Bloodless Coup

Palin reminds me a bit of Kos. She only bucks the system enough to get a crack in the door so she can get in herself. And she totally brought the nasty. Although her tone made it sound like a pack of Valley girls (ba dum bum) trashing a rival sorority.

Listening to her and Rudy really reminded me of listening to Zell Miller 4 year ago. I felt like the anger and the mean-spiritedness was on his level and the lies were up there with "John Kerry will defend America with spitballs."

I definitely expected them to at least TRY to have some substance. We'll see how this plays.

"On tv it truly looks like a white business people and their spouses (and parents) party."

Maybe they took a cue from Obama's campaign:
Two Muslim women at Barack Obama’s rally in Detroit on Monday were barred from sitting behind the podium by campaign volunteers seeking to prevent the women’s headscarves from appearing in photographs or on television with the candidate.

“I was coming to support him, and I felt like I was discriminated against by the very person who was supposed to be bringing this change, who I could really relate to,” said Hebba Aref, a 25-year-old lawyer who lives in the Detroit suburb of Bloomfield Hills. “The message that I thought was delivered to us was that they do not want him associated with Muslims or Muslim supporters.”

When they said they were with Abdelfadeel, the volunteer told them their friend would have to take off the headscarf or stay out of the special section, Marino said.

Gosh, Morris, that was months ago -- and Obama apologized and made amends. We eagerly await the GOP's apologies and amends-making.

not to mention that the exclusion was all but compelled by too many mainstream republican talking heads trying to convince america that obama was a covert, sleeper cell muslim with a name that bespoke future treachery, and thus could not be trusted to govern. the climate in which he felt the need to consider such things is by and large a climate created by the GOP; the right has a lot of nerve bootstraping highhandedness based upon low behavior it has provoked itself.

daily show was fantastic last night confronting pundit and pol after pundit and pol re sexism -- it was sexist and "whiny" (palin) for hillary to refer in any way to her sex in responding to critics; brought to you by the precise same pols and talking heads who now excoriate articles pointing out that palin's telling bald-faced lies just about every time she speaks as sexist and reflective of media bias -- and re unwed motherhood (bristol's a hero, brought to you by the same people who all but called britney's kid sister a whore).

I didn't hear the whole speech, but here's one thing I've noted about what I did here, and the rather amusingly positive press she's gotten for saying nothing in a fairly effective way. The funniest thing in hindsight (and focused by this morning's NPR highlights) is listening to her decry Obama's oratory over substance, suggesting she's got more meat on the bone. Talking about obama's irrationally exuberant crowds. And doing it all with really quite well-delivered, but fundamentally hollow and misleading oratory, with no meat on the bone, in front of an irrationally exuberant crowd.

But then what's good for the goose has never been any good for the gander when it comes to the GOP. Seriously, McCain is the candidate of change. The same basic policies, the same governing ideology, only this time it's going to work!

If I didn't know better -- and truth be told, I'm not sure I do -- I'd swear that McCain has on some level faced the inevitability of his defeat and is now going to a red-meat-for-wingnuts strategy in order to lose honorably and/or preserve some cred wtih the GOP base.

They can't win doing this. Can they?

It's possible to win this way; if McCain wants to make this a culture war/social conservative battle, then it becomes a mobilization issue (which side can put more voters in the booths). The independents stay away (they lose interest since they can't find issues to vote on, or break 50/50), and each side competes to put out the vote. That's what happened in 2004. McCain could hope to win that (data this year seems to argue that there are more motivated Democrats than motivated Republicans), but it looks a long shot from here.

Of course, McCain's got about 60 days to mobilize his troops, and much can change over that time period. If this is the path McCain has chosen (we'll know tonight), it will be a very ugly couple of months. If this isn't the path McCain has chosen, the I have no idea why Palin gave the speech she gave last night.

Having watched that speech, I confess that I now have no fucking idea what the McCain campaign's strategy is.

Ironically, it's a very evolutionary one: Win.*
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* Remember, the right figured out over the past twenty years the ideological and political coherence are an albatross when it comes to winning elections. Why limit oneself so?

Yeah, but the numbers work against a "rally the base" electoral strategy. Generic polling shows Dems win over Reps by about 10+% points (yes, and McCain and Obama are closer; doesn't make sense to me either); so if everyone (base, middle, independents, kitchen sink, etc.) comes out to vote, the Dems win in a landslide. I had thought McCain was running a campaign to win back some of those votes, to peel people away from Obama. That seemed to be what Palin represented (a woman who made a very obvious reference to Hillary in her first public appearance as Vice).

But the Rep Convention was mostly (except for McCain last night) red-meat to get the base riled up. That's also a strategy (worked for Bush in 2004 and to some degree in 2000). But, this year, the Dems base is just plain larger than the Reps base. All the election commenters said so, and they all said that a "rally the base" strategy wouldn't work for McCain. Yet Palin's nomination speech wasn't about appealing to Hillary supporters or independents, and most of the heavy hitters the last two nights (Romney, Guiliani, Lieberman, etc.) weren't talking policy and winning undecideds, they were throwing more red meat to the base.

Then McCain comes out and makes an "appeal to the middle" speech. Which doesn't jibe with what the rest of the convention was saying.

So I have no idea what McCain is doing to win this election. Nothing makes sense as an electoral strategy.

And the latest reports are that Palin will retreat to Alaska to "clean up her affairs" (after campaigning for a few days over the weekend and early next week). Which makes even less sense: whatever strategy McCain is running, having Palin doing nothing doesn't help him at all.

I'll want to see polls (state-by-state; seeing where the electoral votes are) taken AFTER this weekend (let everything sink in). When those come out (about a week from now) we can start to talk about where McCain is ahead, where Obama is ahead and which states are in play. Everything up to now has been introductory, and the real campaign starts next week. But until we know the electoral map, we don't really know how things stand.

None of which explains what the heck McCain's strategy is. I just don't understand.

I won't attempt to vouch for its likelihood of success, but it seems pretty clear, given the apt observations you make, that they're trying to hit everything at once, while the convention makes that feasible. So they give three days of red meat, with one day, in particular, dedicated to using Palin to blunt Obama's energy and vision over long-term experience candidacy; then on the fourth day, McCain goes out and sounds the horn of bipartisanship and the return of ethical government. And while it might be a hail mary to try to placate disparate constituencies that never align more than tensely -- i.e., movement conservatives and old school republicanism -- if their internal calculations suggest that they can't win by chasing either side, even a minimal chance of victory that entails appealing to the whole hotchpot of folks who've lain claim to the title "conservative" over the past twenty years or so is worth pursuing.

Or maybe they're just as inept and concocting a message and sticking to it now as they have been all along.

Alternatively, maybe Palin was the whole handful of spaghetti thrown against the wall to see what sticks, and it took a day or two of convention coverage to figure out the most favorable portrayal the media was willing to promulgate based on her initial appearances. They figured out, as the convention went on, that their best shot, i.e., where the media would be most compliant, was to sell her as a reformer. And since that has been one of McCain's stronger suits over the years, they decided that was the way to go.

As for Palin going home, she needs to be visible, yes, but not if she's going to end up indicted, impeached, or have her parenting questioned. I suspect there are fires to put out. Well, I know there are fires to put out. But I suspect there are others.