For those of you who enjoyed the live-blogging of the veep debate last week, the Mahablog tech/design team (that’d be me) will be live-blogging the debate over at my pad (here). It’s just me and the cat tonight, so I can’t guarantee it will be as entertaining.
Live Blog Tonight
The Base, Debased
Dana Milbank provides an up-close-and-personal look at Palin-McCain supporters:
In Clearwater, arriving reporters were greeted with shouts and taunts by the crowd of about 3,000. Palin then went on to blame Katie Couric’s questions for her “less-than-successful interview with kinda mainstream media.” At that, Palin supporters turned on reporters in the press area, waving thunder sticks and shouting abuse. Others hurled obscenities at a camera crew. One Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African American sound man for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy.”
Palin’s hatespeech doesn’t always work:
The angry GOP vice presidential nominee even found a way to blame the market decline on the yet-to-be-enacted tax policies of the yet-to-be-elected Obama.
“If you turn on the news tonight when you get home, you’re gonna see that, yah, this is another woeful day in the market, and the other side just doesn’t understand — no!” she said at an afternoon fundraiser at the home of mutual fund giant Jack Donahue. “Especially in a time like this, you don’t propose to increase taxes. The phoniest claim in a campaign that’s full of them is that Barack Obama is going to cut your taxes.”
Of course, Obama never promised to cut taxes for people at $10,000-a-plate lunches in air-conditioned tents on waterfront compounds. And the crowd — among them New York Jets owner Woody Johnson — reacted without applause to Palin’s Joe Six-Pack lines. After they didn’t strike up the usual “Drill, baby, drill” or “USA” chants, Palin, rattled, read hurriedly through the rest of her speech.
Josh Marshall reports Palin-McCain rally attendees yelling “terrorist!” and “kill him!” at mention of Obama’s name, “though it’s not clear whether the call for murder was for Bill Ayers or Barack Obama. It didn’t seem to matter.”
“These are dangerous and sick people, McCain and Palin,” Josh says. Yes. As are the mobs who support them.
Serious
As I keyboard the NYSE hasn’t opened yet this morning, but word is that stocks are dropping hard in Europe and Asia. Little Lulu is whining — Wasn’t the bailout supposed to calm the financial markets? The magnitude of what’s happening in Economyland hasn’t sunk into her overheated little head.
The wingnuts are pushing the usual nonsense and trivia they use to derail elections. Little Green Footballs (to which I would rather not link) displays a photo of Bill Ayers standing on a flag that was taken in 2001, at a time that Barack Obama and Ayers were both serving on the board of the Woods Fund, a philanthropic organization in Chicago. This is the Right’s idea of a Serious Issue. (BTW, the photo, which was used with a feature on Ayers in the August 2001 issue of Chicago magazine, no doubt was a pose the magazine requested. That’s how these things usually work.)
For the remaining month of the campaign the names Bill Ayers, Tony Rezko and Rev. Wright will be chanted fervently on television and radio. They will slide into our email boxes and consume vast amounts of ink on newspaper op ed pages.
Oh, and taxes! liberal! boogaboogaboogabooga!!!!!
Even now top-level Republican strategists are meeting to discuss why Sarah Palin’s winks and “you betchas” are not moving the polls for McCain. It’ll be fun to see what they try next. Will they tone Palin down or ramp her up into an even more garish cartoon than she already is? Will Joe Lieberman be videoed crying real tears?
Michael Tomasky writes at The Guardian,
Pssst. Don’t spread it around too much, because there’s still a month to go and I don’t want to jinx things – but substance is in this year. …
… We are a country in decline. The decline is the result of the policies of the last eight years. Everyone outside of hardcore conservatives knows this. No candidate for president can utter the sentence “we are a country in decline”. America’s central myth about itself is that, unlike Rome or Austria-Hungary or (sorry) an earlier Britain, we are impervious to time’s vicissitudes and will always be numero uno. People now are worried that underneath that bravado, maybe we won’t be.
And so, substance matters. The public responses to the financial meltdown and the first two debates make this evident.
Why won’t the swiftboat tactics work this year?
Its easy to lose sight of it in the day to day coverage, but the collapse of Wall Street in the last weeks was a seminal event in the history of our nation and our politics. To put the crisis in perspective, Americans have lost a combined 1 trillion dollars in net worth in just the last four weeks alone. Just as President Bush’s failures in Iraq undermined his party’s historic advantage on national security issues, the financial calamity has shown the ruinous implications of the Republican mania for deregulation and slavish devotion to totally unfettered markets.
Republicans and Democrats have been arguing over the proper role of government for a century. In 1980 voters sided with Ronald Reagan and Republicans that government had become too big and intrusive. Then the economy worked in the Republicans’ favor. Today the pendulum has swung in our direction. Republican philosophies have been discredited by events. Voters understand this. This is a big election about big issues. McCain’s smallball will not work. This race will not be decided by lipsticked pigs. And John McCain can not escape that reality. The only unknowns are the size of the margin and the breadth of the Democratic advantage in the next Congress.
A lot can happen in a month, so it’s no time to get complacent. The election still will be closer than it ought to be because of racism. But over the next four weeks expect the Right to spin faster and further into utter irrelevance. They are starting to sound like a steward on the Titanic, shouting that if people don’t stop this nonsense about rowing out to sea in lifeboats they’ll miss out on dinner with the Captain.
See also — Roger Cohen has a genuinely awesome column today.
