What Makes Franken Run?

Jonathan Chait has a piece in Slate about Al Franken and his run for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota which, in the wake of a possible Obama win, might just be successful.

The piece is sort of so-so until he gets to the end. Then, in my opinion, he blows it:

Franken has an infinite faith in the power of reason. Time and again, he tries to present his adverseries with detailed rebuttals and gets nowhere. One book has a small moment of triumph, in which he badgers House budget committee Chairman John Kasich into admitting that Republicans were employing a misleading measure of their plans to cut Medicare. "I took a few victory laps around the table," he writes. Franken doesn't write, however, that Kasich and his fellow Republicans continued to brandish the misleading statistic anyway.

I would guess that Franken is running for the Senate because he thinks he will have moments like these, when the superior force of his reason will carry the day. I have never seen or heard of a successful politician who thinks like this. I can't imagine he'll find politics anything but a crushing disappointment. But I'm eager to see him try.

Chait couldn't be more wrong. Franken's reasons for running for the Senate aren't reason-based. They're strictly emotional. And deeply personal.

Franken was a friend and admirer of Minnesota Senator Paul Wellstone, who died in a plane crash in 2002, only 11 days before the election that would have given him a third term in the Senate. Former Senator and Vice President Walter Mondale replaced Wellstone on the ballot at the last minute, only to be narrowly defeated by Republican Norm Coleman.

Anyone who was, as I was from its inception in 2004, a devoted listener of Franken's radio show on Air America, knows what an emotional subject this was, and is, for him. Franken's campaign, although he is too shrewd to say so, started out as a Quixotic quest to regain Paul Wellstone's seat in the Senate for the Progressives -- as well as payback for the man who would have lost that 2002 election if Wellstone had lived. At the time Franken announced, he was a longshot -- now, thanks to Barack Obama, a downturn in the economy and the worst administration in the history of the republic, he's got a real shot at winning the election and becoming, not only Wellstone's heir in the Senate, but the 60th Senator needed to supply the Democrats with a filibuster-proof liberal majority.

Somewhere, Paul Wellstone is smiling. And if Al Franken, as I hope he will, wins a week from now, expect to hear an emotional reference to Paul Wellstone from the newly elected Senator from Minnesota in his victory speech.

The Worst Case Scenario

Republican operative Bill Greener in an article in Salon.com makes a case that Barack Obama needs to be at over 50% in the battleground states because he is convinced that the so-called "undecideds" are going to break disproportionately for John McCain:

As you look at the polling data in the homestretch of this election, pay close attention whenever you see any numbers, be they statewide or national, where Sen. Obama is below 50 percent. So long as there are more than a handful of voters describing themselves as undecided, I will maintain that Sen. McCain is very much in the race. Even if Sen. Obama were to open a larger lead, my basis for analyzing things would remain the same. Are there enough undecided voters in crucial states to bridge whatever gap exists in the head-to-head? If so, don't be shocked if on Election Day, Sen. McCain is your winner.

If this analysis is true, then based on the one poll that I examined, that would mean that McCain will win both Ohio and Florida, as well as North Carolina and Nevada. Obama would win New Hampshire, Virginia, Colorado, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Michigan.

Could this be another long Tuesday night? We'll see in eight days.

Keep Your "O" Flag Flying!

Barack Obama gave a speech in Toledo the other day. Here's a piece of it from YouTube:







Notice anything, well, unusual about the background?


Certain conservatives did. Certain really fucking stupid conservatives.


Conservatives like Bob Grant. Here is a transcript of Grant's show from October 15th (courtesy of Media Matters for America):

GRANT: Let me ask you this question, since you are aware of patriotic symbols. Maybe you don't know the answer. I'll be frank. I don't know the answer to this one, but what is that flag that Obama's been standing in front of that looks like an American flag, but instead of having the field of 50 stars representing the 50 states, there's a circle? Would someone please tell me what that is? Is the circle --

CALLER: Well, I thought it was our new flag.

GRANT: -- the "O" for Obama? Is that what it is?

CALLER: I thought it was our new flag. I thought we now instituted a new one under Obama, because we're going to change everything, and none of it is gonna be positive. And do people's mindset that Palin would be any kind of an adverse person around nuclear weapons, when you have somebody who has absolute deceived everybody from his onset of his life --

GRANT: All right, Sue. I want to thank you very much for your call. It's a pleasure to hear from someone who's paying attention to what's going on out there.

