Could it be a Landslide for Obama?

If Obama pulls more than 330 electoral votes it will be considered a landslide! Let it be!
by Charlie Leck

The most conservative estimates right now give Senator Obama 286 electoral votes. He needs 270 for election. These estimates do not include states where it is too close to call – Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, North Carolina, Florida and Nevada.

Should Obama take Florida and Ohio, it is a landslide. Other toss-up states will follow, including Nevada and Indiana. It’s been a long time since a candidate hit 330 electoral votes. It could happen this year. Most polling organizations give Obama a lead in Florida and Ohio.

A landslide will mean that Obama is dragging congressional candidates in with him – the coat-tail affect – and the make-up of Congress will change dramatically.

Just a couple of weeks ago, Missouri and West Virginia were considered solidly McCain. They’ve slipped to a considerable degree as McCain seemed to implode. Those two states are now in the toss-up category.

Washington has been considered a state leaning toward Obama. Polls now put it solidly in the Obama count. Virginia has also moved from a leaner to a solid Obama state.

A lot will depend on how people saw the debate last night. Here’s what I saw. John McCain was swinging wildly, hoping to land a punch – any punch, anywhere. Obama, like the great Ali, “danced like a butterfly and stung like a bee.” By the end of the fight, McCain looked exhausted and worn down. He had thrown everything he had and he had no more.

As Don Hazen wrote on AlterNet:

“But McCain couldn't change at all and, in fact, did worse. His scripted Joe Plumber scenario didn't pay off and left the viewers confused. His attacks about Bill Ayers reduced his favorables consistent with poll results. McCain has been on a losing streak for almost two months, and there is no sign he can break out of his self-imposed straightjacket and dependence on the Rovian tactics that have consistently proved unpopular except for his ever-narrowing hard core base.”

Now the voters decide! Thank goodness for that. In desperation, the McCain campaign organization will need to pull out some nasty swiftboat type ads – and they will. I think it will be a mistake. This time around the American public has decided they don’t want any of that kind of rot again. It worked for the Republicans in 2000 and 2004, and look where it’s gotten us. That’s the attitude of the voting public this time.

Anything can happen in the remaining 19 days before we vote. Anything! The Obama, organization is well funded, however, and they will run the race right to the finish.

My great hope, as you know, is that change is on the horizon and that a great new day will dawn for America is January of 2009 – a day, I guess, I never dreamed I would live to see. My knees wobble from the thought and this certain prayer, this song of my youth, is perpetually in my heart:

“Let it be, let it be, let it be, let it be.
Whisper words of wisdom, let it be.

And when the broken hearted people living in the world agree,
there will be an answer, let it be.
For though they may be parted there is still a chance that they will see,
there will be an answer. let it be.

Let it be, let it be,..

And when the night is cloudy, there is still a light, that shines on me,
shine until tomorrow, let it be.
I wake up to the sound of music, mother Mary comes to me,
speaking words of wisdom, let it be.

Let it be, let it be,..”

Minnesota’s U.S. Senate Race

Wave it in my face on the morning after the election, but here’s my shocking prediction.
by Charlie Leck

The current polls (the reputable ones) have 3rd party candidate, Independent Party Dean Barkley, getting anywhere between 14 and 20 percent of the vote in the upcoming election.
I think Barkley will do better than the high range in those numbers and will come very close to the threshold that will get him elected. Barkley will be in the 30+ range. That + figure will be the key.

My prediction is that Minnesota will elect a U.S. Senator that does not garner even as much as 40 percent of the statewide vote. Whoever the victor, he will not go rushing to Washington with a mandate in his pocket. I sure wish Minnesota had an instant-run-off policy in its statewide elections. It makes such sense!

The question no one seems capable of answering is this: From whom does Barkley take the most votes? A few weeks ago I would have thought it was Coleman. Now I’m not too sure.This is one important election the polls haven’t got right.

In 2009, Dean Barkley may be caucusing with Joe Liebermann. I can’t imagine the Democrats will want the Senator from Connecticut defiling their caucus any longer. They’re not going to need him as they do now and they may just cut ties with this turncoat.

