Taegan Goddard links a Public Policy Polling survey [PDF] showing that President Obama would have beaten the most commonly mentioned Republican hopefuls had the election been held from October 16th to 19th and opened to registered voters.  (I hasten to add, it wasn’t.)

In fact, according to the survey, “Obama leads Mike Huckabee 47-43, Mitt Romney 48-40, Sarah Palin 52-40, and Tim Pawlenty 50-30.”

Considering that Huckabee, Romney, and Pawlenty remain virtual unknowns to most Americans and Obama is the sitting president, I’m not sure this is as depressing news for the GOP as PPP’s Tom Jensen seems to think.  Indeed, Huckabee is actually within the poll’s margin of error!

Look, the 2012 election’s a ridiculously long time from now and it’s pretty silly even talk about it.  Still, as Dave Schuler notes, it’s a Thursday.  Obama’s quite popular and, while his approval is plummeting by historical standards, it’s still pretty good all things considered.  Given our propensity for re-electing sitting presidents, the fact that the economy is bound to be better by mid-2012, and that the Republican Party seems to be in disarray, I’d say Obama is an early favorite to win a second term.  But we’ll have a much better idea in, say, two years.

My strong hunch is that neither Huckabee nor Palin will be the Republican nominee.  The party traditionally nominates the person whose “turn” it is, which would seemingly point to Romney.  But given how sick everyone is with the Washington wing of the GOP, I wouldn’t be shocked if some governor who’s never run before emerges out of nowhere.

Daniel Larison is a bit too charitable here in assessing Mike Huckabee’s finish in last year’s presidential primaries:

While Huckabee was officially the second-biggest vote-getter in the primaries last year, he achieved this mostly through perseverance and concentrated support from evangelical voters. Had Romney continued to compete and waste his money on what would still have been a losing bid, it is not certain that Huckabee could have managed his second place finish.

In fact, the 2008 Republican race wasn’t even a contest.  Mitt Romney quit the race during CPAC on February 7 and pledged his delegates to McCain.   Rudy Giuliani had failed to make his push in Florida — coming in way behind Romney, who finished second.  The race was over.

Except that, technically, it wasn’t.  Huckabee stayed in the race, along with Ron Paul, despite no chance of beating John McCain for the nomination.  As a result, they padded their totals as everyone not happy with McCain as the nominee had to vote for one of them.  And, really, since Paul was a fringe candidate, that meant Huckabee.

The results, per CNN, are at right.

The fact of the matter was that Huckabee, a virtual unknown at the beginning of the contest, was mostly a stalking horse.  Huckabee finally withdrew on March 5, once McCain mathematically sewed up the race on his own — that is, not counting Romney’s delegates.   As I wrote at the time:

But let’s not get carried away, either. He’s a personable fellow who went a long way with very little money, a weak organization, and zero Establishment support. But there was no time in this race when it was plausible that he’d be the nominee. He won Iowa as the “anybody but Mitt Romney” candidate in a contest McCain, Giuliani, and others skipped. He didn’t win again until garbage time, when he was running as “the conservative alternative” to a man who had all but sewn up the nomination.

Huckabee will not win the nomination in 2012. Or 2016. Or 2020. He’d easily win a Senate seat from Arkansas if he changes his mind. But he’s not going to be elected president.

I  stand by that assessment.

Bruce Bartlett explains why he’s not a Republican anymore using a time-honored refrain:  He didn’t leave his party; his party left him.  While he now considers himself an “independent,” he’s more than non-partisan; he’s “anti-Republican.”  Why?

I still consider myself to be a Reaganite. But I don’t see any others anywhere in the GOP these days, which is why I consider myself to be an independent. Mindless partisanship has replaced principled conservatism. What passes for principle in the party these days is “what can we do to screw the Democrats today.”

[...]

I think the Republican Party is in the same boat the Democrats were in in the early eighties — dominated by extremists unable to see how badly their party was alienating moderates and independents. The party’s adults formed the Democratic Leadership Council to push the party back to the center and it was very successful. But there is no group like that for Republicans. That has left lunatics like Glenn Beck as the party’s de facto leaders. As long as that remains the case, I want nothing to do with the GOP.

It’s true that moderates have largely been driven from the leadership ranks of the Republican Party.  But they’ve also been driven from the leadership ranks of the Democratic Party. The combination of gerrymandered districts and the permanent campaign have incentivized polarization.

Still, John McCain, the GOP nominee in last November’s election, was from the moderate wing of the party, beating out a slew of more ideologically pure contenders. George W. Bush, the standard-bearer in 2000 and 2004, ran as a “compassionate conservative.”  Mushy moderate Mitt Romney is the most probable nominee for 2012.

The idea that Glenn Beck is somehow the leader of the party is absurd. Given that the United States lacks a shadow government, the out-of-power party has no obvious leader.   Who was the leader of the Democrats after John Kerry lost in 2004?  Certainly, it wasn’t Barack Obama, who was a mere state senator and U.S. Senator-elect.

Also rather silly:

I see no way a Republican can retake the White House for the foreseeable future. Both CBO and OMB are predicting better than 4% real growth in 2011 and 2012. If those numbers are even remotely correct Obama will have it in the bag.

