As one McCain advisor put it to me: “In the last six weeks there was a remarkable echo. You could listen to arguments made by folks inside of the campaign who were close to Bill Kristol and then open up the New York Times and read them in Kristol’s columns. It was ‘set Sarah free,’ coupled with an agenda designed to appeal to the religious right and the more raucous elements of the party. They got their way often enough, and we started noticing that at many of the Palin functions it was non-stop ‘Sarah, Sarah,’ while John McCain all but vanished. Were they trying to get McCain elected in 2008, or to help Palin on the way to the Republican nomination in 2012? You can’t get yourself into a situation in which anyone can credibly ask that question.”

Bill Kristol is a partisan hack without any redeeming original thoughts, so he just serves as a pipeline for whatever talking points his pet factions of the conservative movement want to get out that day. A good hire. [Daily Beast]

In short, this is the story of the 2008 campaign: the Hillary Clinton campaign was a stressful psychodrama, the Obama campaign was an intellectual exercise, and the McCain campaign was a ragtag bunch of misfits who stumbled into an insane family nightmare from Twin Peaks, Alaska. Let's begin with Hillary and co.

Hillary

The Clinton campaign was beset by the vicious infighting among assholes, basically. The biggest and dumbest asshole was chief pollster/strategist Mark Penn!

According to other staffers, Mark Penn, Hillary's prickly chief strategist, had been all for the assault on Obama, but when he saw it backfiring he told Bill Clinton that he had not been involved, that it was Wolfson's fault. With Hillary Clinton, he suggested that perhaps Wolfson, who was cast in the press as a hit man out of "The Sopranos," wasn't up to the job of chief spokesman in a presidential campaign. For good measure he took a swipe at Grunwald, officially the campaign's chief ad person, though Penn regarded himself as the campaign's true image maker. "You have to fix this," said Hillary. Penn nodded. "We have to make him think that he's in charge of communications," Penn said conspiratorially, "the same way we made Mandy think she's in charge of ads."

And:

In March, Mark Penn suggested that the campaign target Obama's "lack of American roots," and drape Hillary in the flag as much as possible. The idea seemed to be to subtly emphasize Obama's "otherness."

Sadly, the only politics Mark Penn actually knows anything about is office politics. He was terrible with messages:

Shortly after Williams took over, she called a major meeting for senior staff. Penn was given the floor, and he began to walk through all the iterations of Hillary slogans: "Solutions for America," "Ready for Change, Ready to Lead," "Big Challenges, Real Solutions: Time to Pick a President …" Penn marched down the long list.

But then he seemed to get a little lost. "Um, uh, 'Working for Change, Working for You' …" There was silence, then sniggers, as Penn tried to remember all the bumper stickers, which, run together, sounded absurd and indistinguishable. "Ehhh … 'The Hillary I Know' …" Penn trailed off, and the meeting moved on.

And he didn't understand how "the primaries" worked:

Given the way delegates were apportioned, Obama had amassed a nearly insurmountable lead by the time of the Texas and Ohio primaries on March 4. At one meeting around the time of Super Tuesday, Ickes tried—for the umpteenth time, it seemed—to explain the mechanics of proportional representation. When President Clinton said, "Oh, hell, we didn't have this stuff in 1992," Ickes nearly "fell off his chair," as he later put it, because the system had been essentially the same back then. Ickes grumbled to reporters that Penn didn't even know that California wasn't winner-take-all; Penn denied it.

Meanwhile, Hillary floated above it all, unable or unwilling to get her staff in line. She didn't even really want to be President that much!

On a cold midmorning in January 2007, Hillary sat in the sunny living room of her house on Whitehaven Street in Washington, a well-to-do enclave off Embassy Row where she lived with her mother and, on occasion, her husband. She was finishing a last round of policy prep with her aides before getting on a plane to Iowa for her first big campaign swing. In a moment of quiet, she looked around the living room and said, to no one in particular, "I so love this house. Why am I doing this?"

Her policy director, Neera Tanden, and her advertising director, Mandy Grunwald, laughed, a little too lightheartedly. Clinton went on. "I'm so comfortable here. Why am I doing this?"

Tanden spoke up. "The White House isn't so bad," she said.

"I've been there," said Clinton.

As the primaries heated up, Bill began his prolonged, embarrassing meltdown. He began compiling an 81-page enemies list and complained endlessly about the press and about this stupid Obama kid, as he acted more or less like a petulant child.

The press was still in love with Obama, or so it seemed to Clinton, who complained to pretty much anyone who would listen. If the press wouldn't go after Obama, then Hillary's campaign would have to do the job, the ex-president urged. On Sunday, Jan. 13, Clinton got worked up in a phone conversation with Donna Brazile, a direct, strong-willed African-American woman who had been Al Gore's campaign manager and advised the Clintons from time to time. "If Barack Obama is nominated, it will be the worst denigration of public service," he told her, ranting on for much of an hour. Brazile kept asking him, "Why are you so angry?"
[...]
Sen. Edward Kennedy had a difficult phone conversation with Bill Clinton about his divisive campaigning. "Well, they started it," Clinton told Kennedy. "I don't think that's true," said Kennedy.