Not, of course, that I’m bitter!

Palin’s Church is a Bigger Problem than Pastor Wright

What would such religious beliefs lead an irrational person to do in a time of crisis?
by Charlie Leck

Parts of the video that follows were shot inside Sarah Palin’s church with a hidden camera. I don’t promote or endorse using such devises to spy on worshippers; however, now that I’ve seen it, I feel strongly that what goes on inside that little church matters. It matters because Sarah Palin is running for a position that might leap-frog her into the White House someday. I think many of the reasonable people who are supporting Palin today would not do so if they understood some of the foundations of her religious faith and belief.

To me, I think this “stuff” is more frightening that the videos I saw of Pastor Jeremiah Wright. I don’t want a person who believes these things to be President of the United States and I don’t think you would either.

[You can watch the video by clicking here]

Would William Buckley Vote McCain-Palin?

Don’t be too sure that the late, great conservative would support McCain
by Charlie Leck

Read this commentary by Christopher Buckley, the son of the late, great, conservative political observer and writer. It may surprise you. It will entertain you. The story first appeared in The Daily Beast.

Sorry, Dad, I'm Voting for Obama
by Christopher Buckley
October 10, 2008 [7:33am]

The son of William F. Buckley has decided—shock!—to vote for a Democrat.

Let me be the latest conservative/libertarian/whatever to leap onto the Barack Obama bandwagon. It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance.

Or would they? But let’s get that part out of the way. The only reason my vote would be of any interest to anyone is that my last name happens to be Buckley—a name I inherited. So in the event anyone notices or cares, the headline will be: “William F. Buckley’s Son Says He Is Pro-Obama.” I know, I know: It lacks the throw-weight of “Ron Reagan Jr. to Address Democratic Convention,” but it’ll have to do.

Dear Pup once said to me, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.”

I am—drum roll, please, cue trumpets—making this announcement in the cyberpages of The Daily Beast (what joy to be writing for a publication so named!) rather than in
the pages of National Review, where I write the back-page column. For a reason: My colleague, the superb and very dishy Kathleen Parker, recently wrote in National Review Online a column stating what John Cleese as Basil Fawlty would call “the bleeding obvious”: namely, that Sarah Palin is an embarrassment, and a dangerous one at that. She’s not exactly alone. New York Times columnist David Brooks, who began his career at NR, just called Governor Palin “a cancer on the Republican Party.”

As for Kathleen, she has to date received 12,000 (quite literally) foam-at-the-mouth hate-emails. One correspondent, if that’s quite the right word, suggested that Kathleen’s mother should have aborted her and tossed the fetus into a Dumpster. There’s Socratic dialogue for you. Dear Pup once said to me sighfully after a right-winger who fancied himself a WFB protégé had said something transcendently and provocatively cretinous, “You know, I’ve spent my entire life time separating the Right from the kooks.” Well, the dear man did his best. At any rate, I don’t have the kidney at the moment for 12,000 emails saying how good it is he’s no longer alive to see his Judas of a son endorse for the presidency a covert Muslim who pals around with the Weather Underground. So, you’re reading it here first.

As to the particulars, assuming anyone gives a fig, here goes:

I have known John McCain personally since 1982. I wrote a well-received speech for him. Earlier this year, I wrote in The New York Times—I’m beginning to sound like Paul Krugman, who cannot begin a column without saying, “As I warned the world in my last column...”—a highly favorable Op-Ed about McCain, taking Rush Limbaugh and the others in the Right Wing Sanhedrin to task for going after McCain for being insufficiently conservative. I don’t—still—doubt that McCain’s instincts remain fundamentally conservative. But the problem is otherwise.

McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president
someday.

A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.

But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?

All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble
bust.

As for Senator Obama: He has exhibited throughout a “first-class temperament,” pace Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.’s famous comment about FDR. As for his intellect, well, he’s a Harvard man, though that’s sure as heck no guarantee of anything, these days. Vietnam was brought to you by Harvard and (one or two) Yale men. As for our current adventure in Mesopotamia, consider this lustrous alumni roster. Bush 43: Yale. Rumsfeld: Princeton. Paul Bremer: Yale and Harvard. What do they all have in common? Andover! The best and the brightest.