So, the “foreseeable future” is the same as “in the next election”? Yes, barring serious scandal, Obama is likely to be re-elected if the economy is good.  Incumbent presidents always win re-election when the economy is good! Indeed, their party tends to hold power even if the incumbent can’t run again.  At worst, they lose in close and controversial contests as in 1960 and 2000. But that doesn’t tell us anything about the state of the opposition party.  Voters simply prefer to keep the current team on when things are going well and to change horses when they aren’t.

Also, Republicans have to find a way to win some minority votes because it is not viable as a whites-only party in presidential elections. That’s why I wrote my Wrong on Race book, which no one read.

Well, why would anyone bother to read a book whose take-away is a sentence?  And an obvious one at that?

But it’s really a truism, isn’t it?  As non-whites increase their share of the electorate, naturally a successful candidate will need to appeal to non-whites.  But, guess what?  Successful candidates do.  Bush won 46 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004.   McCain did far less well among Hispanics.  Then again, he did far less well among whites.

US News blogger Peter Roff speculates that Mitt Romney will run for the late Ted Kennedy’s Senate seat.

Such an announcement would likely be embraced immediately by the Republicans, who would like almost nothing more than to deny Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada his new, hard-won, 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority. As a self-funding candidate who has already been elected once statewide, Romney has nearly 100 percent name ID. And, in an environment where President Obama seems to be dragging the Democrats down, he would be a serious threat to the Democratic hegemony in Massachusetts’s congressional delegation. Meaning Romney likely would win.

If he did, Romney would then have a platform to actually introduce legislation modeled on the proposals he put forward as a presidential candidate
in 2008 and planned to put forward in 2012. No guesswork. No empty rhetoric. Real ideas, on the Senate floor, that could be evaluated, debated, and perhaps even voted on.

From the Senate floor, Romney could show his fellow Republicans, and the country, just what kind of president he would be. How he would approach national problems. As an added political benefit, it would give him the opportunity to establish true conservative bona fides allowing him to finally overcome the suspicions many conservatives in the GOP’s primary electorate still harbor about him. Rather than tie him down, Romney could actually use the Senate seat to lock up the GOP nomination in 2012.

Two minor problems with this: Romney would have to get elected. And he’d have to instantly be an effective senator.

Romney was governor of Massachusetts, a very advantageous platform from which to run for president. Not only did it allow him to demonstrate decisive, executive leadership — as opposed to those pesky compromise votes that tend to embarrass senators running for president — but it allowed him to claim that he was a uniter, able to get things done as a Republican in a highly Democratic state. So, why did he give it up? Because he was unlikely to win re-election. Why would he suddenly be more popular in a state even less receptive to a Republican while wallowing in a sea of Kennedy emotion?

Were Romney to get elected despite this obstacle, he’d have about five minutes to start passing legislation for it to do him any good in a presidential campaign that will start in earnest next February. If it hasn’t started already. He’d have to do this as the Senate’s most junior member in a body where seniority is everything. And as a Republican in a body where the Democrats have 59 percent of the votes.

UPDATE: Alex Massie, Steve Benen, and Nate Silver all agree this is a really bad idea.  So does Steve M., who notes that Romney doesn’t even qualify for Massachusetts residency at the moment.

Implicit in all their arguments is a fundamental point I failed to make in the original post: The positions one has to take to get elected to statewide office in Massachusetts are diametrically opposed to those one has to take to win the Republican presidential nomination.

Mitt Romney is busy selling off a few of many his mansions and plans to move to his family vacation home in Wolfeboro, New Hampshire, Hotline reports.  He has also registered his PAC there.  This has some people guessing that Romney is contemplating another run for the presidency.

“No doubt in my mind that they are doing the necessary maintenance to keep their network in New Hampshire together,” noted veteran Granite State GOP operative Mike Dennehy, who was a senior adviser to McCain’s 2008 campaign.

Establishing residency in NH could raise expectations for Romney’s performance in the state’s 2012 primary, but the state is also flush with important contests in the upcoming 2010 midterm elections, where Romney could lend a hand. First and foremost for Republicans, NH will host a critical Senate race to replace retiring Sen. Judd Gregg (R). At this point in the cycle, Democratic Rep. Paul Hodes is the only announced candidate, and with recent trends in the state, the seat is a top target for Democratic pick up. What’s more, Romney’s Wolfeboro home is in the 1st Congressional District, represented by Democratic Rep. Carol Shea-Porter, who is likely to face a strong Republican challenge by Manchester Mayor Frank Guinta. In both races Romney’s help–and even his vote–could matter.

At the same time, a case could be made for Romney to establish residency in CA [he already has a mansion in San Diego] instead. Romney’s loss to McCain in the Golden State on Super Tuesday last year was the death knell for his candidacy, given the state’s large share of delegates. Former eBay CEO Meg Whitman is a strong GOP contender for the open gubernatorial contest to replace outgoing Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger (R), while Democrats barrel toward a competitive primary. Whitman originally endorsed Romney and assisted him in his primary campaign before he ended his bid, and former Romney campaign staffers are flocking to Whitman’s effort. And former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, a top McCain surrogate, is looking seriously at a challenge to Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA).

To the extent that the Republican nomination goes to the candidate whose “turn” it is, Romney is well positioned. Technically, Mike Huckabee finished slightly ahead of him in the 2008 delegate count, but only as a function of shamelessly campaigning for months after he was mathematically eliminated, whereas Romney had the good grace to bow out at CPAC once the writing was on the wall.

