McCain advisor Steve Schmidt: Nominating Sarah Palin in 2012 would be "catastrophic." You betcha.

Tuesday night!

* The buzzword at the heart of my dissertation got a bump today.

* 'Good Night and Tough Luck': a short web comic about the misery of insomnia.

* Good news/bad news: the total implosion of the global economy has caused CO2 emissions to plummet 6%, to 8.5% of 2005 levels.

* Corzine takes his first polling lead over Chris Christie in the New Jersey governor's race.

* Osama bin Laden blurbs a few of his favorite books, including Jimmy Carter's Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid and (apparently) Confessions of an Economic Hit Man. (via)

* American debt, the Chinese economy, and mutually assured financial destruction.

* The House passed a resolution of disapproval against Congressman Joe Wilson along strict party lines? You lie!

* When will the MSM break its silence on Obama's secret rat love?

* 'Wealthcare': A brief history of Ayn Rand. Some talk at MeFi.

(The anti-government activist Grover Norquist has told a similar story from childhood, in which his father would steal bites of his ice cream cone, labelling each bite "sales tax" or "income tax." The psychological link between a certain form of childhood deprivation and extreme libertarianism awaits serious study.)

* Conservative bloggers have truly outdone themselves in their efforts to hype the 9/12 rally; Steve Benen and Media Matters have the details on "the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever." It's the greatest propaganda FAIL since they tried to pass off a picture of the Promise Keepers rally as being from last weekend.

* And this interview from one of Bush's last speechwriters has been linked by nearly every mainstream political blog I read: Ezra Klein, Matt Yglesias, Steve Benen, Kevin Drum, Atrios, Ben Smith, Think Progress, MetaFilter, and Crooks and Liars, each with their own favorite moment from the piece. The Palin line is sort of inescapable:

“I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?”

Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.” Then he made a very smart assessment.

“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.”

As Palin has piled misstep on top of misstep, the senior members of McCain’s campaign team have undergone a painful odyssey of their own. In recent rounds of long conversations, most made it clear that they suffer a kind of survivor’s guilt: they can’t quite believe that for two frantic months last fall, caught in a Bermuda Triangle of a campaign, they worked their tails off to try to elect as vice president of the United States someone who, by mid-October, they believed for certain was nowhere near ready for the job, and might never be. They quietly ponder the nightmare they lived through. Do they ever ask, What were we thinking? “Oh, yeah, oh, yeah,” one longtime McCain friend told me with a rueful chuckle. “You nailed it.” Another key McCain aide summed up his attitude this way: “I guess it’s sort of shifted,” he said. “I always wanted to tell myself the best-case story about her.” Even now, he said, “I don’t want to get too negative.” Then he added, “I think, as I’ve evaluated it, I think some of my worst fears … the after-election events have confirmed that her more negative aspects may have been there … ” His voice trailed off. “I saw her as a raw talent. Raw, but a talent. I hoped she could become better.”

Lots of attention being paid today to Vanity Fair's gossipy anti-Palin hit piece, in which the same McCain staffers who insisted she was the second-best possible person for the presidency now (anonymously) admit she was a "Little Shop of Horrors" and alternatively call her a "diva," egomaniac, and "whackjob". Here's Bill Kristol with some pushback, and it's worth noting that this sort of negative media attention doesn't exactly hurt the martyr complex that fuels Palinmania on the right.

Who among us can wait for 2012?

Friday links 3. [UPDATE: Comments closed on this post due to harassment from a banned commenter. Looking into solutions. Reopened.]

* How long will the MSM cover up the heroics of time-traveling Ronald Reagan?

* Another take on Mark McGurl’s The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing, this time from the Valve, about transnationalism and the American university.

* More on yesterday's unjust Supreme Court decision on the right to DNA evidence from Matt Yglesias, including a link to this striking observation from Jeffrey Toobin on John Roberts's governing judicial philosophy:

The kind of humility that Roberts favors reflects a view that the Court should almost always defer to the existing power relationships in society. In every major case since he became the nation’s seventeenth Chief Justice, Roberts has sided with the prosecution over the defendant, the state over the condemned, the executive branch over the legislative, and the corporate defendant over the individual plaintiff. Even more than Scalia, who has embodied judicial conservatism during a generation of service on the Supreme Court, Roberts has served the interests, and reflected the values, of the contemporary Republican Party.