But really folks, did you notice Obama is not content with just having several American flags, plain old American flags with the 50 states represented by 50 stars? He has the "O" flag. And that's what that "O" is. That's what that "O" is. Just like he did with the plane he was using. He had the flag painted over, and the "O" for Obama. Now, these are symptom -- these things are symptomatic of a person who would like to be a potentate -- a dictator. And I really see this in this man.

Hey, I could be wrong. But I wouldn't say this on this great radio station if I didn't think there was some merit in this conjecture. And I stress conjecture. And so much of what we talk about is conjecture, is theory, is opinion based on intuition, based on some facts, based on some history.

I don't want to overdramatize this. Being dramatic, I must confess, does come easy to some of us, because, maybe that's why we're in this business. It is show business, is it not? I know some of my colleagues don't want to admit that, but they are the greatest showmen in the world. And I tell you this. I tell you this quite seriously. I am alarmed at the prospect of his election. I -- I would hope that if he is elected, that I could come before you one day and say, "Hey, there was no need to be alarmed, I was wrong."

Because I care about the United States of America and what future we may have much more than I care about being right or being wrong, having my candidate win or having my candidate lose. I want to know how many of you people think about the significance of the election.

I almost can't type this because I'm laughing so hard.


How stupid are these people? How clueless? How frightened? How threatened?


What Obama is standing in front of, of course, is the state flag of Ohio:

The white circle denotes Ohio's being "The Buckeye State."

But you have to admit, this was a beautiful illustration of how lunatic the lunatic right really is. It just goes to show that John Stuart Mill was correct in the Victorian Era when he stated that, while not all conservatives are stupid, all stupid people are conservatives.

The Right is Terrified (And They Should Be)

The sound you hear is the Right shitting in their pants.

They can't believe what's happening. Not so long ago -- when this blog was begun, for example -- they seemed to have everything under control. The radical right had Congress in a headlock, and were looking towards (as one author put it) a Permanent Republican Majority.

Now everything they hoped for has come crashing down around them, and it very much looks like the Democrats will be in power, either in the White House or Congress or both, for the next 20 to 30 years.

That's what The Wall Street Journal is concerned about. In an opinion piece entitled "A Liberal Supermajority," they claim that:

If the current polls hold, Barack Obama will win the White House on November 4 and Democrats will consolidate their Congressional majorities, probably with a filibuster-proof Senate or very close to it. Without the ability to filibuster, the Senate would become like the House, able to pass whatever the majority wants.

I like the sound of that. Don't you? Certainly the Republicans liked it when they had control of the Congress. But now that the shoe appears to be slipping onto the other foot, all of a sudden this is something to be terrified of.

They continue:

Though we doubt most Americans realize it, this would be one of the most profound political and ideological shifts in U.S. history. Liberals would dominate the entire government in a way they haven't since 1965, or 1933. In other words, the election would mark the restoration of the activist government that fell out of public favor in the 1970s. If the U.S. really is entering a period of unchecked left-wing ascendancy, Americans at least ought to understand what they will be getting, especially with the media cheering it all on.

Here's where the facts stop and the bullshit posturing begins. You gotta admit, though, the term "unchecked left-wing ascendancy" sounds awfully good. Just like pie.

Let's take a look at the facts:

• When Roosevelt and the New Deal came into power with an overwhelming Democratic majority in 1933, the country was flat on its back. Roosevelt restored confidence and saved capitalism from itself and in the process created the FDIC (for which bank depositors are eternally grateful) and Social Security (which the Republicans have been trying to kill ever since its birth, in a sort of legislative late term abortion).
• When Lyndon Johnson had an overwhelming Democratic majority, he was able to push through any number of progressive legislation, including Medicare, on which so many senior citizens depend and which keeps them a hell of a lot healthier than they'd be without it.

I'd take unchecked left-wing ascendancy like that anyday. We should be so lucky.

Republicans, what's left of the radical right and The Wall Street Journal should all stop whining. They had the goverment for eight years -- and they totally fucked everything up. We've had untrammeled, deregulated laissez-faire capitalism at home and fuck-you-to-the-rest-of-the-world interventionism abroad. And it's all blown up in our face.

There's no way that the Democrats could possibly do worse than the Republicans have done over the past eight years.