I’ve read Obama’s books, and they are first-rate. He is that rara avis, the politician who writes his own books. Imagine. He is also a lefty. I am not. I am a small-government conservative who clings tenaciously and old-fashionedly to the idea that one ought to have balanced budgets. On abortion, gay marriage, et al, I’m libertarian. I believe with my sage and epigrammatic friend P.J. O’Rourke that a government big enough to give you everything you want is also big enough to take it all away.

But having a first-class temperament and a first-class intellect, President Obama will (I pray, secularly) surely understand that traditional left-politics aren’t going to get us out of this pit we’ve dug for ourselves. If he raises taxes and throws up tariff walls and opens the coffers of the DNC to bribe-money from the special interest groups against whom he has (somewhat disingenuously) railed during the campaign trail, then he will almost certainly reap a whirlwind that will make Katrina look like a balmy summer zephyr.

Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy “We are the people we have been waiting for” silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for.

So, I wish him all the best. We are all in this together. Necessity is the mother of
bipartisanship. And so, for the first time in my life, I’ll be pulling the Democratic lever in November. As the saying goes, God save the United States of America.

It's a good endorsement -- this one by Christopher Buckley. About his father, there are two possibilities were he alive. One is that he might just vote for Obama in the face of the embarraassing campaign that Senator McCain has run. The other is that, with Buckley around as an advisor, McCain might not have run such a campaign if he knew Buckley was watching his every move.

John McCain is Stuttering His Way to Election Day

The Unsinkable Molly Brown
by Charlie Leck

Sometimes I swipe things from other blogs. This is one of thoses cases. I out-right stole the entire concept.

The following video is from Brave New Films. Better than anything I've seen, it tells the John McCain story. Brave New asks that everyone who watches it pass it along to 10 other people. Watch it and you'll see why. John McCain must not become the President of the United States.

Do it now! Pass it on.

This is Unprecedented Stuff

Dire warnings for John McCain and his campaign!
by Charlie Leck

In all my years watching politics and national elections, I have never seen party leaders step forward, as they are right now, with dire warnings for their candidate – in this case, John McCain. Read some of this stuff below. They are telling McCain, in no uncertain terms, to knock it off.

And, I’m telling you to put this in your memory bank. This is historic stuff and our grandchildren will one day find it all rather bewildering. Most of the following was from the spoken word, so look past the lack of perfect grammar…

David Gergen, writer and Republican advisor, thinks the race is still alive but McCain is falling back quickly.

“Every day that goes by, like today, when McCain doesn’t break through is a bad day for McCain…. And what you do sense is that McCain is losing control over his own destiny. That he’s no longer the man that seems to be in command –he’s thrashing around looking for something that will take hold.”

And Gergen also said something more dire:

“This—I think one of the most striking things we’ve seen now in the last few days. We’ve seen it in a Palin rally. We saw it at the McCain rally today. And we saw it to a considerable degree during the rescue package legislation. There is this free floating sort of whipping around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we’re not far from that.

“…well, I really worry when we get people—when you get the kind of rhetoric that you’re getting at these rallies now. I think it’s really imperative that the candidates try to calm people down. And that’s why I’ve argued not only because of the question of the ugliness of it."

John Weaver, one of McCain former top advisors, and a very committed Republican, has provided some dire warnings for McCain.

“People need to understand, for moral reasons and the protection of our civil society, the differences with Sen. Obama are ideological, based on clear differences on policy and a lack of experience compared to Sen. McCain,” Weaver said. “And from a purely practical political vantage point, please find me a swing voter, an undecided independent, or a torn female voter that finds an angry mob mentality attractive.”

“Sen. Obama is a classic liberal with an outdated economic agenda. We should take that agenda on in a robust manner. As a party we should not and must not stand by as the small amount of haters in our society question whether he is as American as the rest of us. Shame on them and shame on us if we allow this to take hold.”

Republican Frank Schaefer had similar warnings.

“John McCain: If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as 'not one of us,' I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence. 'Stop! Think! Your rallies are beginning to look, sound, feel and smell like lynch mobs.'"

