Month: October 2008
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Colin Powell endorsement fallout
What’s the effect of Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama this morning on Meet the Press? Matthew Yglesias suggests that “It’s a signal to every right-of-center person who maybe thinks the GOP has gotten too right-of-center that Obama’s okay.” That may be true, but I’m skeptical that endorsements matter very much. I suspect that the
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Brief debate postmortem
As expected, the “game” did not “change” last night. Not much else to say except that the way pundits are feeding the McCain anger narrative and purporting to read McCain’s mind is disturbingly reminiscent of the Al Gore “sighing” debacle. Josh Marshall has been out front on this for weeks.
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Bogus “game-changer” debate hype
Washington Post: The Post asked John Podesta, Newt Gingrich, Mary Beth Cahill, Peter J. Wallison and Stuart E. Eizenstat what could make tonight a game-changer. The real answer: Almost nothing. Obama is up by eight points in the Pollster.com estimate — there’s no evidence of a debate ever causing a shift of that magnitude. PS
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Sarah Palin: Not going to be president
It’s amusing to me that people think Sarah Palin is going to run for president in 2012 if McCain loses. Her favorable/unfavorable numbers in the new CBS/NYT poll are 32 percent favorable/41 percent unfavorable. That’s where Hillary Clinton and Al Gore were in early 2007 after 15+ years of negative press. By contrast, Palin has
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Glenn Beck reads the market’s mind
I’m debuting a new use of the swami for people who blame market outcomes on their political opponents — check out this monologue in which noted economist Glenn Beck (PhD, Headline News) blames part of the market decline on Obama: Trillions of dollars in wealth, evaporation; it`s all going away. And it`s natural that most
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Partisanship: Not going anywhere
Today’s dog-bites-man headline of the day from a Gerald Seib story in the Wall Street Journal: Hopes Quickly Fade For a Postpartisan Era Shocking! Who could have predicted that partisanship wouldn’t magically disappear on November 5th? On a more serious note, it’s worth noting the underlying flaw with Seib’s call for bipartisanship: None of this
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McClatchy debunks minority lending myth
What makes McClatchy’s Washington reporting so remarkable is their willingness to fact-check misleading claims without any false balance or punch-pulling. It’s completely different than the Times and the Post. Here’s the latest example, which debunks the widely promoted myth that lending by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to low-income homebuyers and minorities caused the financial
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Duke panel on Muslim Americans & 2008 vote
FYI I’ll be speaking at a panel on Muslim Americans and the 2008 election at Duke on Friday: Three Duke University scholars will discuss the 2008 presidential elections and the potential impact of the Muslim American vote during a panel discussion Friday, Oct. 17, at Duke. The event, “The 2008 Election and the Muslim Vote,”
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The lessons of Hillary’s Obama myopia
Remember this? ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos Reports: Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., and former President Bill Clinton are making very direct arguments to Democratic superdelegates, starkly insisting Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., cannot win a general election against presumptive Republican nominee, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. Sources with direct knowledge of the conversation between Sen. Clinton and Gov.
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Ayers, Obama, and district congruity
It’s worth putting the political problems raised by Barack Obama’s (relatively modest) associations with William Ayers in a larger perspective. What few people have recognized is that the political problem he faces is driven by the same underlying problem as the Jeremiah Wright controversy — namely, the profound mismatch between the electoral context of his