It had to happen sooner or later. Once the emptiness of Obama’s “Hope and Change” campaign was realized by the voters, the Democratic candidate for president had precious little substance to fall back on.

Political attacks only resonate if the voter perceives a kernel of truth in them. And the way John McCain has been pounding away at Obama’s non-existent plans for what exactly he would like to accomplish as president, it was bound to have an effect on the polls.

It has.

Abandoning all pretense of being a candidate who can unite the country by reaching across the aisle to Republicans and reforming Washington, Obama has dramatically shifted his campaign rhetoric to the Bill Clinton strategy of telling voters “I feel your pain:”

Barack Obama sounds more like a man trying to shake a rain cloud these days, dispensing a teeth-clenching, I-get-your-pain stump speech in town after town that offers only snippets of the unbridled optimism that long permeated his campaign pitch.

Beginning in the days before his party’s convention, the inspirational has given way to the traditional: attacks on John McCain, a register of policy prescriptions and partisan language with the sting of a needle.

Over the summer, Obama would often simply say that he and McCain “fundamentally disagree” on key issues. In New Hampshire on Saturday, Obama said the Arizona senator “doesn’t get it. He doesn’t know what is going on your lives. He is out of touch with the American people.”

The poetic defenses of hope, the playful jokes about being a distant relative of Vice President Cheney and the glancing attention to policy have been replaced by an emphasis on economic fears – an issue-by-issue argument of why the American dream is slipping away and the Republican ticket has no plan to rescue it. He furrows his brow, wags his finger and broadcasts exasperation at the idea that a 26-year veteran of Washington is co-opting his mantra of change.

The Obama campaign has even replaced the wistful slogan, “Change We Can Believe In,” with the more imperative “Change We Need.”

This is the sign of a desperate candidate who doesn’t have a clue how to go about regaining the momentum he enjoyed in the early summer. Gone is the messiah who will go to Washington and save us from partisanship and race hatred. Gone is The One who’s campaign once promised to transcend politics and enter the realm of a crusade.

Now the brawling, Chicago trained street fighter is emerging – and it isn’t pretty. One wonders how his younger, more naive fans are taking this switch. I would have to say that based on history, many of them will become disillusioned and could stay at home on election day – as their older brothers and sisters and even their parents did when they were young and impressionable and had their eyes opened about politics and politicians.

One group this change won’t affect is Obama’s African American base who would probably vote for him if he was found to be the devil himself.  This part of the equation could still make the difference in some blue state races in Michigan and Pennsylvania (among other states) where large African American populations in Detroit and Philadelphia respectively could supply Obama with the margin of victory in very tight races.

But the millions of new voters who answered Obama’s call and saw him as a different kind of politician will, unless they are completely unaware of what is going on in the campaign, have second thoughts about this new version of Obama. This is the Machine pol who kicked his challengers off the ballot in his first state senate race by challenging their signature petitions. This is the “reformer” who walked into Illinois senate leader Emil Jones’ office and made a deal with the devil in order to have some kind of legislative record to run on for his US senate bid. And this is the Obama who threw the Chicago reformers under the bus by endorsing some of the worst Machine candidates at the expense of those running on a “hope and change” platform. All of these critiques will now resonate with voters.

That’s why Obama’s new strategy is so risky. Cynically, he is banking on the economy getting so bad that the voter will respond to his Clintonesque class warfare claims which will allow him to barely squeak out a win in November. He apparently feels that’s all he’s got left.

One thing is certain, however; Obama has totally abandoned all that made him different and exciting to so many voters and now appears to be just another Democratic politician.

This blog post originally appears in The American Thinker

UPDATE

As usual, Ed Morrissey and I are on the same page this morning:

Obama has had to turn back towards his base rather than make a play for independents and centrists. The base has begun to get dispirited, if not outright mutinous, and Obama needs an enthusiastic effort to win battleground states. Instead, he’s begun to fade in formerly safe states like Minnesota and New York, and Pennsylvania and Michigan may have already slipped through his fingers.

Make no mistake about it. Obama may claim this as going on the offensive, but this is a purely defensive move that ignores his one major theme: being different enough to transcend partisanship. John McCain has pushed him out of his comfort zone and forced him to play this election by McCain’s rules, and apparently he isn’t adept enough to figure that out for himself.

They call themselves “Values Voters” and they’re meeting in Washington this week at a gig sponsored by the Family Research Council – which in actuality does little “research” and spends most of its money and time lobbying for what they perceive to be “family issues.”

No – you won’t find too many scholarly papers or books published by the FRC. What you will find is a lot of shocking ignorance, bigotry, and a stupidity so profound that one wonders how these people can live in the 21st century without their heads exploding.

These guys would have been right at home in Salem about 400 years ago. This is their take on homosexuality:

Family Research Council believes that homosexual conduct is harmful to the persons who engage in it and to society at large, and can never be affirmed. It is by definition unnatural, and as such is associated with negative physical and psychological health effects. While the origins of same-sex attractions may be complex, there is no convincing evidence that a homosexual identity is ever something genetic or inborn. We oppose the vigorous efforts of homosexual activists to demand that homosexuality be accepted as equivalent to heterosexuality in law, in the media, and in schools. Attempts to join two men or two women in “marriage” constitute a radical redefinition and falsification of the institution, and FRC supports state and federal constitutional amendments to prevent such redefinition by courts or legislatures. Sympathy must be extended to those who struggle with unwanted same-sex attractions, and every effort should be made to assist such persons to overcome those attractions, as many already have.

There’s never a stake and a pile of wood around when you need one, huh guys.

I am no great defender of homosexual activists – or any other activists who seek special rights or privileges based on some idiosyncratic attribute. They can’t help being gay nor can many obese people help being fat or others help the fact that they’ve got red hair (I discriminate ruthlessly against people with red hair). A line must be drawn somewhere or soon, the only people not able to claim special rights are gorgeous, hunky, heterosexual white men under the age of 40. And don’t worry, they’ll find something they’ve been discriminated for too.

But at the same time, does anyone else feel that they’ve jumped into a time machine and travelled back about 100 years when reading how the FRC feels about gays? Well, maybe not a hundred but at least 30. The American Psychiatric Association decided back in the 1970’s that homosexuality was not a mental disorder or disease so where they get this “negative physical and psychological” stuff is not, I assure you, from any recognized authority on the subject.

But the FRC talks like gays are sick while needing our sympathy and help to get rid of “unwanted” (!!) sexual desires. I pity anybody with unwanted sexual desires. It’s sort of like the feeling I get when I see Catherine Zeta-Jones in Zorro. But the FRC isn’t talking about those kind of unwanted desires; they’re talking about sexual feelings for someone from the same sex generally.

So where do they get these cockamamie, stupid, bigoted notions? It ain’t from any “research” done by the Family Research Council. Or at least any published research. What they have are brochures, “booklets,” a lecture, and a couple of friend of the court briefs filed in cases involving sodomy laws.

I have taken some pains to describe these “values” because they are apparently shared by the vast majority of “Values Voters” who showed up at this shindig in DC this week. In addition to a lot of hokum like this, they are also fed a steady diet of political red meat by the likes of Sean Hannity:

Hannity made an offer to Barack Obama. Given Obama’s predilection for scolding America for not being charitable, Hannity offered to send Obama’s destitute half-brother in Kenya $1,000, if Team Obama can send Hannity his address. If Obama will appear on his show, he’ll make it $10,000.

