I have begun to notice something about Hillary supporters: they’re beginning to sound laughable almost to the extent of farce. Yesterday, watching Lanny Davis defend Clinton, and today, watching Charles Rangel do the same, I actually laughed out loud listening to them. Rangel, for example, was cheerfully in denial; when asked to explain what possible path Hillary could have left to the nomination, he just said, “I don’t know” and went on about how wonderful Hillary was and how she should absolutely keep fighting, as if not having a path to the nomination was somehow irrelevant. When asked whether Hillary’s loaning more than $6 million of her own money to her campaign in addition to the previous $5 million showed that she was in financial trouble, Rangel happily spouted that it “showed the depth of her commitment” to the campaign.

Even if Hillary’s campaign were not effectively dead, these statements would sound like bluster and denial; but with things the way they are right now, they are downright comically preposterous. Seriously, these performances would not be out of line in a Saturday Night Live skit.

The pundits in the press, as I listen to them, are straining as hard as they can to claim that this race is not over yet, even going so far as to suggest that the superdelegates might fall in behind Hillary, a suggestion so ludicrous that it strains credulity to the breaking point. Clinton supporters are going even further, claiming that Hillary’s “win” in Indiana (she was supposed to win by about 5%, she may win by as little as a single percent) is devastating for Obama because a month or two ago, Obama expected to win that state. (Only one poll, a small unknown pollster, had Obama ever being ahead in Indiana.) Clinton herself is on stage now, carrying the Clinton message about how Obama said he was going to win Indiana, and how the polls said he was going to win Indiana (despite all but one very old, outlier poll saying that Hillary was going to win), and that because she has “won” Indiana (by less than she was supposed to, a very thin margin–they haven’t even called the state yet, for criminy’s sake), that this is a “tie-breaker” and therefore, she wins the race! Obama might as well just give up! I know she’s got to put a good face on things, but, I mean, really. Sheesh.

There’s no getting away from one thing: Hillary needed some kind of big win tonight. And while the results are not yet all in, it looks pretty clear: Obama won, and Hillary either lost big or didn’t get the minimal win necessary to make her look credible. Indiana, while not an Obama win, may be a Hillary loss; the networks are still not calling it yet despite 87% of the votes counted with Hillary ahead by 4%, because the last district not reporting is a big one, is adjacent to Obama’s Chicago, has a strong African-American population, and has seen tremendously high turnout. It is even possible, however remote, that Obama could still win Indiana–which would be a huge embarrassment for Hillary. While Clinton will probably win the state, it could be very close; in terms of delegates, it will be just as close, maybe almost an even split. In North Carolina, where Hillary needed to at least get close, she is being taken down by double-digit numbers, perhaps as much as 14%. Obama is outperforming the polls tonight.

Perhaps people will shake off this media-induced fuzz where people forgot that Ohio and Pennsylvania were always Hillary strongholds, and that Obama lost very few delegates in those states despite losing the popular vote. Maybe people will begin to recognize that Obama is still dominating the superdelegate gains, that he is now less than 20 superdelegates behind Hillary (some say as few as 14), and after Obama’s performance tonight, that gap is bound to close even faster.

Naturally, Hillary will not quit, neither will the Republicans (who have been helping Hillary all they possibly can because they see her as the easy one to beat) nor the media (who want the race and the mudslinging to continue as long as possible); in coming weeks, you will start to hear a lot more about Florida and Michigan.

But Obama now has his mojo back; expect that to be a big factor from now.

Via Andrew Sullivan. Moyers does the best job yet in laying out what’s going on, what’s right and wrong about the Wright affair.

I know right-wingers have always dismissed Moyers as some kind of ultra-liberal. But then again, they do that with just about every intelligent, literate, sensible person who speaks from the left. It doesn’t keep him from being a wise man who hits the nail on the head almost every time.

This via TPM:

I’ve just obtained a copy of another ad hitting Obama on the gas tax that Hillary just started airing in Indiana.

The last-minute ad, which went up late on the Friday before election day, says Hillary’s gas tax holiday would “save families $8 billion,” and adds: “Barack Obama says that’s just pennies.”

“He’d make you keep paying that tax, instead of big oil,” the ad continues.

Wow.

I mean, really. The gas tax idea has been almost universally exposed as petty pandering to voters, dangling money in their faces which evaporates before it gets to their pockets. Hillary refers to her “improved” version of McCain’s “gas tax holiday,” where she proposes paying for the tax cut by charging the oil companies with it. Therefore the claim that “He’d make you keep paying that tax, instead of big oil.”

Of course, it’s pure BS. Hillary is simply shifting the tax to an earlier point in the pipeline; do you really imagine that the oil companies won’t pass on the tax hike to consumers? It is doubtful that there would even be a hiccup in prices at the pump. The tax would still be there, and you would still be paying for it. Even pro-Clinton Paul Krugman is with Obama on this one.

What’s worse, Hillary is lying about Obama with her numbers. Obama pointed out that in total, Americans would save no more than $30 total, assuming the “gas tax holiday” would work to full effect, which of course it will not. Hillary, who chides Obama for (correctly) pointing out that this comes out to just pennies a day, instead grandly claims that Americans will gain a windfall of eight billions dollars! Wow! That’s a lot! Until you divide that number by the number of Americans, when it comes out to being… $30. She’s calling Obama a liar because he’s claiming her tax cut, if it even worked, would net Americans the exact same amount of money she is claiming it will.

