Needlenose

(John McCain and Barack Obama today in Chicago, via the Associated Press.)

In the New York Times on Monday, pollster Stan Greenberg bade farewell to the infamous “Reagan Democrats” of Macomb County in Michigan:

For more than 20 years, the non-college-educated white voters in Macomb County have been considered a “national political barometer,” as Ronald Brownstein of National Journal described them during the Democratic convention in August. After Ronald Reagan won the county by a 2-to-1 margin in 1984, Mr. Brownstein noted, I conducted focus groups that “found that these working-class whites interpreted Democratic calls for economic fairness as code for transfer payments to African-Americans.”

I’m sure that the oh-so-honorable McCain campaign had no awareness of this when they ran this ad in the final week of the presidential campaign:

It’s not much of a mystery what unspoken attitudes Team McCain was hoping to evoke with that “JUST LIKE YOU SUSPECTED” line, is it?

I wonder if Mr. “Country First” was sad on election night that the racist vote didn’t come through for him, that many of them finally realized there was something more important than skin color of when it came to presidential candidates.

A few days before the 2006 election, Karl Rove whistled past the soon-to-be graveyard of the Republican majorities in the U.S. House and Senate by telling a reporter: “You may end up with a different math but you are entitled to your math and I’m entitled to THE math.”

That same spirit of denial, making up in arrogance for what it lacks in reason, flows through the campaign memo by McCain strategist Rick Davis that I wrote about last night.  For those who were too lazy to click through all the links on that post, I thought I’d revisit the key passages and supply the visual rebuttals I didn’t have time to insert yesterday:

• National Polls: Major polls last week showed John McCain trailing by double-digit margins - but by the middle of this week, we were within the margin of error on four national tracking surveys. In fact, the Gallup national tracking survey showed the race in a virtual tie 2 days this week.

• State Polls: Iowa - Our numbers in Iowa have seen a tremendous surge in the past 10 days. We took Obama’s lead from the double digits to a very close race. That is why you see Barack Obama visiting the state in the final days, trying to stem his losses. It is too little, too late. Like many other Midwestern states, Iowa is moving swiftly into McCain’s column.

The Southwest - It is no secret that Republican candidates in the Southwest have to focus on winning over enough Latino and Hispanic voters in Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado to carry them to victory. John McCain has overcome challenges Republicans face, and has made up tremendous ground in these states with these voters. For these voters, the choice has become clear, and you have seen a big change in the numbers. John McCain is now winning enough voters to perform within the margin of error - putting these states within reach.

Colorado - Barack Obama tried to outspend our campaign in Colorado during the early weeks of October and finish off our candidate in Colorado. However, after our visit early this week, we saw a tremendous rebound in our poll position, and Colorado is back on the map.

Ohio and Pennsylvania - Everyone knows that vote rich Ohio and Pennsylvania will be key battlegrounds for this election. Between the two: 41 electoral votes and no candidate has gotten to the White House without Ohio. Senator McCain and Governor Palin have been campaigning non-stop in these key battleground states and tonight Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has pumped up our campaign at a rally in Columbus. Our position in these states is strong and undecided voters continue to have a very favorable impression of our candidate.

Every picture tells a story, don’t they? Funny how it seems to be the same story in each case.

Beware the kiss of death.

A modest treat from the Obama campaign is above, and here’s a bit of a trick from Team McCain:

We believe this race is winnable, and if the trajectory continues, we will surpass the 270 Electoral votes needed on Election Night.