Afterwards, he returned to the media issue. Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s strategist, told him that the media has lost a tremendous amount of credibility in this electoral cycle. Rasmussen reports that 69% of the public believe that the media outlets have rigged their reporting to favor their candidate. In no manner is that more obvious in the way they have treated Sarah Palin. In six days, Hannity says, there were more questions about Bristol Palin than in 19 months about Obama’s association with William Ayers.

What any of that has to do with being a values voter I don’t know. But it sure revved up the troops, didn’t it?

Bill Bennett was also there. Now I happen to like Bill Bennett quite a bit and believe him to be a rational, intelligent man who speaks and writes with great clarity about the challenges of maintaining western civilization’s core values and protecting them from assault by some nihilists on the left.

But this is nonsense:

Bennett said that we have to tread carefully in our support of the Palins for the pregnancy of their teen daughter. We need to applaud the way that they handled this family crisis, Bennett says, but we have to remain focused on preventing teen sex and fight an epidemic that creates these pregnancies. We can do both, and we should.

Obama represents a different set of values, and Bennett warns that these could prove dangerous to the American way of life. We shouldn’t question his patriotism, but we can certainly question his judgment. Fred Thompson summed it up best, Bennett says. “There are two questions we will never have to ask about John McCain: Who is this man, and can we trust him with the Presidency?”

Values are “dangerous?” Are Obama’s values (he is a nominal Christian, a family man, seems fairly honest for a politician, and cares about his community) going to attack us? Maybe they’ll jump us when we’re sitting in church minding our own business. Perhaps they’ll ambush us on our way home from the store.

Values are not dangerous. They may be different. But different isn’t dangerous unless one seeks to impose those values on people who are unwilling to accept them. Obama and the Democrats may still achieve power in November. But really now, are our core values going to change that much unless we let them?

The problem is that many of the things these attendees believe to be “value oriented” either have nothing to do with “values” and everything to do with politics or, even more prosaically, are absolutely none of their fricking business as far as what others might believe, or think, or seek to live. In other words, I would tell most of the “values voters” there to get stuffed and keep their nose out of my life. My values are my own and seeking to make political issues out of personal morality is the antithesis of liberty.

For instance, saying that life begins at conception is a belief based on faith. I respect that. But science doesn’t see it that way and the government cannot, should not base laws that govern people on the way humans interpret the will and thoughts of a supernatural deity. That simply isn’t rational. Who knows the mind of God? Not Sean Hannity I assure you. And my experience has been that even great intellects and good souls like Pope Benedict harbor doubts about how well they understand what goes on in the mind of the guy upstairs.

These are not evil people at the FRC conference. I believe them to be in thrall to a belief system that they find enormous comfort in as opposed to dealing rationally with the world at large. They are led, for the most part, by good hearted people who really want to do the right thing but end up not recognizing that their own myopia about the modern world is handcuffing their parishioners and preventing them from opening their minds to all the possibilities – other ways of thinking. Other means of discovery besides finding the correct verse in the bible.

There isn’t a god but if there was, it would seem to me that he would want us earthlings to use all of our faculties, all of our experience and learning, all the cumulative knowledge built up over thousands of years of human civilization in order to get the most out of life. The discovery of carbon dating has given the lie to the notion that the earth is only 6 thousand years old. In the parlance of Christians, god opened our minds and allowed us to gain the ability to go beyond Genesis and discover for ourselves some of the mysteries of the universe. We have exceeded the knowledge of the ancients because we have built upon their work and opened our minds to the fundamental truth that we are perfectly capable creatures whose curiosity and ability to ask questions supersedes any “truth” we can get from any religion on earth.

I’m sure I share some of the “values” that these Christians accept as their own. But I don’t think I have a corner on truth nor do I think it a good idea to use the government to impose my own concept of morals or values on someone else. This I will oppose from both the religious right and secular left. My values are my own. I would be pleased if everyone – right and left – just stayed the hell out of my life and let me live it the way I see fit.

It was January 1, 1929 and Tom Lifson’s beloved California Golden Bears were facing the fearsome Georgia Tech Yellow Jackets in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, CA. Midway through the first quarter, Tech’s Jack “Stumpy” Thomason fumbled the ball and Cal’s center, a callow youth named Roy Riegles, picked up the ball and was hit a glancing blow by a Tech lineman that spun him around until he was facing his own goal. This proved tragic because Riegels, temporarily losing his bearings, began to run the wrong way – toward his own endzone.

The fastest man on the field was Reigles’ teammate Benny Lom, who took off after Riegels, screaming at him to stop and turn around. But the 90,000 fans in the Rose Bowl that day were yelling so loud – some for him to stop, others for him to continue – that it wasn’t until Riegels was at his own 3 yard line that Lom was able to corral him and get him turned the right way.

Too late. Half the Tech squad swarmed over Riegels and dropped him at the one yard line. The very next play, Tech blocked a punt for a two point safety, eventually winning the game 8-7.

Forever after, the young man was known as “Wrong Way Riegels.” He went on to live a successful life, dealing with his notoriety with good humor. Eventually, he was named to the Cal Hall of Fame and the play itself was enshrined as one of the six most memorable sports moments of the 20th century.

Barack Obama would do well to study the life of Mr. Riegels. For the last fortnight he has lost his bearings and has been sprinting as hard as he can toward his own goal line while his own teammates are screaming at him to turn around. In the annals of modern American political campaigns, it is hard to remember when one candidate has shot himself in his own foot so often in such a short time period.

His attacks on Palin backfired horribly. Obama should know – since he is the master of this game – that people don’t care much what your position was previously on an issue, it’s where you are now that matters. Hence, Obama’s lurch toward the center during the summer where he threw many of his previous far left positions on issues under the bus and adapted a more moderate stance worked with the voters who now see the former #1 liberal in the senate as a moderate. Similarly, Palin’s previous support for the “Bridge to Nowhere” gets tossed out the window because she now opposes it. Voters are not going to hold it against her no matter how many millions of dollars Obama spends on commercials calling her a liar.

Beyond that, he and his campaign’s snide comments about her experience and his supporters attacking her family seems to have enraged many women. You don’t go from a comfortable advantage in the polls among women to a 12 point deficit in two weeks without screwing up royally.

And speaking of screwing up, the guy who came up with this bright idea of an ad should be fired:

“Today is the first day of the rest of the campaign,” Obama campaign manager David Plouffe says in a campaign strategy memo. “We will respond with speed and ferocity to John McCain’s attacks and we will take the fight to him, but we will do it on the big issues that matter to the American people.”

The newest ad showcasing their hard line includes unflattering footage of McCain at a hearing in the early ‘80s, wearing giant glasses and an out-of-style suit, interspersed with shots of a disco ball, a clunky phone, an outdated computer and a Rubik’s Cube.

“1982, John McCain goes to Washington,” an announcer says over chirpy elevator music. “Things have changed in the last 26 years, but McCain hasn’t.

“He admits he still doesn’t know how to use a computer, can’t send an e-mail, still doesn’t understand the economy, and favors two hundred billion in new tax cuts for corporations, but almost nothing for the middle class,” it says. It shows video of McCain getting out of a golf cart with former President George H.W. Bush and closes with a photo of him standing with the current President Bush at the White House. “After one president who was out of touch, we just can’t afford more of the same.”

Bravo, Barry! You’ve just won the prize as the biggest numbnuts to ever run for president:

Yep. The day after 9/11, as part of its “get tough” makeover, the Obama campaign is mocking John McCain for not using a computer, without caring why he doesn’t use a computer. From the AP story about the computer illiterate ad:

“Our economy wouldn’t survive without the Internet, and cyber-security continues to represent one our most serious national security threats,” [Obama spokesman Dan] Pfeiffer said. “It’s extraordinary that someone who wants to be our president and our commander in chief doesn’t know how to send an e-mail.”

Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by “extraordinary.” The reason he doesn’t send email is that he can’t use a keyboard because of the relentless beatings he received from the Viet Cong in service to our country. From the Boston Globe (March 4, 2000):

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain’s encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He’s an avid fan – Ted Williams is his hero – but he can’t raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

In a similar vein I guess it’s an outrage that the blind governor of New York David Paterson doesn’t know how to drive a car. After all, transportation issues are pretty important. How dare he serve as governor while being ignorant of what it’s like to navigate New York’s highways.

John Hinderaker headlines his post on this “Obama Gets Tough, Shoots Self in Head.” That just about sums it up. If this is the campaign’s idea of “ferocity,” I would suggest they stop taking lessons on how to be an attack dog from Huckleberry Hound. What an insanely stupid thing to do; criticize someone for not being able to perform a physical task because they were brutally tortured (not by the “Viet Cong,”) in service to their country?

The liberals are ignoring the gaffe and concentrating instead on the fact that torture is no excuse for McCain not to be able to type, that there are plenty of devices out there that he could use that would allow him to be as computer literate as the geniuses in the Obama campaign who don’t know how to use Google to find out why McCain is somewhat constrained from using a keyboard because the North Vietnamese used a hammer on his hands to break his fingers several times not to mention hanging McCain by his thumbs and hoisting him off the ground.

The McCain campaign is taking a different tack in defense, pointing out that the candidate travels with a laptop. McCain himself has said that he is “learning” to surf the web and that his wife reads emails to him.

It is largely an irrelevant issue as Goldberg points out. And examining the attack for its political impact, let’s look at this excellent piece by Patrick Ruffini on what makes a good attack meme. First, he quotes Phil Singer’s incisive take on what is needed for a successful attack:

Political attacks work best when the charge they make is both echoed by the subject of those attacks and resonate with voter perceptions of that candidate. Case in point: The flip-flop attack on John Kerry wouldn’t have been nearly as effective as it was if he hadn’t told voters in West Virginia that he voted for the $87 billion before he voted against it. Kerry gave the Republicans a real time example of the negative storyline they were driving against him.

Fast forward to 2008: It’s tough to make the McSame attack stick because John McCain rose to national prominence by being a thorn in George W. Bush’s side. McCain might have voted for 90 percent of the Bush agenda but the public got to know him as a pain in Bush’s behind – a perception aided by the fact that Democrats rushed to exploit the McCain-Bush schism that came out of the 2000 primaries.

So does that mean the Obama campaign should ignore the fact that McCain voted 90% of the time with Bush. Absolutely not.

It means that the Obama campaign needs to focus its energies on generating some real time examples of McCain hugging Bush. (I think there are some other areas to hit as well but that’s a post for another time.)

Does the “out of touch because he can’t use a computer” attack resonate with voters? I’ll grant a yes to that but add that there’s a helluva lot more potent angles to attack McCain on than whether he can use a computer. Even if you can come up with an answer to the idea that he can’t use a keyboard because of torture, you are missing the point, John Cole. Even if he could use one of those devices for the handicapped, all the attack does is remind people that John McCain was tortured. Nothing else matters. You don’t criticize your opponent and then leave yourself wide open to a counterattack that uses your opponent’s powerful narrative as rebuttal.

Towering idiocy.

Ruffini points out that the Obama campaign’s attacks fail to resonate not because they’re not true but because they go against how McCain has defined himself:

This is the Obama campaign going with an Attack 1.0 strategy—pick your opponent’s theoretically most damaging vulnerability and hammer away at it, regardless of how initially believable it is. The premise: repetition will make an initially farfetched but damaging attack believable.

The McCain campaign and the Steve Schmidt machine is pursuing an Attack 2.0 strategy. Pick the most believable attack (or the one most likely to get picked up by earned media, which magnifies paid media by orders of magnitude) even if it isn’t the most damaging, and hammer away until it is the most relevant and therefore damaging.

Attack 2.0 beats Attack 1.0 because there is some kernel of public belief in the attack that allows it to go viral.

This is the premise behind “celeb”—up to that point, Obama’s celebrity status had been considered an asset. But in reality, it was always a hidden vulnerability.

I said when Obama first chose to decline federal matching funds that having too much money was a curse in many ways. This is one of them. They have been hammering the “McSame” meme for weeks, spending tens of millions of dollars and have failed to make a dent in McCain’s “maverick” personae. I daresay with less money, they probably would have realized sooner that this strategy was going nowhere and backed off. Now here we are in the middle of September and they really have not developed an overriding attack strategy at all. They are in limbo – caught between a failed strategy and a ticking clock.

Meanwhile, the McCain campaign is driving Obama and the netnuts wild with attacks that are resonating because they play into people’s growing perception of Obama as a far left liberal with no experience and someone who is full of hot air and not much more.

And Obama is assisting the McCain campaign by coming up with attacks that help the Republican rather than destroy him. If things keep going the way they have been for the past two weeks, this election is going to be remembered for how many times Barack Obama took the ball and ran toward his own goal line, scoring for his opponent.

This post will not be about 9/11. I have written about that day for each of the last three years and have poured out all the emotion and psychic injury that the memories engendered by watching the horror originally filled me to bursting. There is nothing left to say that I haven’t already said and I hate repeating myself. I am, as the poet said, a “vessel’s contents spilled out onto the ground, a wastrel shadow, as sands in an hourglass pouring till time marks my soul’s rest.”

Have we really changed all that much? We conservatives like to talk about Democrats and liberals living in a “9/10 World” but the fact is, the world and America were changing long before 9/11 and will continue to change as long as we are alive. As a chronicler of events and enthusiastic but hopelessly amateurish historian, I have watched history’s march these last few years and tried to answer the question “What has changed in America since 9/11?” It might surprise you that I have come to the conclusion that a much more relevant question is “What has remained the same since 9/11?”

The internet is more of a factor in people’s lives but everybody and their stupid uncle saw that one coming in the 90’s. The ubiquitousness of cell phones has made it possible for people to plug in to the world in the morning and remain wired for the whole day. HDTV is cheaper and better. The greatest boon to mankind – the Tom Tom – has altered the way we drive and probably saved a few marriages along the way.

But save a few technological baubles that glitter in our hand or in our home, what has really changed in America since 9/11/01? Democrats and the left still believe that 9/11 was a tragedy but that the “War on Terror” is a misnomer and we are going about it the wrong way. The right believes the left wants us all to die at the hands of a scimitar wielding Islamist and that the US is suffering from Sharia creep.

Both outlooks are silly, stupid, and self defeating. I would say to my friends on the left that there is a “War on Terror” whether you want one or not thanks to our enemies declaring it so. And the idea of fighting such a war by “addressing the root causes” of the conflict is just absurd. Some of the truly fabulously wealthy people on this earth – Saudi princes – are some of the most dyed in the wool, American and western hating Islamists.

It isn’t a lack of education either. The madrasses that are currently turning out Taliban fighters by the hundreds every month in Pakistan take great care in teaching their charges how to read and write, figure sums, and teach other subjects western children also learn. Of course, they also teach how to blow people up which makes them somewhat different than your average suburban American school.

To my friends on the right, please get off this silly meme that America is being Islamized. Every time I read a story about some town or city accommodating the religious beliefs of Muslims and then read blogs and commenters who point to that as evidence that America is giving in to Sharia law, I want to throw up on my monitor. You sound exactly like the Know-Nothings of the 1850’s who feared the Irish because they were “papists” and thought they would turn America into a Catholic country. There are about 5 million Muslims in the United States and the chances of them taking over and converting the rest of us are about the same as the Democrats winning the presidential race in Wyoming.