Hillary is testing an idea: are the voters in Indiana complete morons who will vote for anyone who promises a tax cut, no matter how obviously false the promise is? Unfortunately, she could be right in her assumption.

The ball’s in your court, Indiana: lying panderer, or truth teller? You decide.

Here’s a rather interesting pro-Barack video lasting five minutes, made almost in cartoon form. Hardly professional quality, but not bad, either. Sometimes over the top, there’s a lot of fun stuff in there as well. Via FSJ.

You may have heard about how McCain, and now McClinton both support a “gas tax holiday” for this summer, and argue that Obama is “out of touch” with regular Americans because he opposes the “tax cut.” The problem: the tax cut is so limited, in fact nearly worthless, that it works only as an election-year gimmick, not an actual solution to any problem. The tax stands at 18.6 cents per gallon, where gas costs $3.60 on average in the U.S. today. Let’s say that your gas tank holds 15 gallons and you pay the average price; you will save only $2.79 on a $54 refill. Wow! What a savings! That should fix a lot of people’s financial problems!

Truth is, you could probably save more money right now just by going to one of those web sites that finds the lowest gas prices, and save ten to fifteen cents per gallon that way. In my old ZIP code, there is a 23-cent-per-gallon difference between the highest and the lowest gas prices at stations within just a few miles of each other.

In short, the McCain/Clinton proposal is nothing more than hot air; Obama has got to be respected for speaking truth on this one, in contrast with Clinton’s jumping on the McCain publicity-stunt bandwagon:

Mr. Obama derided the McCain-Clinton idea of a federal tax holiday as a “short-term, quick-fix” proposal that would do more harm than good, and said the money, which is earmarked for the federal highway trust fund, is badly needed to maintain the nation’s roads and bridges.

In 2000, Mr. Obama supported a bill in the Illinois legislature to suspend most of the state’s 6.25 percent gasoline sales tax. But he later opposed making the reduction permanent, arguing that the state needed the revenue and that the measure had saved consumers little.

Mrs. Clinton, of New York, has also taken varying stands on the issue of gas taxes. In her 2000 Senate campaign, she spoke against repealing the federal gasoline tax, calling it “one of those few taxes that New York actually gets more money from Washington than we send.”

At a meeting with voters in North Carolina on Monday, Mr. Obama said lifting the gas tax for three months would save the average consumer no more than $30, a figure confirmed by Congressional analysts. Mr. Obama has previously dismissed Mr. McCain’s proposal as a “scheme.”

“Half a tank of gas,” Mr. Obama told his audience. “That’s his big solution.”

Well-put. Naturally, the Liberal Media™ will probably report that Obama is costing you money and how Clinton is successfully pulling for the little guy. Because the media is now far less about reporting facts than it is about branding images for profit.

Update: I was thinking of adding this when I wrote the above post, but couldn’t think of a way to phrase it succinctly and convincingly; Krugman, in a rare moment of not baiting Obama, put it extremely well:

if the supply of a good is more or less unresponsive to the price, the price to consumers will always rise until the quantity demanded falls to match the quantity supplied. Cut taxes, and all that happens is that the pretax price rises by the same amount. The McCain gas tax plan is a giveaway to oil companies, disguised as a gift to consumers.

Forgive me the omission.

I know we shouldn’t respond to liberal-baiting by right-wing media loons, but I think that in this election season, there is a value to pointing out to people who consider themselves ordinary Americans exactly how sick and depraved the conservative side of things can get.

Case in point: Rush Limbaugh, while playing “I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas”–an obvious, racist reference to Hillary winning the Democratic nomination–stated on air that he dreams of, hopes for race riots in Denver to sink the chances for a Democratic win in November.

The dream end of this is that this keeps up to the convention and we have a replay of Chicago 1968 with burning cars, protests, fires, literal riots, and all of that. That’s that’s the objective here. … Riots in Denver, the Democrat Convention would see to it that we don’t elect Democrats.

The fact that he called the riots an “objective” is what spurred many to understand that he was calling for, trying to instigate riots; with his “Operation: Chaos” history, the impression was that Dittoheads would descend upon Denver and spark the riots themselves, then blame blacks and Democrats for the violence. Rush denied this, insisting that he only expected blacks to riot and prayed for such an outcome, not that he would try to instigate such an outcome (which, after all, would be a felony offense).

When a caller confronted him with this the next day, he claimed that his conduct on the show demonstrated “nothing but love, care and concern for people,” then proceeded to call the woman he was talking to a “mush head.” Defending himself on his racist-toned Denver riot fantasy, he claimed that it was Al Sharpton who was reprehensible and responsible:

The fact is that the Democrat Party has members in it that have already said, ‘There will be riots,’ or something to that effect. Al Sharpton. He was throwing down the gauntlet to the superdelegates: ‘You take this election away from Barack Obama, and there’s gonna be trouble. There’s going to be trouble in Denver.’

Because, as we all know, if Al Sharpton warns of “trouble in Denver,” that has to mean race riots and nothing else, like a contested convention that could be harmful to the party. Reportedly, after making that statement, Sharpton then went straight to Sylvia’s Restaurant in Harlem and ordered an “M.F.’ing iced tea.”