What’d I Miss?
I’ve been at a retreat and haven’t seen the news since Friday morning. I take it the polls say a majority of veep debate viewers who were polled favored Biden. I agree with Bill Curry:
Why then did Palin take a drubbing in the polls? It may have to do with the very personality that brought her to the ball. You may recognize it: it’s Marge Gunderson, from the darkly comic Coen Brothers film “Fargo.”
For her portrayal of the small-town sheriff forever saying “golly” and “you betcha,” Frances McDormand won an Oscar. So should Palin. The resemblance is uncanny. Some reporter should find out if Palin talked that way before the movie came out.
Palin also draws on goofy neighbor characters from old situation comedies. I watched the debate on CNN, which had hooked undecided voters up like hamsters to a machine. As the night wore on it sunk in that her impersonation was really of them and more condescending than any they’d suffered at the hand of Harvard.
Not every Palin cliche is borrowed from show business. She calls herself both “Joe Six Pack” and a “Hockey Mom,” labels spawned by political consultants. The people she patronizes don’t really talk that way. With their homes and retirements threatened, they are less easily amused. That Biden cleaned up may indicate that the crisis bearing down so hard has put us all in a more serious frame of mind.
I don’t know that Palin is impersonating Marge Gunderson (one of the all-time great film characters) as much as she and Frances McDormand are/were evoking a generic woman of the Frozen North. But Marge Gunderson is less of a caricature than Sarah Palin, IMO. Palin’s “by golly” and “you betcha” stuff is just too contrived.
I see also that the McCain-Palin campaign is still trying to scare voters with the alleged Bill Ayers-Obama connection. CNN does a good job explaining that there is no “there” there.
It’s striking to me that the Right continues to flog the Ayers (non)issue, even though they’ve been at it for months and it has gotten them nowhere. I don’t think most people give a bleep about former 1960s radicals, frankly. Especially since Obama himself was born in 1961 and, obviously, was a small child when all this radical-ness was going on.
Open Thread
in the tank!
So I get to live blog, I suppose to give my perspective as both a Young Person and as a debate expert. (I have 12-some years of experience with policy debate, as a participant, judge, and coach, most recently affiliated with the University of Massachusetts. See, once upon a time, people payed me to judge debate. I’m like Gwen Ifill. Only, you know, pastier.)
Last Friday, I watched the debate from the comfort of one of my favorite bars, and tonight, I’m at a small gathering of friends at an apartment in the Williamsburg neighborhood of Brooklyn for extra Young People Cred. We’re eating fondue and drinking lambic (a Belgian beer brewed with fruit). My friend who’s hosting (Olga) just informed all assembled that there is plenty of alcohol, so this could get entertaining.
The pundits are all basically that if Sarah Palin doesn’t fall on her face, it’ll be a success. So, let’s get to it. Get out your bingo cards.
Continue reading
Maha’s Way Cool Debate Live Blog
Watch this space!
Oh, that’s cute. Can I call you Joe? Nice.
Palin is looking at the camera and Biden did not.
OK, we’ve got the canned remarks out of the way.
She’s pointing at predator lenders and corruption. Personal responsibility.
Joe is getting in the quote about deregulating health care.
Palin: Taxes taxes taxes booga booga booga
As mayor she left her city in crippling debt. Someone should bring that up.
Biden is repeating the middle class tax cut. There you go Joe, look at the camera.
Palin: Redistribution of wealth. I hate that term.
Government is the problem.
Crossing state lines to buy insurance; I still don’t believe that’s possible.
Biden — ultimate bridge to nowhere. Good line.
Energy plan — Palin had to take on the oil companies. She broke up a monopoly?
Ooo, the bankruptcy bill. Greed and corruption don’t have anything to do with the bankruptcy bill. But Biden wasn’t on the side of the angels with that one.
We don’t have enough fossil fuel resources to eliminate dependence on foreign oil.
Don’t care as much about the climate than we do? Foreign countries will laugh.
OK, guys, how do you think it’s going so far?
Same sex versus heterosexual couples, no discrimination, says Biden. Hospital visitations, life insurance, benefits. Property.
Ooo, she just glows when she talks about the surge.
Funding the troops.
Ooo, white flag of surrender! Here we go!
I think she’s losing it. She’s repeating her talking points and not responding to what Biden said.
Al Qaeda is defining our war.
At least she can pronounce the name of whozits of Iran.
We’re in favor of diplomacy but not with people we don’t like.
McCain has pain and won’t sit down in Spain.
I honestly don’t know how this might be going over.
Here you go, Joe! No different from George Bush’s.
Um, little girl, Kim Jung Il already has nuclear weapons.
Ooo, we’re building schools in Afghanistan. Sure.
Bosnia. Kosovo. Bosnia.
She still sees like a ditz to me, but how will an independent voter see this?
The SNL writers are taking notes.
Pointing backward.
I just flipped to CNN to see the focus group line. The gang at MyDd says the squiggly lines like Biden.
Ooh, they’re right. As soon as Joe talks the lines swing up. Women like him especially.
She’s not answering the achilles’ heel question.
Palin speaks, the squiggly lines are nearly flat. This is fun.
Joe almost choked up.
Maverick maverick maverick. Oh, and the lines just went flat. Wheee!
Joe is challenging the “maverick” thing. The squiggly lines go up.
She appoints people of all parties in Alaska, as long as they are her friends.
OK, what did you think?
Y’all go ahead and talk among yourselves.