I have a couple of new posts over at Care2, my other blog home, and I’ve been negligent in linking to them. The first looks at Jacques Rogge and the International Olympic Committee, and wonders whether they’ll ever actually let the Olympics celebrate the human spirit in a way that doesn’t involve the detention, death, or denegration of humans:
The reality is that Rogge and his colleagues have absolutely no incentive to change things. They are making ridiculous amounts of money. They get treated like kings and queens everywhere they go. And everytime an athlete does something spectacular, most people forget about the bad stuff. As Jenkins notes, the Olympics are virtually indestructible. That’s good news in terms of the amazing spectacle they offer viewers. But let’s stop pretending that they are some sort of celebration of the human spirit. . . . When it comes to the utter mendacity competition, you’ve got to give the gold medal to Rogge and his colleagues on the IOC.
The second looks at a bill introduced yesterday by Rep. Patrick McHenry (R-NC) proposing to replace Ulysses S. Grant on the fifty-dollar bill with Ronald Reagan. . .because he did better in a poll of Presidential historians.
Grant isn’t on the money because of his service as President. By all accounts he was a lousy President — although he’s no longer regarded as one of the worst. But he was kinda sorta maybe really responsible for leading the Union forces to victory in the Civil War. So using a poll of historians on who was the best President as the basis for excluding Grant pretty much misses the reason why he was honored in the first place.
You can read them both here, along with a more thorough takedown of Marc Thiessen, Dick Cheney’s favorite torture apologist.
First, Gallup daily tracking (which does not include last night’s debate):
That’s the first double-digit lead of the election. To be fair, some other trackers see a narrowing, but most folks regard the Gallup and Rassmussen daily trackers as the most reliable, and both show Obama with a significant lead.
Second, a map from Open Left showing a composite of the half-dozen websites out there forecasting the electoral college. Remember, this is not Open Left’s estimate, but an average of all such sites.
The score is Obama 338, McCain 163, 37 too close to call.
There’s still four weeks left, and anything can happen here, but we’re moving into Reagan-Carter territory here.
Take a moment to watch this clip. It’s from an Obama town hall appearance yesterday in Farmington Hills, Michigan.
At first glance, it seems pretty good. He says that “there should be no contradiction between keeping America safe and secure and respecting our Constitution.” He gets in a good shot in about the need to catch the terrorists before you worry about what to do with them. And he has a great line at the end: “Don’t mock the constitution. Don’t make fun of it! Don’t suggest that it’s un-American to abide by what the founding fathers set up.”
Those are all good points. The problem is that along the way, he violates two fundamental rules of messaging:
1. Don’t use your opponent’s talking points to frame your arguments. Obama did that on three occasions:
“Senator Obama is less interested in protecting people from terrorism than he is in reading them their rights.”
“You may think it’s Barack the bomb thrower, when in fact it might be Barack, the guy running for president.”
“The reason you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism.”
When you do this, you reinforce people’s preconceptions about you. If folks are already inclined to worry about whether you’re the right guy, then what they’re going to hear is that Obama is soft on terrorism, has a Muslim name, and is interested in protecting the bad guys.
2. Don’t try to convince people with facts. Obama spends over a minute explaining the concept of habeas corpus. He sounded like a professor. Most people don’t have any idea what the words “habeus corpus” mean. But they do understand the underlying principle: that sometimes, our government makes mistakes, and we need rules to protect innocent people from being thrown in jail indefinitely. They’ll understand that much more readily than talking about how this right goes back to before we were a country.
So what should have Obama said? How about something like this:
You know, all of us want to be treated fairly. You could say that’s the basic idea behind the Constitution and the Bill of Rights: do unto others as you would have them do onto you. In this country, we give people the chance to be heard. We promise them that they won’t be tortured. We say to them that they have the right to prove that they are innocent of the charges against them, and that they don’t have to incriminate themselves.