• National Polls: Major polls last week showed John McCain trailing by double-digit margins - but by the middle of this week, we were within the margin of error on four national tracking surveys. In fact, the Gallup national tracking survey showed the race in a virtual tie 2 days this week.
• State Polls: Iowa - Our numbers in Iowa have seen a tremendous surge in the past 10 days. We took Obama’s lead from the double digits to a very close race. That is why you see Barack Obama visiting the state in the final days, trying to stem his losses. It is too little, too late. Like many other Midwestern states, Iowa is moving swiftly into McCain’s column.
  The Southwest - It is no secret that Republican candidates in the Southwest have to focus on winning over enough Latino and Hispanic voters in Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado to carry them to victory. John McCain has overcome challenges Republicans face, and has made up tremendous ground in these states with these voters. For these voters, the choice has become clear, and you have seen a big change in the numbers. John McCain is now winning enough voters to perform within the margin of error - putting these states within reach.
  Colorado - Barack Obama tried to outspend our campaign in Colorado during the early weeks of October and finish off our candidate in Colorado. However, after our visit early this week, we saw a tremendous rebound in our poll position, and Colorado is back on the map.
  Ohio and Pennsylvania - Everyone knows that vote rich Ohio and Pennsylvania will be key battlegrounds for this election. Between the two: 41 electoral votes and no candidate has gotten to the White House without Ohio. Senator McCain and Governor Palin have been campaigning non-stop in these key battleground states and tonight Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has pumped up our campaign at a rally in Columbus. Our position in these states is strong and undecided voters continue to have a very favorable impression of our candidate.

Obama campaign faces tremendous structural challenges in the final days of this campaign

• Obama has a challenge hitting 50%: Barack Obama has not reached the 50% threshold in almost any the battleground state. He consistently is performing in the 45-48% range. When we look closely at the primary votes, we see a history of a candidate whose Election Day performance is often at or behind his final polling numbers. If this is true, our surge will leave Obama with even or under 50% of the vote on Election Day.
  
• Early Vote: The Obama campaign has promised that their early vote and absentee efforts will change the composition of the electorate. They have sold the press on a story that first time voters will turn out in droves this election cycle. Again, the facts undermine their argument. In our analysis of early voting and absentee votes to date: The composition of the electorate has not changed significantly and most folks who have voted early are high propensity voters who would have voted regardless of the high interest in this campaign.
  
• Expanding the Field: Obama is running out of states if you follow out a traditional model. Today, he expanded his buy into North Dakota, Georgia and Arizona in an attempt to widen the playing field and find his 270 Electoral Votes. This is a very tall order and trying to expand into new states in the final hours shows he doesn’t have the votes to win.. . .

On the Ground

Our field organization has tremendous energy and is out-performing the Bush campaign at the same time in 2004. This week our field organization crossed a huge threshold and began reaching more than one million voters per day, and by week’s end will have contacted more than 5 million voters. Our phone centers are full and our rate of voter contact is significantly out-pacing the Bush campaign in 2004.

Ha, ha, ha — funny stuff, guys! (Check out the links for the punch lines.)

Update: As Josh Marshall notes, the most hilarious bit of creative spin here is the notion that Obama’s ramped-up efforts in once-solid (but now unexpectedly competitive) McCain states like North Dakota, Georgia, and Arizona “shows he doesn’t have the votes to win” — as if Team Barack had given up hope of holding off the McCain juggernaut in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, Virginia, Iowa, and other states where Obama’s already in the lead, and instead is looking to turn the tide in states where he’s still trailing.

It’s one of the clues that Rick Davis is just making up BS and hoping someone falls for it, rather than describing a genuine comeback.  Another is where Davis gets carried away about imaginary private polling numbers from Iowa; rather than just describing McCain’s position in the state as “strong,” within reach,” or “back on the map,” as he does elsewhere, Davis says, “Like many other Midwestern states, Iowa is moving swiftly into McCain’s column.” Which other Midwestern states, Davis forgets to explain.

Robert Draper’s attempted dissection of the schizophrenic McCain presidential campaign in the New York Times magazine is an amazingly rich source of anecdotes — some insightful, some dubious, and some just plain weird.  This story told by pseudo-strategist Steve Schmidt to Draper may fit in all three categories:

The smartest bit of political wisdom he ever heard was dispensed by George W. Bush one spring day at the White House residence in 2004, at a time when his re-election effort was not going especially well. The strategists at the meeting — including Schmidt, who was directing the Bush campaign’s rapid-response unit — fretted over their candidate’s sagging approval ratings and the grim headlines about the war in Iraq. Only Bush appeared thoroughly unworried. He explained to them why, polls notwithstanding, voters would ultimately prefer him over his opponent, John Kerry.

There’s an accidental genius to the way Americans pick a president, Schmidt remembers Bush saying that day. By the end of it all, a candidate’s true character is revealed to the American people.

Leaving aside that this obviously wasn’t true for Dubya (although it may be proving that way for McCain), what are we supposed to make of a so-called strategist who says he got the best political advice of his life from George Bush? Isn’t that like taking performance advice from Howdy Doody or Charlie McCarthy?

Then again, I suppose that’s what Sarah Palin did.

Found on Flickr (larger size):

Check out seenos’ disgustingly funny juxtaposition of Repug imagery over at Left-Over.

("Bad Reporter" cartoon by Don Asmussen)

Analysts and historians who waste their time in future years looking back at John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign will undoubtedly be struck by the raw, unfiltered ugliness of McCain’s personality during his three debates with Barack Obama.  As Jane Hamsher wrote just after Wednesday’s final match, McCain’s “smirking, snarky tone was decidedly un-presidential… [he] was a nasty, vicious glass of sour milk who can barely contain his temper and can’t quite fathom what is happening to him.“

But now I think I understand why McMean couldn’t control himself.

You see, when I wrote three weeks ago about “McCain’s insistence on seeing the election (and world events) as mere vehicles for his all-consuming personal drama,” and three weeks before that about how “for McCain, being president isn’t about doing anything for the American people — it’s the world’s biggest gold watch… [he] has been a goddamned selfless patriot his entire adult life, and it’s time for you fuckers to pay him back,” I had no idea just how right I was.

I didn’t know what the Washington Post reported on Monday about the origin of McCain’s White House ambitions:

To endure their long ordeal, John McCain and the other U.S. servicemen held as prisoners of war in North Vietnam in the 1960s developed a number of survival techniques. None was quite as effective as the one former Navy pilot Richard Stratton remembers: “If you kept your mind occupied, you were going to be okay.”

Stratton would imagine meticulously assembling a large glider and flying it over the Alps. Another prisoner imagined himself fishing. But McCain had the most audacious dream of all, and he shared his vision one day with a group of fellow POWs. “He was talking about his father to us and then he said: ‘I want to be president of the United States. Someday I’m going to be president,’ ” Stratton recalls. “If the cell wasn’t so small, we’d have been rolling around laughing.”

. . . Not at all dissuaded, McCain offered his view on the meaning of real command, shaped in part by his father’s perspective on genuine power. He wanted to be the one who made the decisions, McCain said, and his father had taught him that even such impressive-sounding jobs as chief of naval operations, the service’s highest uniformed position, didn’t always provide that opportunity. The only job that guaranteed it was that of president, McCain believed.

“Pursuit of command,” as McCain often referred to it, was an ethos bordering on obsession in his family, and it was in Vietnam that he embraced it.

Over at emptywheel’s blog, bmAZ picked up on the narcissism of McCain’s apolitical desire for power for power’s sake, but that’s only part of the story.  See, it’s not just that in pursuit of his private dream, McCain lied, cheated, backstabbed, married for money, sold himself to lobbyists and all the rest, but for three decades or more, he got away with it.  And after the seemingly definitive failures of his 2000 GOP primary defeat and near-collapse in the polls before the 2008 contests began, this summer he finally, miraculously found himself just one step short of his ultimate goal.

I doubt any adviser could have convinced McCain then that he had only won because his Republican challengers were even more implausible and inept than he was.   From the candidate’s perspective, it must have seemed that fate was on his side.  Why should he need to learn message discipline, or emotional self-control, or (heaven forbid!) gain a convincing knowledge of the issues facing the American public now?   He merely needed to present himself to the world and be granted his destiny.

At least, that is, until Barack Obama came along.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

One of the following pictures is not of John McCain at last night’s debate. Can you tell which one?

“Keep a civil tongue in your head” — Shakespeare, The Tempest