Other midday links.

* Apropos of what I was saying yesterday about Andrew Sullivan, here's Ben Smith on Sullivan, his continued outsized influence, and the first-mover advantage in the blogosphere.

* There have been a lot of assertions from both left and right that Obama "isn't doing enough" to support the protesters in Iran. It's not clear to me what exactly these people have in mind; any U.S. involvement is likely to be entirely counterproductive, as Obama himself has noted. So it's worth noting that the Obama administration has quietly taken action to support the protesters in a way that is not counterproductive; according to NBC News, the State Dept. has leaned on Twitter to delay scheduled maintenance because of the way the site is currently being used in Iran.

* Also from Iran: Gary Sick lays out an important challenge to that much-discussed pre-election poll showing Ahmadinejad ahead that I hadn't seen discussed anywhere else—it's from over a month before the election.

Thursday again! How does this keep happening?

* Today is the 20th anniversary of Tiananmen Square. MetaFilter remembers.

* Planetary #27 finally on its way. October.

* New Hampshire officially passes marriage equality. It looked for a while like nitpicking from the governor's office might actually kill this; very glad it didn't.

* Country first: Lindsey Graham admits he puts the Republican Party before the good of the nation.

* In the wake of Dr. George Tiller's assassination, a frequent Fox News guest has put photos and addresses for the last two late-term abortion providers in the country on the Web.

* Obama speaks in Cairo.

* E.J. Dionne on the corporate media's continued rightward slant. More from Steve Benen.

* The recession: a global view. It's important to remember how good America actually has it—and that the current level of hardship in the States is, relatively speaking, not even all that bad.

* Here comes heath care. Donkeylicious says Team Edwards has something to crow about here. Maybe, but the health-care justification for Edwards's (and later Hillary Clinton's) candidacy long past viability was always weak—the plan you campaign on is never the plan that gets passed.

* And sad news: Bill, killed. Early reports declare David Carradine a suicide.

Al Giordano reminds us that one year ago today Barack Obama got his ass handed to him in New Hampshire.

The pressure was now on Obama. How could he possibly retake the initiative after the New Hampshire primary shocker? That same January 8 night, he took the stage in Nashua:



And with three words - "yes, we can," introduced for the first time as a call and response line in his speeches - Obama parlayed his defeat into a victory. In temperament, with confidence and calm - and with the assist of a raucous crowd that was determined not to let the setback get it down - he kept himself in the game.

I remember that speech well, and I bet you do too: it was a much-needed call back to arms on what had seemed, at the time, to be a devastatingly and perhaps determinatively bad night. "Maybe I'm doomed to always back the wrong horse," I wrote in the post introducing the speech. "But maybe not."

In a week and a half, he'll be president.

Quick ones.

* Naturally, Barack Obama is Time's Person of the Year. For a brief while I thought they might pick someone else for shock value, but come on, this was a gimme.

* Jaimee pointed this out to me today, and now I'm seeing it at Politico: if she's selected to replace Hillary Clinton in the Senate—which seems, sadly, inevitable—Caroline Kennedy will have been in the Senate eight years in 2016, just like Clinton '08...

* Science fiction and glamor.

* TV Tropes has a whole subsection on comic book tropes.

* The best superhero graphic novels of 2008.

* And my vote for best news story of this or any year: Tiny Swiss watch found in undisturbed 400-year-old tomb.

Because everybody loves political dynasties: Caroline Kennedy is allegedly a top contender for Hillary Clinton's Senate seat.

Last night's Daily Show coverage of Obama's Cabinet appointments nicely demonstrates once again that the Daily Show is the only news program possessed of a VCR, the power of memory, or rudimentary human intelligence.

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Team America

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

The Daily Show With Jon StewartM - Th 11p / 10c

Obama/Clinton Sarcasm

Barack Obama Interview
John McCain Interview

Sarah Palin Video
Funny Election Video

Also: The New York Times guarandamntees Clinton at State, while Bill Richardson's thirty pieces of silver may be Commerce Secretary.