I searched the web for any independent source of the Sharpton quote, and could find nothing at all. Rush either picked up on some stealth report of Sharpton’s words, or twisted Sharpton’s words so far out of context that it would not be possible to find the actual quote, or just made up the attribution out of whole cloth.

Whatever the case, whether Sharpton said there would be trouble or not, Limbaugh is showing the same propensity he did when he jumped on an L.A. Times article about the film archetype “magic negro” to launch a weeklong racial tirade against Sharpton and Obama. The pattern is to take a marginal statement out of the media and use it as cover for allowing his racist attitudes to take flight. It’s not him who is racist, you see–he’s just commenting on racial matters that someone else brought up.

Remember also that Limbaugh, while outrageous, is not some fringe loon–he popularly represents a mainstream Republican caucus. If you’re considering voting Republican, consider carefully the company you keep.

Anyone who thinks they know about Obama’s pastor and that he reflects badly on Obama should feel obligated to see him outside the context of a ten-second video clip. Here’s an excerpt from the upcoming broadcast:

Just watching that excerpt should be a good start for anyone who thinks that Wright is some anti-American loon. Go ahead.

She won by 9 points, and barely even that. Despite almost every media outlet reporting a ten-point spread (only about one in ten reports mention a 9-point spread, and then only as a question, as if it’s not really clear), the fact remains that Hillary won by almost exactly 9.1%.

So why is everyone reporting 10%? Because of double-rounding. Clinton got 54.55% of the vote in PA, and Obama got 45.45%; that’s just a hair’s breadth from the midline for both numbers, but just barely enough so that Obama’s number is rounded down and Hillary’s is rounded up. Since the media uses the rounded numbers to calculate the distance between the two, it comes out with the 10% figure–despite that number being wholly inaccurate.

Although with how the media has behaved in recent years, it surprises me not at all that their math sucks, too.

Wow, the right-wingers are really showing their true colors as bigots. They just filibustered (what, the 5,349,816th time this session?) a bill that would make it possible for workers to sue for pay discrimination, essentially killing it. Obama and Clinton returned to D.C. to vote for it, and McCain stayed away, signaling that he would have voted to kill it anyway.

Let’s rehash: this is based upon a scummy re-interpretation of law by the Bush administration. The original law was intended to make it so that if you found out your employer was paying you less than another worker for the same job because you were the wrong gender or race, you could sue them, so long as you filed suit 180 days after the last occurrence of the discriminatory pay. That was obviously meant to be structured so that the 180 day deadline happened after the last disparate paycheck was issued.

In a suit based upon this law, an employer tried to claim that the 180-day deadline started when the initial decision was made to issue unequal pay, taking advantage of wording that was just nebulous enough to allow for that interpretation (if you’re a complete idiot). Co-workers don’t immediately disseminate how much money they make to all coworkers, and employers often strongly discourage (or even try to prohibit) such sharing in any case. Finding such disparity within 6 months of the initial pay difference is so rare to discover that the law would essentially be meaningless under the new interpretation. It’s about as obvious as it can get that this was not the way the law was supposed to work.

The plaintiff, Ms. Lilly Ledbetter, won her case, and all the appeals until it reached the conservative-stacked 11th circuit (a spin-off of the 5th circuit, the most conservative in the country)–whereupon the law suddenly changed to support discrimination. Then the case was appealed to the Supreme Court, and naturally, the Bush administration jumped on the company’s side, filing a brief in support of the bigotry, in opposition to the EEOC’s rational application of the law in accordance with decades of precedence. And the 5-member Republican majority on the Supreme Court voted along straight party lines to uphold the ludicrous reinterpretation that essentially gutted the law. (Message: if you’re a corrupt, lawbreaking corporation, now is the time to get your suits before the high court! Get the payoffs while they last!)

Some right-wingers used the “it’s the law’s fault” defense, saying that they’d like to fight against discrimination, but darn it, the law is just so clearly written to be stupid, we have no choice but to follow it and be stupid ourselves. The Bush administration made no such dodges; they simply claimed [PDF] that once a decision was made to discriminate, a corporation could not be expected to remember that it had initiated such discrimination beyond 6 months, and it would be a travesty if people were allowed to sue after discrimination had continued for years and years. (They even made the deranged argument that the Ledbetter law would discourage allegations of discrimination from being “expeditiously resolved.”)

So if a corporation got away with discrimination for 180 days, then they were home free–untouchable from that point on. As I pointed out before, this asinine view of the law just begs for abuse, and is even institutionalized in posterity if pay increases are decided as a percentage of initial pay levels.

Well, no problem–just re-word the law so that it clearly states the obvious intent. But there’s a big problem–no, two big problems: one, the president–who vowed to veto the reworded bill, and now the Senate Republicans, who just filibustered it to death before it could even get to the president’s desk.

So the conservative wingnuts in all three branches of government have not voiced their intent to let bigotry reign.

Ready to vote yet?

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: the insidious Liberal Media™ continues to call Republican obstruction “blocking” or “denying” in their headlines, even eschewing the correct term “filibuster” in the full text of most of the articles covering this story (the few that there are, that is). They showed no such reluctance to use the word “filibuster” almost endlessly in the far more rare cases when Democrats blocked a handful of the most extremist right-wing judicial nominees.

Oh, and here’s a bonus bit of Republican hypocrisy:

Republicans said Democrats were playing politics, by timing the vote to give the Democratic presidential candidates, Sens. Hillary Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois, time to return to the Capitol from the campaign trail. Both senators spoke in support of the bill before the vote.

