Campaign Update-Saturday Edition

·         Newsweek National Head-to-Head: Obama 53%/McCain 41%

·         Obama is out with a 2min. ad this morning, “Defining Moment” which we’ll link to on the blog later today, beginning the final 10-day closing argument phase of his campaign

·         A consortium poll of Ohio Newspapers has Obama leading John McCain 49%/46% in what is perhaps the most reliable survey in the state of Ohio

·         It is reported that Obama & Fmr. President Bill Clinton will jointly campaign together sometime “within the next week”

·         According to a revealing Rasmussen Poll out today, 50% of respondents believe that continuing the storyline of William Ayers has HURT the McCain campaign, while only 28% said that it has helped the Arizona Senator. At the time, injecting Ayers into the campaign was seen as a chance to get the McCain campaign back on track—this poll is one of the first indications that it may have had the exactly opposite effect

·         Make sure to read the Politico Story, linked below, about the inside of the Palin side of the Republican ticket—and look for more stories like this as we near the end of the campaign

·         Rasmussen Daily Tracking Poll: Obama 52%/McCain 44%, ties Obama’s largest lead in the Rasmussen Tracking Poll to date

·         Diageo/Hotline Daily Tracking Poll: Obama 50%/McCain 43%/Undecided 5%: note the small number of undecided voters, down 2-3% just this week

·         Gallup Daily Tracking Poll (Likely Voters-Expanded Model): Obama 51%/McCain 43%

·         Gallup Daily Tracking Poll (Likely Voters-Traditional Model): Obama 51%/McCain 44%

·         Gallup Daily Tracking Poll (Registered Voters): Obama 51%/McCain 42%

·         Note Obama’s support is consistent among all three Gallup Polls, while McCain’s support ranges from 42-43; in all three readings there is some relative strength from Obama from polls over the last few days

 

 

Essential Politico Story, "Palin Allies Report Rising Campaign Tension"

Palin allies report rising campaign tension
By: Ben Smith October 25, 2008 updated: 1:02pm EST