My very first use of the "Barack Obama" tag was on August 30, 2007, when I wrote of some now-vanished article concerning some saber-rattling HRC comments on Iran:

Hillary Clinton, working as hard as ever to make it impossible to support the Democrats in 2008.

A few months later, in December, I was more explicit:

God save us from the Clintons.

So you can imagine how happy I am to see Hillary Clinton apparently being offered, and accepting, Secretary of State.

I see the logic of it, accept the political wisdom of it, but good lord, this is not what I had in mind.

Lots of buzz on the internet last night about rumors that Hillary Clinton might become Barack Obama's Secretary of State. I'm with Josh Marshall on this: being a senator, even a senator with comparatively low seniority, seems like a much better gig both in itself and in terms of her potentially running for president again in 2016. But maybe there's an angle we're not seeing, or maybe—maybe—she just genuinely wants the job...

Jeff from Syntax of Things nails the prediction thread for 2008, calling the electoral threshold (Obama with 364 EVs) exactly and missing the popular vote spread by only 2%. His prize: our undying respect. Well done, Jeff!

UPDATE: Neil asks for (and receives) deserved credit for his second-place finish. Well done, Neil. Can NeilThirtyEight.com be far behind?

Newsweek has the first of the great campaign postmortems, including new tidbits on the even-worse-than-previously-thought Sarah Palin shopping spree and even an F-bomb from BHO. A few highlights from the highlights:

* Palin launched her attack on Obama's association with William Ayers, the former Weather Underground bomber, before the campaign had finalized a plan to raise the issue. McCain's advisers were working on a strategy that they hoped to unveil the following week, but McCain had not signed off on it, and top adviser Mark Salter was resisting.

Palin goin' rogue goes a long way towards explaining why the McCain camp never seemed to know what it was trying to do with Ayers.

* McCain also was reluctant to use Obama's incendiary pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as a campaign issue. The Republican had set firm boundaries: no Jeremiah Wright; no attacking Michelle Obama; no attacking Obama for not serving in the military. McCain balked at an ad using images of children that suggested that Obama might not protect them from terrorism. Schmidt vetoed ads suggesting that Obama was soft on crime (no Willie Hortons). And before word even got to McCain, Schmidt and Salter scuttled a "celebrity" ad of Obama dancing with talk-show host Ellen DeGeneres (the sight of a black man dancing with a lesbian was deemed too provocative).

WTF?

* The debates unnerved both candidates. When he was preparing for them during the Democratic primaries, Obama was recorded saying, "I don't consider this to be a good format for me, which makes me more cautious. I often find myself trapped by the questions and thinking to myself, 'You know, this is a stupid question, but let me … answer it.' So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f---ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

Ladies and gentlemen, the president of the United States.

UPDATE: Part I of the article is now up.

New thread.

10:30 Obama promises his tireless effort -- for the children.

Bob channels his mother and tells us to go out and vote, "it'll make us feel big and strong." McCain comes over to Obama immediately, shakes his hand, and says very loudly, "good job, good job." Trying not to show any more contempt, I guess.

10:27 On the special needs issue, while McCain rambles: Jaimee and Sweet Caroline both say that McCain keeps saying that Palin's son has autism, rather than Down's Syndrome. I got the impression that he was trying to speak to special needs generally and autism parents in particular, but I may be wrong on that, and he may have actually flubbed the issue.

I'm also seeing evidence of a huge "gender gap" on the CNN instant-response panels—McCain's horrible "health of the mother" rant has to be a big part of that.

10:27 Final statements: McCain first.

10:19 How many reporters are looking for Joe the Plumber tonight? Who will find him first? UPDATE: Yup.

10:16 ... as a threat to national security? Uh, sure.

10:16 Education.