Frankly, as I've said before in this blog, I don't expect a huge, New Deal-like wave of progressive legislation from the next Congress or from a potential President Obama. For one thing, he won't have the money. He'll be relegated to doing what Democrats have been relegated to doing for the past 30 years -- being the schmuck with the broom walking behind the elephant in the circus parade. They make a mess, we clean it up -- that's been the story of the past 30 years.

But whatever the Democrats do with the power they're almost sure to have after November 4th, I sure am looking forward to it.

Bring it on!

Is It Over?

Did the campaign end tonight?

John McCain did better in this last debate -- at least at the beginning of it -- than he's done in either of the other debates.

It wasn't enough.

I recently heard from a person who told me that they thought that Obama had a good chance of winning their home state -- of Texas.

Conservatives like Christopher Buckley (son of the founder of National Review) are endorsing Obama. People are starting to talk about a landslilde that will transform Washington.

And here I am trying to figure out how Obama and the Democrats are going to blow it.

I can't help it. I'm old enough to remember the Humphrey administration. Not to mention the McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, Gore and Kerry administrations. I've seen the Democrats yank defeat from out of the jaws of victory time after time.

I don't want to get my hopes up. I watch the talking heads on Charlie Rose (while noting that Doris Kearns Goodwin made a mistake in calling FDR "The Happy Warrior" -- that was Al Smith) and I don't want to believe them. I want to think that it's going to be close, and that it can still get away from us.

I'll watch the next 20 days very carefully. Because I get the feeling that November 4 is going to change the country. And I want to hope -- in spite of history.

McCain and "That One"

It's the only moment from the second presidential debate that they'll remember.

When John McCain referred to Barack Obama as "that one."

The sheer contempt that McCain has for his fellow senator and the nominee of the Democratic party for president of the United States was suddenly, painfully, viscerally obvious.

It was not a pretty moment.

John McCain is an angry and a desperate man at this point -- and he's got a lot to be angry and deperate about. After all, if Barack Obama by some miracle of atrocious luck were to lose this election, he's got a lot more chances. 2012, 2016, 2020, 2024... you name it. Consider the mind-boggling but very real fact that in 2032 Obama will be younger than McCain is now.

Time is on his side.

Time, however, is not on McCain's side. This is his last shot at the White House. It's do or die for him -- and at the moment it very much looks like die.

I sat down with an electoral map provided by AOL and tried to figure out a way for McCain to win this election -- and I couldn't do it. I don't think there's a way for him to do it. All Obama has to do is hold onto the states that Kerry won last time and add New Mexico and he's the next president. McCain's job is a lot harder. He has to win all the states that Bush won last time and that's not even remotely possible.

Obama will win Michigan. He'll win both Ohio and Florida. He'll win Pennsylvania and New Mexico. I also think he'll win Virginia and possibly even North Carolina -- which native son John Edwards couldn't deliver for John Kerry four years ago.

If the election were to be held today Obama would get well over 300 electoral votes and McCain would get less than 200.

It's not going to be a landslide on the nature of 1932 or 1964. But Obama is going to win, and he's going to win decisively.

And a new era could begin in this country. A better era than the one we've been dealing with since Ronald Reagan asserted so piously in 1981 that government wasn't the solution to our problems, it was the problem.

We know better now. And we're going to prove it in less than a month.

Where Are We?

Things aren't looking too good right now.

It seems like we might be on the verge of, not just an American financial catastrophe, but a financial catastrophe of global proportions. The stock market is plummeting, people are frightened and are looking to the government for answers.

And Andy Sullivan thinks the presidential election could end up in a tie.

Oh, really?

Andy Sullivan (not to be confused with Andrew Sullivan, who's gay and supposedly conservative) wrote an article for Reuters yesterday floating the possibility that the 2008 election could be a draw:

A handful of battleground states are likely to determine the November 4 U.S. presidential election and it's possible that Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama could split them in a manner that leaves each just short of victory.

If that happens, the Democratic-controlled House of Representatives would pick the president but it's unclear whether Democrats would have enough votes to send Obama to the White House.

Does anyone really think this is going to happen? Or was it just a slow news day yesterday?

Sullivan elaborates:

If McCain wins Virginia, New Hampshire, Florida and Ohio but loses Pennsylvania, Colorado, New Mexico and Iowa to Obama, both candidates could end up with 269 electoral votes.

Other, less likely scenarios -- McCain losing Virginia and New Hampshire but winning Michigan, for example -- also could result in a tie.