Romney’s relatively moderate but the political advantage of setting up shop in California would be negligible; no Republican is going to beat Obama there in 2012.  The power of New Hampshire in the nominating process, on the other hand, is as obvious as it is ridiculous.

The economy is not doing well.

To be sure, some of you may have already sensed that, what with the bursting of the housing bubble, the bank failures, insurance failures, auto company failures, massive government bailouts,  burgeoning unemployment, and whatnot.  But now we have something really concrete to go on.

HuffPo’s Sam Stein reminds us that Alan Greenspan liked to monitor men’s underpants (or, should I say, their sale) as an indicator of economic health:

“If you look at sales of male underpants it’s just pretty much a flat line, it hardly ever changes,” Krulwich recounted after the publishing of Greenspan’s book, “The Age Of Turbulence.” “But on those few occasions where it dips that means that men are so pinched that they are deciding not to replace underpants. And [Greenspan] said ‘that is almost always a prescient, forward impression that here comes trouble.’”

Well, it seems, underwear sales are projected to drop 2.3 percent this year!  And just months ago, the same company had forcast a 2.6 percent increase! (Which might lead a more skeptical reader to wonder just how good these people are at forecasting underdrawer sales.)

Of course, I don’t know how Greenspan calibrated his BVD-o-Meter.  The theory behind it seems to be that men have replaced their Fruits-of-the-Loom at a steady pace over the years.   But, did he calculate this on a per-unit basis?  Or are gross dollar figures an adequate proxy? After all, maybe prices are simply coming down on Jockeys?  Or people have switched from 2xist to Hanes?  Or perhaps the proliferation of microfiber drawers has resulted in longer life?  Or, again, the underwear forecasting gurus could be wrong.

Again, I’m pretty sure the economy is in fact in rough patch.  And it may be that this is causing men to wear holey underpants (not to be confused with Mitt Romney’s holy underpants).  But I can’t imagine that this is the most reliable statistical indicator.

Timothy Sandefur is embarrassed:

So I was watching this insane video of Christopher Hitchens and Salman Rushdie discussing the War on Terrorism with Mos Def. And it’s amusing to laugh at the utterly hapless ignorance of “Mr. Def,” as he is repeatedly called—until you stop and wonder. Why is the black community not outraged by this? Bill Maher hosts a talk show to discuss the threat of Islamic terrorism and the Middle East, and he invites two world-renowned white male intellectuals and Mos Def? If this show had been choreographed by the Ku Klux Klan it could not have been more infuriating. Did Maher not have the phone number of a black intellectual? Were Colin Powell, Condoleeza Rice, Orlando Patterson, Julian Bond, Walter Williams, Thomas Sowell, Shelby Steele, John McWhorter all busy?

Here’s the video:

While I agree entirely that this is an absurd pairing, it’s most definitely not a racist one.  Sandefur has apparently never seen “Real Time with Bill Maher.”  The premise of the show, from its inception more than six years ago, has been to pair politicos and pop culture figures in discussion.  (Whether the point of the exercise was to demonstrate that the latter are morons or that their opinions are equally valid, I could never determine.)

Here are the seven season openers.

February 21, 2003. Guests: Author Ann Coulter, actor Larry Miller, writer, radio host and professor Michael Eric Dyson, comedian Sarah Silverman, comedian Chris Rock.  Topics: The UN, Affirmative Action.

January 16, 2004. Guests: Ret. Gen. Wesley Clark, artist Moby, Rev. Al Sharpton, actor Ron Silver, Rep. Darrell Issa. Topics: American values, Iraq, MoveOn.org, environment.

February 18, 2005. Guests: Correspondent Lesley Stahl, actor Robin Williams, former H&HS Sec. Tommy Thompson, Sen. Joe Biden, and actor Don Cheadle. Topics: On protecting sources, Jeff Gannon, on Interrogating prisoners, Iraq elections, Darfur.

February 17, 2006. Guests: Sen. Russ Feingold, commentator Fred Barnes, actor Eddie Griffin, reporter Helen Thomas, Iraq advisor Dan Senor. Topics: Cheney shooting, on the Patriot Act, Bush, Mohammad cartoons.

February 16, 2007. Guests: Fmr Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, fmr Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, TV host Craig Ferguson; via satellite, fmr Sen. John Edwards and basketball player John Amaechi. Topics: Developments in North Korea, Iran, and Iraq; global warming; Mitt Romney and Mormonism; Al Franken Senate campaign.

January 11, 2008. Guests: Entrepreneur Mark Cuban, fmr Court TV anchor Catherine Crier, fmr Bush Press Secy Tony Snow, Rolling Stone writer Matt Taibbi (election correspondent); via satellite, humorist P.J. O’Rourke. Topics: New Hampshire primary, electronic voting machines, Iraq troop surge, subprime lending and prospects for economic recession.

February 20, 2009. Guests: Financial Times editor Chrystia Freeland, journalist Tina Brown, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA); via satellite, Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), journalist Brigitte Gabriel The economy, President Obama’s first month in office.

See the Wikipedia episode guide if you fear the season openers are not representative.

The pairings are, in most if not all cases, patently absurd. They include plenty of famous white guys who would, on the face of things, seem to be woefully out of their elements and plenty of black guys who would seemingly mop of the floor with the competition.

For what it’s worth, Mr. Def was really good in this week’s “House.”