10:14 McCain attacks the notion of the "health of the mother," accusing Obama of speaking in code. That's what he's going to go with? He hates the health of mothers? Going down in flames.

10:12 And Obama again, using basic common sense, rebuts the lies. Story of the night.

10:11 McCain spits on equal pay for equal work, accuses Obama of infanticide. Is it smart to make these attacks when Obama's right there next to you and gets to rebut everything you say?

10:10 Obama announces his support for Roe v. Wade, then pivots to Lilly Ledbetter and equal pay for equal work.

10:08 McCain approaches this question as a senator, not as the guy who will actually be making the choice.

10:05 Abortion! But only as a litmus test.

10:04 John McCain says transplants are a Cadillac-style luxury. We think he meant "implants." This is a debacle.

10:03 Why are we still talking about Joe?

10:02 Obama does, in fact, hit health care out of the park.

10:01 Obama lays out his fine: $0. McCain is angry about this.

9:59 Another slow pitch, Obama. $5,000 tax credit. Ridiculously bad policy. This is easy.

9:58 McCain wants to give everybody $5,000 tax credit. Even Joe the Plumber.

9:55 New topic: Health care. Control health-care costs or expand health-care coverage? Naturally, "we can do both."

9:54 Obama on fire with the facts and figures tonight -- he's destroying McCain on the competence gap. McCain, as Kevin Drum says, just lurches from attack to attack.

9:53 Obama continually has to deflect McCain's bullshit. Every exchange has the same flow: McCain says something crazy dishonest, Obama calmly retorts, rinse and reeat.

9:50 McCain calls Obama Clintonian. But is the drill-baby-drill oil dead in the face of the collapsing price of oil? Oil's well under $100 a barrel right now, and under $3 a gallon in a lot of states.

9:48 Obama wins energy, too. This has got to be brutal for McCain supporters to watch.

9:47 McCain refuses to answer another question, gets in a jab that puts him on the wrong side of NAFTA to boot.

9:46 Energy! Climate change! Put Bob Schieffer in charge of every debate.

9:44 Obama pivots back against the spending freeze on the special-needs-family issue. That was deadly.

9:43 McCain: Sarah Palin should be president because she understands special-needs families. Hmm?

9:42 From Christ, I Need A Drink in the comments: "I have to say, I'm liking Bob Schieffer as moderator a heck of a lot more than Brokaw." Me, too.

9:42 "Americans have gotten to know Sarah Palin." Yeah, that's kind of your problem, dude.

9:41 Obama: Biden rocks hard.

9:40 Why would the country be better off if Biden became president than Sarah Palin? (And vice versa.)

9:39 McCain is angrily demanding more details, then pivots back to claiming that *his* focus is on the economy. Obama just laughs.

9:38 McCain's campaign is imploding as we speak. This was a huge tactical mistake for him.

9:36 Obama responds: "Mr. Ayers has become the centerpiece of McCain's campaign." Professor. 40 years ago. Eight years old. Reagan. Presidents of University of Illinois and Northwestern University. Nailed.

ACORN: "Had nothing to do with us."

9:36 ACORN! The fabric of democracy is at state!

9:35 McCain brings up Ayers!

9:33 John McCain's feelings have also been hurt by a number of offensive T-shirts at Obama rallies. What are we talking about here? This is ridiculous.

9:32 McCain: "I'm proud of the people who come to our rallies." Really? Really?

9:31 Obama hits the Palin rallies, hard. McCain continues to look like he's five seconds away from meltdown.

9:30 McCain trying to portray himself as the aggrieved party here is completely absurd. Is anyone buying this?

9:29 McCain looks like he's about to blow his top.

9:27 Obama also hurt McCain's feelings w.r.t. to public financing. Obama says that the American public doesn't care about McCain's hurt feelings, and hell yes to that.

9:26 Now McCain accuses John Lewis of hurting his feelings. Poor guy.

9:25 McCain says that Obama should have accepted the town halls. What a loser.