These are our core values. These are incredible gifts that the founding fathers gave to us. And these are the very things that our opponents are now mocking. How dare John McCain and Sarah Palin suggest that what was good enough for Thomas Jefferson and John Adams and Benjamin Franklin isn’t good enough for us.
Other than our familes, our freedoms are the most precious thing we have . They are what made this country great. They are the promise that all men and women are created equal, that we are endowed with certain inalienable rights, and, as you said so beautifully, ma’am, that we are the sweet land of liberty.
John McCain and Sarah Palin, just like George Bush and Dick Cheney, want you to believe that our security is more important than our freedoms. What you know and what I know — and what McCain and Palin and Bush and Cheney certainly should know is that we cannot have security without freedom. We cannot have justice without freedom. We cannot be America without our freedoms.
Those who suggest otherwise should be ashamed of themselves.
They should be ashamed for resorting to torture, for doing the very same things that John McCain himself suffered in Vietnam. They should be ashamed for letting places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, instead of places like Farmington Hills and Peoria define who we are. They should be ashamed for allowing waterboarding, beatings, sleep deprivation, and other techniques that we used to think only happened in places like Zimbabwe and Burma and Cuba. They should be ashamed of themselves for believing that it’s all okay because the President can do anything he wants anytime he wants.
That’s not my America. That’s not your America. That’s not George Washington’s or Abraham Lincoln’s or Teddy Roosevelt’s or FDR’s or JFK’s or Ronald Reagan’s America. Nowhere in our Constitution does it say the President can do anything he or she wants. Nowhere. That’s not Martin Luther King’s or Susan B. Anthony’s or Bobby Kennedy’s America. That’s George Bush’s America.
It’s time we reclaim our heritage of freedom, our role as that shining city on the hill. It’s time we say “not on our watch,” not here, not in Guantanamo, not anywhere.
It’s time that we say to Bush and Cheney and McCain and Palin and anyone else who supports them, we’re taking America back. We’re taking America back to what it stands for. We’re going to make America great again. We’re going to be the America that respects people’s rights, that honors our core values, that draws so many people around the world to our shores.
Let’s start showing the world why we’re better than our enemies. Let’s honor our founding fathers by returning to the values that make America America.
That would knock McCain and Palin on their butts. It would force them to explain why they support the very torture techniques that John McCain himself endured. It would make them explain why they aren’t un-American. It would require them to argue that they don’t want to destroy the Constitution or shred the Bill of Rights. Tar them with every sin of the Bush Administration, and do it in a way that will leave them no space to reply except by repeating your arguments.
That, after all, is exactly what they’re doing to the Democrats.
So for crying out loud, Senator Obama, stop defending yourself and start attacking them. It’s the only way you win.
P.S. To my colleagues in the blogosphere and the mainstream media, this goes double for you. Stop caring about how many times Sarah Palin lied about the bridge to nowhere and start talking about why Obama and Biden are the right choice. Stop parsing every lie that McCain and Palin tell and start talking about what their Administration would do to the country. And if you can’t, then shut the hell up.
Assume for a moment that John McCain is a transitional figure, and that he will serve only one term if he actually does manage to get elected. If that is true, where does the Republican Party go after he leaves office?
Sarah Palin represents a dead end for the Republicans. A Palin candidacy in 2012 will be to the Republicans what George McGovern was to the Democrats: a transitional, highly partisan individual who appeals to the base without significantly expanding it the way Reagan did.
To make an even more forced analogy, Palin is the Republicans’ Neil Kinnock, the Labor Party leader who preceded Tony Blair. Kinnock was an old-school traditional Labor ideologue who helped solidify the base but could never translate that into electoral success. It may be that Republicans have to go through a similar period where they enjoy the false comfort of an ideologue in charge, one who gets trounced regularly, before moving back to a centrist, more inclusive place in American politics.
To further strain the analogy to the breaking point, the fundamental question is who will be the Republicans’ Bill Clinton/Tony Blair/Bruce Cameron — the thoughtful, charismatic, and young centrist who pulls his/her party back into the mainstream of the political discourse.
