Three Weeks Left...

...and so where do you put your money? If you have any left and wish to contribute it to any political races, the Princeton Election Consortium suggests that you'll get more bang for your buck not by contributing to Obama's or McCain's campaign, but to the smaller, local races that would support either a Democratic or Republican majority (your choice) in the House.

On a different note, I've been passing around a brilliantly-written article to friends over the weekend and for some reason neglected to post it here. This article, written by the editors of the New Yorker, spells out exactly why Obama would make a better choice than McCain. They explore what's at stake from a national as well as an international perspective and they do so in a more insightful way than any other writers I've recently read. Actually, the entire October 13, 2008 issue of the New Yorker is a fantastic read. There's another article that discusses why white working-class people won't necessarily vote Democrat (the article focuses on Ohio).

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".

Turning a Red State Blu... A Lighter Shade of Red

My husband D. and I used to live in West Lafayette, Indiana but moved away twelve years ago because we found the conservatism and the overt and covert racism untenable. D. continues to work there, and this past week, I took time off work to go spend a few days with him there. As planned, I visited the Indiana for Change office in downtown Lafayette to see if I could volunteer. It turned out that they are desperate for volunteers. Democrats there are a little nervous about wearing their politics on their sleeve, a little like what Republicans must feel in Hyde Park (if Hyde Parkers carried guns and Bibles). While West Lafayette, a university town, has a thriving liberal population (though no one would ever confuse it for Berkeley, California, Ann Arbor, Michigan or even Bloomington, Indiana), Lafayette, which is across the Wabash River from West Lafayette, and Tippecanoe County as a whole are more representative of the rest of Indiana in their conservatism. Tippecanoe is pretty much all farmland with a few factories such as Caterpillar, John Deere, and Isuzu clustered close to Lafayette, the county seat. It looks like what you’d imagine the heartland of America to look like – fields and fields of corn and Wal-Marts -- and when you talk to people, you begin to understand how someone like George W. Bush got elected and reelected.

On all three days, I was asked to make phone calls to the “undecideds”, the ones who weren’t sure who they were going to vote for in November. Almost everyone on my list was over 55 years old, some in their 80’s and even their 90’s. (That’s a change from Chicago – you just don’t see as many older people in the city). Day One was a little depressing. I got a few who said they were voting for McCain, a few who were going to vote for Obama, and a great many who were actually undecided. But I made the mistake early on of engaging a McCain supporter in conversation and that what really shook me up. The directive from the campaign is that you ask the person you’ve called if they’ve decided who they’re going to vote for, and if they say McCain (or any candidate other than Obama), you thank them for their time/wish them a nice day, and end the conversation. The idea isn’t to waste time attempting to convert a McCain supporter to an Obama supporter but to engage a genuinely undecided person in conversation and discuss the issues that matter to them. This guy I called told me that he thought he was maybe going to vote for McCain. I heard the ‘maybe’ and asked him if he had any questions about Obama’s stand on any issues. Oh my god. He took off on me! I was able to answer his mostly rhetorical questions (about drilling for oil and about his misconception that Obama was a product of Chicago machine politics) but of course he wasn’t actually looking for answers, just someone to direct his dripping snarkiness at. Finally when he compared Obama’s rise to the rise of the Third Reich, I’d heard enough and said goodbye. Welcome to the real world.

The rest of the over one hundred people I spoke to weren’t so nasty and full of invective. I had some very eye-opening conversations that were sometimes very encouraging, sometimes funny, sometimes very touching even, and sometimes just very, very telling. As I said earlier almost all of these conversations were with people over 55. Here are some of the people I spoke to:

• A Hillary supporter who liked Palin. She felt that women should stick together, that Palin was likeable, that she wasn’t really that inexperienced, and, “I don’t know, I just like her.”

• A man in his 90’s who was looking after his wife who was recovering from surgery. He himself had just gone through chemotherapy. He told me that someone needed to come get his ballot because he couldn’t get away, and that they’d also need to help him fill it out because he couldn’t read or write.

• A woman who wasn’t going to think about it until election day because she always made up her mind on her way to the polls every election year. A kind of time-honored ritual?

• “Ask me on Friday, honey, and I’ll know better!” (Friday being the day after the Vice-Presidential debate).

• “I can’t stand that idiot, Biden!”

• A few people who weren’t going to vote because they didn’t like either one of them. I was reminded that in 2000, a lot of people didn’t vote because they didn’t like either Bush or Gore, and look what happened.

• A woman who liked both McCain and Obama and kept switching her support every other day. I jokingly told her that on a day that she feels like voting for Obama, she should go over to the Tippecanoe Courthouse and cast an early ballot… but only on a day that she feels like voting for Obama, not any other day.

• A woman who wasn’t sure who she was going to vote for but she was really worried about social security because she was getting ready to retire.

• Many, many people who were worried about the economy but didn’t understand a thing about what caused this crisis.

• “I vote straight Democrat”. I got a few of these. One person wanted an Obama-Biden lawn sign for his front yard because he lived on a prominent thoroughfare.

• “Oh, I’m a Democrat dear. I’m 94 years old and I’ve always been a Democrat.” And she very sweetly thanked me for my efforts. That was a first (and a last)!

• “I’m voting for McCain.” Not as many as I expected actually! My favorite McCain-supporter line after my usual greeting, “This is Mona and I’m a volunteer with the Barack Obama campaign”: “Well, I’m sure sorry to hear that, honey. I don’t want to hear one more thing about that man.” (Hoosiers have a very southern accent, by the way, so read that again).

• “I don’t know who I’m going to vote for. I don’t like McCain, but my religion prevents me from voting for anyone who won’t put his hand on the Bible.” That was a reference to the myth that Obama would not use a Bible for his Senate swearing-in ceremony.

• “I have cancer and I can’t talk to you about this.” I unfortunately heard this more than once. One of them actually did want someone to talk to. It’s one thing to know what a politician wants to do about health care, but it’s another thing entirely to hear a 75-year-old cancer patient worry out loud about her bills.

• A woman who was very worried about the economy but yet when we talked about the war, said, “Think of where we’d be if we hadn’t gone into Iraq.” She still equated the Iraq war with fighting terrorism but didn’t equate spending $10 billion a month on the war with the $4 trillion budget deficit.

• Countless people who agreed with me that there were too many Americans dying in Iraq and who told me of people they knew whose sons/daughters died. Countless people who agreed that we had gone into the wrong country but weren’t entirely sure what to make of that. There were a lot of people, I noticed, who were eager to talk about the war and, surprisingly, who also listened very carefully too.

And then there were these “mystery” people of which I counted 3 or 4:

• “No, there are no particular political issues but just something I’m not going to share with you.”

Oh… you mean like race?