9:24 Where's the high road? Will you say to each other's face what you've said in your ads?

9:22 "When have you ever stood up to your party?" Obama starts listing off Democratic constituencies he's pissed off. Interesting response, not necessarily what I would have gone with. Then he starts to list areas in which McCain and Bush are indistinguishable—that response I like.

9:21 McCain declares he's not President Bush. Interesting. I did not know that.

9:20 The one-half-of-one-percent line is better than a hard number, though.

9:19 Damnit, Obama, just say it: You don't cut spending in a recession.

9:18 McCain is having a terrible night, already. Rambling, constantly off-message -- he looks like he's about to burst.

9:17 McCain hits this spending freeze nonsense again. Obama, it's a soft-pitch over the plate: YOU DON'T CUT SPENDING IN A RECESSION.

9:16 Amazingly, McCain *doesn't* want to talk about spending. He's back to talking about houses. Even Bob won't stand for it.

9:15 While they talk about the same boring stuff for the third boring time, here's a post on the rules from Ben Smith, with some interesting consequences on whether it makes sense for McCain to go negative tonight:

"It's a huge mistake in a sit-down debate to attack or be snarky," he said. He said that talking about an opponent's negatives can be done if the moderator prompts it, "but to self generate it is very difficult in a sit-down debate"

"It would be a big mistake for McCain do do the Ayers stuff, the Acorn stuff," he said.

9:13 Bob mercifully saves us from the tax bullshit. Unfortunately, it's only to plunge us deep into the spending bullshit.

9:11 Sweet Caroline is sick of Joe the Plumber already. So say we all.

9:10 McCain calls Obama a communist -- Obama wants to "spread the wealth around." Calls Obama a tax-raiser again, for the millionth time.

9:09 Obama: "Joe's been watching some ads of Sen. McCain's. Here's what I'm actually gonna do." The audience laughs—it's a good line.

9:07 McCain tries to play a random swing voter against Obama, promising some guy named Joe he'll help him buy a business. Just 100,000,000 more voters to go.

9:06 Obama hits his usual points, talking directly to the camera with his four principles for the economy.

The problem with these debates, incidentally, has been that neither of them is really able to disagree with the other about the big issue -- "fix the economy" -- and so the discussion immediately dissolves into platitudes.

9:05 McCain plays his usual 'X is in the hospital tonight' card -- tonight it's Nancy Reagan -- and then immediately begins to ramble.

He also said "Freddie Mae," but that's neither here nor there.

9:03 How will you fix the stock market?



9:02 Oh, good, they're both sitting tonight. That'll keep the energy up.

9:00 Here we go. There's a lot of anticipation that tonight is the night that McCain either goes massively negative OR completely loses his shit, or perhaps both. Meanwhile, I find this tidbit from Ezra Klein intriguing:

Campbell Brown just said that John McCain called Hillary Clinton for debate advice today. Huh.

Maaaaaybe she wasn't the best person to call.

Debate #3 liveblog!

During the primaries Hillary Clinton was pilloried (and I think rightly so) for a speech that seemed to suggest that part of the justification for her long candidacy was the possibility of an Obama assassination. But the fires that McCain/Palin are now stoking are a thousand times hotter and more dangerous. It is profoundly irresponsible for a presidential campaign, in the heat of an intense campaign, with frazzled and demoralized supporters bracing for a big loss, to use eliminationist rhetoric that provokes screams of "Kill him!" and "Terrorist!" from its audience. And it is, certainly, particularly disgusting in this instance, as the specter of assassination has haunted the Obama candidacy since its inception. For McCain/Palin to embark down this road, at this time, in this way, is a deep and fundamental betrayal of the democractic compact that keeps this country functional, a deliberate and calculated rhetoric of hate that in the best-case scenario won't even help them win and in the worst could result in the unthinkable.

"Country first" used to mean something. This isn't it.