Even as John McCain and Sarah Palin scramble to close the gap in the final days of the 2008 election, stirrings of a Palin insurgency are complicating the campaign's already-tense internal dynamics. Four Republicans close to Palin said she has decided increasingly to disregard the advice of the former Bush aides tasked to handle her, creating occasionally tense situations as she travels the country with them. Those Palin supporters, inside the campaign and out, said Palin blames her handlers for a botched rollout and a tarnished public image — even as others in McCain's camp blame the pick of the relatively inexperienced Alaska governor, and her public performance, for McCain's decline. "She's lost confidence in most of the people on the plane," said a senior Republican who speaks to Palin, referring to her campaign jet. He said Palin had begun to "go rogue" in some of her public pronouncements and decisions. "I think she'd like to go more rogue," he said. The emergence of a Palin faction comes as Republicans gird for a battle over the future of their party: Some see her as a charismatic, hawkish conservative leader with the potential, still unrealized, to cross over to attract moderate voters. Anger among Republicans who see Palin as a star and as a potential future leader has boiled over because, they say, they see other senior McCain aides preparing to blame her in the event he is defeated."These people are going to try and shred her after the campaign to divert blame from themselves," a McCain insider said, referring to McCain's chief strategist, Steve Schmidt, and to Nicolle Wallace, a former Bush aide who has taken a lead role in Palin's campaign. Palin's partisans blame Wallace, in particular, for Palin's avoiding of the media for days and then giving a high-stakes interview to CBS News' Katie Couric, whose sometimes painful content the campaign allowed to be parceled out over a week. "A number of Gov. Palin's staff have not had her best interests at heart, and they have not had the campaign's best interests at heart," the McCain insider fumed, noting that Wallace left an executive job at CBS to join the campaign. Wallace declined to engage publicly in the finger-pointing that has consumed the campaign in the final weeks. "I am in awe of [Palin's] strength under constant fire by the media," she said in an e-mail. "If someone wants to throw me under the bus, my personal belief is that the most graceful thing to do is to lie there." But other McCain aides, defending Wallace, dismissed the notion that Palin was mishandled. The Alaska governor was, they argue, simply unready — "green," sloppy and incomprehensibly willing to criticize McCain for, for instance, not attacking Sen. Barack Obama for his relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Palin has in fact performed fairly well in the moments thought to be key for a vice presidential nominee: She made a good impression in her surprise rollout in Ohio and her speech to the Republican National Convention went better than the campaign could have imagined. She turned in an adequate performance at a debate against the Democratic Party's foremost debater. But other elements of her image-making went catastrophically awry. Her dodging of the press and her nervous reliance on tight scripts in her first interview, with ABC News, became a national joke — driven home to devastating effect by "Saturday Night Live" comic Tina Fey. The Couric interview — her only unstaged appearance for a week — was "water torture," as one internal ally put it.
Some McCain aides say they had little choice with a candidate who simply wasn't ready for the national stage, and that Palin didn't forcefully object. Moments that Palin's allies see as triumphs of instinct and authenticity — the Wright suggestion, her objection to the campaign's pulling out of Michigan — they dismiss as Palin's "slips and miscommunications," that is, her own incompetence and evidence of the need for tight scripting. But Palin partisans say she chafed at the handling. "The campaign as a whole bought completely into what the Washington media said — that she's completely inexperienced," said a close Palin ally outside the campaign who speaks regularly to the candidate.
"Her strategy was to be trustworthy and a team player during the convention and thereafter, but she felt completely mismanaged and mishandled and ill advised," the person said. "Recently, she's gone from relying on McCain advisers who were assigned to her to relying on her own instincts." Palin's loyalists say she's grown particularly disenchanted with the veterans of the Bush reelection campaign, including Schmidt and Wallace, and that despite her anti-intellectual rhetoric, her closest ally among her new traveling aides is a policy adviser, former National Security Council official Steve Biegun. She's also said to be close with McCain's chief foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, who prepared her for the Oct. 2 vice presidential debate. When a McCain aide, speaking anonymously Friday to The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder, suggested that Palin's charge that Obama was "palling around with terrorists" had "escaped HQ's vetting," it was Scheunemann who fired off an angry response that the speech was "fully vetted" and that to attack Palin for it was "bullshit." Palin's "instincts," on display in recent days, have had her opening up to the media, including a round of interviews on talk radio, cable and broadcast outlets, as well as chats with her traveling press and local reporters. Reporters really began to notice the change last Sunday, when Palin strolled over to a local television crew in Colorado Springs. "Get Tracey," a staffer called out, according to The New York Times, summoning spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt, who reportedly "tried several times to cut it off with a terse 'Thank you!' in between questions, to no avail." The moment may have caused ulcers in some precincts of the McCain campaign, but it was an account Palin's admirers in Washington cheered. Palin had also sought to give meatier policy speeches, in particular on energy policy and on policy for children with disabilities; she finally gave the latter speech Friday, but had wanted to deliver it much earlier. She's also begun to make her own ad hoc calls about the campaign's direction and the ticket's policy. McCain, for instance, has remained silent on Democrats' calls for a stimulus package of new spending, a move many conservatives oppose but that could be broadly popular. But in an interview with the conservative radio host Glenn Beck earlier this week, Palin went "off the reservation" to make the campaign policy, one aide said. "I say, you know, when is enough enough of taxpayer dollars being thrown into this bill out there?" she asked. "This next one of the Democrats being proposed should be very, very concerning to all Americans because to me it sends a message that $700 billion bailout, maybe that was just the tip of the iceberg. No, you know, we were told when we've got to be believing if we have enough elected officials who are going to be standing strong on fiscal conservative principles and free enterprise and we have to believe that there are enough of those elected officials to say, 'No, OK, that's enough.'" (A McCain spokeswoman said Palin's statement was "a good sentiment.") But few imagine that Palin will be able to repair her image — and bad poll numbers — in the eleven days before the campaign ends. And the final straw for Palin and her allies was the news that the campaign had reported spending $150,000 on her clothes, turning her, again, into the butt of late-night humor. "She never even set foot in these stores," the senior Republican said, noting Palin hadn't realized the cost when the clothes were brought to her in her Minnesota hotel room. "It's completely out-of-control operatives," said the close ally outside the campaign. "She has no responsibility for that. It's incredibly frustrating for us and for her." Between Palin's internal detractors and her allies, there's a middle ground: Some aides say that she's a flawed candidate whose handling exaggerated her weak spots. "She was completely mishandled in the beginning. No one took the time to look at what her personal strengths and weaknesses are and developed a plan that made sense based on who she is as a candidate," the aide said. "Any concerns she or those close to her have about that are totally valid." But the aide said that Palin's inexperience led her to her own mistakes: "How she was handled allowed her weaknesses to hang out in full display." If McCain loses, Palin's allies say that the national Republican Party hasn't seen the last of her. Politicians are sometimes formed by a signal defeat — as Bill Clinton was when he was tossed out of the Arkansas governor's mansion after his first term — and Palin would return to a state that had made her America's most popular governor and where her image as a reformer who swept aside her own party's insiders rings true, if not in the cartoon version the McCain campaign presented. "There are people in this campaign who feel a real sense of loyalty to her and are really pleased with her performance and think she did a great job," said the McCain insider. "She has a real future in this party."
© 2008 Capitol News Company, LLC

http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=33A79FEE-18FE-70B2-A89B82E0E4361B64

Remembering Paul & Sheila Wellstone: Six Years Later

Saturday, October 25th marks the 6th anniversary of the plane crash that took the lives of Paul and Sheila Wellstone, Marcia Wellstone Markuson, Mary McEvoy, Tom Lapic, and Will McLaughlin. We pause to remember these six wonderful and talented individuals and to hold them in our hearts.We remember their passion for social justice and their commitment to transforming our world for the common good. We dedicate our work to their memory, knowing that they would be proud of all that we collectively have accomplished.
From Wellstone Action, www.wellstone.org

Micro-Targeting

As an example of how specific demographics, or types of voters, are being targeted by the presidential campaigns this year, the above screen shot is of the YouTube video for John Mellencamp’s “Our Country,” a song frequently played at Republican rallies. Notice in the upper right hand corner an ad, from the McCain Campaign, reaching out to the type of voter that “Joe The Plumber” represents. In big red lettering, the ad says “Don’t Tax Me.” Likewise, throughout the Internet you will find advertisements for McCain. On websites and searches where traditional Republican voters are likely to be found and for Obama on more liberal-leaning sites. The ability to micro-target has been revolutionary in American politics but its effect in terms of mobilizing supporters has yet to be proven.