I have come to the conclusion that we are pretty much the same country as we were on September 10, 2001. We are more cognizant of the terror threat which is a good thing. But we have allowed the war against terror to become politicized which is not. I have written many times that we need the left in this fight if we are to eventually prevail. But that won’t happen as long as our liberal friends continue to see fighting terror as some kind of police dragnet and the right calls anyone who disagrees with them unpatriotic. Somehow, a bridge must be found that both sides can use to rationally discuss our situation.

And boy do we need a national conversation. Both sides have fallen into such absolutes on the issues that we have the spectacle of some on the right defending torture while some on the left seeing any increase in executive power as tantamount to the creation of a dictatorship. This is nuts. If there is one thing we should have learned since 9/11 its that absolutism is deadly. Its stultifying effects on debate precludes any kind of rational response to the serious threat of Islamic terrorism. There is room for disagreement about terrorism and other national security issues. But how can you debate someone so closed minded that they dismiss the other side out of hand because they believe their opponents don’t care about America? Or that their political foes prefer an authoritarian police state to freedom due to unreasoning “fear” of terrorism?

Toxicity in our national dialogue exists not because we debate whether Obama called Palin a pig or even if Obama is as unqualified as Palin for high office. This is politics and in case you haven’t noticed, it is the way political contests have been fought in this country for a long time. Television and the internet have only magnified the controversies, given them a more immediate impact and perhaps a longer shelf life. But jumping on something dumb your opponent has said has been forever a part of American politics. To pretend – as the left and the media is whining today – that this is something new is ridiculous.

It is not the trivial things that separate us. It is trust in the intentions and motivations of the other side. I have written often that the left – with the best of intentions – supports the trashing of our culture. The ostensible reason is more freedom. The result is toxic sludge as the appeal to the lowest impulses in human beings slithers to the surface and enters the mainstream. The backlash against this we see with Christian cultural warriors who believe the left is out to deliberately infect their children and hence, they seek to impose their own standards and morals on the rest of us.

The inevitable push back from the left, who believe the Christians are out to destroy America, adds fuel to the fire and a full blown culture war erupts where debate is useless and both sides seek government help to impose their own worldview on everyone else.

This poison has spilled over and now infects all of our politics. If there is one thing that has changed since 9/11 is that the chasm between the two sides has gotten wider and the infection has spread to the point where nothing is untouched. The hope that Obama could bridge the gap – or anyone for that matter – was never realistic. America is what it is today and blaming one side or the other for the mess our politics has become is futile.

The fear I have is that if 9/11 can’t bring us together, what will? A nuclear terrorist attack? Assassinations? War with a nuclear Iran?

We are a weaker nation because we are so divided. To my mind, it’s only a matter of time before someone takes advantage of that fact and makes us pay a price we may be unwilling to bear.

I want to congratulate Senator Obama for handing the Republicans a truly awesome line of attack with his “lipstick on a pig” insult. In fact, few presidential candidates have acted as stupidly as Obama the last fortnight, although John Kerry’s late summer silence when the Swift boaters attacked comes pretty close. Or maybe Michael Dukakis’s entire campaign.

The fact of the matter is that Barack Obama and the Democrats haven’t a clue what to do about Sarah Palin. Virtually every time they open their mouths about her, they stick their foot so far down their own throats, they initiate the gag reflex. The little lady from small town USA who is morphing into Everywoman before our eyes (minus Steinem feminists and super-partisans) has the best political minds in the Democratic party well and truly flummoxed, paralyzed with fear or so angry they go off half cocked and say something incredibly dumb.

What a sight it is to behold.

And now Obama, without meaning to, has slit his own wrists with a poorly chosen metaphor for the McCain-Palin idea of change while his running mate, with equally bad judgement, seemed to bring little Trig Palin into a political debate over stem cell research.

First Obama’s gaffe:

Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin’s new “change” mantra.

“You can put lipstick on a pig,” he said as the crowd cheered. “It’s still a pig.”

“You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still gonna stink.”

“We’ve had enough of the same old thing.”

I actually prefer the “pig in a prom dress is still a pig” metaphor but that’s because I’m partial to sleeveless frocks worn by teenage nymphs whose nubile bodies are silhouetted so alluringly in the moonlight on prom night.

(There I go again.)
Did he or didn’t he? Did he actually refer to Palin as a pig? The press, playing it right down the middle, are giving Obama the benefit of the doubt as are some conservatives like Ambinder.

For me, the context is ambiguous enough that at the very least, Obama can shield himself with a “plausible deniability” defense.

But then there’s that second line about “old” fish stinking. One analogy that serves the dual purpose of hitting McCain’s “change” argument and trashing Palin might be defended as Obama simply using an idiom he has used before and that McCain has even employed in the past as Ambinder shows.

But Marc ignores the second metaphorical swipe by Obama about old stinking fish. Taken together it is hard for a reasonable person to come away with any other conclusion than the Obama campaign sliming first Palin and then McCain with schoolyard epithets.

In the end, it really doesn’t matter what he meant. The crowd certainly thought they knew what he was talking about when they roared their approval at the insult. And the McCain campaign came out immediately with a response:

The McCain campaign is holding a conference call with former Massachusetts Gov. Jane Swift, who is calling on Barack Obama to apologize to Sarah Palin for his “lipstick on a pig” comment. “We need to continually combat this stream of insults,” Swift said, referring specifically to “what I can only deem to be disgraceful comments comparing our vice presidential nominee, Gov. Palin, to a pig.”

Reporters were a bit skeptical that Obama intended to do that; from the sketchy reports we have, he seemed to be talking about how John McCain can claim to represent change but isn’t really an agent of change. But Swift said, “it’s pretty clear the crowd thought that that was the insult he was leveling.” And Swift made the (hopefully) undeniable observation that Palin is the only one of the four national candidates who wears lipstick.

The Obama people tried vainly to stamp out the brush fire:

Enough is enough. The McCain campaign’s attack tonight is a pathetic attempt to play the gender card about the use of a common analogy – the same analogy that Senator McCain himself used about Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health care plan just last year. This phony lecture on gender sensitivity is the height of cynicism and lays bare the increasingly dishonorable campaign John McCain has chosen to run.

I don’t necessarily think the McCain campaign is playing a “gender card” but rather they appeared to be responding to the base insult of calling someone a pig. After all, Swift never brought up gender in her critique. She specifically referenced Palin as “our Vice Presidential candidate.” Perhaps the unspoken subtext was that Obama had been sexist but the McCain campaign quite cleverly left that to the imagination. Women will be offended because Obama supposedly called Palin a pig. They don’t need a set of instructions to get mad at someone already accused of running a sexist campaign against Hillary Clinton.

Indeed, the McCain camp already have a 30 second commercial on Obama’s double entendre in the can:

It didn’t take Team McCain long to develop a new television spot from Barack Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” comment. They have rolled out this 30-second spot hammering Obama for his sexism, using a Katie Couric quote to remind viewers of Obama’s allegedly sexist campaign against Hillary Clinton. They also note that while Obama isn’t ready to lead, he seems ready to smear:

Ditto Joe Biden who actually seemed to bring the Palin’s Down Syndrome baby into a political argument or at the very least challenge Palin’s deeply held beliefs:

“I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have … the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability,” said Biden…. “Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don’t you support stem cell research?”