* Peak Oil, risk, and the financial collapse: some speculative economics from Dmitry Orlov. Via MeFi.

* Mark Penn's superscience proves pessimism is the new microtrend. Via Gawker.

* Freakonomics considers vegetarianism-sharing.

* Possible outcomes in Iran from Gerry Seib in The Wall Street Journal. Via the Plank.

* People power prevails. After some period of extended protest, President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is shown to be a fraud, his re-election rigged, and Mir Hossein Mousavi and his forces of moderation win a runoff. A long process of changing Iran's system in which real power lies in the hands of clerics operating behind the scenes begins, and the voices demanding an end to Iran's international isolation move to the fore. Such a simple and straightforward outcome seems unlikely, but that's what happened in Ukraine.

* Mr. Ahmadinejad survives, but only by moderating his position in order to steal the thunder of the reformers and beat them at their own game. U.S. officials think it's at least possible the erratic leader decides to survive by showing his critics that he actually is capable of what they claim he isn't, which is reducing Iran's isolation. He stays in power and regains his standing with internal critics by, among other things, showing new openness to discuss Iran's nuclear program with the rest of the world.

* The forces of repression win within Iran, but international disdain compounds, deepening world resolve to stop Iran's nuclear program and its sponsorship of extremists. In other words, Iran doesn't change, but the rest of the world does.

* The protests are simply crushed by security forces operating under the control of spiritual leader Ali Khamenei, the election results stand untouched, and Iran's veneer of democracy ultimately is shown to be totally fraudulent. That makes it clear that the only power that matters at all is the one the U.S. can't reach or reason with, the clerical establishment. There is no recount, no runoff, and the idea that "moderates" and "reformers" can change Iran from within dies forever.

* There is some legitimate recount or runoff, but Iran emerges with Mr. Ahmadinejad nominally in charge anyway. He emerges beleaguered, tense and defensive, knowing he sits atop a society with deep internal divides and knowing the whole world knows as well. His control is in constant doubt. What's the classic resort of such embattled leaders? Distract attention from internal problems with foreign mischief, and use a military buildup (in this case, a nuclear one) to create a kind of legitimacy that's been shown to be missing on the domestic front.

* Mr. Mousavi somehow prevails, perhaps through a runoff, and becomes president, but he operates as a ruler deeply at odds with the clerical establishment that controls the military and security forces, and deeply mistrusted by it. As a result, he's only partly in charge, and in no position to take chances with a real opening to the West. He has always supported Iran's nuclear program anyway and now has to do so with a vengeance to show that, while a reformer, he isn't a front for the West.

Napolitano to DHS? I thought she was going to run for McCain's Senate seat.

Fox News apparently has its marching orders: destroy Sarah Palin.

I heard this live on the Fox Report, Shepard Smith's show. It was at the end of the show, a report done by Carl Cameron. But apparently the tensions and drama behind the scenes in the McCain Campaign were far, far worse than anyone in the media allowed us to believe.

According to Cameron:

Palin did NOT know Africa was a continent.
She did NOT know who the parties to NAFTA were.
She threw dramatic temper tantrums over bad press.
She refused to prepare for the Gibson or Couric interviews.

UPDATE: TPM's got the video.

These victory montages on MSNBC are something else. What a night. Yes we can.

Obama crosses 270. President-Elect. They're chanting "Yes We Can" on the Daily Show and they're cheering wildly in my house. It's a new day.

Dan gives us his personal assurance that Obama will win Indiana and Missouri—sounds good—while FiveThirtyEight says my Omaha prediction may pan out.

Fox News projects Obama wins Virginia.

Signs of the times: Voters in Colorado and South Dakota on Tuesday rejected anti-abortion initiatives, while Michigan approved medical marijuana and Massachusetts decriminalized the possession of an ounce or less of marijuana, according to NBC projections. It's a new day.