And the Clinton campaign's infighting only got worse:

Staffers were trying to work, sort of, and ignore the sounds coming from the office of communications director Howard Wolfson. "He's going to ruin this f–––ing campaign!" shouted Phil Singer, Wolfson's deputy. No one was quite sure who "he" was, but most assumed it was Penn, the chief strategist who was in more or less constant conflict with Hillary's other top advisers. Wolfson said something indistinct in response, and Singer cut loose, "F––– you, Howard," and stormed out of his office. Policy director Neera Tanden had the misfortune of standing in his path. "F––– you, too!" screamed Singer. "F––– you," Tanden started. "And the whole f–––ing cabal," Singer, now standing on a chair, shouted loudly enough to be heard by the entire war room. "I'm done." Within a week or two Singer was back, still steaming and swearing. "If the house is on fire, would you rather have a psychotic fireman or no fireman at all?" Wolfson explained to Williams.

Finally, Hillary was entirely convinced that Obama was utterly unelectable, and that is why she extended her campaign beyond when it was mathematically possible to win without the superdelegates. "He can't win!" she shouted to Bill Richardson, before he endorsed Obama. The Clintons probably continued to believe it even once they finally conceded, though they were never quite able to justify the tactics that belief led to in the last days:

"They live in a world where they think Hillary was the meanest she could be," the aide told a NEWSWEEK reporter. The Clintonista believed that Hillary had held back—noting that when Hillary was asked in a debate if Obama was electable, she said yes, which was not what she was saying privately.

Yes, well, being polite in a debate is one form of holding back, but it doesn't mean much when you're not holding back to journalists, superdelegates, and crowds of supporters, does it? The Clinton fundraisers were shifted into Obama's team, though they were upset that Obama didn't have titles and fancy ranks for them, which led Lynn Forester de Rothschild to call Obama an elitist.

McCain

The best part of the McCain campaign? Senator McCain's bestest friend in the world, Senator Lindsey Graham, who just follows McCain around like a puppy, all the time. Graham and McCain went to Iraq when McCain was dead last in Republican Primary Polls and helped inspire McCain's comeback. When they went down to South Carolina, home of McCain's embarrassing 2000 failure, Graham was there too, acting goofy.

In South Carolina on Jan. 19, McCain was on edge and his wife, Cindy, even more so. This was the place where the dirty tricksters had slimed the McCains in 2000, and Cindy could not shake off a sense of dread. The weather in Charleston was awful—sleeting rain—and McCain seemed caged, cooped up with his friend Lindsey Graham, who was annoying him by trying to "visualize" victory. By 7 p.m., Cindy and Graham were ready to "jump out the window," Graham later recalled. McCain's 95-year-old mother, Roberta, tried to lighten the mood by cracking jokes about how she wanted to marry Lindsey.

That surreal scene was only the beginning of the insanity to come, of course. Later, Graham helped formulate the "celebrity" attack against Obama ("Who the hell does this guy think he is? And who are all those Germans, and what are they cheering about?"), and suggested Lieberman as a running mate. Once Palin was on board, though, Lindsey continued to have fun, and also to be around, constantly, for no reason:

McCain loved the whole Palin family. They seemed to offer some relief, if not a touch of anarchy, to the Straight Talk Express, which had become a bit joyless. Piper, the governor's 7-year-old, thought nothing of crawling across Joe Lieberman's lap to get to her mother. Lindsey Graham mischievously enjoyed getting the child hopped up on Mountain Dew, a beverage to which he was mildly addicted.

When McCain heard the magical story of Joe the Plumber, he immediately called his friend Lindsey, at 4:30 a.m., to share. And then, finally, there was this:

Irrepressible, Lindsey Graham had started calling his Senate pal "Joe the Biden," which McCain found inexplicably hilarious.

Lindsey Graham, ladies and gentlemen.

Then there was Palin. The usual strategist infighting and candidate nonsense took a backseat to the baggage Palin brought with her. The whole campaign just got weird.

The campaign was obsessively secretive about the choice. Charlie Black, one of McCain's senior advisers who was involved in the early discussions about Palin, was not told until very late Thursday night. Speechwriter Matt Scully and senior communications aide Nicolle Wallace were instructed to fly to Cincinnati and were given the name of a small, nondescript hotel. When they arrived they found Salter sitting on the curb, smoking, while Schmidt stared at his BlackBerry. The two men escorted them upstairs, saying virtually nothing. As they got out of the elevator Scully began to wonder, who the heck is behind the door? Colin Powell? Schmidt opened the door to the suite and said, "Meet our vice presidential candidate." It took Scully a few seconds to register who she was. Wallace, still a little dopey from painkillers from a root-canal operation, had no idea.

You have probably heard the famous towel story, but did you know it was just the set-up to this amazing Todd Palin routine?

At the convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys'-club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Schmidt and Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. "I'll be just a minute," she said. Salter tried to strike up a conversation. He knew that Todd was half native Alaskan and a championship snow-machine racer.

"So what's the difference between a snowmobile and a snow machine, anyway?" Salter asked. "They're the same thing," Todd replied. "Right, so why not call it a snowmobile?" Salter joshed. "Because it's a snow machine," came the reply.

Later, Schmidt and Salter went outside so that Salter could have a cigarette. "So how about the Eskimo? Is he on the level?" Schmidt asked. Salter just shrugged and took another drag.

Then, Palin just went nuts, babbling about terrorists and buying thousands of dollars of clothes, and "silk boxers" for Todd and self-tanner.