Jonathan Last offers a long retort to the notion that Rush Limbaugh is a significant influencer of American politics, much less the de facto leader of the Republican Party.  He rejects, for example, the notion that having a large audience necessarily matters:

Consider television. From 1998 to 2005, Everybody Loves Raymond was among the top 15 rated shows on TV. For five of those years it was in the top 10. It averaged 17.4 million viewers. Was Everybody Loves Raymond influential? I would argue that the show left a very small–maybe non-existent–cultural footprint.

If you sift through the Nielsens from recent years, you’ll find a number of highly-rated shows pulling in tens of millions of viewers, which were basically invisible after the credits rolled. This is true even at the very top of the heap: CSI and Home Improvement each finished #1 overall and yet, had they been canceled in the middle of their ratings dominance, I doubt anyone would have noticed.

The obvious rejoinder is that Raymond existed solely to make us laugh (and thereby sell high priced ad space) while Rush, although no doubt an entertainer, is in fact trying to persuade his audience toward his political viewpoint.

Well, I’ll assume that Limbaugh can send a crowd of people toward a weblink if he mentions it on his program or his website. But crashing a server doesn’t take all that much. Slashdot and Boing Boing can do that, too. Can Limbaugh sell books? I’m not being pedantic–I honestly don’t know the answer to this question. But if Limbaugh really is influential, then the mere mention of books he likes ought to be enough to routinely put them high on the NYT’s best seller list for weeks, the way Oprah Winfrey’s approval does.

He’s managed to get a couple of (frankly, not very good) books of his own atop the bestseller list.  Otherwise, I don’t know.

Well, I’ll assume that Limbaugh can send a crowd of people toward a weblink if he mentions it on his program or his website. But crashing a server doesn’t take all that much. Slashdot and Boing Boing can do that, too. Can Limbaugh sell books? I’m not being pedantic–I honestly don’t know the answer to this question. But if Limbaugh really is influential, then the mere mention of books he likes ought to be enough to routinely put them high on the NYT’s best seller list for weeks, the way Oprah Winfrey’s approval does.

I understand that Limbaugh (and other conservative talk-radio hosts) weighed in heavily against the Bush immigration deal. That deal failed. But was this because of Limbaugh? Maybe. But presumably Limbaugh was against a great number of other Bush initiatives that passed–No Child Left Behind, Medicare prescription drugs, the omnibus energy bill, the Detroit bailout.

Well, the Detroit bailout failed in Congress and Bush just did it anyway.  But otherwise, that’s right.

The 2008 primary season provided a particularly good indication of Limbaugh’s level of influence. He seems to have supported Mitt Romney. Despite Limbaugh’s support, Romney received only 4.7 million votes. The candidate Limbaugh favored least and argued against most–John McCain–won the nomination. Again, I’m not a devotee of Limbaugh’s show, but my sense is that Limbaugh made his distaste for McCain very apparent. Republican primary voters paid little heed.

Quite true.

After the Romney flame-out, Limbaugh began promoting what he called “Operation Chaos,” where he instructed listeners to vote for Hillary Clinton in Democratic primaries. Limbaugh claimed a good deal of credit for her subsequent victories, but I’ve never seen any data which suggests that his influence was significant, let alone decisive. To the contrary, almost all of the Democratic primary results–both before and after “Operation Chaos”–fit within a stable racial, socio-economic model.

Yup.

Limbaugh’s powers of influence seem more on the level of Howard Stern. At his peak, Stern drew about 13 million listeners, which is in the ballpark with the 14 million or so Limbaugh has drawn through most of this decade. Like Limbaugh, Stern was credited with having a great deal of influence on his listeners. But that influence never really materialized beyond his ability to get people to tune in to a show he was giving away for free. Stern’s one attempt at translating his influence to the movies failed–the 1997 Howard Stern’s Private Parts opened to $14 million and grossed only $40 million. And when Stern moved to subscription-based satellite radio, his audience let him go without a second thought.

Ouch.

Actual buttons at CPAC 2009

I think that Daniel Larison is dead on right when it comes to describing a disturbingly large portion of the conservative base in this post.

Conservatives seem to have spent the last year rapidly regressing from cheering on lame politicians who could at least intelligently recite their platitudes (Romney) to worshipping pseudo-populists who could not even do that (Palin) to elevating random guys who didn’t like taxes (the Plumber) to rallying around a radio host who makes Romney’s own brand of Reagan nostalgia and three-legs-of-the-stoolism seem deep and meaningful by comparison. Of course, there isn’t that much substantively different between Romney’s opportunistic recitations and Limbaugh’s boilerplate, but at least with Romney you knew that he was capable of saying something else and would have said it if he had thought it was to his advantage. The boilerplate is not only all Limbaugh knows how to say, but if you pressed him to elaborate on any of it he would just repeat himself.

This is, sadly, quite right. I read most of the major conservative blogs and magazines and am frankly distressed at the tone the movement has taken over the past several years. There are very few people out there pushing real, conservative/libertarian opinions out there in a fresh way that recognizes that the policy challenges and solutions are not the same as the were in 1929/1960/1980/1993. Instead, even from self-proclaimed conservative intellectuals like Newt Gingrich, all we get are tired ideas that have no bearing on the economic and policy problems of today. How the hell is repealing the estate tax going to solve the collapse of the financial system? How can we drill for more oil now when oil companies are currently divesting from new drilling because of the sharp decline in the price of oil? How can cutting earmarks be the key to getting to a balanced budget when they comprise only a tiny portion of the deficit? Yes, we should “replace Sarbanes-Oxley,” but what is the suggested alternative?

