The Inquiring Manatee

A New Low in Vicious Stupidity From Palin

  Is there no end to the evidence that Sarah Palin is totally unqualified to be vice president of the United States, or the governor of one of America's 50 states?
  Today, ABC News reports, Palin indicated to an interviewer on conservative WMAL-AM radio in Washington, D.C., that it is unconstitutional for the news media to criticize her political tactics as a candidate for high federal office. She strongly suggested that her First Amendment right of freedom of speech is being violated by "attacks" from the media -- whose right to "attack" politicians happens to be expressly guaranteed in the First Amendment. Much-criticized early presidents from George Washington to James Madison, who had helped write the Constitution, clearly understood this (with the brief exception of John Adams with the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798). 
   Palin was reacting to the frequent and indisputable news reports and comments that she is engaging in negative campaigning by harping on Barack Obama's "associations" with 1960s domestic terrorist Bill Ayers ("palling around with terrorists") and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
   "If (the media) convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations, then I don't know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media," Palin said.
   Thus, criticizing how she conducts a campaign is not only unpatriotic, it is a violation of the First Amendment; in Sarah Palin's reading of the Constitution, a powerful public official with the ability to broadcast her every opinion to the world should be above critical response. If she says something, it must be taken as true, accepted and obeyed. Only conservative Republicans have free-speech rights. The press has none.
   With this outrageous, clueless whine, Governor Palin -- who inquired about banning books from the Wasilla public library, and tried to fire the librarian -- further disqualifies herself from taking the oath to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States. This is because she makes it clear that she doesn't have a first grader's understanding of our fundamental document -- the enshrined core of our liberties that has brought us more than 200 years by protecting the press' right to speak out to the same extent that it protects a politician's right to speak without thinking. 

   Adding to Palin's broad void of understanding is her ignorance of the basic legal fact that the First Amendment and the other nine amendments in the Bill of Rights -- not to mention every other part of the Constitution -- are checks upon what the government can do; they are not checks on what the people can do. Only government action, such as censorship or jailing a speaker who nonviolently advocates change, can violate the First Amendment.

   I shudder to think what would become of American liberty if this moron ever were to advance beyond Alaska. In fact, I cringe in fear for the future of Alaskans with her in charge.

Get Out and Enjoy Election Night

  

If there's a Democratic or Republican gala in your city at some nice hotel on Election Night next Tuesday, get up from in front of the TV. Get out there with the crowd and maybe get your face on TV. Buy a beer at the no-host bar and either celebrate or look morose as the results come in. It's a great American tradition.
   My own plan is to pop down to the Democratic do at the Century Plaza Hotel in Los Angeles after spending at least 15 hours working at a polling place as an election precinct official for Los Angeles County (which is another thing I recommend doing). These Election Night parties are great fun, especially if you've volunteered for a campaign. You're together with kindred souls, waiting for the returns to come in and perhaps waiting for a winning or losing candidate or a contender over a ballot measure to come downstairs from the suites and make a speech. It's particularly a reunion night for news reporters, who exchange war stories about the campaign year between bouts of typing on deadline. And you might see some celebrities, at least local ones. At least the political celebrities.

Justice at Last for Justice Ginsburg

  

The New York Times issues a bizarre correction on page 2 of its national print edition today. The Newspaper of Record notes that a recent story had misspelled the name of Supreme Court Associate Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg as "Ginsberg." Furthermore, the paper said, that error marked at least the 18th time that the Times had gotten this prominent woman's name wrong since 1980. No correction ever had been publicly made before, the paper said.
   A justice of the Supreme Court! And the Times has such a famously smart and finicky copy desk! Where were they on this one, all these years?
   Well, you say Ginsberg and I say Ginsburg. Let's call the whole thing off.

Some Surprising Tossup States (North Dakota!)

   Who would have predicted, with 5 days until Election Day, that Montana, Indiana, North Carolina, Georgia and North Dakota would be ranked as tossups? Yet that is how the electoral map at www.realclearpolitics.com has evolved to list these perennially red states, along with the traditional battleground states of Florida and Missouri. Further, Arizona is listed as merely "leaning" McCain and is colored suspiciously pinkish.
   The grayed-out states listed as tossups, based on an average of polls there, have a total 85 electoral votes that remain unallocated to either McCain or Obama. RealClearPolitics allocates 311 EVs in other states to Obama, 142 to McCain. That's a comfortable margin for Obama beyond the 270 needed to attain the presidency. When forced to a choice of giving the 85 tossup EVs to one candidate or the other, the well-regarded website gives 364 in all to Obama, 174 to McCain; McCain gets North Dakota, Montana, Georgia and Indiana in the end. (Plus Arizona.) Obama gets Florida, North Carolina and Missouri.
   Even if it works out for the GOP in the loamy wheatfields of North Dakota, the party will have had a historic scare. For this, Republicans can blame the economy as they fight over whether the choice of the Fargo-accented Sarah Palin also contributed to the gray clouds over the high plains in their final week of campaigning.

