McCain to pick Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT). At the “last minute,” however, McCain strategist Steve Schmidt and campaign manager Rick Davis convinced McCain to pick Palin:

The evening of Aug. 24, Schmidt and Davis, after leaving the Ritz-Carlton meeting, showed up at McCain’s condominium in Phoenix. They informed McCain that in their view, Palin would be the best pick. “You never know where his head is,” Davis told me three weeks later. “He doesn’t betray a lot. He’s a great poker player. But he picked up the phone.” Reached at the Alaska State Fair, Palin listened as McCain for the first time discussed the possibility of selecting her as his running mate.

Schmidt’s enthusiasm for Palin seems to have waned significantly in the last days of the election. Yesterday, reporters on the McCain campaign plane asked Schmidt if the campaign was “happy” with the Palin pick. Schmidt couldn’t bring himself to say “yes“:

Q: And the pick of Palin for you guys? Are you happy with that?
SCHMIDT: You know, we’ll uh, I’m not going to do, there’ll be time for all the postmortems in the race.
Q: But are you happy with what she?s done for the ticket?
SCHMIDT: I think that, you know, I think we?ll know in a few hours what the results are, you know and I, there’ll be a time for all the postmortem parts of it. That?s not this afternoon before the polls close.

Schmidt went so far last night as to “veto” Palin’s request to offer a few words to the crowd after McCain conceded the election. Politco’s Mike Allen reports on a forthcoming Newsweek article, “Palin asked to speak along with McCain at his Arizona concession speech Tuesday night, but campaign strategist Steve Schmidt vetoed the request.”

Read The Full Article:
http://thinkprogress.org/2008/11/05/schmidt-palin/

Digg this

Dancing in the streets

post from Jesus' General on 05 November 2008 10:14:00 AM. © Jesus' General

As grandma use to say, "it's a wicked, wicked world." We elect a president and people start contorting their bodies to music like a bunch of damned Canadians. We wouldn't be acting that way if we'd had won. We'd act more dignified. We'd be parading socialist-roaders down the street in dunce caps while we poked them with sticks.

video details and more

A helmet tip to that Blue Gal, who I assume is one of those Fugates from up around Troublesome Creek.

Read The Full Article:
http://patriotboy.blogspot.com/2008/11/dancing-in-streets.html

Digg this

Boehlert: Joe Biden and the press: A case study
in the absurd

post from Media Matters for America on 05 November 2008 10:02:30 AM. © Media Matters for America

Authenticity and access, that's what the campaignpress corps craves. Election scribes claim they long for candidates who ventureoff-script and are confident enough to reveal themselves on the campaign trail, to say what they reallythink instead of hiding behind consultant-approved sound bites. (The press,we're told, hates phonies.)And,of course, the press prizes access to candidates in hopes of uncovering thatauthenticity, in hopesof tapping the candidate's true personality. The two --[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://mediamatters.org/items/200811050003

Digg this

Six Years Down the Memory Hole

post from Daily Kos on 05 November 2008 10:00:03 AM. © Daily Kos

video details and more

Campbell Brown: For those people who have been worried about the possibility of one party controlling Congress and the White House, the last president to do that, of course, was....?

John King: Ah, that was Bill Clinton, and...

Brown: Jimmy Carter! Jimmy Carter had... Bill Clinton had Democrats in the House and in the Senate?

King: Very briefly.

Brown: Very briefly. [Crinkles her nose] Didn't go so well.

King: No it didn't.

Ahhhh.... yeah.

Folks? The last president to have his party in control of both the White House and both houses of Congress?

Anyone?

Think hard now!

Hint: He's president right f-ing now!