Yes, how terrible that they allowed senators time to vote on legislation. As opposed to four years ago, when Kerry returned to D.C. to vote for a veteran’s health care vote… and the Republican leadership delayed the vote so Kerry couldn’t vote on it. Those Republicans are just pips, aren’t they?

One point less than is being reported, though many points more than I expected (and of course hoped for). That is to say, Hillary didn’t win it by 10 points–the results right now have her with a 9.39% lead, so let’s establish that and stay with the facts. It may seem like a quibble, but you can be certain it is one that the Clinton campaign (and unsurprisingly, the media) wants to claim: a double-digit win instead of a single-digit one.

But even that is relatively meaningless, because for all the fuss being made, what I said before the election and what has been established for some time still stands true: Hillary needed a lot more than this to have a chance at winning the nomination.

She made no more than an 11-delegate gain, although perhaps as small as an 8-delegate gain. After the results so far tonight, CNN has Obama ahead by 138 delegates; MSNBC by 133; CBS and USA Today/AP by 126.

The polls show Indiana (84 delegates) as going either way, but certainly closer than Pennsylvania. North Carolina (134 delegates, the last big state left) shows Obama beating Clinton by as much as she won Pennsylvania by. Clinton will probably then get West Virginia (39 delegates) and Kentucky (60 delegates), Obama should get Oregon (65 delegates), Hillary Puerto Rico (63 delegates), and then Obama probably gets Montana (24 delegates) and South Dakota (23 delegates).

But remember: like tonight, winning a state does not take all, and even Clinton’s 9% lead did not give her 9% more delegates–at most, she’ll get 6%, but perhaps even as low as 4%. That’s how it works. Now work those numbers. Let’s say Indiana is a tie, but that Hillary gets a 20-delegate gain in Kentucky, 15 in West Virginia, and maybe 5 in Puerto Rico. Not even counting Obama’s gains, that still leaves Hillary more than 80 delegates short of Obama, and Obama has been picking up superdelegates far faster than Hillary has been. Even if Hillary steals away Montana and South Dakota, that would only add a paltry half-dozen delegate-lead, if even that much. And Obama is set to add at least 10 (probably 15 or more) delegates in North Carolina, and another half-dozen or so in Oregon, keeping Hillary almost a hundred delegates short of just catching up.

But winning? Preposterous. And the superdelegates are professional enough to see that. The math simply denies the possibility. Somehow I doubt they’ll start stacking up for Obama after Pennsylvania–it would seem too much like trying to overturn a popular vote (never mind the cumulative totals). They’ll probably creep up over the next few weeks, but I expect to see movement in early May, after North Carolina and Indiana. Hillary will try to make as much as possible out of Pennsylvania, but even nothing but Clinton victories from here on out would not put her ahead in pledged delegates–she’d need to powerhouse overwhelmingly just to get the superdelegates to hand her the race, and the likelihood of that is near to zero percent. That even with the media continuing to bash Obama mercilessly as they have been in the past several weeks.

Chris Matthews put it this way:

“…But I really do think it’s a strange time because we’re all watching to see who won, but as Nora pointed out, 4 out of 5 ,or so, of the Hillary voters today believe she’s still in the running. That this is still up in the air and I think that was probably a mistake of the media. I think in the effort of the media, to try to keep this game going, we’ve created the delusion that somehow this race is still open. I don’t think it is open. I think if you look at the numbers Barack has to really blow it in the weeks ahead to lose.”

The only thing going for Hillary is that she now reportedly is ahead in the popular vote as opposed to delegate counts. But that won’t win the nomination for her, even if every last superdelegate goes her way. The fact is, you’ve simply got to ask for far too much for Hillary to win, with the faint possible exception of stringing it out to the convention and then winning it with back-room politics… and I simply cannot see the party letting that happen.

But hey, I was wrong about Pennsylvania. I just hope I’m not wrong about this.

Update:I thought the popular-vote-for-Clinton claim sounded fishy. MSNBC gives the real figures: Hillary wins the popular vote only by cheating, as you have to count both Florida and Michigan, and even then you have to deny Obama the “uncommitted” votes, most of which were clearly for him; Obama didn’t campaign in Florida (ha has always narrowed Clinton’s lead by campaigning), and he wasn’t even on the ballot in Michigan.

But since neither Florida nor Michigan had a “real” primary that gave them the chance to see both candidates equally and in person, and more importantly, because those primary contests broke the rules and so do not get included in the actual count, you have to discard those numbers… which leaves Obama with a half-million-vote lead in the popular count.

Hillary is still acting as if winning the nomination is a strong possibility for her, when it clearly is not–like when Hillary said she’s consider Obama as a vice-presidential candidate, it was almost comical in its presumptuousness. But that is what Hillary has to do, because if Pennsylvanians go to vote and figure that she really has no chance, then she will lose, no matter her lead over Obama in the polls: Democrats will vote for Obama, even if they favor Clinton, because they recognize what is best for their party as a whole. It has been made pretty clear to enough people that a Clinton victory would only prolong the inevitable and hurt the party, and I think that this is worth quite enough that Obama stands a good chance of getting a surprising number of votes this week.