More to the point, what is the conservative vision for what the economy should look like? All I ever hear is “tax cuts!” and “less regulation!” Right now, conservatives aren’t pushing a clear picture of what they want. Largely because, I suspect, because they’re not sure. Best as I can figure, the answer is “whatever will annoy liberals.” That might make folks like Limbaugh and Coulter rich, but it’s hardly a way forward for the future.

I voted for Obama knowing full well that his economic vision and mine were not the same. But one key thing to realize is that McCain’s was barely any different. Twiddling around with marginal tax rates and differing bailout plans won’t do a thing to alter the fundmental structure of the American economy. And that’s what we need. Frankly, I doubt a McCain Administration stimulus package would look very different than Obama’s. A few more tax cuts here, a little bit different spending there… but overall neither the Republican Party nor the Democratic Party have grasped some of the fundamental changes in the economy that would be possible if the rules weren’t set up to be rigged in favor of large, bureaucratic, economy-dominating, big government dependent corprorations instead of small, nimble, niche-oriented entrepeneurs.

That’s because both parties are too deeply invested in the rules.

Photo by Flickr user skye820, used under Creative Commons license.

In a NYT op-ed entitled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” Mitt Romney argues that Congress should let creative destruction do its job.

IF General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

Without that bailout, Detroit will need to drastically restructure itself. With it, the automakers will stay the course — the suicidal course of declining market shares, insurmountable labor and retiree burdens, technology atrophy, product inferiority and never-ending job losses. Detroit needs a turnaround, not a check.

I agree wholeheartedly.  Funny thing is, though, when he was vying for votes in the Michigan primary — which he ultimately won — he was saying something rather different.  A January 13 NYT piece titled “McCain and Romney Tangle Over Job Losses in Michigan” tells the story:

Mr. Romney, a former governor of Massachusetts whose father was president of American Motors in the 1950s and ’60s, insisted that the auto industry can be revived and blamed Congress and Mr. McCain for ignoring Michigan’s problems.

“The question is, where is Washington?” Mr. Romney said, speaking to a gaggle of reporters across from a General Motors transmission plant near Ypsilanti, where 200 layoffs were announced this week. “Where does it stop? Is there a point at which someone says ‘enough’? Or are we going to allow the entire domestic automotive manufacturing industry to disappear?”

[...]

In Warren, Mr. McCain said he would be “ashamed” to tell voters that the lost jobs would return to Michigan, but he vowed to take care of displaced workers through a promised job retraining program that would be offered through community colleges. “We are a Judeo-Christian values nation,”Mr. McCain told the group at the town hall in Warren. “We cannot leave people behind.”

What a difference a campaign makes.

We’ve reached the seemingly inevitable part of the campaign where the trailing candidates start hurling charges out of desperation and the leader responds in kind. In the closing days of 1992, President George H.W. Bush, ordinarily among the most decent, genteel fellows you’d ever meet, was running around calling Bill Clinton and Al Gore “bozos.” He simply couldn’t believe that he, a war hero, seasoned public servant, and recent winner of the Gulf War, was losing to a draft dodging, dope smoking hick from Arkansas.

It appears that John McCain has reached that point. During the primaries, he merely shook his head and noted that “Life’s not fair” when guys like Mitt Romney and even Mike Huckabee were outpolling him. But he kept plugging away and ultimately won the nomination easily. It looked like he was going to do the same thing in the general election, even taking a small lead after connecting on the Sarah Palin Hail Mary. But, alas, life’s not fair and the financial crisis seems to have stopped his campaign in its tracks. (It’s been noted before that this campaign has eerie similarities to the Santos-Vinick race during the last season of “West Wing.” The financial crisis is apparently the real world’s answer to the nuclear plant disaster on the show.)

Howard Wolfson is almost surely right that “Bill Ayers Won’t Save John McCain.”  Unless there’s far, far more to the association than we’ve seen, it’s a non-story that’s already been absorbed into the current polls.  And this is right, too:

This dynamic is very unlikely to change. John McCain’s goal in the first debate was to discredit Senator Obama as a credible Commander in Chief and elevate the issue of foreign policy and national security. He didn’t come close. Absent a domestic terror attack the economy will remain the number one issue in the race, and there is little Senator McCain can do to make up his gap with Senator Obama on it. Oh, Senator McCain will try to make issues of Bill Ayers and Tony Rezko and Rev. Wright, and that might hurt Senator Obama around the margins — but it will not prevent him from winning.  The economy is simply bigger than the rogues gallery that John McCain is conjuring up.

Palin kicked it up a notch yesterday with this nonsense: “Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who target their own country.”  To put it in a vernacular Palin might understand, that dog won’t hunt.  (One presumes dogs are involved in moose hunting, although my expertise is limited.)   It just comes across as a pathetic, desperate charge.

The foreign campaign contributions charge that’s been floated over the weekend is much more reasonable.  Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to work.   I seem to recall proof positive that Clinton was taking money from Red Chinese nationals in 1996 not having much, if any, impact on the race.

Ironically, Obama’s planned countercharges involving the twenty-year-old Keating Five scandal are more likely to have an impact because they go against McCain’s cultivated anti-corruption “maverick” image and most people have forgotten about that scandal.