How curious that this "worry" that people supposedly have is something that the TeeVee news people think we haven't seen for decades.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.dailykos.com/~r/dailykos/index/~3/8NKsTo_vbdw/653450

Digg this

President-Elect Barack Obama

post from Moue Magazine on 05 November 2008 09:59:39 AM. © Moue Magazine

Amazing. I can hardly put into words how poignant, inspiring, and tremendously joyous last night was. I still feel close to tears. As one friend over last night put it, this is what it’s all about: addthis_url =[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.mouemagazine.com/blog/2008/11/president-elect-barack-obama/

Digg this

CALIFORNIA PROPS.

post from Ezra Klein on 05 November 2008 09:58:00 AM. © Ezra Klein

First, the bad news. Out in the Golden State, on a night when Barack Obama won with more than 60 percent of the vote, the proposition to amend the Constitution and legally restrict the rights of gay Americans, passed. Last night, Obama said that this[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=11&year=2008&base_name
=california_props

Digg this

Remember LBJ, Mr. President: Go For It All The
First Year

post from TPMCafe on 05 November 2008 09:55:00 AM. © TPMCafe

Lyndon Johnson understood that the honeymoon would be short. After the largest landslide in history -- with the biggest Democratic Congressional majorities ever -- he acted as if he had a year to get his Great Society enacted.

"You've got to give it all you can, that first year," he told an aide. "Doesn't matter what kind of a majority you come in with. You've got just one year when they treat you right, and before they start worrying about themselves."

His worry about the imminent loss of his mandate could be specific. In January 1965 as his four-year term was beginning and at the pinnacle of popularity, he told top administration officials that he had already lost three of his sixteen million-vote plurality of November 3. "I was just elected President by the biggest popular margin in the history of the country...because Barry Goldwater had simply scared hell out of them, I've already lost about three of those sixteen. After a fight with Congress or something else, I'll lose another couple of million. I could be down to 8 million in a couple of months."

So what did he do. Within one year -- by the summer of 1965 -- he had achieved the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Medicare, the Elementary and Secondary Education Acts, and a host of other laws that changed America and which, of course, made Barack Obama's election possible.

It was a good thing that he didn't wait because by 1966, his Vietnam policies had eroded his popularity and the Republicans won back most of the Congressional seats they lost two years earlier. But those LBJ laws from 1965 are still with us -- thank God -- forever.

My job is to work on the Middle East and I believe, and hope, Obama will wrap up Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian agreements by the spring. He has the authority. He has the leverage. And, despite what the lobby says, it's easy to do if the President understands who holds the cards: he does. He just has to play them. The same applies to the more complicated domestic issues.

We don't want and we don't need another DLC Presidency. We need this President to push hard for the same kind of transformational change in policy that he has already achieved in our politics.

He can't please everybody. Powerful interests are organizing against him already. But, so long as Obama understands the leverage he has, he can give us another New Deal or Great Society. Every interest group -- every lobby -- lives in fear that a popular President will take them on. That is why they will always advise him to "wait. Don't do it the first year" (do it when when can stop you!).

Go for it. We've got your back. Obamacrats and Obamacans can do this. Together. We are the majority now and we have a leader -- for the first time since FDR and LBJ -- who has the will to change America.

Just don't get us into a war and you'll finish what FDR started and L:BJ continued.

As Tony Kushner wrote, "The Great Work Begins."

Read The Full Article:
http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/tpmcafe-main/~3/cNphyrb2mK0/

Digg this

Why Every Vote Matters

In Minnesota's senate race between Norm Coleman and Al Franken:

With 100 percent of the 4,130 precincts reporting, Coleman had an unofficial margin of 601 votes out of nearly 2.9 million cast. Recounts are required in races with a winning margin of less than one half of 1 percent.

The recount probably won't be completed until early December.

Read The Full Article:
http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/TalkleftThePoliticsOfCrime/~3/443318357/8044

Digg this

President-Elect Barack Obamas Acceptance Speech

Transcript (also h/t TPM): If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.mouemagazine.com/blog/2008/11/president-elect-barack-obamas-acceptance
-speech/

Digg this

GUESS WHO'S COMING TO THE WHITE HOUSE

Chris Orr reminds me of a post from back in June that seems appropriate to revisit now:Towards the end of the 1967 movie "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner," Dr. John Wane Prentice, played by Sydney Poitier, sits down with his fiance's white father, played by[...]

Read The Full Article:
http://www.prospect.org/csnc/blogs/ezraklein_archive?month=11&year=2008&base_name
=guess_whos_coming_to_the_white

Digg this