Death Rides a Pale Horse...

...and what is that weasel-like thing on top of her head? BHO has a bunch of weird names; Palin intentionally named her kids Trigg, Track, Kitt, Revv, and Gritt, i think...bewildering. We could talk forever about the late nineties white-separatist exurban-Escalade tough-sounding kid-name phenomenon, and maybe that would be fun...but we still wouldn't understand the choice of Sarah Palin as VP.

At first, I thought it was a shot at the Hillary women. Back in June, John Dickerson thought this unlikely. That was when 80 percent of Hillary backers preferred Obama to McCain. So why's Obama only up 9 points in CA? WTF happened there? Surely that's those Latino union women Hillary voters bolting to McCain, right? Oh wait, those people don't exist. According to Pew, BHO will win 75% of HIllyClint's Hispanic voters; leaving behind (.25 of .20 of 18 million) 900,000 women and men. According to PPIC, BHO's real problem is with white males in California, who are breaking 42-46 for Walnuts. Latino Californians for Obama: 71-16!

A couple million disgruntled women concentrated in Ohio and Florida might win Walnuts the election, but spread out are of no consequence. So why Palin?

She's pro-life and pro-gun where Mc is moderate. She sued the Bush administration for protecting Alaskan fauna, as protections got in the way of increased gas and oil drilling. Her last job was mayor of Wasilla AK, pop. 5,470. She's an evangelical moose-hunter? Dangling modifier aside, that's weird shit, man!

Joe Trippi on NPR said this was less about Hillary women than about shoring up McCain's right flank. But McCain doesn't need evangelicals to win the election; never mind that Palin is the kind of evangelical that would have won votes in 1994, and evangelicals are trending toward green and social-justice issues. McCain needs the center. And as far as I could tell from BHO's speech, he's just sucked up all the oxygen in the room:

As president, I will tap our natural gas reserves, invest in clean coal technology, and finds ways to safely harness nuclear power. I'll help our auto companies re-tool, so that the fuel-efficient cars of the future are built right here in America.

So if winning Hillary voters won't win the election, and Palin isn't about reaching out to the moderate-undecided third of voters (who are breaking for Obama by like 6 and Democrats by 12), and she's shy on experience, and if Biden can resist cutting her a new one in the veep debates (careful here Joe...sensistivity sells...cruelty kills...no smirking), what is she here for?

2-0-1-2...she's here to keep the right flank from bolting the GOP entirely and becoming a Bob-Barr-Ron-Paul-Pat-Buchanan megaflank. She's here to entice disenchanted conservative Democrat women into the party. She's here just in case BHO fails to deliver on health care, fails to pass a middle-class tax cut and deploys more troops to Afghanistan while Iraq goes to shit again. In the event of a bad showing by BHO in the first term, she'll be Romney's VP, with the experience of being in a national campaign, motherly cred, and social conservative Wild West skills...Palin-Romney 2012...death on a pale horse...
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If she says...

"Who am I? Why am I here?" then I'll just...

...really, I don't know what I'll do. I've been dumbfounded by the pick the whole day. Presume I'll continue to be dumbfounded.

Frozen conflicts...Putin losing marbles: "I am surprised that you are surprised..."

Is there anyone in the region actually intimidated by Vlad Putin? Poland signed a missile defense agreement at long last. Lithuania's president is a noted hardass (and a serious thinker; here's his speech to the London School of Economics in February). Putin can bluster about countries making themselves into targets, but the biggest thing he/Medvedev have threatened lately is Moldova.

Said Medvedev to the Moldovan president:

After the Georgian leadership lost their marbles, as they say, all the problems got worse and a military conflict erupted [...]

The dispute between Transdniestrian separatists and the Moldovan central government was identified as Second Most Likely to Feel the Putin by Joshua Kucera in Slate:

The conflict in Transdniestria has been frozen for some time, and there's not much at stake in Moldova, but if the situation heated up, the United States and Russia would definitely take opposing sides, and in the post-South Ossetia world, who knows?

Indeed; good news for cartographers, though.

As for losing marbles, Putin now believes that the West arranged for the Georgian aggression in order to boost the McCain candidacy (and to remind McCain what country Putin is from). Here's Putin in the WaPo:

When the CNN correspondent, Matthew Chance, expressed skepticism, Putin argued that the Bush administration faced difficulties in the Middle East and Afghanistan, as well as economic difficulties.

"A small, victorious war is needed," Putin said. "And if you don't succeed, it's possible to shift the blame on us, turn us into the enemy against the backdrop of rah-rah patriotism to rally the country again around certain political forces. I am surprised that you are surprised at what I say. It's obvious."

To summarize: Moldova is the largest thing Putin's willing to threaten; Putin is slowly becoming deranged on CNN. Is there cause for alarm here? To my mind, the best indicator that the past month's media hyperventilation about the New Cold War is meaningless is that David Brooks thinks it's for real: from PBS, after watching BillyClint in Denver:

MARK SHIELDS: [...] People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than the example of our power.

DAVID BROOKS: Not sure Vladimir Putin will be impressed by the power of our example or Ahmadinejad, but it's a nice formulation.

This is the benchmark by which we judge serious foreign policy difficulties: if Brooks is afraid, ignore it. If Brooks is for it, watch out.

By this standard, let us confidently assume that just as Putin has no intention of leaving Ossetia and Abkhazia, he also has no interest in adding a half-dozen wannabe-states to the roster of cranky part-Russian regions. No Nagorno-Karabakh, no second Dagestan, no Transdniestr. Let's see if we can get Putin out of Poti, and stop wetting the bed about What Happens Next...
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He threw rocks tonight...

...these guys are dead in the water.

"Tonight, Americans witnessed a misleading speech that was so fundamentally at odds with the meager record of Barack Obama. When the temple comes down, the fireworks end, and the words are over, the facts remain: Senator Obama still has no record of bipartisanship, still opposes offshore drilling, still voted to raise taxes on those making just $42,000 per year, and still voted against funds for American troops in harm's way. The fact remains: Barack Obama is still not ready to be President."

That's what you got? That's... that's it?

I mean, really, I'm still rather blown away. But I don't get paid to be looking always for something to snipe at. If his is all they've got, it's going to be a LONG autumn for the republicans. He looked like he was just getting warmed up.

Changing the electorate...lightning war

David Plouffe utters every politico's pipe dream; rather than sit idly watching the electorate change, change the electorate with massive voter registration. Since newly registered voters (purportedly) turn out more than others, massive registration equals massive turnout. Get the citizens of Gary IN to turn out, and Indiana breaks for BHO by 2 points, and the rubes down south are left scratching their heads.

Let's leave aside a few questions, but state them up front: By how much do new-registrees outvote old-registrees? Plouffe didn't say. Doesn't the candidate's identity make it easier to recruit new, once-disenfranchised voters? That is, isn't the registration blitz just a follow-up to Barack's innate crossover appeal? Is any Democrat registering new rural white voters, for instance? What does a candidate owe the newly-enfranchised? Why should the newly-enfranchised trust this candidate more than others? Why, if you're so confident in the power of grass-roots democracy, would you sponsor such a top-down action? Hasn't the GOP already figured out how to screw with that key disenfranchised poor-urban-black vote that Plouffe wants to turn out?

But my real problem with this plan is its implicit laziness, its complicity in preserving the same old remarkably profitable politics.

Ideally, a candidate changes the electorate -- that is, the people -- through his powers of persuasion. Blitzing the registrar is a tacit admission that not enough people are going to be persuaded. When you can't change heads, change the head count.

Registration blitz inverts the relationship between people and their elected. In this scenario, the candidate selects his people and imagines or demands their allegiance.

Registration blitz elides historical and social reasons for disenfranchisement, presuming that everyone who doesn't vote has been manipulated/discriminated/coerced out of it. Black precincts in Philadelphia have half to a third of the registered voters that white precincts have, and even those voters turn out at just over 35% on average. Philadelphia gets news coverage for having separatist movements, but the real story is that America has been engaged in a low-grade secession/quarantine action ever since 1968. It's protest by dropping out. Why should Plouffe expect to skip his history lesson?

(A side note on social reasons for disenfranchisement: When I had jury duty in February 2007, the presiding judge came to tell us all to get our friends to register to vote. "Don't disenfranchise yourself just to get out of jury duty." My white ass was shocked that anyone would consider not registering just to get out of jury duty...for an instant. Then I remembered what the rest of Philadelphia looks like, how voting hasn't changed shit, and how very much jury duty sucks...and I began to understand. I think it's a lazy, shiftless response, but not totally unwarranted.)

So Plouffe should make a deal: for everybody who registers this cycle and then gets called for jury duty, an Obama volunteer should take their spot. Civic responsibility needs an examplar. You can't hector people into enacting democracy, any more than you can choose who votes for you...
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Jed Report does the due diligence.

Good folks over at the Jed Report have got the video of the McCain Senior Moment/Dodge that I blogged about a short while ago. It's worth a watch.

I liked him more when he was the future SecState.

...so we'll get the plagiarism, the Dunkin' Donuts line, the clean and articulate flop and God knows what else.

We'll also get a refreshing blue-collar battler who's more than capable of delivering a powerful zinger to an opponent. He's funny and comes off as (sometimes painfully) honest and he's a quick wit. He's genuinely likeable, though, and a good balance to sometimes stiff seeming BHO.

Dear God, please don't let him crack a joke about Mexicans, though.