Sarah Palin to speak at 11 PM.

Ezra Klein connects Obama's landslide to the darkly anti-American policies he now has a mandate to implement.

Republican House members have been driven from New England: the last, Chris Shays, has just been voted out.

On a more serious note: Books are going to be written, for decades, about the strength of the Obama organization in achieving this. I've always thought Democrats would win this year, but Obama thought through this race, and the specific structures of election procedure and how best to take advantage of them, in a way we just haven't ever seen. From owning the caucuses to taking full advantage of early voting, Obama and his people seemed to see every angle. Neither Clinton nor McCain ever saw what hit them.

It's a good sign for how they'll govern, as well as the coming generation of progressive activists he's helped train.

Deep thought: For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country.



New thread for a new president. Unbelievable.

9:22 Now NBC calls Ohio for Obama. That's all it takes. Obama wins.



9:17 Fox News takes back the Ohio call! Gasp!

9:15 Ben Smith says Virginia is "edging" towards Obama.

9:12 Ben Smith reports that an Obama landslide is, perversely, bad for marriage equality. I'd hoped it might go the other way—I really hope Prop 8 fails.

9:05 Fox News calls Ohio for Obama. If that's true, he's the president.

9:02 Arizona, too close to call? I doubt that.

9:00 Minnesota and Wisconsin easy Obama wins. Still looking for the Bush-state defection that gives him the presidency.

McCain takes North Dakota.

8:51 McCain Camp: "At this point, we need a miracle."

8:43 Steve Schmidt takes that first crucial step towards throwing Sarah Palin under the bus.

QUESTION: And the pick of Palin for you guys? Are you happy with that?

A: You know, we’ll uh, I’m not going to do, there’ll be time for all the post mortems in the race.

FOLO: But are you happy with what she’s done for the ticket?

A: 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 post mortem parts of it. That’s not this afternoon before the polls close.

8:36 McCain wins Georgia. My superultrawickedmega landslide is out of reach, but still, so far so good.

8:30 A bit of bad news: Virginia switches back to "too close to call" from "too early to call."

8:21 Fox News calls it against Liddy. V-NC!

8:15 Shaheen beats Sununu in New Hampshire. +1 towards 60.

8:13 Matthews steals my bit, calls Howard Dean Obama's "St. John the Baptist." This is a deeply underappreciated fact. While I think we would have gotten Obama either way, we probably wouldn't have gotten this Obama, or this victory.

8:04 Scarborough calls Pennsylvania "fool's gold for Republicans." Too true.

8:03 Florida and Missouri too close to call...

8:01 New Hampshire, too! Whoo again!

8:00 NBC calls PA immediately! Whoo!

7:50 Lots of states closing at 8 PM:

Alabama,Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, Missouri, New Hampshire, New Jersey, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, DC

7:30 North Carolina is too close to call, Ohio too early to call.

At 7:30: Polls close in North Carolina and Ohio (and West Virginia).

7:25 Harold Ford, Jr. says they're seeing good things for Democrats in Alaska. Stevens presumably going down?

7:17 Where's Keith's "Mission Accomplished" banner?

7:14 Lots of people pointing to Vigo County in Indiana, a historical bellweather which Bush won 53-47 last time around and where Obama leads 56-42 with half the votes counted.

7:11 Buchanan endorses the Canavan Thesis, calls this a transformational election like 1980 or 1932. He goes on to say that "the conservative era has passed." That must be like ashes in his mouth.

7:07 Scarborough: "This is a total repudiation of the Republican brand."

Matthews: "It's 10 after 7, Joe!"

7:07 Scarborough: "For the first time since the 1930s," we get two landslides for the same party in a row.

7:05 Mitch McConnell too close to call. Let's send a message...

7:04 Re: Indiana, Nate Silver number-crunches.

Just looking at some of the places where we have results in so far. Obama is substantially outperforming Kerry -- which is what he needs to do to win the state, of course, but the differences are pretty substantial.