Then there are the polls: as I have noted, they are all over the place. This is probably due to the pollsters trying to figure out how to weight the numbers. For example, will young voters or old voters have higher turnouts? Each pollster makes different decisions like these, and therefore we see a 20-point spread in polls with supposed margins of error far smaller than that. But as I note above, I think there will be an effect beyond polling: the polls measure which candidate is supported, and that is not necessarily who they will end up voting for. In my case, right now the idea of a Clinton candidacy is galling–but if the delegate counts were reversed and Obama had as slim a chance as Clinton has now, then painful as it might be, I would vote for Clinton for the good of the party. And that’s saying something.

Not to mention that both Ohio and Texas had semi-open primaries; Pennsylvania’s is closed. That means we’ll see fewer “Limbaugh” Republicans crossing the lines to get the candidate they want, and that could have an effect as well.

This close to the end, with the damage from a prolonged campaign so clear, and the real conclusion of the race so evident… I’m going to go out on a limb here and predict Obama will, if not win, at the very least lose by no more than 4 or 5 points in Pennsylvania. I would favor, however, something much closer, near a tie.

The question is, how will Pennsylvania be spun by the high and mighty media? In the past, Obama has been hurt by high expectations; his advancing in the polls in the days just before other elections made him seem like the favored candidate, and that hurt him mightily–look at New Hampshire, where the polls saw him jump from a double-digit deficit just a week before the primary to the 5-to-10-point favorite on election day–only to lose by a slim 3-point margin. Hardly a stunning victory for Clinton, who had as much as a 16-point lead just days before–but because the polls gave Obama such momentum, it looked like a stunning victory, and perception is everything.

So how will they spin, say, a 5-point Clinton victory here? Some polls say that is what will happen, some say Hillary leads by 18 points or so. We haven’t seen a poll that had Obama tied or ahead in more than two weeks–but will the media cling to that former image of Obama catching up? You can guess where my money is–the media is addicted to this race, and if they can help Clinton, they will. A 5-point Clinton win will probably be called a Clinton “victory,” despite the doom it spells in terms of delegates. There might be some small caveats in the small print, but the headlines will probably trend Hillary’s way. I would think that only if Obama comes within two or three points of a tie will the media abandon the pretense.

The question is, even if Obama wins, will Hillary finally give up?

While some polls have Obama keeping even with or even gaining a little on Clinton after the ABC “debate,” many polls–especially Gallup’s tracking poll–show Obama losing ground. Little wonder, considering how the debate seemed designed to tear Obama apart and allow Hillary to pile on and look better at the same time.

Some might disagree that the ABC fiasco was “designed” to do that, but look at some of the evidence that is piling up. Aside from the fact that George Stephanopoulos, a former Clinton official, literally took notes from right-winger Sean Hannity on how to smear Obama with irrelevancies, there is now proof that ABC actually sought out an anti-Obama Pennsylvanian woman who has been featured before in the press as being obsessed with Obama’s lack of flag lapel pins.

Clinton is following this up with a new strategy: despite Obama’s classy “you just gotta brush these things off” reaction to the attacks, Clinton is now labeling Obama as a “whiner.” As if somehow, she and her media allies can ruthlessly smear Obama, and if he rebuts–which is universally agreed upon as a necessary response to such attacks (and which Clinton has done before herself)–then he’s a “whiner.”

But since rebutting is whining in Clinton’s book, then surely she will have no reaction to yet another witness to Clinton’s disrespectful 1995 remarks about voters. Theda Skocpol was there when Hillary reportedly told Bill to screw the voters (insert your own Bill Clinton joke here), and while she can’t confirm or deny any exact words, she did get this directly from the notes she took that day:

… there was extensive, hard-nosed discussion about why masses of voters did not support Clinton or trust government or base their choices on economic as opposed to what people saw as peripheral life-style concerns. Hillary Clinton was among the most cold-blooded analysts in attendance. She spoke of ordinary voters as if they were a species apart, and showed interest only in the political usefulness of their choices — usefulness to the Clinton administration, that is.

In other words, she cares.

Insipid, shoddy, despicable, ridiculous, tawdry, astonishingly miserable, embarrassing, inane, frivolous, historically poor quality, stupid, disgusting, a really, really horrible freak show, a trainwreck, an unmitigated travesty, and the biggest sham I’ve ever seen. These are all descriptions taken from various blogs and editorials about the “debate” tonight, where former Clinton staffer George Stephanopoulos took notes from Sean Hannity on how to smear Obama, and Charlie Gibson acted even worse. The first half hour was nothing but Obama-bashing, talking about lapel pins, the Weathermen, “Bittergate,” and Wright–with Hillary piling on. The “mediators” were even booed by the audience at the end. Even arch-conservative Jonah Goldberg called it “nothing but Republican water-carrying,” and many expressed the belief that John McCain was the big winner of the debate.

Like Kevin Drum, I am thankful I was not able to watch it live. The problem: from what I have heard of the freak show, it was a microcosm of “media” coverage of the Democratic race: primarily a long streak of candidate-bashing, manufacturing fake “controversies” so as to boost ratings and prolong the “exciting horse race” which is this disaster of a primary season. The “press” is thoroughly and apparently unashamedly invested in turning this into festival of scandal, while not reporting on trivial stuff like the Vice President, Secretary of State, and Attorney General gathering in secret to discuss how often a child’s testicles may be crushed as they quietly repeal the Fourth Amendment to the Constitution.