  
  

Best YouTube Video of the Campaign

  You gotta go to YouTube and see this. It's "McCain and Palin's Bollywood Musical," a 3-minute, 22-second goof that was taped on a big-city rooftop somewhere. To a catchy, Mumbai-like score, lookalikes for the GOP ticket join a Brooks Brothers-suited dancer corps in hilarious, speeded-up moves as McCain explains why "I want to be the 44th president." I wish I had some technical means of embedding the video on this website. At least I can provide the link.
   Laugh and pass it on.

Obama Ramping it Up in Arizona

   Intrigued by the closeness of various Arizona polls this week (McCain's once double-digit advantage is now between 2 and 4 points), the Obama campaign is picking up on the signal that John McCain's Western home state is winnable.
   The Democrat's campaign is e-mailing potential volunteers in Arizona, asking for GOTV signups. According to the Huffington Post, the Arizona Democratic chairman has asked for more money and a bigger effort, and Obama himself might stop off in the state during a Western swing late this week.
    To me, it would be a worthwhile move, and one that Obama can afford. Arizona has few African-American voters, but it has lots of Latinos and lots of energized other Democrats. McCain has been reduced to sending out waves of those annoying (but cheap) robocalls, a last refuge of scoundrels that indicates a waning corps of on-the-ground volunteers.

Will McCain Lose His Home State?

  

A newly released Arizona Poll shows home-stater John McCain at 46% support and Barack Obama at a thisclose 44% -- well within the poll's margin of error of +/- 3.5 percentage points. The poll was directed by Bruce Merrill of Arizona State University, a highly respected, nonpartisan polltaker whom I've interviewed often.
   Could McCain be in danger of losing his home state, just as Al Gore embarrassingly lost Tennessee in 2000? (Had he merely won his home state, Gore would have been elected even without Florida's 25 EVs.)
   It's possible. Huffington Post reporters on the ground statewide in Arizona report today much more volunteer enthusiasm for Obama than for McCain, whose spic-and-span offices are echoingly quiet, devoid of working supporters. Social conservatives control the GOP in Arizona, and they've never liked McCain very much. Though Obama isn't putting much money into Arizona, his volunteer field effort is a strong one -- and could be even stronger if the Obama campaign in California now makes a minor shift on the strength of the new Arizona polls to throw more phone-banking into the Copper State. Obama has been using reliably blue California as a huge reservoir of gung-ho phone bankers, working 7 days a week to flood Nevada and Florida with phone calls urging an early vote for Obama. Arizona could be profitably added to the phone-banking mission in California now.
   Another reason for the Obamans to put more of a closing effort into Arizona: Latinos. They are just as important a component of the electorate in Arizona as they are in the Western battleground states of Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, and it would be surprising if Arizona Latinos were much more favorable to McCain, just because he's from their state, than Latinos in those other three states are; in those other states, McCain is faring much more poorly in polls than Bush did among Latinos in 2004, when he got 44% of that vote. McCain had a good arguing point with Latinos when he favored a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. But since he backed away in favor of "enforcement" and said he would no longer vote for his own bill, Latinos have turned on him.
   I've always thought it was a mistake for the Obama campaign to appear to write off Arizona. With the latest poll, they have encouraging evidence that the chance to throw the ultimate egg in McCain's face is well worth making the attempt with some phone calls and some of that plethora of money thrown into last-minute ads.

Don't Expect Openness From Presidential Candidates in the Fall

  In today's Los Angeles Times, reporters Maeve Reston (from the McCain campaign plane) and Peter Nicholas (on the trail with Obama) mourn the lack of contact the candidates have with their traveling press corps.
  Reston partly blames herself for the buttoning-up of the once-garrulous McCain of Straight Talk Express days. In late July, she asked the Republican candidate if he agreed with his advisor Carly Fiorina's statement that it was unfair for health insurers to cover Viagra but not birth control pills. McCain struggled for an answer for what seemed like minutes. (How could he come out for birth control pills when his fundamentalist Christian base and Roman Catholic bishops hate contraception?) Cameras put the embarrassing moment on the Internet -- and McCain started clamming up.
  Nicholas complains that Obama is unknowable, unspontaneous and too disciplined in sticking to his message. Nicholas says Obama is "sort of a bore," and that "you want him to loosen up." The reporter even echoes those sinister-sounding Republican "who is the real Barack Obama?" statements. "After all this time with him, I still can't say with certainty who he is," Nicholas writes.
   Well, welcome to a typical presidential fall campaign, Maeve and Peter.
   In my years of campaign travel with Ronald Reagan (1980), President George H. W. Bush (1992), Bill Clinton (1992 and 1996), Al Gore and Dick Cheney (2000) and John Kerry and John Edwards (2004), I observed one constant: the candidates were more tightly controlled and more remote from the press in the fall general campaign than in the more freewheeling primaries.
   One of the few, brief exceptions: During a slow, 4-day cruise down the Mississippi on an ersatz steamboat (actually diesel-powered) just after the 2000 Democratic convention in Los Angeles, Al Gore loosened up late one night at an outdoor, off-the-record party on the top deck. As rock music resounded over the great, dark river, Gore and Tipper rocked out with staffers and reporters. For me, Gore put an end then and there to stereotypes about his woodenness. The guy could dance, laugh and let his hair down.
    In my office right now, I am looking at a picture from the 1980 Republican primaries. Reagan is holding forth on his Braniff Airways charter plane to my boss, Newsweek national news editor Steve Shepard, as I take notes and press secretary Ed Gray looks on. (Later, as head of the U.S. Office of Thrift Supervision, Gray was lobbied hard by John McCain on behalf of S-and-L crook Charles Keating).    Reagan was extremely accessible during the primaries. He often regaled reporters with ribald old Hollywood stories, one of which ended with him zipping up his fly. On a yellow school bus during the South Carolina primaries, I was able to sit right behind him and check out -- follicle by follicle -- whether, as rumored, he colored his hair. (I concluded that he didn't, since plenty of gray was visible. I later learned that I was wrong -- it was just that the colorist did a great job of leaving some gray in).
   Come the fall campaign, Reagan and the others were much more standoffish. More controlled by their handlers -- the campaign's highly-paid strategists -- they willingly stayed up front on the plane and avoided off-the-cuff, on-the-record comments that would risk "stepping on" the day's message, which was confined to a single issue: health care, the economy or the like. That's simply the way modern campaigns work. 
   Kerry would have a quick "press avail" to take questions now and then, and he came back to the press rows to help the Boston Globe's Patrick Healy (now with the New York Times) celebrate his birthday, but he didn't do much on-the-record chatting. Edwards, the running mate remotely controlled by the Kerry staff, did even less as the weeks went on. He also looked so sweaty and haggard from rope-line gropers that he was in no shape to talk even if he'd wanted to.
   There's no use in reporters longing for unrestrained schmoozing, for really getting to know a candidate. It ain't going to happen.
    Besides, it's becoming plain who Barack Obama really is: He's a cerebral, somewhat aloof guy who doesn't wear his emotions on his sleeve. But in his extremely well written 1995 memoir, "Dreams From My Father," he unbridled himself about youthful demons to an extent few in public life ever have. If you want to know Obama, read that book. But don't expect a lot of laughs on the campaign trail. He is a serious man, and the stakes are too high to let his guard down now.

Ted Stevens Convicted: An Opening for Dems, maybe for Palin

  From today's crime notebook:  A Washington, D.C., jury has convicted Sen. Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, of corruptly concealing on Senate disclosure forms a panoply of gifts from an oil-industry buddy. The Cabingate verdict is potentially great news for Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, Stevens' Democratic opponent in the election only 8 days from now -- and even better news for Democrats, whose chances for a 60-vote, filibuster-proof majority sound greatly improved.
   Unless something quirky happens. And it could. Alaskans could decide they still love their 84-year-old, pork-barreling Uncle Ted so much (when you fly to Anchorage, you land at Ted Stevens International Airport) that they re-elect him despite the felony conviction. The philosophy: "He may a crook, but he's our crook." There's no Senate rule against swearing in a felon for a new term. Stevens could be barred from the chamber by a two-thirds vote, but surely he's made enough friends over the decades to stave off such a disgrace.
   Could Sarah Palin benefit from the conviction by taking over the Stevens seat? Probably not right away. It's too late under Alaska law for the GOP to designate a replacement nominee if Stevens should pull out of the race, and ballots already have been printed. So, let's say Sarah Palin thought of resigning from the GOP national ticket (which looks like a loser) and becoming the Senate candidate. It can't happen -- except if she chooses the usually long-shot course of running a write-in campaign.

   Here's another, jaw-dropping scenario:

   1. Stevens wins re-election next week.

   2. In January, he is sworn in for an eighth term. Saying he's been fully vindicated, he announces that he's stepping down -- as Palin and McCain called Tuesday for him to do.

   3. As governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin appoints herself to fill the vacancy, calls a special election for a permanent choice, runs and easily wins. She's in an even better position for a 2012 presidential run.

   Probably Palin's benefit would come at longer range. If Democrat Begich wins on Nov. 4, it would be a sure thing that Palin would run against him six years from now -- unless Republican incumbent Lisa Murkowski's seat opens up before then, which is unlikely, or unless Palin is elected president or vice-president in 2012.

  All in all, Palin has a foreseeable future at the national level. Even if Stevens wins Nov. 4, Palin would get to inherit his seat in 2014, or even earlier if he falls short of making it to age 90 -- that is, if she isn't successful for the Senate or the White House before then.

Was it News Not Fit to Print, or What?

   I didn't see a word in the New York Times or the Los Angeles Times this morning about Ashley Todd, the McCain volunteer who admitted cutting a backward "B" into her face and trying to blame it on a nonexistent black ATM mugger. The story, so embarrassing to the Republican campaign because the College Young Republican Committee used this nutcase as a recruitment volunteer, was all over the Web for two days, but apparently it wasn't considered newsworthy by major newspapers.
   I'd like to know by what standards of newsworthiness the editors bypassed this horrifying story. Was it fear of stirring up racial trouble? Pity for a disturbed young woman? Or a desire not to jump on the already beleaguered McCain campaign with more bad publicity?