Steuben: Kerry 34%, Obama 42%
DeKalb: Kerry 31%, Obama 38%
Knox: Kerry 36%, Obama 54%
Marshall: Kerry 31%, Obama 50%

7:03 Warner wins!

7:02 Matthews elaborates on the Indiana call: "If you're rooting for Barack Obama," I paraphrase, "that's good news, because if the Republicans are fighting to hang onto Indiana they're probably losing in Ohio."

7 PM Indiana is too close to call. Too early to call in Georgia. Too early in call in South Carolina. Too early to call in Virginia, but K.O. is trying to hint that's good news.

7 PM Polls close in the first six. McCain wins Kentucky, Obama wins Vermont, everyone owes Steve a dollar.

6:54 Norah O'Donnell just read on-air a text-message from a Republican strategist in North Carolina, claiming that "Democrats in North Carolina have hung Bush like an albatross around Dole's neck that will likely sweep her out of office." Yes, we can!

6:46 A subdued McCain came to the back of the plane to talk to reporters on the flight from New Mexico back to Arizona.

Cindy McCain, who stood beside her husband, had tears in her eyes.

6:40 Howard Fineman says that the late Rev. Wright slime ads in Pennsylvania may have massively driven up turnout in African-American areas. For what it's worth.

6:36 Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell has a shit-eating grin on his face, for whatever that's worth.

6:27 Olbermann and Matthews going at it on MSNBC over whether or not Obama broke his word on public financing. Even after David Gregory cuts them off you can still hear them fighting in the background. I smell a sitcom.

6:21 Is anyone else as nervous as me? Can't we just hurry this thing up?

6:11 Scarborough is on MSNBC already more or less calling it for Obama, saying that the Republicans he's talking to just don't have the fire this time around. "All the energy seems to have switched to the other side," he says. Joe's looking forward to 2012 to see how demoralized we Obama voters feel four years into his presidency.

6:00 PM The polls have closed in the eastern part of Indiana, but the real magic doesn't start until 7 PM, when Georgia, Virginia, Indiana, Kentucky, South Carolina and Vermont close.

6:00 PM Results liveblog. I'll stay in this same post basically all night, so put your thoughts in the comments and I'll bring some of them into the liveblog as we go.

The Onion is on the scene with news of an election upset in the making.


Voting Machines Elect One Of Their Own As President

It's funny because it's (still!) true, but it might be more funny if it weren't true...

Two years ago this week SurveyUSA interviewed 30,000 Americans - 600 in each state - asking them who they would vote for in 2008 if the candidates were John McCain and Barack Obama.

Springboarding off a recent poll showing an incredible 100% of Pennsylvania voters supporting Obama, philly.com claims that Philly turnout is "big. Real big."

A Democrat has won Dixville Notch for the first time since 1968.

The town, home to around 75 residents, began voting at the stroke of midnight. The final tally was 15 votes for Sen. Barack Obama and six votes for Sen. John McCain.

The final SurveyUSA polls predict Obama victories in Pennsylvania and Florida, a loss in either of which probably spells the end for John McCain.

PA: Obama 52%, McCain 43%
FL: Obama 50%, McCain 47%

Meanwhile, the Huffington Post says "When it comes to predicting elections, head down to your local betting hall and talk to some gamblers. They have a much better record at forecasting elections." As of right now, the bookies put the odds at a 93-7 Obama advantage...

MyDD summarizes PPP on the early-vote advantage Obama has built, suggesting McCain may have already lost the election in key states. Consider Nevada:

71% of the state's likely voters say they have already cast their ballots and with those folks Obama has a much broader 57-43 lead. McCain's bringing the race to within four points is predicated on winning election day voters by a margin of 57-38.

Or Ohio:

[Obama's] banked a huge lead with early voters, who made up about 30% of the sample. He's up 65-34 with those folks. McCain's tightening the race to two points is predicated on his winning election day voters 54-44.

In other news, my prediction for tomorrow is more optimistic and unrealistic than even Kos's. I can live with that. Get your guess in before the polls close in Virginia and win an Apple MacBook Awesome No-Prize.

PPP backs up my speculation that rain in North Carolina is good news for the good guys.