Barring a catastrophic event like a terrorist attack, I’m not sure what happens over the next four weeks to turn this thing around for McCain.  It strikes me that his best course is to run an honorable, dignified campaign and simply sell himself.   Who knows, if he doesn’t win maybe Obama will offer to make him Secretary of State.

Attendees at a Family Research Council convention were buying up “Obama Waffles” like hotcakes before organizers decided they contained images that could be deemed racist and suspended sales.

Activists at a conservative political forum snapped up boxes of waffle mix depicting Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama as a racial stereotype on its front and wearing Arab-like headdress on its top flap.

Values Voter Summit organizers cut off sales of Obama Waffles boxes on Saturday, saying they had not realized the boxes displayed ”offensive material.” The summit and the exhibit hall where the boxes were sold had been open since Thursday afternoon.

The box was meant as political satire, said Mark Whitlock and Bob DeMoss, two writers from Franklin, Tenn., who created the mix. They sold it for $10 a box from a rented booth at the summit sponsored by the lobbying arm of the Family Research Council.

David Nammo, executive director of the lobbying group FRC Action, said summit organizers were told the boxes were a parody of Obama’s policy positions but had not examined them closely.

Republican Party stalwarts Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney were among speakers at the forum, which officials said drew 2,100 activists from 44 states.

While Obama Waffles takes aim at Obama’s politics by poking fun at his public remarks and positions on issues, it also plays off the old image of the pancake-mix icon Aunt Jemima, which has been widely criticized as a demeaning stereotype. Obama is portrayed with popping eyes and big, thick lips as he stares at a plate of waffles and smiles broadly.

Placing Obama in Arab-like headdress recalls the false rumor that he is a follower of Islam, though he is actually a Christian.

On the back of the box, Obama is depicted in stereotypical Mexican dress, including a sombrero, above a recipe for ”Open Border Fiesta Waffles” that says it can serve ”4 or more illegal aliens.” The recipe includes a tip: ”While waiting for these zesty treats to invade your home, why not learn a foreign language?”

This sort of thing is quite juvenile.  But racist?  Aside from the bit about illegal aliens, there’s not much ammunition for the charge.

Cartoon images, especially satirical ones, always exaggerate people’s physical characteristics.  That’s what makes them cartoons.  But the cartoon images of both Obamas depict them as attractive people.

The main distortion in Barack Obama’s drawing is to over-exaggerate his slightly oversized ears.  That’s not a racist stereotype; it’s making fun of him as an individual.   His nose is quite slim.  His lips are rather dark but not particularly large.  This is hardly Barack as Sambo.  No giant afro — even though there are old photos of him sporting one — no giant lips, no huge nose.

The Michelle Obama cartoon is even more flattering.  She’s wearing a rather odd expression on her face but she’s well coifed — in straightened hair — has a very thin nose, and thin, light-colored lips.   Indeed, she has no African American characteristics, stereotypical or otherwise, except brownish skin.

Barack Obama is running for president.  He’s black.  (That’s his self-proclaimed identity despite being half white and being raised almost entirely by his white mother and grandparents.)  Because of the former, he’s going to be the target of satire.  Because of the latter, the satirists are going to be vulnerable to charges of racism.

But let’s not be silly about it.  The images on the Obama Waffles box are quite benign.  Compare them, for example, to some of these:

Black Republicans get satired, too:

Okay, some of those are racist.   There’s a line that can’t be cross that, like the late Potter Stewart, I can’t quite define but I know it when I see it.  The Obama Waffles are safely on the other side.

I should note that they’re not particularly funny.  Good satire is based on a strong kernel of truth and Obama doesn’t have a reputation as a flip-flopper.  Why should he, after all:  He’s only taken public positions on most controversial issues in the last two years.    Stacy McCain is right:  This is just a recycled joke from 2004.

I’m sure that if Hillary had won the Democratic nomination, Whitlock and DeMoss would have marketed “Hillary Waffles” — and then would have been accused of promoting sexist stereotypes, no doubt.

More troubling, though, is that he’s almost certainly right about this:

Is it possible to caricature a black man without being accused of “racial stereotype”? (Note to editorial cartoonists: If Obama is elected, you’ll have to endure four years of this crap.)

Either that or we’ll figure out more clearly where the lines are.

Box art courtesy Samantha Chang at The Improper.

A new John McCain ad belittles Barack Obama’s legislative achievements on education reform and includes this gem:

Obama’s one accomplishment? Legislation to teach “comprehensive sex education” to kindergartners. Learning about sex before learning to read?

TPM’s Greg Sargent finds the charge “false” and “pernicious.”  He cites this passage from the bill, as circulated by  McCain’s staff:

“Each class or course in comprehensive sex education offered in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.”

Sargent notes that Obama camp’s explanation that the bill “would simply add instruction on disease prevention to already existing Illinois sex-ed standards.”   Indeed, Team Obama is calling the charge “perverse.”

“It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls – a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds. Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn’t define what honor was. Now we know why,” said Obama campaign spokesman Bill Burton.

Taking legislative language and votes out of context to exploit cultural divides is so routine that it’s hard to get particularly excited by this. Indeed, the ad’s not totally unfair.

While I’m generally pro-sex ed, it strikes me as bizarre to mandate teaching kindergartners about STDs.  Making them aware of sexual predators is, sadly, probably necessary.  But are six-year-olds really having unprotected sex and sharing hyperdermic needles?

BREAKING: Alaska Governor Sarah Palin has been tabbed as John McCain’s vice presidential running mate, CNBC reports.