The sharpest jabs were aimed at Palin. An anonymous McCain staffer described her to Politico as "wacko" and a "diva." When Politico reported on Oct. 21 that Palin had spent $150,000 for clothes for herself and her family, the governor had been all wounded innocence. At a campaign stop in Tampa, she said, "These clothes—they're not my property, just like the lighting and the staging and everything else that the RNC purchased. I am not taking them with me. I am back to wearing clothes from my favorite consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska." Publicly, McCain aides backed up Palin, saying that a third of the clothes had been returned immediately, before they were worn in public, and that the rest would be donated to charity. Privately, however, McCain's top advisers fumed at what they regarded as Palin's outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist, but thereafter Palin had "gone rogue," as the media buzz put it. She began buying for herself and her family—clothes and accessories from top stores like Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. A week after she announced that she was going back to her consignment shop she was still having tailored clothes delivered. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards; the McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent "tens of thousands" more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as "Wasilla Hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.

By the end, Steve Schmidt was furious with her. She refused to talk to donors, Todd was apparently telling everyone to wait for 2012, Palin wouldn't appear on stage with pro-choice or anti-drilling Republicans, and she wanted to speak at his concession speech.

McCain himself was kind of amusing cranky, the whole time. "What the f––– would I want to lead this party for?" he reportedly said in 2007. Oh, and here is the origin of the "HENNNGHH" noise he kept making, in the end: someone compared his campaign to the Pirates of the Caribbean movie and he became obsessed with pirates, like a little kid.

McCain, of course, is still kind of a mildly misogynistic dick, all the time:

McCain's subversive instincts had long shown up in his speaking style. Before the 2000 primary in South Carolina, when he spoke in favor of flying the Confederate flag over the state capitol, he would pull a piece of paper out of his pocket and read from it. It was obvious that he didn't really believe what he was saying and was ashamed of his pandering. His aides had trouble coaching him because the very act of telling him what to do could incite a rebellion. When distracted or restless, a not infrequent occasion, McCain could be tempted to play the high-school prankster. Once at a press availability in Kentucky he spotted a large woman, who was wearing a black T shirt embroidered with two bedazzling martini glasses, standing behind the photographers. He asked her to stand by him at the podium, where she might have a better view. "Is this OK?" he asked. "This is fi-ine!" the lady replied, but as she saw a sea of cameras and smirking reporters, she looked stunned and slightly embarrassed. She started to sidle away, and McCain asked, with mock forlornness, "You leaving me?"

Tho some of his dickishness is aide Mark Salter's fault! When new-to-the-Senate Barack Obama pulled out of McCain's bipartisan ethics project, because Harry Reid made him, and then Reid leaked his letter regarding same to the press, Salter freaked the fuck out and wrote the crazy sarcastic letter about how "I hold no hard feelings over your earlier disingenuousness" and all that.

Two family anecdotes: as McCain limped to his defeat, blogger daughter Meghan McCain "was increasingly, and sometimes profanely, complaining that her father was being poorly served by his advisers." And Cindy McCain is a fragile, sad lady, who will fucking cut you.

But Cindy never did. At a private gathering in Aspen, Colo., in the summer of 2007, a friend asked Cindy whether she would stab Rove in the back if he walked by. "No," she answered, "I'd stab him in the front."

Mark Salter and Steve Schmidt, the guys who ran the McCain campaign, were, of course, gruff drunk assholes who reporters loved hanging out with. They got wasted and sang karaoke all night after the town hall debate, and in the last days,

Salter entertained staffers with a shadowboxing match with Schmidt. The latter became a little overenthusiastic, however, and clipped Salter's aviator glasses, slightly cutting and bruising Salter's eye socket. When reporters asked what had happened, Salter pointed to the small wound and joked, "Vicious staff infighting."

Fun!

Obama

The Obama campaign was boringly well-run and drama free, so, really, all we can focus on his how hilarious and nerdy and cool and incredibly cocky and self-confident Barack Obama himself is.

On the eve of his speech to the Democratic convention in 2004, the speech that effectively launched him as the party's hope of the future, he took a walk down a street in Boston with his friend Marty Nesbitt. A growing crowd followed them. "Man, you're like a rock star," Nesbitt said to Obama. "He looked at me," Nesbitt recalled in a story he liked to tell reporters, "and said, 'Marty, you think it's bad today, wait until tomorrow.' And I said, 'What do you mean?' And he said, 'My speech is pretty good'."

Hah. While preparing for the Democratic Primary Debates, Obama bitched about how stupid the questions were, and how stupid his answers had to be to be politically acceptable.

So when Brian Williams is asking me about what's a personal thing that you've done [that's green], and I say, you know, 'Well, I planted a bunch of trees.' And he says, 'I'm talking about personal.' What I'm thinking in my head is, 'Well, the truth is, Brian, we can't solve global warming because I f–––ing changed light bulbs in my house. It's because of something collective'."

The story of Obama's debate prep before the McCain debates is also great:

The Obama team was sure that McCain would criticize him for having said, in a Democratic debate in the summer of 2007, that he would be willing to meet with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Cuba's Fidel Castro. Obama was instructed to point out that McCain was so averse to personal diplomacy that he had declined to meet with the president of Spain. Obama can be a little bloodless and dull in his preternatural calm, but his goofy side showed up at debate prep. He would appear very somber and emphatic when he accosted Craig/McCain for refusing to speak to the president of Spain. "You wouldn't even talk to the president of Spain!" he would intone with mock gravity. Then he would begin to giggle. He was told that he should attack McCain for saying that it was enough to "muddle through" on Afghanistan. "Muddle through!" Obama would exclaim and dissolve into giggles. It was as if he refused to take the theater of mock indignation too seriously.