Another way to look at it is that John McCain is to Ronald Reagan as John Major was to Margaret Thatcher: the last exhausted gasp of a once-vibrant worldview.
There really are three types of political leaders in the United States: base mobilizers (McGovern, Mondale, Bush II, Palin), centrists (Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter, Bush I, Clinton, Dole, Gore, Kerry, McCain), and game-changers (FDR, Goldwater, Reagan, and perhaps Obama).
The problem for Republicans is that they will see Palin as a game-changer when in fact she is only a base-mobilizer. And with the (disastrous) exception of Dubya, most base-mobilizers don’t win elections.
McCain’s advertising strategy reminds me of the story Leslie Stahl tells about Ronald Reagan and a piece she did on 60 Minutes:
Stahl recalled one of her most famous stories for “60 Minutes” — an expose on the 1984 Reagan re-election campaign that aired the night before the election. In a blitz of images showing a benevolent Reagan appearing at nursing home openings and hospitals, Stahl narrated that Reagan had, in fact, cut the budget for such projects.
Stahl feared the backlash of the White House the next day; instead phone calls of praise began to pour in from [the Reagan Administration] thanking her for the “positive” newscast and free advertising the night before. Stahl was befuddled. Her broadcast was obviously meant to question Reagan’s budget cuts. It was then she was told a stark reality. . . . “No one heard what you had to say in that piece,” [Michael Deaver] told her. “They just saw the pictures.”
I have no idea whether Stahl’s story is true or not, but it does point to a problem for McCain. His campaign ads have become all about Obama. And in the YouTube-only ads, even the usual (and I thought mandated) shtick at the end, where McCain says “My name is John McCain and I approved this hatchet job message” is missing. So to what degree is this actually influencing the campaign?
It depends on who you ask. According to a recent report in(the incredibly conservative and Unification Church-owned) The Washington Times, all these ads have given McCain a boost, with his YouTube viewership now surpassing Obama’s:
Mr. McCain has pumped out a series of brutal yet entertaining attack ads and Web videos mocking the press and Mr. Obama, and the combination of wit and insult has pushed his YouTube channel to the sixth most watched on the site this week. Mr. McCain has beat Mr. Obama’s channel for seven straight days and 11 of the past 14 days, in a signal he intends to compete for the YouTube vote.
Brutal? Absolutely. Entertaining? Maybe.
But effective? I don’t think so.
Let’s use a different metric instead of views: votes. Very few of McCain’s YouTube videos get more than three (out of five) stars — and most of the ones that do tend to be the positive, focusing on McCain’s biography rather than Obama’s shortcomings. Perhaps more telling, the most viewed clips on his site are among the least popular.
For example, “Celebrity” (the notorious Paris-Britney-Barack ad) is by far the most viewed ad on the site, receiving nearly 2 million hits. Yet it is also the lowest rated, receiving only two stars. The next most watched, “The One” (which mocks Obama as a false messiah), has 1.2 million hits and is the second lowest-rated clip. You have to go down to the 6th most-watched video to watch one that gets more than three stars. Not coincidentally, it’s the first one that’s positive — but does so by having a bunch of Democrats talk about what a great guy McCain is.
In contrast, most Obama videos get between four and five stars. You have to go to the 46th most watched video on Obama’s site to get one that receives less than four stars. (His top video, at 4.7 million hits, is his “Toward a More Perfect Union” speech in Philly — all 37 minutes of it.)
I know that these are not exactly scientific numbers, but it does mean something. To put it another way, the most talked about kid in high school is not necessarily the most popular.
I think what we’re seeing here is that Obama supporters are going to the McCain site to see what the fuss is about — and some of them are voting against the clips. In contrast, almost no McCain supporters appear to be going to the Obama site (or at least they’re not voting.)
So this is mostly a case of rubbernecking. People are slowing down to watch these ads, but they’re still driving by the McCain campaign to support Obama.
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