The Golden Report for Friday October 24

Out of disparity, absurdity.

 

Utterly absurd notions were injected into the 2008 presidential race this week when, in several different instances, the McCain campaign implied their Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, and his network of supporters and donors are in some way “less American” than those who support the Republican ticket. It started last Friday when on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Minnesota Republican Congresswoman Michelle Bachman fired a litany of charges at Obama, everything from socialism to palling around with terrorists and then suggested that those who believed what Obama believed were, in some way, “anti-American.” She was immediately called out by the liberal host in what has become one of the most watched YouTube videos of the campaign. The Bachman episode was used as a campaign pitch by both campaigns over the course of the week. Then, the next day, McCain Campaign Spokeswoman Nancy Pfotenhauer suggested that, given the poll numbers showing McCain falling as many as 10 points behind Barack Obama in the State of Virginia, that in fact there were two Virginias, a “real” Virginia, in the South and West (and where McCain support is based) and a Virginia that was merely a suburb of Washington, DC and therefore, in some way, didn’t count. Then towards the end of the week we saw an extremely bizarre episode from Pennsylvania where a young girl claimed that she was assault by African-American male supporters of Obama and that those who had accosted her brazingly engraved a “B” in her cheek. Today we learned that, in fact, the entire story was falsified, the woman had made up the entire case in what most be the most extreme and overt episode of racism thus far in this campaign. What do these incidents—just within the last week of this campaign—tell us about the disparity of the McCain Campaign? They show the turning point that this election can represent from the extreme and lunatic views of the past, an America where citizens were divided by red or blue state, where blacks were divided from whites within those states and where a nation could not find the inner strength to achieve progress because of internal division (called partisanship in Washington) which gridlocked a country and stymied the promise of a new century.

 

I refuse to believe that the inner desire to build a life greater and better, a family stronger and more prosperous, a community of safety and support and a country a glistening melting pot of the most innovative ideas and greatest thoughts is in any way limited by race, class, gender or geography. By the very nature of being American, we are inspired by what we have seen in the generations preceding and we are driven to build a greater nation, beginning by upholding a new individualistic declaration of morals that we inherently commit ourselves to with every struggle and renew with every success. We are one nation unique from any other on this Earth that prescribe to the greatest Democratic beliefs ever recorded on paper.

 

And finally now our country is faced with a generational tipping point which, at the conclusion of a two-year test to determine who will lead a fractured nation through repair and renewal, is turning less into a contest than a verification. We are a nation built on beliefs, on great experiments that we undertake not knowing if they will be successful, on bold pronouncements that some decry as more idealistic than realistic. Yet, in these moments, when a nation is inspired behind a leader with a vision, history has proved our triumphant ascension. When faced in this election with merely the glimmer of hope, the slightest prospect of change or the smallest suggestion of a commitment to cooperative leadership and when the contrast behind past and future could not be more aesthetically apparent, this nation must wholeheartedly and genuinely commit itself to the pathway of a new direction. No longer can we, the people, be stymied by divisive electoral counts where the end result of one fraudulent exchange is the commencement of the next election, to be even longer and less productive than the prior.  No longer can we, the people, accept the labels and categorizations that have come with a consultant-driven and media-induced political cycle. We, the people, know that the only mandate our leaders receive come from us. Further, we know that with the coalescence of our support, in whatever way, shape, or form, WE can be the inspiration for change. And in more cases than not, instead of just being the inspiration, we can, collectively within our multiply defined communities, to cause the changes that will make our country better.

 

The citizens of the United States of America are about to undertake their most time honored and revered tradition, when millions of people, differing in appearances but united by a shared internal identity driven by the desire to advance the causes to make our republic simply good, cast secret ballots to align themselves not as much with a candidate but with a direction.

 

It is said that power corrupts and maybe the modern American presidential campaign is the best example of how the desire to be the leader of the greatest nation on Earth, even amid the plethora of crises that she faces, can cause even the most sincere to follow the same playbook that the public repeatedly says that it decries. But in a time of great consequence, in a moment of great fragility and during the time when the story of America is in drastic need of a new chapter, Americans must make a decision based upon their best assessment of a candidate of progress, not regress, of advancement, not decline, and of inspiration, not degradation.

 

America is faced with a clear choice in this election and the contrast is becoming sharper in the days leading up to the actual vote. As if by faith, this nation has survived great challenges throughout its history based upon the tremendous leadership of those selected by a majority of the citizens in this country. We are presented with a great responsibility and a history defining opportunity. Those of us who believe in the strength of the people of this country know that we will make the right decision and begin to put this country on the path advancing the causes of liberty, justice and equality for all its people.