PPP projects that [Obama] racked up a lead of a little over 250,000 voters during early voting. He led 55-45 among those who said they had already voted in our poll, and a little over 2.5 million North Carolinians have already cast their ballots.

But among those planning to vote on election day John McCain leads 56-42. It is always better to have actual votes than hypothetical votes so there's no doubt Obama has the edge right now—the question is just whether enough of those McCain supporters really turn out to make up the gap.

Like rain on election day: bad weather forecast for North Carolin and Virginia tomorrow. Given the well-documented enthusiasm gap and (in North Carolina) the staggering early voting numbers, my guess is that the rain benefits our side...

Predictions. Who's got them? Leave 'em in the comments.

I was on Poli-Sci-Fi Radio yesterday (podcast forthcoming) and they cajoled us all into making predictions. Unexpectedly, I was among the most optimistic people on the show, expecting Obama to cross 360 electoral votes and over 50% in the popular vote. I stand by this. To the extent that the polls are wrong, I (honestly) believe they will be wrong in our favor, underreporting Obama's depth of support and his GOTV operation and underestimating the level of Republican demoralization and widespread discomfort, in different registers, with Bush, Palin, and McCain all.

I've been predicting / hoping for a Reaganesque landslide since January—it was one of the biggest early factors in my decision to support Obama in the primaries in the first place—and I think that outcome is finally at hand. If things go the way I think / hope they will tomorrow, 2008 will come to be seen as a realignment election along the lines of 1980 or 1932.

If I'm wrong, I'm wrong, and I've been very wrong before—but that's my prediction.

So let's have two numbers, the EV spread and the popular vote spread. (Use 270towin to calculate the electoral votes.)

I'll go first with what will surely be way-too-high estimates of 397 EVs and eight points in the popular vote, 52%-44%. In my heart of hearts, I think we'll run the table, including taking Omaha.



But of course I'll be just as happy scrapping by with 269...

Some of the best posts this weekend were from Josh Marshall, expressing outrage over the baseless attacks on Rashid Khalidi for no reason other than the fact that he is Palestinian:

The McCain campaign has been throwing around so much mud and smears in recent weeks that it's easy to miss just how ugly and shameful their character assassination of Rashid Khalidi is. This is an entirely respectable, highly respected scholar. To go further into making a case for him would only be to enable and indulge McCain's sordid appeal to racism. For McCain, personally, to compare Khalidi to a neo-nazi, it's just an offense McCain should never be forgiven for. It's right down in the gutter with Joe McCarthy and the worst of the worst. Khalidi is in this new McCain set piece for one reason -- as a generic Arab, to spur the idea that Obama is foreign, friendly with terrorists and possibly Muslim.

A little election news I didn't get to blog over the weekend.

* More on the improbable Sarah Palin prank call, including an explanation of how they did it. As with the compromising of Sarah Palin's Yahoo account, the key was social engineering.

"It really took a lot of work," he said.

"We had to go through the Secret Service, the people in her entourage. It's the biggest coup so far. We're proud to add (this prank) to our top hits."

* As a Conservative, I Must Say I Do Quite Like the Cut of this Obama Fellow's Jib.

* There's just no way Lois Lane votes Republican.

* A Pennsylvania judge has ruled against another GOP voter suppression scheme in the state.

* But student votes are still being illegally challenged in Virginia.

* McCain is doing a campaign event in his home state, never a good sign.

* And why did McCain go on Saturday Night Live to participate in a skit mocking not him but his running mate? Things must be getting pretty fratricidal over on Team McCain.

Hello. I'm calling for John McCain and the RNC because you need to know that Barack Obama has not accepted Joe the Plumber's friend request on Facebook. We know he's logged on, because we saw he changed his status on Monday. On Tuesday, he joined the group Art Historians Are Saucy. But he still won't accept Joe the Plumber's friend request. He knows it's Joe. Joe uses the screen shot of the two of them together as his profile picture. That's not a uniter. That's the same old liberal-elite politics as usual.

John McCain's rejected robo-call scripts. At McSweeney's.

See also: "The Audacity of Despair."