The Sarah Palin pick has crystalized what I'll throw up here as my Boldest Prediction Ever: the next elected president of the United States, after Obama, will be a woman. Hillary Clinton exposed not only the potential political advantages of a female candidate—a surprising reversal of historical trends that she simply failed to capitalize on early enough—but also a palpable hunger that the "highest, hardest glass ceiling" be broken. And Palin's selection proves that this hunger extends even across the aisle.

We can't know right now, of course, but from where I'm sitting it seems likely that the next totally open election will take place in 2016, when Barack Obama steps down after his second term and presumably-still-VP Joe Biden (being just a few months older than John McCain is now) will be too old. I'd actually take odds, if that does come to pass, that both parties run women at the top of the ticket in 2016. In game theoretical terms there's just too much net potential advantage to be lost in allowing the opposing party to run a woman while you run a man. That hunger won't be getting any smaller in eight more years of waiting.

I hope I'm right. It'll be a very good day for America, and a better day still if she's a Democrat.

Politico has the full text of Hillary Clinton's speech, as good and as tough as I'd hoped it would be. Very moving, too, her evocation of Harriet Tubman standing out in particular:

This is the story of America. Of women and men who defy the odds and never give up.

How do we give this country back to them?

By following the example of a brave New Yorker , a woman who risked her life to shepherd slaves along the Underground Railroad.

And on that path to freedom, Harriett Tubman had one piece of advice.

If you hear the dogs, keep going.

If you see the torches in the woods, keep going.

If they're shouting after you, keep going.

Don't ever stop. Keep going.

If you want a taste of freedom, keep going.

So, Mark Warner kind of really sucked. There's nobody who could have hoped to follow Barack's 2004 barnburner, and anticipation for Hillary has sucked all the air out of the room—but that was a snoozer. I guess it's a good thing no one listens to me...

UPDATE: Rachel Maddow agrees: "Apparently Mark Warner visited us from the future, and in the future there is no Democratic Party." Spot on. Really, really, really really bad.

She also points out that Warner's failure ups the stakes for Hillary significantly. I agree: she absolutely needs to take the hammer to McCain tonight in a big way to regain her credibility with the Obama wing of the party. He's given her an opening by using her in this week's ads—that was a huge tactical error on his part—and now she can move both her die-hard supporters and the debate-at-large towards Obama by hitting McCain tonight and hitting him hard.

It's made-for-TV. It writes itself.

And for what it's worth, I think she will, if only because a nice and fiery anti-McCain speech tonight is just about the only way, in the unlikely event Obama loses, she could ever hope to have the support of someone like me in 2012.

UPDATE 2: Ezra Klein and Kevin Drum agree. Here's Ezra:

For what it's worth, my hunch is Clinton will own the convention. What she needs to do in this speech is so easy and so obvious and will be greeted with such gratitude by the Democratic Party and such rapturous coverage by the media that it's almost inconceivable that she'll pass up the opportunity to be the hero.

I guess today's the day for the final, final, actually final veepstakes prediction. On a long-term strategic level I still favor the Virginia strategy, and so when I was throwing down my predictions in the Edge of the American West thread last night that's what I went with: Warner / Romney, second choice Kaine / Romney.

But the longer this goes on and is dragged out the more it seems to me they need a huge name, and there's really just a handful people on that list: Hillary Clinton, Al Gore, maybe a wildcard like Colin Powell or Chuck Hagel. Expectations are at a fever pitch; the fact that's it's the Friday before the convention and I expected a Kaine announcement Tuesday or Wednesday (if not weeks ago) makes me think it may actually be Hillary.

If that's the way Obama's behind-the-scenes geniuses think it has to be, I guess that I'm at peace with it, but good lord if it going to be a crazy famous superstar I hope that it's Al Gore.

Hooray for Mondays.