________________________

Earlier this morning, all signs were pointing to Tim Pawlenty as John McCain’s running mate.  He even had issued the requisite “I’m not the guy” statement.

His name has been on the short list all along and, while he’s not an exciting choice, he doesn’t bring the liability of the other names that we’ve been hearing.

Mitt Romney is the obvious choice.  Despite Mike Huckabee ultimately getting a few more votes by hanging in long after it was over, Romney was easily the second choice of Republican primary voters.   He’s attractive, relatively young, and has a strong resume.   But he and McCain seem to genuinely dislike each other and there are plenty of negative sound bytes from the primaries for the Democrats to use in their ads.  And then there’s the “he owns more than one house” problem.  And the Mormon problem.

Huckabee would be the best choice if the election were going to be decided by Evangelicals.  It won’t be, however.

Joe Lieberman would be the guy if it McCain had his druthers.  The two are good friends and would work well together.  It would also be the boldest serious choice available and a strong play in the contest to attract moderates and even conservative Democrats.   But it’s too risky.  McCain has enough trouble with the base that he’s not going to be able to pull the trigger on a pro-choice fellow who, despite being hated by the Democrats, votes with his former party 80 percent of the time.

Condi Rice, Sarah Palin, Bobby Jindal and other longshot choices would liven up the race.  They’d also undercut key parts of McCain’s message.  Neither Palin nor Jindal are more experienced than Obama and it’s hard to run as a maverick who’s not a third Bush term running with  Bush’s chief foreign policy advisor.

UPDATE:  ABC reports that Palin in still in Alaska, seeming to rule her out logistically.  They also report that Pawlenty has received a call saying he’s not the guy.  Which means, as it did with Biden, he’s either 1) actually not the guy or 2) telling a little white lie to keep the suspense going a little longer.

UPDATE II:   Now AP says, “Two GOP strategists close to the McCain campaign said all indications pointed to Palin.”  Drudge has had a McCain-Palin logo atop his site most of the morning, despite no links to stories (until this one) indicating Palin was a likely choice.

Aside from being young and hot-for-a-politician, though, Palin undercuts McCain’s entire campaign theme. She’s got less political experience and less foreign policy experience than Obama.

UPDATE:  More from CNBC, which seems to be the first to go on the record with Palin as the choice.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a self-styled “hockey mom” who has only been governor for a little over a year, is GOP Presidential candidate John McCain’s choice for Vice President, CNBC has learned. According to a Republican strategist, Palin is the nominee, though McCain’s campaign has not comfirmed this. [But have they confirmed it? -ed.]

[...]

At 44, Palin is younger than Obama and, like McCain, she calls herself a maverick.

I’d never heard of Palin before the VP buzz started on the blogs a while back. She’s supposedly an excellent campaigner. And, obviously, her youth and gender make her a bold pick. Ultimately, though, I think she doesn’t make sense. If you’re running on “the country’s security is too important to be run by neophytes,” you can’t have one as next in line.

While Joe Biden was, twice, an awful presidential candidate, he’s a plausible president. Sarah Palin is not.

I hope CNBC is wrong.

UPDATE:  AP is running with the story, too.

UPDATE:  They’ve gone from qualifiers to a bold statement that Palin’s the one:

UPDATE: CNN’s on board, too:

Palin, 44, who’s in her first term as governor, is a pioneering figure in Alaska, the first woman and the youngest person to hold the state’s top political job.

She catapulted to the post with a strong reputation as a political outsider, forged during her stint in local politics. She was mayor and a council member of the small town of Wasilla and was chairman of the state Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, which regulates Alaska’s oil and gas resources, in 2003 and 2004.

The conservative Palin defeated two so-called political insiders to win the governor’s job — incumbent Gov. Frank Murkowski in the GOP primary and former two-term Democratic Gov. Tony Knowles in the 2006 general election.

Palin made her name in part by backing tough ethical standards for politicians. During the first legislative session after her election, her administration passed a state ethics law overhaul.

Palin’s term has not been without controversy. A legislative investigation is looking into allegations that Palin fired Alaska’s public safety commissioner because he refused to fire the governor’s former brother-in-law, a state trooper.  Palin acknowledged that a member of her staff made a call to a trooper in which the staffer suggested he was speaking for the governor. Palin has admitted that the call could be interpreted as pressure to fire state trooper Mike Wooten, who was locked in a child-custody battle with Palin’s sister. “I am truly disappointed and disturbed to learn that a member of this administration contacted the Department of Public Safety regarding Trooper Wooten,” Palin said. “At no time did I authorize any member of my staff to do so.”

She’s going to make us pine for the days of Dan Quayle, methinks.

TIME, at least, is happy with the boldness of the pick, going with the headline: “McCain’s Surprise Pick: Sarah Palin.”  The text, thus far, is just AP wire copy.

WSJ is hailing the pick.

The move is the most dramatic in a series of efforts to appeal to Hillary Clinton supporters still disappointed that she didn’t capture the Democratic nomination. Gov. Palin also reinforces Sen. McCain’s reformer image. She took on her state’s political establishment that had been rocked by an FBI corruption investigation.

[...]

At the same time, her thin resume runs the risk of undercutting a central attack by Sen. McCain against Sen. Obama: That he isn’t ready to serve as president. The ability of Sen. McCain’s vice president to step into the top job is seen as particularly important given his age: He turns 72 today and would be the oldest person ever to enter the White House.

Even as Alaska governor, Gov. Palin has been criticized for her sparse experience. “Sarah is a small town mayor running Alaska as if it’s a small town,” says Frank Smith, a former union and Democratic Party activist in Alaska. “McCain is out of his mind. He has no foreign policy experience and she’ll help because she’s been fishing in Canada.”

[...]

The Republican Party’s conservative base — long wary of Sen. McCain and angry in recent weeks about hints he may pick a pro-choice running mate — hailed the move.

“Conservatives will be thrilled with this pick. Gov. Palin is a down the line mainstream conservative who will energize the base and reach across party lines attracting women voters, independents and blue collar Democrats,” Greg Mueller, a Republican strategist, and former aide to Republican presidential candidates Steve Forbes and Pat Buchanan, said in a blast email. “Governor Palin is a terrific contrast to the all Washington ticket of Obama-Biden. She is a wonderful contrast to Biden, and a truly outside the beltway pick.”

We’ll see what the reaction turns out to be.  I’m certainly not the target audience.  But McCain’s first big decision is, in my mind, a truly awful one.   Obama went traditional but steady in Biden.  It wasn’t a bold pick but it was one that butressed his claim that he has judgment even though he lacks experience.   McCain has done the opposite here.

Update:  I’ll have more on Palin in subsequent threads as I get to know her a bit better and have time to digest it.  Since my take has been so negative, though, I thought I’d add some praise from an unlikely source, Charles Homans, a new editor at Washington Monthly who “lived in and reported on Alaska for the entirety of Sarah Palin’s tenure as governor.”

Palin can legitimately claim the maverick reformist credentials that McCain himself has long since lost. Her pro-life record helps McCain with the Republican base, her gender might lure away a few Hillary bitter-enders, and her youth goes a little way towards compensating one of McCain’s major weaknesses. Palin also manages the Obama-esque feat of commanding a great deal of popularity among people who don’t really know what she stands for–Dave Dittman, an Anchorage-based pollster, who has done a lot of polling and thinking about this, pointed out to me several months ago that Palin was maintaining a 85 percent approval rating among Alaskan voters even when her policies (particularly a natural gas line deal that has been a signature ambition of her administration) polled far short of that, and even when voters had trouble accurately describing her political leanings. She also pretty much guarantees a McCain victory in her home state, where Obama has been polling astoundingly well (Alaska hasn’t gone for a Democrat since Lyndon Johnson).

It’s not much, to be sure, but useful in an admission against interests sort of way.  That Mark Levin and the like are stoked is, by contrast, decidedly less comforting.

Hillary Clinton’s speech is the big draw tonight at the Democratic Convention.  She’s going to have to convince a lot of people  — perhaps starting with herself — to put aside their grudges and voter for Barack Obama to be the next president.

Matt Yglesias echoes my longstanding view that this will happen organically and notes a recent parallel:

As you may recall, several months ago it looked as if one of America’s two major political parties was going to have a serious “party unity” problem. Their nominating contest produced a winner who’d prevailed against divided opposition without ever proving himself to be a clear majority choice anywhere. What’s more, the party’s base was divided between a substantial element that strongly approved of the party’s unpopular incumbent president, and another substantial element that joined the majority of the public in disapproving of his job performance. What’s more, the winner had a long history of personal and professional tensions with key stakeholders in his party’s political movement and with leading party politicians.

He’s referring, of course, to John McCain.  While a not insignificant number of Republicans still remain less than enthusiastic about him as their standard bearer, almost all have come around to its inevitability.  Few people who voted in the Republican primaries, perhaps excepting the Ron Paul crowd, will seriously consider Obama.

Matt argues that the transformation happened “by shifting attention off the internally controversial of their nominee and his relationship to other party figures and on to the internally uncontroversial subject of how awful the other political party is.”  I would argue that this happened without much help from Team McCain but is the natural state of affairs for partisans.

Slate’s John Dickerson, likewise, has thought the talk about a lasting riff between Obama and Clinton supporters was nonsense.  But, he confesses, “I’m getting wobbly. ”

In the two and a half months since Barack Obama won the nomination, he’s been trying to convince Hillary’s supporters—but his standing with them has gotten only worse. Roughly 30 percent of Clinton voters say they won’t vote for him, and this is not a one-poll anomaly. The number is the same in the Pew, ABC, and CNN polls. That’s as bad as it was during the heat of the Democratic primary.

[...]

Whatever role these PUMAs (”Party Unity My Ass”) ultimately play, we are learning that Barack Obama’s ability to persuade is limited. This has obvious implications for the coalition he needs to build to win, but it also raises questions about the way he intends to govern. He’s promised he can rally the nation to change, but it may be that he can rally only a certain constituency (and boy can he rally them) rather than being able to sway opinions and emotions across several constituencies.

I must confess, that I thought the healing would have taken place by now.  At times, it does seem like Team Obama has gone out of its way to poke Hillary supporters in the eye, as with the hiring of Patty Solis Doyle or by not even pretending that Hillary Clinton had any shot whatsoever to get the VP nod.

But, seriously, it’s simply bizarre to contemplate that all that many Clinton supporters are going to vote for McCain in a huff.  The amount of public policy light between the two Democratic contenders was miniscule, whereas McCain is a rock solid Republican on all but a handful of issues.  One can’t imagine, for example, partisans of Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee flocking to Obama in a huff.