And, of course, everyone freaked out when insane Palin went on her "rile up the crazies tour '08" across the nation:

"I'm worried," Gregory Craig said to a NEWSWEEK reporter in mid-October. He was concerned that the frenzied atmosphere at the Palin rallies would encourage someone to do something violent toward Obama. He was not the only one in the Obama campaign thinking the unthinkable. The campaign was provided with reports from the Secret Service showing a sharp and very disturbing increase in threats to Obama in September and early October. Michelle was shaken by the vituperative crowds and the hot rhetoric from the GOP candidates. "Why would they try to make people hate us?" she asked Valerie Jarrett.

As for everyone else, Davids Axelrod and Plouffe are both serious professionals who have no hilarious anecdotes to share.

Miscellany

Campaign reporting is hard!

On Election Day, undecided women voters broke almost entirely Clinton's way. That night, in the press-filing center, New Yorker writer Ryan Lizza was putting the finishing touches on a 10,000-word story on Rocket Ship Obama. "I think I'm f–––ed," he said. "I have to write a completely different story."

The lobbyist-fucking story? Outrageous and uncalled for and specious and proof of liberal bias and also basically entirely true:

The next day McCain flatly denied any romantic involvement with Iseman and excoriated the Times. Schmidt's instincts were right: the story proved to be an embarrassment to the newspaper. The pundits turned on the Times for running a story with so little apparent evidence; the Times's ombudsman was also critical of the paper. There were a few awkward loose ends. The story claimed that McCain's advisers had warned him to stop seeing Iseman. McCain flatly denied this to reporters. But John Weaver—McCain's old best buddy, now in semi-exile though still talking occasionally to Salter—told the Times (and NEWSWEEK's Michael Isikoff) that he had met with Iseman at a restaurant at Union Station and told her to stay away from the senator. Speaking not for attribution, two advisers told NEWSWEEK that McCain had indeed been warned to stop seeing Iseman back in December 1999, when he was gearing up for a presidential run. But these details were largely overlooked by the mainstream press, which quickly lost interest in the story.

And the Obamas continue their habit of refusing to give any credit to any previous Democratic politicians or campaigns (which is fair becauase most of them are losers!):

Joe Trippi, the unorthodox political genius who created the Dean Internet juggernaut, often said that if the Dean campaign was like the Wright Brothers at Kitty Hawk, then Obama was the Apollo program—in other words, in one cycle skipping over commercial aviation, jet travel and supersonic transport to go straight to the moon. (Asked about this analogy, Rospars replied evenly, "Not really, if you consider that Kitty Hawk was a successful flight, as compared to something that blew up on the f–––ing launchpad.")

Obviously there's a lot more good stuff buried in the zillion internet pages of the Newsweek piece, but here, you've got your cocktail narratives and representative anecdotes. Enjoy them, because we don't get to do this again for like six months.

Secrets of the 2008 Campaign [Newsweek]

...he's considering applying the site's predictive tools to congressional votes, movies' box-office performance and other topics.

It would be surprising if Silver weren't in talks to go on retainer with a cable news network or some other media outlet (beyond his gig at Baseball Prospectus) as a consultant.

Silver's predictions on the nutty electoral college, by the way, were only slightly less accurate than his calls on the popular vote:

(Picture via Guardian)

Before this Obama election gets too grounded in our national psyche, let's go ahead and banish the hopeful assertion that this marks the beginning of a "Post-racial" society. As has been pointed out by everyone from Tavis Smiley to TAN, we're not post-anything. Race is just as strong of a psychological factor as it ever was. Our socialization has changed, and our expectations have been moderated, but America is far, far away from being a place where people "don't see" race.

As the only black commentator on CNN noted last night, Obama's 2009 inauguration will come exactly 100 years after the founding of the NAACP. The founding of that group came 100 years after Abraham Lincoln's birth. There you have the three easy stages of American racial history: the fight to end slavery, and Reconstruction; the long movement for civil rights; and whatever we're moving into now.

The civil rights movement was concerned with laws, and it won all of the big battles that it set out to win. It's clear that laws don't totally erase inequality or racism. The NAACP is a now shell of its former self, a victim of its own successes. All of those people of my parents' and grandparents' generations who openly wept seeing the first black man elected President last night were surely, on some level, overwhelmed by the enormous distance that blacks in America have come; from slavery to the White House, which Obama's anecdote of his 106-year-old supporter so neatly alluded to.

But Obama is a transcendent figure, and pegging his election as a new, inalienable plateau in race relations is a mistake. When Al Sharpton was a presidential candidate only four years ago, I'll bet that many of the people who voted for Obama yesterday would have guessed that they'd never see a black president in their lifetimes. Obama's mystical ability to appeal to everyone should be celebrated; but what does his election really represent for Black America?

Lots of people are just happy that one of their own has finally made it. There hasn't been a truly strong "leader" of Black America since MLK and Malcolm X were assassinated, and if you want to cast Obama in that role, he'll probably do for now. The symbolism of his success is worth a lot, but it won't change everything. Toure wonders how black men will be able to say 'Fuck the system' when the system is run by a black man. Obama himself is more a product of the hip hop generation than the generation that marched in Selma. And with every year that passes, and every successive generation that's born, our country becomes less white, more diverse, and less like the easy black-and-white dichotomy that seemed so clear to our parents.

It's impossible to view race honestly through anything other than our own personal experiences. I know what this election means to me. Want to know what it means for black people? Ask a black person. Obama got elected because people honestly feel he'll do a better job. And he probably will. John Lewis, and Jesse Jackson, and, yes, even Al Sharpton are all American heroes. But while the issues they fought over haven't been resolved, their time in history's spotlight is gone just as sure as John McCain's is. The more relevant question may not be "What does Obama mean for Black America?" It may be, instead, "What does Black America mean any more?"

And if every non-black person goes out and has a conversation about that question with somebody who might actually know the answer, we'll all have made some good old-fashioned racial progress. That's how Obama helps us be better, even if he doesn't do a damn thing. "It's about you."

[Pic via Flickr]

Presumably the network is waiting for the neighborhood tech kid to come over and make the clock stop blinking midnight on its "virtual reality" machines. Click the video at top to watch Fox's "gee whiz" moment.

Back in 2004, this guy named Barack Obama gave a really really good speech at the Democratic National Convention. Watch it again, if you haven't lately, because it's really good. Can you believe we're gonna elect this guy?

Oh, but then he had to win the Democratic nomination, this year. In order to do that, he had to make Hillary Clinton cry.

In the Republican side, John McCain faced crazy challenges from a bunch of losers and lowlifes. And Mike Huckabee, the formerly fat radio DJ Arkansas Governor who was endorsed by a real-life Internet Meme.

Meanwhile, Mike Gravel ran for president too. Oh god we just remembered Mike Gravel. He was from Alaksa, who knew Alaska would even be a thing this year?

10 million people have watched this intelligence-insulting bullshit.

Mean Joe Biden never had a chance at the nomination, but this was the best zinger of the campaign.

This was the worst joke of the campaign. John McCain sings about nuclear war!

Oh, Hillary Clinton was still around. After she cried, she got wasted.

And then she couldn't stop laughing.

And her husband got all racist for a sec.

One of this election's big winners? Big stupid touchscreen computers. CNN's Giant iPhone, operated by John King, is hypnotic.

Anderson Cooper's Magic Pie Chart was just stupid.

Fred Armisen playing with the Magic Map is kinda funny!

Oh, drunk, crying Hillary wants you to know she'll answer the phone, at 3 in the morning, in case you need to get sprung from jail or something.

Say it with us now: GOD DAMN AMERICA!

Here is another just really fantastic speech from Barry Obama. This one's about the GOD DAMN AMERICA guy and also the history of race relations.

Flashback: Terrorist fist-jab!

Then Jesse Jackson cut Obama's nuts off, on the tee-vee.

Say hello to Sarah Palin, a lipsticked pitbull hockey sixpack maverick from small-town real America! She doesn't know what "community organizers" do but she is pretty sure they are fucking losers who should be shot.

Peggy Noonan was not impressed.

Neither was America, once they saw Palin talk extemporaneously to Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric.

But everyone was in the tank. Look how mean they were to Tucker Bounds!

Meanwhile, the old guy was apparently still the nominee, not that hockey lady. He had a debate with Barry and didn't look at him, once.

Then the economy exploded and your money burned and John McCain said the economy was fine.

Meanwhile, Palin rallies became insane racist nightmares. Instead of "kill him" and "terrorist" we'll just focus on the monkey sticker guy.

Well, and "palling around with terrorists," too, why not.

Then the election became an elaborate horrible farce, when Joe the Plumber showed up.

Joe the Plumber won the debate, too.

WHERE'S JOE? YOU'RE ALL JOE THE PLUMBER. Go to bed, old man.

Now it is election day. Barack Obama cried because his grandma died and Cindy McCain cried because her husband is losing. The end.

Rupert Murdoch has always been canny about getting in good with those in power, even if they're from the party he opposes. He made nice with Tony Blair in the UK. And the Post did in fact endorse Obama over Hillary Clinton, once it was clear Obama would win. Besides that, Murdoch's pet paper the Sun in the UK pretty much deified Obama. And even Fox News managed to work out an Obama interview with Bill O'Reilly, when they weren't calling him "Osama" and such.

So why didn't Rupert just get the Post to go ahead and endorse Obama in the general election? Two reason. One of those reasons is named "Sarah Palin." Murdoch flirted with her coyly, and ended up tentatively supporting her convoluted policy proposals in public. It may be that he fell in love with her personality (the same mistake McCain made), or just came to the conclusion that, dumb as she is, at least she wasn't likely to push for any more regulation of his business if she came into office when McCain keeled over.

The second reason is more basic: a Post endorsement of Obama just wasn't practical. It would defeat the paper's very reason for existence, which is to be a rabid conservative voice in the midst of the liberal NYC media. So Rupert Murdoch just allowed them to endorse McCain, then set about sending every possible signal that he's willing to be friendly with Obama after he wins. Not that dumb after all.

• What will it mean for political media? We're looking at you, Politico! I mean, who the fuck outside the Beltway will want to read Politico after this campaign is over, seriously? No offense guys. They have plenty of good reporters, but Jesus. Huge readership decline, is what I'm saying here. John Koblin at the Observer has Politico's memo to staff today laying out what the editors see as the paper's future. Basically they say, yes, readership will decline, but their business model is to reach "influentials," which they already do well, so they should be cool:
  

  This business model, we believe, insulates us to a large measure against the adverse trends in both the media business and the economy more broadly.

  I'd predict layoffs at the Politico within a year. But we'll see!

• What will it mean for television networks? The big networks are counting on Americans giving up on this political shit and getting back to what we do well: Watching horrible TV shows. Just consider this lead from a THR story today on this very topic:
  

  Could the big winner on Election Day be "Knight Rider"?

  Christ, that implies so many scary things. But the likelihood is that cable news rating will drop post-election and those viewers will go back to mindless network dramas and bad comedies, where they were before. Thank god Obama has done his part for Knight Rider.

• What will it mean for comedy? Oh this is the most interesting of all, be honest. Will everybody forget about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert? More broadly, will all these political comedians who teed off on Bush and the Republicans for the last eight years be able to do the same on the Democrats. And most importantly of all: Will white comedians figure out how to make fun of Barack Obama?
  Early indications are bad. I mean, have you seen SNL do Obama? It's disgracefully unfunny. Maybe start by getting... a black guy to play him? Too hard?
  Here's the problem: everyone is worried about what Obama's election will do to the comedians who are already established. Fuck that. This will be a golden age for black comedians! It's about fucking time! This is what nerdy white comedians are worried about:

  "In front of white liberal audiences — which is what most comedy clubs are, even in red states, it's always that blue-state element — if I try doing race jokes about Obama you can hear the sphincters tighten up faster than lug nuts on a '57 Ford. Until I can say 'President Homey' and get away with it, it's going to be a little tougher."

  Hey fool, you know why you can't "get away with it?" Because "President Homey" is not funny. Not "racist"—rather, "not funny." I expect black comedians to be one of the few demographics to see their salaries rise over the next year. Woo ha.

• What will it mean for the Huffington Post? They will have fewer readers. But most of the ones who leave will be wingnuts.

Among the other voters who have shown up to vote at Shoesmith Elementary School this morning, where Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., will vote: Louis Farrakhan and William Ayers.

He's palling around with a domestic terrorist and a radical black person! The real Barack Obama is revealed at last! It's not too late to vote for the white guy, America! Unless you voted early! Curses!

“We could know Virginia at 7,” he said. “We could know Indiana before 8. We could know Florida at 8. We could know Pennsylvania at 8. We could know the whole story of the election with those results. We can’t be in this position of hiding our heads in the sand when the story is obvious.”

Eight o'clock on the East coast is, of course, before most voters in California even get off work.

CBS News is not the only one that's cocky. Slate is refusing to "engage in a weird Kabuki drama that pretends McCain could win California," editor David Plotz told the Times. NBC News said it's an "unfortunate circumstance" that it may be calling the election before polls close elsewhere, but OH WELL.

It's actually true, as we said ourselves, that the presidential race could be wrapped up around 8 p.m. There's really no way California is going for McCain or Texas for Obama. But an early call for the Democratic nominee could hold down lefty turnout in California, thus helping anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 as well as Proposition 4, which imposes certain restrictions on abortion rights.

Not that the nets will or should care about those unintended side effects. Where they should probably be careful is in calling the swing states. With interest in this election so intense, and cable and online competition at new highs, the pressure to extrapolate from early precinct returns in states like Ohio, Indiana and Florida will be high. Exit polls, set for initial release at 5 p.m., will add only add to the pressure.

And the "swing" states only start to matter if the election ends up way closer than is now expected. As things stand at present, it looks like the only real dilemma will be determining when Obama supporters should put their elitist French champagne on ice.

Nick Kalm, founder and president, Reputation Partners - I'm going to buck conventional wisdom and predict that McCain will win — but as narrowly as Bush did in 2000. If McCain does win, it will be because he and his proxies were successful enough at painting a picture of Obama as a "risky liberal" that they were able to overcome the huge advantage in money, new and passionate voters that Obama was able to generate. The proxies (talk radio hosts, Fox News, 529 groups) are key because McCain's campaign and that of the RNC have been "erratic" (to borrow Obama's phrase).

Regardless of who wins, however, the level of partisan rancor will be so high, it will make people long for the "good old days" of Bush's second term.

Now that's a man to whom I would pay thousands of dollars for advice. [PRWeek, my old employer, via PRNewser]

"I'm not getting paid for things. It's starting to get hard to eat," the now-famous Joe the Plumber tells INSIDE EDITION's Deborah Norville.

What is this, Russia?

On the eve of election day, Joe, a single dad, told INSIDE EDITION he's getting by with help from friends and family, along with donations from well-wishers.

"It's hard being on the receiving end, a little bit of pride gets in there sometimes," admits Joe.

"So you just go to the mailbox and there's an envelope with a check in it, written to your name?" marvels Norville.

"Yes ma'am," Joe says.

With the help of these unidentified checks from shadowy sources, Joe has been able to do some pro bono plumbing for his friend—an Obama supporter. Of course, if McCain won, Joe would probably be set for life. But he won't, so Joe better get back to plumbin'. He has the potential to dominate the Holland, Ohio drain cleaning market, if he acts now.
[Inside Edition]

You have to remember that for a lot of reporters, today is the last gasp of glory. By the end of this week the campaign will be over, and there will be far fewer opportunities to go on TV and be "experts." There may also be far fewer opportunities to be, you know, reporters; some percentage of these people are bound to be laid off in the coming year. We already know that the LA Times will be laying off the bulk of its Washington bureau. And most ofl those plucky young embedded reporters from TV networks are preparing to be fired when this thing wraps up.

Everybody wants to make sure that you know that they were on the inside. Just because you, the consumer, didn't get all the colorful anecdotes in your morning paper doesn't mean that they didn't happen. Reporters have all types of fun memories from the campaign that they would like to share with you now that the campaign is over! Most of these fall into two categories: the "God these candidates are more morally bankrupt than I could ever say outright in the pages of my tepid publication," and the (more popular) "I made friends with important people!" Some key examples of each:

God these candidates are more morally bankrupt than I could ever say outright in the pages of my tepid publication

Michael Scherer from Time went to some Republican retreat in Michigan where politicians "came there to speak to state party activists, serving up stump pomp while waiters in white-tie tuxedos served drunk diners with pecan-coated ice cream balls." Then he finds a regular lady who says everyone in town is not like that. He rejoices.

HuffPo's Sam Stein was set upon by a gang of disgruntled Hillary supporters in a Washington bar. "And soon the denizens were letting me have a piece of their mind. 'HuffPost sucks! HuffPost sucks!' they chanted, as I bit into my now-arrived Reuben. 'Fox News, fair and balanced! Fox News, fair and balanced!'" Although he does not say so, he hates them.

Marc Ambinder from the Atlantic recalls watching Obama's little daughter Sasha talking to her daddy on stage at the Democratic convention; it "was very cute, but it also revealed how staged even Obama’s campaign had become." The thought of a little girl talking to her dad now makes him want to absolutely vomit. Politics has ruined him.

I made friends with important people!

Wacky old Dana Milbank from the Washington Post remembers Mike Huckabee "taking reporters hunting, taking them jogging, taking them to the barber for a face massage and shave." Dana Milbank would not object to being asked to appear on Mike Huckabee's teevee show, if Mike Huckabee so chose.

Ana Marie Cox from Time had fun singing karaoke with McCain campaign hacks Mark Salter and Steve Schmidt. Salter even sung Dylan tunes! Later they went back to figuring out how to oppress black people.

Adam Nagourney from the Times liked nothing better than sharing his Christmas dinner with failed Hillary flack Howard Wolfson: "We were quick to discover that there aren't a lot of restaurants open in Des Moines on Christmas night (or bars, but that's another story). But what was open was sure to warm the heart of two displaced Jews from New York: A Chinese restaurant." Aw! Then they made passionate love.

You see, just about everyone on the campaign trail goes a little crazy. It's classic Stockholm syndrome; trapped on buses and planes for months on end, reporters come to regard their captors as friends. Just to get a fact-free look back at the election season to fill a hole in its Week in Review section yesterday, the NYT had to turn to Frank Bruni, who's spent the entire campaign eating brains at Manhattan's finest restaurant. But they needed an outsider who could say about this godforsaken campaign, presumably with a straight face, "that we have, if anything, undervalued and even lost sight of its significance at times." Had they put Adam Nagourney on that story, the editors would have had to spend hours rewriting his knowing asides about Howard Wolfson's bewitching cologne.

For the media, the campaign means life. It means purpose, and employment, and attention, and a sense of self-importance. It's an unparalleled opportunity to cast oneself as an expert with no qualifications whatsoever, and to profess to speak for millions of "real Americans" without any factual basis. In reality, campaign reporters have a far less objective view of the Presidential race than a fat, laid-off auto worker sitting on his ass playing XBox in the ugly part of Toledo.

It takes a rare breed to remain sane during the ordeal. And we should salute those who do. So Joshua Green of the Atlantic, we salute you; you alone have found a moment that appropriately embodies American democracy:

My most memorable moment on the trail was getting offered weed by a Ron Paul supporter during the Republican primary in Ames, Iowa. He had urgently wanted to discuss the gold standard and I wasn't having any part of that, so I guess the weed was intended as an enticement.

USA.

[Pic: HST]

[via Guanabee]

As Slate's Big Money put it, on its WSJ-critiquing Twitter stream, "So...is this an endorsement? If so, it's the world's most tepid."

Very true. The Journal of Wall Street didn't seem ready to lavish praise on the candidate who blamed the economic meltdown on "greed and corruption" on... Wall Street:

If the 2008 election were solely about character and experience, Mr. McCain would be winning in a walk... Mr. McCain's bad luck is to be running in a year when character and experience aren't enough. His party is at a low public ebb and the financial system imploded only weeks before Election Day.

Looked at individually, most of Mr. McCain's economic proposals are sensibly conservative, and some are even bold. They are superior to Mr. Obama's, and if implemented would make a recession shallower and shorter... But Mr. McCain was never able, or willing, to explain the differences. More broadly, he has never explained to fearful Americans how an economy with Republicans at the helm could fall into this ditch.

...Once the panic hit in September, Mr. McCain's penchant for hyperactivity was also less than reassuring...
In this difficult year, Mr. McCain has had the harder sale to make. His admirable personal tenacity has been better than his variable political argument. We'll find out Tuesday if biography trumps hope.

There you have it: Vote McCain and defeat hope.

Also: Never seek an endorsement from the Wall Street Journal.

Highlights above, full video here.

Joe the Plumber

Who?: Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, an Ohio plumber who was caught on film asking Obama the tough questions about his tax plan, and was mentioned 74976 times in the subsequent debate by John McCain, who tried to use Joe as a symbol of everyday Americans. Turned out to be not quite the all-American guy he seemed.

The Next Step: He's already signed with a publicist and a manager and is pursuing a book contract and a country music career. Both are bound to tank, because Joe fails to realize the fleeting nature of his fame. A better plan: become the best darned plumber that Toledo has ever seen. Your brand is already established! Now go forth and plumb.

William Ayers

Who?: Former member of the 60s far leftist group The Weathermen, now a professor of education and run-of-the-mill activist in Chicago. He is the "terrorist" that Obama "palled around with," according to credible source Sarah Palin.

The Next Step: Ayers has been keeping his mouth shut, doubtless at the request of the Obama campaign. He's probably just waiting for the election to end so he can go back to his normal liberal activism. Way to blow an opportunity, dude! You want to reform education? Why not start the Bill Ayers School Of Political Activism? Train peppy young liberal ideologues to infiltrate our nation's school boards. It worked for Christian fundamentalists!

Jeremiah Wright

Who?: Obama's pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. He made some remarks about perhaps not being in love with white America for all it has done for African-Americans, and was made into a prime symbol of Obama's sympathy for the radical black agenda of hating white people! According to the McCain campaign. He initially tried to talk in his fiery way to rebut the smear campaign, but the Obama campaign managed to make him be quiet, like Ayers.

The Next Step: Open an Obama-themed gift shop and mail order business, just to "support the church." Slowly expand. Roll out your own line of hot sauce. Wake up one day four years from now and realize that you have become George Foreman. Later, sign commentator contract with Fox News. Slowly become friends with Pat Buchanan.

Bernard Kerik

Who?: Remember way back when Rudy Giuliani was considered a serious candidate? Ha, yes that was a while ago. Kerik was Giuliani's Police Commissioner in NYC during 9/11, and became a de facto "hero" just like his boss. Rudy had big plans for Kerik in his cabinet, until Bernie was indicted for fraud and conspiracy and then everybody realized he was basically just a big incompetent lug who hung out with gangsters and did nothing in his ill-fated position in Iraq and generally had nothing going for him except for the fact that he was friends with Rudy Giuliani, who turned out to be a loser.

The Next Step: Even hard-line Republicans and hapless corporate dupes have come to understand that Kerik has no political future, or good ideas about anything. He should go ahead and go to prison, make friends with mobsters on the inside, and come out as a full-fledged mafioso. That would be cool. One day they could make a movie about it.

Obama Girl

Who?: Pretty girl who made an insanely popular YouTube video about being a pretty girl who has a crush on Obama.

The Next Step: Cheerleader for the Washington Redskins. Playboy centerfold. Have a fling with a Congressman. Make friends with Julia Allison.

Bristol Palin

Who?: Sarah Palin's poor pregnant daughter.

The Next Step: Once your mom loses the election and you turn 18, move as far away from Alaska as you possibly can. Do not get married. Go to college and get a regular job, like a teacher. Try to live a normal life. Jesus, we feel sorry for you, Bristol.

[Stewart:] "I know Florida.. Many of my people go there to retire…You might want to hold the rally early. They don’t like to miss their shows at night or the early bird special at the diner.
"No comment on that Jon. I’m trying to win Florida," Obama responded.
Stewart asked "If you do win, is that a mandate for socialism?" and asked about a range of other, mostly outlandish, negative claims about Obama had had an impact.
“It just hasn’t. I think that there’s a certain segment of hardcore Sean Hannity fans that probably wouldn’t want to go have a beer with me," Obama said.

Politico's Ben Smith wrote a story rounding up the stories of voters who "wouldn't want a mixed race marriage" for their children but are still voting for Obama. It featured this awesome Paul Begala quote:

“If you go to a white neighborhood in the suburbs and ask them, ‘How would you feel about a large black man kicking your door in,’ they would say, ‘That doesn’t sound good to me,’” said Democratic political consultant Paul Begala. “But if you say, 'Your house is on fire, and the firefighter happens to be black,' it’s a different situation.”

Does Paul ask this question of people regularly? He must be a great dinner companion.

For further evidence of racist support of Obama, consider the working-class white Philly neighborhood of Fishtown—where the anecdote linked up top hails from. The Philadelphia City Paper has a whole feature on the community, and their totally unrepentant casual tribal racism, and their willingness to vote for Barack Obama:

Consider Patrick McGowan, a union carpenter whom I met at Murph's bar on Girard, just a block down from the Fishtown for Obama office. McGowan said he was voting for Obama.

"Everyone's voting for him," he said.

Would race be an obstacle?

"Not at all — not for anybody who's a working man paying taxes," he assured, adding: "First of all, he's not all black. And maybe if a black person gets in there to be president, it'll keep all the crybabies from crying discrimination."

Sure, buddy. Thanks for voting!

Chicago Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg has an amusing/scary column today on why racists should vote for Obama.

What you want is Obama to become president. That would make all your dire predictions seem prescient (that means "knowing the future"). The fear that makes a person embrace Nazi ideology in the first place will be ramped up exponentially (that means "fast").

And what would Obama do as president? He would make decisions, some good, but others bad, and think how those bad decisions will reverberate among people such as yourselves. They would be evidence, not of the missteps of one politician, but a blanket indictment of the entire Black Race. Think of it. The Thing You Fear Most, sitting in the Oval Office, greeting visitors, greeting Girl Scouts, for the love of God! Think about it. Posing for photographs with young, tender Girl Scouts, shaking their small white hands, asking them about cookie sales . . .

Think of what that would do for recruitment. It wouldn't just be you and your buddy Hrolf taking videos of each other brandishing your dad's hunting rifle in menacing poses. You could have real meetings, attract actual followers. The plan for world domination that you so laboriously wrote out in 11th grade detention would come to fruition at last!

Obviously, you want Obama elected — the nation will soon realize what it has done, the pendulum will swing the other way — your way. At long last! Ausgerechnet jetzt!

Ha ha... ha?

But before you get too excited over people voting their economic self-interest over their racial prejudices, just remember that Joe the Plumber has a record deal, so America is still doomed.

From Obama's prepared remarks for a rally in Raleigh, today:

That's why he's spending these last few days calling me every name in the book. I'm sorry to see my opponent sink so low. Lately, he's called me a socialist for wanting to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans so we can finally give tax relief to the middle class. By the end of the week, he'll be accusing me of being a secret communist because I shared my toys in Kindergarten.

ZING. McCain will now parry with more airquotes and saying "blah blah blah."

Not that zingers win elections or anything, but, you know, they're more fun than race-baiting attacks on your opponent's Other-ness, right?