McCain's Background

For a really eye-opening look at Senator John McCain's life, take a look at the cover story of the latest Rolling Stone magazine. McCain has been in the public sphere for so long that much of what is cited in the article is from him directly. It not only puts all the disparate things you may already know about him into perspective, but it provides a well-researched big picture of his life that is just chilling.

BBC News also had a Viewpoint article (similar to an OpEd) about McCain's volatility today.

Gallup Poll Results of Presidential Debate #2

I just checked the Gallup polls for the two candidates' current standing and found that they also did a poll to gauge people's views as to who won the second presidential debate. The results are interesting -- take a look. Gallup says they have been doing these post-debate polls since 1960 and that this is one of the most decisive polls they've ever measured, similar in margin to the ones done in 1992 and 1996, both in Bill Clinton's favor.

Gallup has now started doing daily election polls (instead of their previous weekly polls) and today, Barack Obama has a 52% to 41% lead over John McCain. This refers to their general standing among voters, not to peoples' reactions to the debate.

Presidential Debate #2

The second presidential debate was held on Tuesday night and proved to be slightly more intense than the first one. Perhaps it was due to the town hall format where the candidates were surrounded by actual people, sitting in a circle around them, and had to address questions asked directly by them. (These people were all undecided voters, by the way). The answers seemed directed at real people this time, not at a generic TV audience. The vile insinuations about Barack Obama remain as the subtext of McCain's campaign, but that's of little comfort. People pay attention to the subtext when the main text sounds like just a string of the usual words. McCain has reached a stage where he can speak almost as meaninglessly as Sarah Palin without alienating his supporters. Case in point: his telling us during the debate that he knows how to do everything and *can* do everything and will do everything -- this includes knowing where Bin Laden is and knowing how to get him.

For a humorous critique, watch Jon Stewart on The Daily Show. The first four minutes of this eleven-minute video are a little dry, be forewarned!

As for me, I wonder what Obama's first broken campaign promise will be. Let's face it: the economic crisis is going to mean that neither Obama nor McCain can successfully carry out what they're promising to carry out, once elected into office. Not that any politician ever does even in good times, but in these times especially it is unlikely that they will be able to fulfill a whole lot. As for McCain breaking his campaign promises if he gets elected, one can only hope he breaks at least some of them.

So Where Do the Republicans Stand Right Now?

Election day is thirty days away. There have been a few conservative commentators who have been expressing their very serious doubts about the Republican party's current standing. One is David Frum and another is Kathleen Parker. Both write for the National Review. While Parker despairs about Sarah Palin (note: the article was written before the VP debate so one can only imagine how much deeper in despair she must be now), Frum despairs about McCain's (and other Republicans') inability to assimilate the warning signs about the economy and to instead, hunt for villains.

According to yesterday's Meet the Press, the Republican strategy already in play, as we speak, is to now make it all about who the unknowable Barack Obama is and to question whether he is a trustworthy character, and to suggest that we have no idea what kind of presidency we will get with him. Remember all the stuff that was dredged up by Hillary Clinton, like Obama's past association with William Ayers? I remember wondering during the primaries what the Republicans' October Surprise might be for Obama, given that Hillary was already airing everything that could possibly be aired. Well, October Surprise is apparently the same as that thing your mom called Turkey Surprise: poorly disguised leftovers. Here's a blog about Sarah Palin's recent accusations. It includes some very interesting and revealing background information too.

I'm hoping that Obama will stay focused on the economy. Sure, he could fight back and bring up John McCain's dubious dealings with Charles Keating, but what constructive purpose would that serve? I think Obama should in fact start naming his economic advisers and leave no room for doubt as to what his presidency is going to look like. 

[P.S. I spoke too soon... moments after I initially posted this, I got this link via email from the Obama campaign. Looks like they're doing the Keating thing after all. But a 13-minute documentary? Was this something they had in their arsenal all along, to be pulled out on a rainy day?]

As to where the Republicans (hypothetically) stand in terms of electoral votes and swing states, watch this quick analysis from Meet the Press:

The Race Factor

In my previous post, I mentioned that over the course of speaking to about a hundred people in Lafayette, Indiana, I had come across 3 or 4 people for whom I suspected that race, i.e., Barack Obama's race, was the biggest issue by far in deciding which way to cast their ballot. But I felt that so many of my other conversations could not be properly understood without acknowledging the nuances of racism that exist in a relatively homogenous town like Lafayette. Nicholas Kristof's Op-Ed piece in the New York Times tells it like it is. Overt racism is one thing, but covert racism such as assigning lower credibility to an African American individual because of very deeply-imbedded biases can manifest itself in a variety of different ways. In a town where you see hardly any African Americans on the street or in the malls (this is a town that once prided itself on having such a "healthy" KKK that no African American passing through would ever spend the night there, and indeed held at least one KKK rally during the time I lived there), how does someone living there even imagine what an educated, professional African American looks like? That image is as foreign in Lafayette as that of a Chinese banker in Hong Kong (as opposed to a Chinese cook) or an Arab doctor in Dubai (as opposed to a turbaned terrorist).

This is of course not to say that there are no genuine causes for objection to a Barack Obama presidency, or even for an explanation as to why he isn't further up in the polls than he should be. There are those who feel, for example, that he is far too hesitant in a world that requires more immediacy. Or that he's far too professorial to be a president (and he's not even one of those lectern-banging professors). But I think that anyone who does not acknowledge that racism is a very real player in these elections is totally and completely out of touch with American people. It's been said before but it's worth repeating: Joe Six-Pack would never, ever even consider voting for an aging presidential candidate who, in terrible though characteristic judgement, chooses as his vice-presidential running mate a black man or black woman who openly owns guns, has an unmarried pregnant teenage daughter, took six years at four different colleges to earn a college degree, is politically inexperienced (despite some miraculous turn of circumstances that got him/her the governorship of a state eighteen months ago), confesses to not having kept up with the Iraq war or any other international (or national) news, and needs urgent last-minute tutoring to bring him/her "up to speed".