I don't want to seem flippant, but the way things look right now (and keep in mind that the election is a month away and there's always the possibility of an October surprise) the only way that the Democrats could lose this election would be if Osama Bin Laden were to release a tape of himself and Barack Obama having sex.

Something tells me that's not going to happen.

What is likely to happen (given all the caveats I've stated above) is that this is going to be a transformational election, akin to 1932 and 1980.

Take a look at the record of the last 76 years:

• Between 1932 and 1968 (not counting the latter) there were nine presidential elections. The Democrats won seven of them (Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956 being the exceptions).
• From 1968 to 2008 (again, not counting the latter) there were ten presidential elections. The Republicans won seven of them (Carter in 1976 and Clinton in 1992 and 1996 being the exceptions).

I'd say that it's logical to assume that the pendulum is going to swing back towards the Democrats -- possibly for a generation.

The economy is not a winning issue for Republicans -- and everything is about the economy right now. McCain and Palin know this -- which is why they're flinging mud so furiously at Barack Obama right now, hoping against hope that they can drive up his negatives enough so that they'll have a chance to pull even in the polls. It's not going to work -- not with the Dow taking a dump it's not.

Meanwhile McCain is pulling out of Michigan, Virginia Republicans think the state might go Democratic for the first time since it voted for Lydon Johnson over Barry Goldwater 44 years ago, and McCain pretty much has to run the table of states that Bush won in 2004 in order to win. Even Karl Rove thinks Obama's going to win. Karl fucking Rove.

I don't want to say what I think. I'm afraid to jinx it. But I'm getting more certain every day.

I'll give you a hint. It begins with "l" and it rhymes with "grandslide."

Republican senators (like Elizabeth Dole) are almost certain to lose their seats to Democrats. It's entirely possible that Obama might not win, but that he might win by a huge margin and take a shitload of Democratic senators and congressmen with him into office.

It's almost intoxicating to think about -- at which point I find myself muttering under my breath, "President Mondale... President Dukakis... President Gore... President Kerry..."

Sarah Barracuda Strikes Back!

Sarah Palin exceeded expectations in the vice presidential debate on Thursday night -- by which I mean that she didn't vomit on herself. The bar had been set so low for her performance that only copious projectile vomiting could have made her look worse than she has lately.

All things considered I thought it was a draw -- which means that, arguably, Palin wins. The same way that, in the presidential debate, it was also a draw which meant that Obama won. McCain needed to land a knockout punch on Obama, and he didn't lay a glove on him. Palin didn't need to land a knockout blow Thursday night. All she needed to do was stay on her feet and not make an utter fool of herself. And by that standard she was successful.

But is that how it's going to seem in a day or two? Will anyone care in a day or two? The House is supposedly going to vote again on the -- well, whatever they're calling it Friday. I doubt they're calling it a "bailout" because people don't seem to care for that term. But whatever they're calling it, they're voting on it tomorrow, and that's all people will be talking about.

I was favorably impressed with Joe Biden, however, who had to perform an interesting (and easy to overlook) form of rhetorical jiu-jitsu against Palin that was, I think, largely successful. He referred to her solely as "The Governor" which I thought was perfect. He didn't correct her when she made mistakes because it would look condescending and sexist and because he knew that the media would later do it for him. He was respectful and yet he didn't give an inch. But in many ways he was more impressive for what he didn't do than for what he did.

Because what did Sarah Palin do? If you ask me, she sabotaged the ticket. And he just stood there and let her do it.

How did she do it?

By consciously espousing the old, tired, discredited Ronald Reagan philosophy that government isn't the solution, government is the problem. With the economy going into the toilet and people worrying about a recession if not a depression, that's not what they want to hear. They want to hear that government is on their side and has a solid plan to fix what's wrong -- not that they're on their own in a cold, cruel, dog-eat-dog world. All ther "darn its" and "you betchas" in the world can't hide the fact that the philosophy that the McCain-Palin ticket espouses is history -- and they will be soon as well. By 2010 Sarah Palin will be a question in "Trivial Pursuit."

With McCain pulling out of Michigan and Obama pulling ahead in the polls, it looks like this is going to be Obama's election, and that Obama is the man for these times, just as Roosevelt was in 1932 and Kennedy was in 1960. But things are going to get a lot worse before they get better, and I suspect that, sometime in 2009, Obama may be tempted to say to McCain what Kennedy once reportedly said to Barry Goldwater:

"You want this fucking job?"

Tom Moran