Leave aside Biden’s monumental ignorance of the science of stem cell research, this is dishonest and slimy on its face. Allah at Hot Air:

 He’s not going after Trig, he’s going after Palin for a position she’s taken on a specific policy issue. Compare and contrast with the media’s descent on Bristol Palin last week, which had nothing to do with policy – Palin’s stance on abstinence education was a fig leaf they reached for afterwards – and everything to do with proving that Palin’s a bad mom. I’m with Ambinder on this one, though: It’s worse than a crime, it’s a mistake. For one thing, in true Biden fashion, it’s clumsily phrased. Presumably he means embryonic stem-cell research, not stem-cell research generally; putting it the way he did leaves McCain open to remind centrists that he supports ESCR and Palin open to tout alternatives to the embryonic approach to take control of the issue. For another thing, even partisans as unhinged as Sullivan have felt obliged to praise her for her commitment to life in carrying Trig to term knowing his condition. It’s one of the strongest testaments to her character in her biography. All this does is push that fact back in front of voters. But beyond that, his question is simply stupid and easily answered: She doesn’t support ESCR because she believes in life at conception and isn’t willing to sacrifice it even to help her own son. Unlike Joe Biden, of course, who also claims to believe in life at conception and yet seems willing to sacrifice it at every opportunity.

It boggles the mind that they allow Joe Biden out and about without a muzzle and a handler whose job is to switch off the mike whenever Biden deviates from the script. The guy is a walking, talking gaffe machine and if anyone was paying any attention to what he says, he would probably be in even more hot water.

But Biden’s head exploding gaffe is just a sympton of what ails the Obama campaign. They are off balance, tentative, and clueless when it comes to strategizing a counter to Palin and her popularity which has hit the presidential campaign like a sudden thunderstorm and thrown everything out of whack. And the McCain camp, finally running on all cylinders and demonstrating a competence no one expected from it just a few months ago, is laying the wood to Obama and Biden for every misstep they make. They are making them pay – in spades. (Pardon the idiom but as Obama says, everyone uses it.)

Can they right the ship in time to make a run? Of course they can. It’s only September and we’ve got a long way to go. And Palin is a rookie who will probably be prone to making a few gaffes here and there once she starts doing interviews and participates in the VP debate next month. But already it appears that some states they once thought competitive like North Carolina (McCain +20) and states they believed in the bag like Wisconsin (Obama +3) have changed with the altered dynamics of the race supplied by Palin.

The Obama campaign will never be able to get back the time they have lost with their scattershot, ineffective, and ultimately self defeating attacks on Palin. And in the end, that might spell the difference between victory and defeat.

I would have thought by now that the Obama campaign would have figured out how to effectively attack Sarah Palin and bring her down a peg or two. But it appears that rather than take a studied, reflective approach to determining their best strategy for assaulting her, they have continued to flail about wildly, throwing everything against the wall and watching to see if anything sticks.

So far, no dice. They tried the old “smear and fear” approach but only ended up getting so many facts wrong while appearing mean and stupid that Palin skated merrily away, garnering sympathy for having to endure the baseless, outrageous lies and falsehoods about her family from the press and liberal blogs.

Their efforts to paint Palin as an extremist were even less successful. Even FactCheck.org referred to the charges that she cut funds for special needs children, banned books, endorsed Pat Buchanan, and belonged to the secession-minded Alaskan Independence Party as “sliming” Palin. She also does not support teaching creationism in public schools although she’s one of those “let’s allow the kids to debate evolution and creationism” folks that makes me want to throw my copy of Origin of the Species through the wall. And her pastor apparently believes that gay people can be “cured” – of what, I’m not sure except he might want to pray for himself so that God allows him to move forward in time so that he can live in the 19th century.

No word on whether Palin believes the same thing and until someone asks her, we won’t know. But don’t you find it a touch ironic that GOP efforts to tie Obama to his kooky preacher are met with cries of “guilt by association” by the left while it is apparently perfectly alright to make Palin’s preacher and his views fair game?

No matter. The Democrats seem to have realized the backlash created by their smears and have now tried a few other tacks – at least one of which has backfired almost as badly as the smears against her family.

I’m talking about “Troopergate” where Palin apparently pressured the Public Safety Commissioner to fire her state trooper ex-brother in law. The press tried to paint the entire matter as Palin improperly interfering in an internal police matter because she was being vindictive. Unfortunately for the Democrats, the truth came out about her sister’s ex drinking on the job, tasering his 12 year old stepson, and finally threatening her father’s life.

Funny how those details were included in stories about “Troopergate” as insignificant asides – or not included at all. At any rate, Palin may indeed be censured because technically, it appears she exercised influence where she shouldn’t have. The Democrat’s problem is that no one blames her for doing so because of the threats and the beastly behavior of the ex.

I note on Memeorandum that stories of “Troopergate” have disappeared entirely. They have been replaced by articles about how Sarah Palin is lying when she says she fought the “Bridge to Nowhere” which actually was a “Bridge to Somewhere” – specifically an island with 7,500 inhabitants. Palin says wants to use state funds to build it but a couple of years ago, she was singing a different tune:

“We need to come to the defense of Southeast Alaska when proposals are on the table like the bridge,” Gov. Palin said in August 2006, according to the local newspaper, “and not allow the spinmeisters to turn this project or any other into something that’s so negative.” The bridge would have linked Ketchikan to the airport on Gravina Island. Travelers from Ketchikan (pop. 7,500) now rely on ferries.

Apparently, she eventually did kick the residents of Southeast Alaska under the bus and oppose the bridge – but only after conservative bloggers had made it a cause celebre.

OMIGOD STOP THE PRESSES! A politician is exaggerating! Maybe even lying. I would find this a cause for concern if liberal bloggers and the media were one tenth – make that one one hundredth – as interested in Obama’s whoppers and exaggerations as they are Palin’s.

Face it guys. Politicians are liars. They lie for a living. They lie at the drop of a hat and will continue lying because it works. To suddenly acquire religion and decry politicians lying is an absurdity I didn’t think even the left was capable.

Only 12 year old children and liberals believe politicians like Obama which is why they can become so disillusioned with politics. When their heroes are shown to have feet of clay, they don’t blame their own naivete and child like belief in those who seek great power but rather they blame the “system” or they become even more infantile and blame their hero’s opponent for making him something less than what he purports to be. I’ve seen it for nearly 40 years and it never ceases to amaze me.

So the Plain fib about opposing the Bridge to Nowhere is getting them exactly that – nowhere. Josh Marshall is hopeful.

We’ve now had a week of blaring headlines and one-liners about Sarah Palin as the mavericky, pork-busting reformer from Alaska. But we seem to be witnessing the first stirrings of a backlash and a dawning realization that the ‘Sarah Palin’ we’ve heard so much about over the last few days is a fraud of truly comical dimensions.

The McCain camp has made her signature issue shutting down the Bridge to Nowhere. But as The New Republic put it today that’s just “a naked lie.” And pretty much the same thing has been written today in Newsweek, the Washington Post, the AP, the Wall Street Journal. Yesterday even Fox’s Chris Wallace called out Rick Davis on it. (Do send more examples when you find them.)

On earmarks she’s an even bigger crock. On the trail with McCain they’re telling everyone that she’s some kind of earmark slayer when actually, when she was mayor and governor, in both offices, she requested and got more earmarks than virtually any city or state in the country.

As you can tell, Josh has been using the Hadron Collider to split hairs about what constitutes Palin “fraud” and what is revealed as lefty hyperbole. Exaggerating accomplishments and diminishing negatives is a part of politics. Grow up Josh. Or better yet, be a journalist and start listing Obama lies and whoppers on your site. I won’t hold my breath for that.