Of course, this may all just be the infamous “Liberal Media™” at work….

Some are suggesting that this will backlash and Obama will receive a surge of donations and maybe even a boost in Pennsylvania (I’m considering donating myself, if for no other reason than to make a statement). I am hoping for a bigger backlash against the so-called “journalists” and the noxious, steaming river of manure they are calling “news” these days. Some of this is expressed in this roundup by The Moderate Voice.

Update: Obama wraps it up:

Hillary has been making a huge deal about Obama calling working-class Americans “bitter.” The media, wanting to prolong the primary battle, has accommodated her, making a “huge political firestorm” out of it for her.

Now we learn that in 1995, Hillary said of the same people: “Screw ’em.” That’s a verbatim quote:

In January 1995, as the Clintons were licking their wounds from the 1994 congressional elections, a debate emerged at a retreat at Camp David. Should the administration make overtures to working class white southerners who had all but forsaken the Democratic Party? The then-first lady took a less than inclusive approach.

“Screw ’em,” she told her husband. “You don’t owe them a thing, Bill. They’re doing nothing for you; you don’t have to do anything for them.”

Let’s see if this becomes an issue the media picks up on. Any wagers?

I have trouble believing that this faux-Bruce-Springsteen video is not a hoax, a really bad joke meant to take a jab at Microsoft:

Engadget, however, claims it’s for real–a Microsoft-made video promotion for Vista SP1. Even if it was intentionally made for camp value, it is still cringe-inducing.

The antidote:

Meanwhile, the actual Bruce Sprinsteen, the one with ultimate blue-collar image, has endorsed Obama (“Hi, I’m a Mac” to McCain’s “And I’m a PC”):

LIke most of you, I’ve been following the campaign and I have now seen and heard enough to know where I stand. Senator Obama, in my view, is head and shoulders above the rest.

He has the depth, the reflectiveness, and the resilience to be our next President. He speaks to the America I’ve envisioned in my music for the past 35 years, a generous nation with a citizenry willing to tackle nuanced and complex problems, a country that’s interested in its collective destiny and in the potential of its gathered spirit. A place where “…nobody crowds you, and nobody goes it alone.”

At the moment, critics have tried to diminish Senator Obama through the exaggeration of certain of his comments and relationships. While these matters are worthy of some discussion, they have been ripped out of the context and fabric of the man’s life and vision, so well described in his excellent book, Dreams From My Father, often in order to distract us from discussing the real issues: war and peace, the fight for economic and racial justice, reaffirming our Constitution, and the protection and enhancement of our environment.

After the terrible damage done over the past eight years, a great American reclamation project needs to be undertaken. I believe that Senator Obama is the best candidate to lead that project and to lead us into the 21st Century with a renewed sense of moral purpose and of ourselves as Americans.

Over here on E Street, we’re proud to support Obama for President.

Let’s see if that doesn’t carry any weight in Pennsylvania and Indiana.

This on McCain being reported from a new poll:

McCain was seen as a better steward of the economy than either Democrat despite their repeated criticism of his economic credentials. He led Obama by 3 points and Clinton by 5 points on the question of who would best manage the economy.

This despite McCain showing no reason to believe he would be a good steward of the economy, and in fact demonstrating that he would not be. The only thing he might do differently is to not favor pork as much, but with Democrats in control of Congress, he would do that anyway–and would still likely favor his own party’s pork in any case. But McCain wishes not only to extend Bush’s tax cuts for the rich, but to add his own to the pile, while allowing the middle class to lose their homes while he bailed out those who foreclose on them.

So why is McCain seen as a better steward? For no better reason than he is a Republican, and Republicans–completely contrary to all evidence–are still considered better on the economy. Yet another baseless favor McCain will enjoy, like being seen as stronger on campaign finance reform despite having violated federal laws on campaign finance and surrounded himself with lobbyists, or like he is considered strong on defense and foreign policy despite having authored the failed surge, promised an endless war in Iraq and a new costly war in Iran, and so much more to his detriment. He is seen as a centrist maverick when he is really a strong conservative who readily toadies to the most extreme elements of his party. And so forth and so on.

Kevin Drum put it succinctly and well:

The results are simple: Democratic presidents have consistently higher economic growth and consistently lower unemployment than Republican presidents. If you add in a time lag, you get the same result. If you eliminate the best and worst presidents, you get the same result. If you take a look at other economic indicators, you get the same result. There’s just no way around it: Democratic administrations are better for the economy than Republican administrations.

Democratic presidents generate more jobs–even the worst Democrat in the past century has outperformed the best Republican. Deficits fall under Democrats, and skyrocket under Republicans. The rich get just as rich under both, but while the middle class and the poor suffer under Republicans, they do very well under Democrats. While Democrats keep spending down to a dull roar, Republicans spend like there’s no tomorrow; while Democrats responsibly try to find ways to pay for what they spend, Republicans carelessly pile up massive debts which cripple the economy, costing us $469 billion this year alone just to pay interest [OMB figures, Excel file] on our Republican-generated debt. Without the interest payments on the Reagan-Bush-Bush deficits alone, we would have a balanced budget right now.

The facts are clear for anyone to see: elect a Democrat, and your income will go up, jobs will increase, the deficit will fall, the economy will do better. Elect a Republican, the reverse will happen. And yet, millions of Americans continue to vote against their own financial interests based on nothing more than a fairy tale, a PR sham job.