Ray LaHood is retiring from Congress. As a Republican, he supports the McCain ticket, but he has strong criticism for Sarah Palin and the way she’s campaigning out on the trail.

"When she mentions Obama’s name she gets people shouting back some awful things. She isn’t dealing with it."

"Look it. This doesn't befit the office that she's running for. And frankly, people don't like it."

Partisan Republican, Ed Rollins, says that the campaign is over – that Obama will win in a landslide.

“The momentum has gone all the other way… Barack has met the threshold where people think he’s going to be a leader. He’s tied McCain to the past and to Bush…. This is going to turn into a landslide.”

If Rollins is right and that’s McCain’s view also, he can do one of two things. He can take the high road and be very diplomatic, pushing the debate on solid and worthy issues; or, he can become deranged and flail around and throw every kind of punch he’s got, including the dirty ones.

John McCain is a tired and bewildered fighter. He honestly doesn’t know what to do.

As I wrote, early this morning, to a very long-time, old friend: “A grand old party has been raped. It is not truly conservative anymore. It is something else that none of us have been quite able to name and John McCain looks out of balance as its head.”

Let’s hope John McCain chooses to save his career and come out of this as a distinguished American.

Sarah Palin and the State Trooper She Hates

Palin in a skuzzy type person and would be an embarrassment in the office of the Vice President!
by Charlie Leck

Here’s the facts, Jack! Read ‘em and weep! Sarah Palin (aka Mrs. Joe Sixpack) would be an embarrassment as VP. She was an embarrassment as Governor of Alaska. Even putting aside the results of the recent investigation ordered by the Alaska State Legislature, which found Palin abused her powers as Governor, the woman would still be an embarrassment. Brigitte Bardot, the famous actress of seduction, recently criticized Palin for constantly “making statements that are disconcertingly stupid.”

Palin has some interesting traits. These are my observation – and only my observations – of personality characteristics. I’ve got my rights to make such observations!

She’s tough – stupid tough! She couldn’t and wouldn’t be able to control her temper.

She’s not conciliatory at all! It’s her way or the highway. She’s very much a partisan and she’s going to stick to her views even when she discovers they’re wrong.

As per the above, she’s incredibly stubborn.

Humility is something she knows nothing about.

She’s not exactly stupid, but she doesn’t know when she doesn’t know! It’s dangerous, someone has told us, to have a little bit of knowledge. She has only a little bit of knowledge.

On top of it all, and circling back around to the first personality trait listed here, she’s nasty – really low-down, harsh and rotten nasty.

Frankly, Sarah Palin was John McCain’s biggest mistake. No one sensed it at the time, but all the campaign experts are seeing it now. McCain was desperate to move right. He felt he wasn’t going to pick up the support of the freaks way out there in Waa-Waa Land. Well, by picking up Palin, he got their support. The problem is, he lost far more of the support that came from the center. And, he lost a huge percentage of the undecided vote. It didn’t happen immediately. It took some time for the American public to see through this woman and realize she would be an utter joke in such a high and distinguished office.

So much for Rush Limbaugh as a presidential campaign advisor!

The Democrats don’t even need to go after Palin. Just as long as the TV cameras continue to show her, that’s enough. Her “deer-in-headlights” look as she answers questions is enough. Watching her slowly sink into a thick pool of quick-sand says everything that has to be said and the Democrats don’t have to touch it.

HEADLINE: NY TIMES (10 October 2008):
“Palins Repeatedly Pressed Case Against Trooper”
This NY Times story is thorough and cites many sources and reports on interviews with a wide range of people. It’s accurate! Take it to the bank! Nevertheless the folks in Waa-Waa Land will begin screaming about the “liberal” NY Times. Here’s something you and I both know: We wouldn’t want the NY Times after us if we had done something wrong! On this particular issue, Palin is toast.[Read the story by Serge Kovaleski]

Slinging Mud
Yesterday I told you that McCain’s organization is pressing the Senator to start slinging mud at Obama. They feel, with the numbers getting worse and worse for their candidate, they have little choice. The people in Waa-Waa Land actually believe the crap about William Ayres. That issue, like Sarah Palin herself, is indescribably silly and flimsy. There is, again like Sarah Palin, nothing to it. We can only hope that moderate, sensible people will see that and McCain’s numbers will drop even more.

Barack Hussein Obama
To appease the people in Waa-Waa Land, we will hear Obama’s middle name constantly uttered in the next four weeks. This will fill that strange land’s inhabitants with excitement and wrath! They will foam at the mouth. Will it affect moderates and sensible people? We can only hope not and, with great optimism, we certainly believe not.

The Chicago Connection
We’ll also hear a great deal about Chicago and it’s political corruption. Don’t feel sorry for Chicago. It is one of the world’s great cities and it will stand very well on its own against attacks from Waa-Waa Land.

Why does Waa-Waa Land dominate McCain campaign procedures?
There’s a potential answer in a column in yesterday’s NY Times…
OPIONION COLUMN: NY TIMES (9 October 2008)
Conservative Columnist, David Brooks

I don’t like the opinions of David Brooks, but I keep reading him anyway, in an attempt to better understand conservative thinking. In this column, “The Class War Before Palin,” Brooks is on to something – and not on something!

“Driven by a need to engage elite opinion, conservatives tried to build an intellectual counterestablishment with think tanks and magazines. They disdained the ideas of the liberal professoriate, but they did not disdain the idea of a cultivated mind.“…But over the past few decades, the Republican Party has driven away people who live in cities, in highly educated regions and on the coasts.

This expulsion has had many causes. But the big one is this: Republican political tacticians decided to mobilize their coalition with a form of social class warfare. Democrats kept nominating coastal pointy-heads like Michael Dukakis so Republicans attacked coastal pointy-heads.“Over the past 15 years, the same argument has been heard from a thousand politicians and a hundred television and talk-radio jocks. The nation is divided between the wholesome Joe Sixpacks in the heartland and the oversophisticated, overeducated, oversecularized denizens of the coasts.

“The Republicans have alienated whole professions. Lawyers now donate to the Democratic Party over the Republican Party at 4-to-1 rates. With doctors, it’s 2-to-1. With tech executives, it’s 5-to-1. With investment bankers, it’s 2-to-1. It took talent for Republicans to lose the banking community.

“Conservatives are as rare in elite universities and the mainstream media as they were 30 years ago. The smartest young Americans are now educated in an overwhelmingly liberal environment.

“This year could have changed things. The G.O.P. had three urbane presidential candidates. But the class-warfare clichés took control. Rudy Giuliani disdained cosmopolitans at the Republican convention. Mitt Romney gave a speech attacking “eastern elites.” (Mitt Romney!) John McCain picked Sarah Palin.

“Palin is smart, politically skilled, courageous and likable. Her convention and debate performances were impressive. But no American politician plays the class-warfare card as constantly as Palin. Nobody so relentlessly divides the world between the “normal Joe Sixpack American” and the coastal elite.

“She is another step in the Republican change of personality. Once conservatives admired Churchill and Lincoln above all — men from wildly different backgrounds who prepared for leadership through constant reading, historical understanding and sophisticated thinking. Now those attributes bow down before the common touch.

"And so, politically, the G.O.P. is squeezed at both ends. The party is losing the
working class by sins of omission — because it has not developed policies to address economic anxiety. It has lost the educated class by sins of commission — by telling members of that class to go away.”

I know I quoted too much of that column and I’m probably in copyright infringement trouble, but this conservative has nailed it and you should read his words. The conservatives are giving too much of a great party away to the Sarah Palins and Joe Sixpacks of the world. No problem with them being a part of the party, but when they are the party that’s a problem.

Here’s one thing I guaranty you – not that Sarah Palin won’t read the Brooks column, though that she won’t is highly likely also – and that is that Sarah Palin won’t understand this column if she does read it. Take it to the bank!

A great, strong conservative party is important to America. Perhaps, if Obama wins in a resounding way, the rebuilding will start and Rove, Chaney, Palin and Joe Sixpack will be asked to step aside for some real leadership.