Nor will I waste my time waiting for Marshall to list our “Change and Hope” candidate’s hundreds of millions in earmarks – some of which went to his political cronies and his wife’s employer. This doesn’t include using his influence while state senator to enrich his patrone, convicted felon Tony Rezko. These items seem to disappear into the ether between Marshall’s claim to be a “journalist” and the rank partisan stench that emanates from his blog.

But Josh has a weird habit of thinking that whatever people inside the beltway believe about an issue or a candidate that the rest of the country shares those attitudes. I daresay he will be greatly disappointed if he thinks that Palin’s convenient dodge about the BTN will resonate with anyone save his fellow lefties.

So far, nothing appears to be sticking to Palin that would destroy her or even lessen her popularity. And despite efforts to paint her otherwise, she appears to be a genuine reformer. And it is an historical fact that she ran against the establishment Republicans and won. The parsing of words, the effort to blow up the most insignificant appearance of impropriety into a major scandal, and the still whispered smears against her and her family have all failed to make a dent in Palin’s shining armor much less throw her off her white charger.

The ghosts of Chet Huntley and David Brinkley can rest easy now.

The two NBC news icons who for years consistently topped CBS and Walter Cronkite in the ratings and set a standard for political coverage unmatched since, no doubt would have been flabbergasted at the idea of a former sportscaster and unabashed liberal screamer being taken seriously as the anchor of the network’s political news coverage. That “experiment” is now over as Olbermann, along with his loudmouthed, ignorant sidekick Chris Matthews, have been tossed from anchoring political coverage on MSNBC.

Thankfully, both men died before Keith Olbermann began to run MSNBC. In this New York Times article, a staffer is quoted as saying what anyone could see; that the inmate was running the asylum; “They have banked the entirety of the network on Keith Olbermann,” said the staffer.

Any network news executive who would build political coverage around that shrill, partisan, conspiratorial-minded boob should first, have their head examined to see if there is any gray matter present and then summarily fired.

God knows what the worst imitator of Edward R. Murrow in history would have made of the wry wit and incisive analysis of a David Brinkley or the authoritative voice of knowledge and experience of a Chet Huntley. No doubt he would have given them short shrift since they wouldn’t have been in the tank enough for Barack Obama. And if he shared the stage with either of those two, he would have been exposed as … well, a former sportscaster who doesn’t know anything about politics.

But Olbermann didn’t need Huntley or Brinkley to reveal his ignorance. He does it on a daily basis all by himself, thank you. It still would have been priceless to see Brinkley – who was known to be brutal in correcting errors of correspondents on air during election night telecasts – throw a few wry observations about the role of a news anchor at the clueless Olbermann.

MSNBC was obviously trying to duplicate the success of Fox News and their sometimes biased news coverage that slants toward conservatives and Republicans. But what MSNBC President Phil Griffin just doesn’t get is that Fox News also does a lot of straight news programming as well with respected journalists like Brit Hume and Chris Wallace playing it pretty much down the middle most of the time. Instead, Griffin believes that all news should have an ideological bent: “In a rapidly changing media environment, this is the great philosophical debate,” he says.

This is pure baloney. There is nothing philosophical in trying to save newspapers or garner more rating point and please don’t insult our intelligence by pretending otherwise. This is a debate about the bottom line and whether it is worth the loss of integrity in order to pander to one side or the other. The idea is tempting because it is the way news used to be disseminated. In the days before radio and TV, newspapers and magazines as a matter of tradition were either Democratic or Republican organs. There were a few independent outlets but they were never as popular as the party rags that waged political war on the front pages of their newspapers. The publishers took great pride in their ability to move people through fear and smear tactics to vote for their preferred candidates.

This was in the day when large cities routinely had at least a dozen or more dailies – both morning and evening editions – and papers fought to sensationalize everything. The more partisan the slant, the more readers. And yet, there was also a healthy dose of straight news reporting as well – mostly on local matters. But very little news from Washington or the state capitol was unbiased.

Then around the turn of the 20th century, that began to change as the progressives sought to make journalism if not unbiased then certainly less partisan. The people responded by rewarding those publications that offered a more balanced view of politics with more success and gradually, the rank partisanship of most news outlets became less obvious and was generally confined to the Op-Ed pages.

The new medium of TV had barely any news programming at all and what there was of it consisted of a news reader sitting at a desk, facing the camera and largely reading wire service copy. Edward R. Murrow at CBS changed that, bringing in his “boys” who revolutionized radio journalism in the 1930’s. Murrow was even more liberal than Olbermann and made no bones of it on his show See it Now.

But Murrow had two things going for him that Keith Olbermann could never dream of having; integrity and an overriding sense of fairness. Where Olbermann was overheard during the convention trying to cut off a GOP strategist Mike Murphy with his “Let’s wrap him up” aside that was caught by a live mike, Murrow made it a point of immense pride that he gave equal time to the targets of his show. He saw the enormous potential power of TV news and felt that too much partisanship would destroy the credibility of the new medium.

But MSNBC’s Griffin thinks that this “great philosophical debate” over whether to throw journalistic integrity to the winds in order to improve the bottom line should be foisted on an unsuspecting public:

Mr. Griffin, MSNBC’s president, denies that it has an ideology. “I think ideology means we think one way, and we don’t,” he said. Rather than label MSNBC’s prime time as left-leaning, he says it has passion and point of view.

But MSNBC is the cable arm of NBC News, the dispassionate news division of NBC Universal. MSNBC, “Today” and “NBC Nightly News” share some staff members, workspace and content. And some critics are claiming they also share a political affiliation.

Indeed, Griffin thinks that simply putting Olbermann in the anchor chair defines the ranting nutcase as “unbiased:”

In May, MSNBC President Phil Griffin said in an interview that during live events Olbermann and Matthews “put on different hats. I think the audience gets it. . . . I see zero problem.”

But NBC News journalists, who often appear on the cable channel, did see a problem, arguing behind the scenes that MSNBC’s move to the left—which includes a new show, debuting tonight, for Air America radio host Rachel Maddow—was tarnishing their reputation for fairness. Tom Brokaw, the interim host of “Meet the Press,” said that at times Olbermann and Matthews went too far.

How an adult can look at Olbermann and see a non-biased observer is a mystery. Jennifer Rubin asks the same thing:

The Left has compared MSNBC to Fox, but the analogy has always fallen on exactly this point: Fox separated talk-show partisans (e.g. Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly) from news anchors and reporters ( e.g. Brit Hume, Chris Wallace) while MSNBC did not. This move is a small but essential corrective step.

From the outside one can easily ask, “What took so long?” But the temptation to give into bullies and to seek some small ratings/monetary advantage is great. It is no easy thing to say “enough” and somebody –or somebodies — at MSNBC/NBC did just that. But whether this is part of a greater course correction, one that will be reflected in more than a shuffling of the anchor chairs on the deck of the MSM Titanic remains to be seen.

When even the sane left agrees that Olbermann as anchor was a loony idea, you realize the titanic blunder made by Griffin and other MSNBC execs. Jeralyn Merritt:

Sure, it was his and Matthews’ abysmal coverage of the primaries that ensured millions of viewers wouldn’t be back. But it’s more than that. Who wants to watch an hour of Keith Olbermann’s opinions, backed up by reporters and pundits selected only because they share his view? It’s no different than watching Laura Ingraham or Lou Dobbs.

Good for MSNBC for recognizing, however belatedly, that news coverage of live events like debates and election night, should be anchored by journalists with an assist from pundits on both sides. They shouldn’t be the main event.

Ron Chusid:

Having Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews anchor political coverage was often more interesting than the other networks, but it was, to be mild, journalistically flawed. This especially proved to be a problem as the reputation of MSNBC also affected the reputation of NBC. The New York Times reports that Olbermann and Matthews are to be removed as anchors for the remainder of the coverage of the election.

Matthews, who at times seemed to be trying to match Olbermann’s partisanship, never belonged on an anchor desk either. But at least he knows something about politics. Watching Olbermann’s painfully amateurish and simple minded “analysis” was actually funny at times. He seemed like a little boy who had wandered by accident into the after dinner gathering of adult men who were smoking cigars and drinking Courvoisier while talking talking politics and world affairs. He was wearing short pants in a long pants world.

David Gregory, who will take over the anchor duties for the debates and election night, is an improvement but hardly someone who has demonstrated fairness in his coverage of the campaigns. But he has an excellent grasp of politics and the issues and should at least give the viewer the benefit of some expert analysis.

Meanwhile, one wonders how MSNBC can get its soul back. A good start would be to fire Griffin and bring in a genuine news executive. After all, Griffin is the man who gave Keith Olbermann his head and allowed him to run the NBC News brand into the toilet. Someone should pay for that or the ghosts of Huntley and Brinkley may haunt the network for eternity.

With “Palinmania” continuing to grow at every stop on the campaign trail, John McCain and his advisors are suddenly faced with a most unique and troubling problem; his Vice Presidential pick is much more popular than he and will almost certainly draw bigger crowds than the presumptive presidential nominee once she goes out and campaigns on her own. This will no doubt be pointed out by the press and the Obama campaign (is there a difference at this point?) and might serve to underscore McCain’s relative weakness and the tepid level of enthusiasm he generates even among party faithful.

The campaign is vamping a bit, extending the scheduled 3 day joint tour of the two for a few days, no doubt to both take advantage of Palin’s extraordinary popularity and to try and come up with a solution – or at least a decent response – to questions that will arise about McCain’s drawing power. Frankly, I’m not sure there is anything they can do. The press is going to be counting noses at the separate events for the two and will try to spin the difference as detrimental to McCain no matter what the campaign does or says about it. It is probably best that McCain simply ride the wave of Palin’s celebrity as far as it will take him. And if she gets millions to the polls who might have stayed home otherwise, it may give him the presidency.

Sarah Palin is something new in conservative politics; a figure actually adored by millions of ordinary Americans, many of whom are not Republicans. To say that this turns the idea of celebrity on its head is an understatement. Conservatives are not supposed to be pop culture icons in that traditionalists are what popular culture seeks to rebel against. But many of the same mothers who take their daughters to Miley Cyrus concerts (and probably took their older sisters to Britney Spears events) would have no trouble taking both to an appearance by Palin.

That’s because Palin has transcended what she stands for as a politician and is admired for who she is; a mother of 5 kids, a wife of 20 years to a working class hero kind of guy, and a woman with a career who tries to balance it all while looking like a million dollars. She is what millions of middle class women aspire to be and recognize as a kindred spirit.

I have a feeling that the women quoted here are representative of a new group of swing voter;

“She’s a real woman, she’s a real feminist but she’s not strident — she’s like us,” said Hauswirth, a middle-aged mother who didn’t offer her age. “She’s strong, powerful and opinionated, all the things a women should be, while still retaining her femininity, her womanhood.”

[ . . . ]

But for the many who showed up to see the newly minted Republican team, it wasn’t any issue or political posture that had brought them out.

It was just a woman that they saw a lot of themselves in. Or, as one homemade sign put it, “Pro-Life Hockey Moms 4 Palin.”

“She’s got a real family with real troubles, just like the rest of us,” said Melody Halstrom, a middle-aged women from River Hills, Wis., who came over to the Cedarburg rally. “You know, she’s got teenagers,” Halstrom said, alluding to without actually bringing up the well-publicized pregnancy of Palin’s unwed 17-year-old daughter.

(HT: Right Wing Prof)

These are traditional women playing non-traditional roles who see the 44 year old Alaskan governor through the prism of their own life experiences and can identify with her choices. Her struggles are their struggles. Her crisis are theirs.

How many of them are out there? I am not speaking of the millions of GOP partisans who admire Palin for her stand on abortion or any of the social wedge issues. The women of whom I am thinking more than likely voted for Hillary Clinton or are independents who would have supported her in the general election. There may be enough of them in Ohio to secure that state for McCain. And they might even help McCain in states like Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan if this Palin boom continues through the election.

Unfortunately, this may not occur simply because it is unthinkable that the campaign will allow the nominee’s running mate to upstage him from now through November 4. It is a situation unique in American politics even though there has been a woman on a major party ticket prior to Palin’s ascension. Geraldine Ferraro may have been the first woman nominated as Vice President on either the Republican or Democratic slate. But it is safe to say that despite being a smart, capable person, Ferraro never generated even half the excitement Palin is creating out on the hustings.

The easy answer to that is that Ferraro was a dyed in the wool feminist and a liberal to boot. But that ignores the more important cultural ramifications of Palin’s candidacy. Ferraro, I’m sure, was a good mother and loving wife but there was never a sense of the modern balancing act women with careers have to perform on a daily basis with kids, and hockey practice, and family problems, and the whole slew of issues middle class women have to deal with in order to keep the family happy and close knit.

Most women work because they have to in order to make ends meet or give the family those vital little extras not to mention the fulfillment many women get from the feeling of independence and pride that having a job brings. Politicians have tried for years to address these women directly with varying degrees of success. Democrats have offered child care, family leave, job protections for pregnant women, and the child health insurance program S-CHIP among other programs. Republicans haven’t ignored these women but have not offered much government assistance, preferring tax credits to ease the financial burden on the family.

Palin is the first Republican politician with which these women can truly identify. She speaks their language. She sounds like them. Her family looks like their family. And when she speaks of the mixing of her career and family, she can look directly at the camera and give them a knowing smile of solidarity – as if they were neighbors casually talking over the backyard fence.

It is true many of these white, working women are socially much more liberal than Palin. But one might note that in their appearances together, McCain and Palin eschew the normal panders to the right wing social conservatives and talk about issues of national concern instead. I find this highly significant because one of the ostensible reasons McCain chose Palin was as a sop to the evangelicals. And yet I note in both their acceptance speeches, abortion and gay marriage were never mentioned (Palin referred elliptically to her “choice” of having a child with Downs Syndrome).

I celebrate that change from past conventions because it welcomes into the Republican party millions of women who are marginally pro-choice but who are troubled by the moral implications of unlimited and unfettered abortion. Say what you will about the Clinton’s but they triangulated the issue of abortion beautifully by supporting choice but saying that we should work to make abortion the least performed operation in the country. Not that McCain-Palin would ever go so far as that but the idea of dialing down the rhetoric and pushing abortion down the list of agenda items for a GOP administration can only help with independent voters.

With Palin set to steal the show from McCain in the coming weeks, the campaign will no doubt let the press and the Democrats draw their own conclusions. And why not? The immense assistance that the press has already given to Palin’s popularity by going after her so viciously may be augmented by trying to paint John McCain as a mere appendage of Palin’s celebrity. Every time the press tries to belittle Palin, the Republican base rallies to her and independent women resent the attacks.

It must be driving some of them stark, raving mad to realize their smears are having the exact opposite effect that they intend.

I’m back safe and sound in Streator, my own bed a welcome place to rest my head after 4 tiring days of fighting crowds, deadlines, and my own cynicism.

That last has stood me in good stead over the years as well as being an impediment at times. On the one hand, it has allowed me to view politicians and politics with a jaundiced eye and the proper skepticism one must have when listening to people who lie for a living make promises they have no intention of keeping or present themselves as something they are not.

But the downside to cynicism is that it tends to narrow your view so that when seeing the people and the process through a very dark prism, you miss the occasional bloom in the rose bush – that tiny spark of genuineness that while rare, nevertheless makes American politics so unique and inspiring.

Such was my problem with watching and listening to Sarah Palin. My initial thought was that this was the greatest act since Houdini – a politician trying to convince people she was a real person. But viewing the speech a second and third time changed my mind. There really was little artifice in this woman. She was a breath of air as fresh as a mountain breeze in her home state. She was tough, strong, easy to look at, and when she spoke, the thunder rolled and lightening flashed. Sparks flew from the stage. I had never been in a venue where the atmosphere crackled with anticipation, the crowd hanging on every word, their voices causing the very air to shake when they showed their support and appreciation.

This presented a problem for me. Clearly McCain had struck gold by choosing this woman. But after a couple of days and some time to reflect on what both McCain and Palin had to say, there are a few observations I need to share with you about Palin and McCain’s idea of “reform” that may be my cynicism showing through but are also grounded in history and common sense.

Sarah Palin is like a virgin in the Sultan’s harem. She is so fresh, so new that it seems to me the corrupting influence of power has yet to perform its dastardly sorcery on her and turn the pure-as-the-driven-Alaskan-snow child into the coldly calculating political computer that will probably be her legacy once history is done with her.

To say that Sarah Palin will eventually become just another Washington pol if she is elected to high office may be taken by many readers as sacrilegious, akin to pronouncing the death of Santa Claus or exposing the tooth fairy as a fraud. Such criticism misses the point. Palin will become what she has to become in order to succeed. And to succeed in Washington, one must adopt the ways of our capitol city – the artful dodge, the 1,000 word answer to a question that reveals nothing and says even less; the thousand tiny compromises with principle in order to get things done; the deal making, the log rolling, the white lies that eventually turn into nose-growing whoppers – all of this and more will turn Palin from a Shield Maiden of Rohan into a female ork, a corrupted elf whose fall from immortality and goodness will become just another sad commentary on our political culture.

And lest we blame Washington for being the only outpost of cynicism and corruption, one might wonder what Palin would have become with just a few more years of experience even in Alaska. For proof, look at the current state of corruption in that state – corruption that Palin helped expose and was fighting even as she was chosen as McCain’s running mate. Would she have been so eager to take on the powers that be in 5 years? In ten? An honest answer would have to include the near certainty that over time, Sarah Palin would be absorbed by the very system she took on with such passion.

There have been a thousand Sarah Palin’s in our history and to each has come the decision whether to play ball or go home. Most have chosen the easy path of least resistance. Those that haven’t have been largely forgotten, casualties of their own conscience and history’s relentless judgment that in order to achieve some of your goals, you must compromise with the devil. Some, like John McCain, make the adjustment and learn to live with losing at least part of their soul. Others can’t abide the hypocrisy, the groveling for money, the back scratching, the trading of favor for favor and quit in disgust. They realize that real “reform” would include the reformation of something that not even Barack Obama and all his powers can effect; the reform of human nature.

Our Founders recognized human frailty and how the temptation of self aggrandizement can rob the people of their liberty. It is why they created a federal republic with mechanisms to spread the corrupting power inherent in all governments around and not allow a deadly concentration in a single political entity.

Past “reformers” took the exact opposite tack; that concentrating the power of government in one place made it easier to keep an eye on the shysters, the hustlers, the jobbers who beg, plead, and bribe their way to influence. That and the necessity of using the vast power of the central government to break the back of abominations like predatory capitalists, industrial and financial trusts, and finally the evils of segregation and Jim Crow made it imperative that we grow government to protect us from those who would abuse freedom to deny others their liberty.

Corruption was as much a part of early America as it is today with one significant difference; the ability of that corruption to dramatically effect the health of our democracy and the liberty of its citizens. Times change. And as America grew, corruption and the abuse of power grew with it. It took the idealism of early 20th century reformers to save democracy and keep America from turning into a plutocracy where the few oppressed the many and workers would have been little better than wage slaves, toiling away 12 hours a day, six days a week in mines and factories with no rights and fewer prospects to realize their dreams of a better life for their children.

But the way they accomplished this magnificent feat was to vastly expand the powers of the federal government. They sought to “scientifically” perfect society by applying new fangled theories advanced by a new kind of scientist; sociologists and the science of trying to predict and codify how and why people behave the way they do.

With the purest of intentions they and their descendants in the Wilson and FDR administrations destroyed the idea of federalism in favor of trying to “solve” the problems of poverty and inequality; as if there are laws that can be passed that can govern human nature and the natural state of man.

It is the reason I am a conservative. I do not believe in the “perfectibility” of society any more than I believe in the Easter Bunny. Nor do I believe – as the Communists still believe – that man himself can be changed and once put through the proper “re-education,” a “New Man” can emerge and create the perfect state that doesn’t even require a government. This is not to say that society can’t be improved or that we can, as humans, resist our basest impulses and act in the common good. It only means that you will never, ever be able to legislate such things into effect and anyone who tries is daft.

So just what is it that Obama and McCain want to “reform?” Do they wish to scrub original sin from men’s souls? Both wish to mitigate the effects of corruption by curtailing the activities of lobbyists. But we have tried such “reform” before with campaign financing.

And we know how well that has worked out, huh?

It seems to me that John McCain’s attempts to “reform” or, more accurately, improve the way that government delivers services and bring it into the 21st century is slightly more realistic than Obama’s crusade to remake America into some kind of social democracy. But neither has a clue really. They, and America, will continue to muddle through while the bureaucracy goes its merry way and lobbyists find their way around whatever legislation is passed to ostensibly hold them in check. Real reform would require a groundswell of grassroots support so stupendous that politicians could only ride the wave and not control it. It may come to that someday.

But not this day. Not this time. Not with these two candidates.

I’m leaving shortly for the airport to fly out to Minneapolis and the Republican National Convention.

I will be covering it as part of the Pajamas Media team – the only online publication granted a booth above the Excel Center floor. Not sure what my responsibilities will be but I will almost certainly do a little writing, a little editing, and no doubt a little partying as well.

I might mention that PJTV will be making its debut at the convention. Read here what it’s all about – sounds new and exciting. It’s a subscription service but I think it has a chance if what they’re talking about as far as programming is concerned. I intend to pony up and I hope you at least give the idea some consideration.

This Palin smear on her baby that I write about below is incredible. It is based entirely – entirely – on supposition. Things like how a woman is supposed to look when she’s six months pregnant and the tiny bulge in her daughter’s teen age tummy being seen not as evidence that she eats too many Ho-Ho’s but that she is with child is “balmy” is the Brits would say.

It’s daft. It’s nuts. It’s cuckoo. It’s every adjective you could possibly come up with that denotes unhinged idiocy on the part of the left. I was joking yesterday when I wrote that the left would demand that Palin take a DNA test to prove the child is hers. Judging by how this story is spreading like wildfire across the leftysphere, my joking may become a reality sooner than I ever dreamed.

Coupled with the other major attack meme that is emerging – that Palin should be staying home and taking care of her Down Syndrome kid – and you have an interesting contretemps for the left; that for all their whining about how low and dirty the GOP and conservatives play the game, they have proved they can get in the gutter and root around with the worst the GOP has to offer.

I will try and post on this site during the convention but time factors may make that an impossibility. If not, catch my stuff at Pajamas Media as I’m sure I’ll have a few things to say about the RNC.