In Akita Prefecture, Japan, there is a measure coming before the legislature to ban door-to-door sales to minors and the elderly. Naturally, several categories of businesses (financial, insurance, and retail, according to the report–I’m surprised that newspapers were not mentioned here, as they do tons of door-to-door sales) are whining, saying that this will ruin their businesses. All I have to say is, if these businesses cannot function without conning people of limited capacity into buying their product, then they deserve to fail. Me, I’m waiting for them to go all the way and give “no solicitors” signs the force of law. Oh, wait, they’re doing that too!

The ordinance will also ban door-to-door sales of financial products in which the principal is not guaranteed, including investment trusts, stocks and variable pension insurance, for all people.

Under a proposed registration system, sales people will be banned from visiting homes of consumers who have registered with the prefectural government as people who do not want sales staff to visit. The registered consumers can also display a sign at their homes to keep away sales people.

Yayy! I wonder what real estate prices are like in Akita? Better yet, how about Tokyo legislators getting off their butts? Next: start punishing people who fill your mailbox with ads. Meanwhile, they can similarly outlaw NHK collectors, now that the politicians are calling for NHK to drop all pretenses and become an official propaganda arm for the ruling party. Yeah, I’d love to be forced to fund that, thanks.

(Hat tip to f*cked gaijin)

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“Liberal” (turncoat) Joe Lieberman wonders aloud (on Fox Noise) if Obama is a Marxist. Um, yeah, right.

Bonus: Andrew Sullivan points out that in 2006, Lieberman loved Obama, inviting Obama to speak for him in Connecticut. Obama held no different stands then relative to now, so apparently Lieberman loves Marxists. Er, potential Marxists.

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John McCain, playing up his imprisonment and torture on the campaign trail, also had this to say:

We cannot ever, in my view, torture any American, that includes waterboarding.

Apparently, everyone else in the world is fair game.

Obama, meanwhile, says this:

We have to be clear and unequivocal. We do not torture, period. … Our government does not torture. That should be our position. That will be my position as president. That includes, by the way, renditions. We don’t farm out torture. We don’t subcontract torture.

I’m glad that McCain’s impressive foreign relations credentials have not turned him into a wishy-washy hypocrite.

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Wow. They’re calling it “Bittergate.” Also a “huge political firestorm.” Certainly, Obama suggesting that Pennsylvanians are bitter is not nearly as newsworthy as John McCain violating campaign finance laws that carry a five-year prison sentence, or revelations that the Bush administration approved the crushing of children’s testicles at the highest levels. Yeah, calling Pennsylvanians “bitter” was way out of line, and I can easily see such a huge gaffe wiping those other stories clear off the media’s radar altogether.

Meanwhile, in Pennsylvania, they tend to agree with Obama:

As a native-born, small-town Pennsylvanian, a son of native-born, small-town Pennsylvania parents – one from the coal region, one from Lancaster County – let me assure you that the so-called offensive, condescending things Barack Obama said about the people I come from are basically right on target.

“Bitter” perhaps best describes my late mother, an angry Irish Catholic who absolutely clung to her religion.

Dad, also a journalist, wasn’t really bitter as far as I know, but he sure liked to hunt.

So, despite carping from Hillary Clinton and annoying yapping from her surrogates (really, it’s like turning on the lights at night in a puppy farm), I take no offense.

What’s offensive to me is suggesting that small-town, working-class, gun-toting and/or religious Pennsylvanians are somehow injured by a politician’s words.

Are you kidding me?

Indeed.

There has been a lot of talk about how the sound bites will hurt Obama, from the endless loop in the media about Wright and “God Damn America,” to Obama’s own words about Americans being bitter and taking refuge in guns and god. Somehow I never thought that these things would hurt Obama in the long run, but it was hard for me to put my finger on exactly why.

Having just watched Obama in the “Compassion Forum” on CNN, it hit me as to why Obama will survive these attacks against him: eventually people who hear these sound bites will hear Obama speak more at length, and that will burn away all the damage done by these attacks.

What it comes down to is this: the real Obama is not compatible with the version of Obama portrayed in these sound bites. They cannot be reconciled. McCain and Clinton can fall from their own actions and words because they are applicable. We hear McCain saying we could be in Iraq for 100 years, and it is believable. Despite his words and past actions on campaign finance, the fact that he is neck-deep in lobbyists and has violated campaign finance law can only hurt him more. We see Hillary and the lengths she will go to for her own sake at the expense of others, and it will stick.

But what the sound bites try to do to Obama is to make him out to be the kind of person which is contradicted by his manner and speech when you see him in action. The “bitter” comment idea is to try to make him out to be an elitist who sees the voters as hicks and rednecks–but listen to him at the compassion forum and that impression is so far from what you can clearly see him to be, it is impossible to maintain the idea that the sound bites were somehow accurate. The comments of Wright may be one thing, but you listen to Obama for more than a few minutes and you can clearly see that Wright’s speech is light-years from where Obama is.

An attack against an individual is only as effective as it is believable after having seen and heard the candidate yourself. Kerry was stodgy enough that you could maybe buy into the claims against him; Gore, with his debate sighs and wooden manner, was believable in the role of prevaricator. In contrast, Reagan didn’t seem like a liar or a front, which contributed to his “teflon” status. In each of these cases, the public image contradicted the reality, but the image stuck because people could witness the politicians and believe the images applied.