* Yesterday we went to New York to see After Nature at the New Museum and Rififi—the film that singlehandedly gave birth to the very idea of French film noir, according to a quote Ryan saw in the newspaper—at the Film Forum's French Crime Wave series. I officially pronounce both things Worth Doing™, with an extra-special deliciousness shout-out to Kate's Joint at 58 Avenue B in the East Village.

* Rest in peace, Isaac Hayes.

* YouTube video tribute to Jack Kirby, king of comics. Via MeFi.

* I've already made what I consider the definitive comment on election polling, but in case you need more I recommend Matthew Yglesias's post today on tracking polls:

Or maybe none of that happened. As everyone knows, there’s sampling error associated with polling. As a result, if you poll 1,000 people on August 1 and then you poll 1,000 different people on August 2 you shouldn’t be surprised to see the results differ by several percentage points even in the absence of any change in the underlying public opinion. Beyond that, doing one poll per day throughout a long campaign would mean that you’d expect to see one or two relatively rare outlier results per month even under circumstances of total stasis. And as Alan Abramowitz points out if you look at the daily results this is actually what you see — incredible volatility with Obama’s lead oscillating violently around an average of 3-4 points. Since it’s not plausible that the public mood is really swinging anywhere near as rapidly as a very naive reading of the Gallup daily results would suggest, people could see that this is basically statistical noise in a stable race.

But Gallup doesn’t report its daily results, they report a multi-day rolling average. Abramowitz notes that if you report a ten day rolling average, you get a chart where nothing happens — Obama maintains a flat lead of 3-4 points. Again, a stable race. But if instead of doing either of those things you do what Gallup actually does and report a three day rolling average, you get these pleasant looking peaks and valleys in the race. The change over time here is large enough in magnitude (unlike on the ten day chart) but also slow enough in pace (unlike on the one day chart) to be plausibly interpreted as public opinion shifting in response to events. And since the human mind is designed to recognize patterns and construct narratives, and since it suits the interests of campaign journalists to write narratives, people interpret the peaks and valleys of the three day average as real shifts in public opinion. But while I have no way of proving that it’s just statistical noise and nothing’s really happening, the “nothing happening” narrative is completely consistent with the data, and it’s telling that the conventional narratives collapse when the data is presented in different ways whereas the “noise” narrative is consistent with multiple ways of displaying the information.

I'll only add that given the extent to which polls serve as a bulwark for functional democracy and accountable elections, the increasing sensationalization of polls as a means to drive news ratings rather than to reliably monitor public opinion is a very, very disturbing trend.

Polls should be boring. They should be so boring no one cares what they say.

* And Jesse Taylor has the best hypothetical history of the presidential primary I've seen:

Any number of things could have swayed the primary. But at the end of the day, Clinton apologizing for her Iraq vote (or just not having voted that way in the first place) would have guaranteed her the nomination. Or her running for Senate in Illinois.

I really think that's right. If she'd decided to run for Senate in Illinois rather than New York, she'd have had it.

Politics Tuesday.

* GOP: If we only lose eight Senate seats this year, we win. Never stop chasing that rainbow.

* Salon says relax, liberals, we've already won. I'm not going to relax until I see Obama with 270+ electoral votes in November, and probably not for a few days even then.

* American Public Media has a Budget Hero game to try and fix the national budget. Via MeFi.

* The Democratic Primary in eight minutes.

And if American politics is your bloodsport of choice, don't miss the big Clinton event at noon today, at which she will either suspend or concede her campaign and (finally) endorse Barack Obama for President.

UPDATE: Just watched it. It was a very good speech. I thought there was absolutely no way she should or could conceivably be Obama's VP, but I must admit I feel myself wavering on that...

UPDATE 2: The best thing for everyone would be for her to make it absolutely clear she won't take the job, so the eventual pick of Anyone Else doesn't reopen this wound.

Unfortunately, I think she actively wants the slot, so not picking her remains in its own way as sticky a problem as picking her would be.

UPDATE 3: Yahoo has video.