The Obama that people have seen and eventually will see simply is not consistent with the elitist, condescending, “Muslim” foreign snob his opponents have been trying to paint him as. Were they to try to paint him a slick huckster, that might possibly fit the image–“oh, he talks sweet, but he doesn’t mean any of it” could possibly sell to some people. But that’s not what is being sold. If you want to lie about someone and make people believe a good person is really bad, or that a bad person is really good, you have to come up with a lie that will not melt away as soon as people see and hear the person.

A few days ago, Obama got into trouble for making this comment about what people in Pennsylvania and the midwest do when they feel abandoned by politicians in Washington:

And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

The criticism of this would have to be a bit nuanced, and it is: Clinton was more roundabout, and criticized Obama for saying that Americans are “bitter” when she says they’re not; McCain criticized Obama for being “elitist” and “condescending,” which is closer to the point. What they want to say but can’t directly is that Obama’s statement sounded like he was calling folks in that region rednecks who are all about god and guns, who are protectionist and don’t like immigrants. To say that directly about Obama’s remarks would be a bit too much, as it would provoke closer analysis of what he said and a more clear defense of it. Instead, they dance around it so that just the quick clip out of context and no analysis gets played again and again, allowing people to make the inference themselves.

Obama’s comment was indeed pretty sloppy, and did not sound good at all; in a follow-up, he expressed himself much better:

So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on.

This is not a politician “clarifying” themselves by essentially completely remaking what they said, or just claiming they were “misunderstood” and leaving it at that. When you look at his original statement, the sense of what he said was fully there–it was simply said in a truncated way, as if Obama had the idea in his head, but used a shorter version that came out sounding wrong; taken out of context and not considered fully, it sounds the way his opponents want people to think it sounds.

The truth is, Obama’s statement is 100% true: people were disgusted by not having a good choice to vote for, so instead they voted on negatives, issues ginned up to play on their fears, and that’s how Republicans won those elections. Obama is right, that is exactly what happened.

For those of you who prefer to read comments in fuller context, here are wider transcripts containing the above quotes (highlighted in bold); the first:

So, it depends on where you are, but I think it’s fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people are most cynical about government. The people are mis-appre…they’re misunderstanding why the demographics in our, in this contest have broken out as they are. Because everybody just ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’ That’s…there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today – kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing.

Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long. They feel so betrayed by government that when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama, then that adds another layer of skepticism.

But — so the questions you’re most likely to get about me, ‘Well, what is this guy going to do for me? What is the concrete thing?’ What they wanna hear is so we’ll give you talking points about what we’re proposing — to close tax loopholes, uh you know uh roll back the tax cuts for the top 1%, Obama’s gonna give tax breaks to uh middle-class folks and we’re gonna provide healthcare for every American.

But the truth is, is that, our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Um, now these are in some communities, you know. I think what you’ll find is, is that people of every background — there are gonna be a mix of people, you can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you’ll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I’d be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.

And the second, where he clarifies, explains, and responds to McCain and Clinton:

When I go around and I talk to people there is frustration and there is anger and there is bitterness. And what’s worse is when people are expressing their anger then politicians try to say what are you angry about? This just happened – I want to make a point here today.

I was in San Francisco talking to a group at a fundraiser and somebody asked how’re you going to get votes in Pennsylvania? What’s going on there? We hear that’s its hard for some working class people to get behind your campaign. I said, “Well look, they’re frustrated and for good reason. Because for the last 25 years they’ve seen jobs shipped overseas. They’ve seen their economies collapse. They have lost their jobs. They have lost their pensions. They have lost their healthcare.

And for 25, 30 years Democrats and Republicans have come before them and said we’re going to make your community better. We’re going to make it right and nothing ever happens. And of course they’re bitter. Of course they’re frustrated. You would be too. In fact many of you are. Because the same thing has happened here in Indiana. The same thing happened across the border in Decatur. The same thing has happened all across the country. Nobody is looking out for you. Nobody is thinking about you. And so people end up- they don’t vote on economic issues because they don’t expect anybody’s going to help them. So people end up, you know, voting on issues like guns, and are they going to have the right to bear arms. They vote on issues like gay marriage. And they take refuge in their faith and their community and their families and things they can count on. But they don’t believe they can count on Washington. So I made this statement– so, here’s what rich. Senator Clinton says ‘No, I don’t think that people are bitter in Pennsylvania. You know, I think Barack’s being condescending.’ John McCain says, ‘Oh, how could he say that? How could he say people are bitter? You know, he’s obviously out of touch with people.’

Out of touch? Out of touch? I mean, John McCain—it took him three tries to finally figure out that the home foreclosure crisis was a problem and to come up with a plan for it, and he’s saying I’m out of touch? Senator Clinton voted for a credit card-sponsored bankruptcy bill that made it harder for people to get out of debt after taking money from the financial services companies, and she says I’m out of touch? No, I’m in touch. I know exactly what’s going on. I know what’s going on in Pennsylvania. I know what’s going on in Indiana. I know what’s going on in Illinois. People are fed-up. They’re angry and they’re frustrated and they’re bitter. And they want to see a change in Washington and that’s why I’m running for President of the United States of America.

Followup: Josh Marshall posted this video of Obama in 2004 giving nearly the identical message, again put in less-twistable words: