Dear Soon To Be Ex-President Bush,

Please stop crowing over and over on television about how we haven't been attacked for 7 years. You are going to freakin' jinx it!

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Bailout Weary

So I wake up this morning and I read/hear the bailout of the big three isn't happening today or in the next few days because the bill died.  Whoop-de-do!  That followed by the markets opening really down today.  No duh!  I am so freaking tired of a bunch of whiney rich people arguing over money.  I am tired of anyone who wants to argue about money really, unless they're poor.  I want GM/Ford/Chrysler to have their money not because I think their cars are so great, but because I don't want even more people going from kinda poor to I've lost my house poor.  I was tired of talking to my parents when all they would do is relay to me their arguments over money.  Money isn't all it's cracked up to be, especially when it suddenly is worth a lot less than it used to be.  Family and health are probably two things to try to buy more stock in.  You don't necessarily need money for either of those...and wealth can't buy either.

The only good thing about the new news is that they finally stop boring me with the nonsensical linkage between Obama and Trump's cousin that happens to be the mayor of Chicago.  They're covering it like it's this huge crisis in the Obama presidency-elect.  That's the equivalent to me opening the fridge in the morning and realizing I forgot to buy milk yesterday.  It's not going to ruin my morning but it's an unfortunate oversight that I will give myself a mental kick for...maybe a few seconds or so.  They've been dragging it out for over three days now?  I haven't turned the television yet so maybe I've spoken too soon. 

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So...

Did the mayor of Chicago find a barber who'd just jumped out of a time machine previously situated in the late 70's to get that haircut?

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Classic

So I'm watching MSNBC and they have Maya Angelou on with her thoughts about the impact of the election. Once the interview was over, Angelou interrupted...I forget the older, blondish woman's name but she got interrupted to be told that the picture that MSNBC has of Angelou was, "terrible". I laughed out loud because I had been thinking the same thing. Funnier still because on that new show 'Chocolate News' with the guy from (sorry, bad with actor names) 'In Living Color'. Did a spot on Maya Angelou commenting on the election. It was just serendipitously funny. I'm sure the clip I speak of is on youtube or something. Maya Angelou tells it like it is.

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Judgment Day

Insert dramatic 'Terminator' music here. Today is the day finally! I didn't post anything for a while in part because I've been a bit more busy than usual and that the campaign coverage was lame and overly analytic because there was no news. A work colleague of Puck came to work dressed up as Tina Fey dressed up as Sarah Palin. We came upon her in the parking lot as I was dropping Puck off and we honked at her. She was really into it and only talked to us in character hehe.

Back to politics. I was wrong on most of my predictions. That's a good thing because I was pretty paranoid. There were no October surprises! Only a few pathetic videos and associations drudged up that didn't get any traction. I was totally wrong. I was also wrong on McCain dumping Palin, and it hurt him in the polls apparently. Speaking of polls, I went to fivethirtyeight.com yesterday. I knew of it because I follow baseball and Nate Silver is one of the leading sabermetric guys (inventor of Pecota projection system), but I never took the time. I guess it's because I only followed political goings on via television and cnn.com, so I didn't search out politics on the net so much. Well this election changed that a tad.

This is the kind of convergence of politics and baseball that I lusted after with my blogger hat on, but now that I have it sitting in front of me it bores me. Go figure. Anyways, the blog is well put together and there is more information than anyone could ever ask for there. I'm sure Biz has it on his reading list already. Wish I'd been more curious. I like the pie chart showing McCain's statistical chance of winning at 1.9%. It makes me smile. The most entertaining chart to me is the scenario run-downs. Anyways, go vote if you haven't already and bribe/bargain/whatever you have to do to coerce Go-Go to go-vote. Promise to watch mtv or the oxygen channel with her for an entire week. I got Puck to talk to strangers (barely) so anything is possible.

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Coincidences?

Gas prices are down just two weeks before the election. Don't think I have to spell that one out. Big oil...gas prices...big election...wonder why that would be...hmmm.

And last week Obama added an attack on McCain regarding medicare cuts. I'm assuming his campaign is a little concerned about the amount of seniors who will vote for him and needed a little kick to get their attention.

I still like Obama, but that medicare attack seemed a bit like the garbage I've hated for the last eight years or so...appealing to fears. I hope he doesn't keep that up this week.

Sarah Palin shouldn't have done SNL if she was just going to sit around and look like she wasn't having a good time when she wasn't looking straight clueless. You can tell anything controversial in the jokes was bargained out by Palin. The only mildly funny part was Baldwin blasting Palin thinking it was Fey.

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Oops I Did It Again

I didn't whimp out. More importantly to me, I got Puck to go along. It wasn't easy. There were shouted, angry phrases I had to take, but it was worth it. We ended up doing the neighborhood on the opposite side of the major street that runs outside our gate. Puck held stuff for us and said goodbye to people as we left. I introduced her a bunch of times. She would have left if I'd tried to get her to engage anyone. I kinda know the limits of how far to push.

Anyways back to the canvassing task. It was about the same number of residences as last weekend. The people were a bit more peeved about a knock on their door than last week. Not sure if it was because it was a different neighborhood, the fact that yesterday was the first day or early voting, one weekend closer to the big day of Nov. fourth, or a combination of all of the above. A lot of people were canvasser weary. A couple specifically complained of me being the 7'th or 8'th person to knock on their door for a campaign in the last week. I can definitely see that for undecideds because both sides or going to try to focus on them. I partly fault the campaigns for that. The campaigners that handed us our route told us that there should only be 1's or 2's (campaign speech for strongly and semi strongly committed Obama voters). Their reasoning, which I agree with, is that knocking on doors of undecided voters this late in the game to persuade them is less likely to help them, but more likely to alienate them from voting for Obama. You aren't going to change minds this late in the game. It's far better use of your volunteers to visit the homes of the 1's and 2's actually go out and vote. When I looked at my list though, there were 20 or so registered democrats, republicans, non-partisans, or independents that were either undecided or were leaning towards or decidedly pro-McCain. Having 1/3 of my list having "persuade" on it kind of bummed me, but I figure most wouldn't answer their door. I was mostly right. Still I don't understand why the philosophy of the campaign didn't match the data lists.

Anyways, most people were civil except for about 5 of the houses. One guy closed his door behind him and raised his voice with a...fork raised menacingly at me (yes, I'm typing that with a smile). Puck said he scared her. He annoyed me a bit because in my opinion he was using our knock on his door to work out his frustration with the voter roll having his name down incorrectly (asked for the female on the roll, he asked me to name the other person listed as registered to the address, which I figured was incorrect because it had the same last name as the house two doors down). I can understand a bit of his frustration, but to take a minute or so to yell at me about a bunch of stuff was a bit much, especially when we offered to correct everything he complained about but he didn't want us to do anything to help.

He complained about the voter roll name being incorrect. Offered to get it fixed. He said no. He complained about seven or eight people showing up within a few days. Said I could stop canvassers coming to his address. He responded that he wanted canvassers, just not so many and that us knocking on the door has gotten him from wanting to vote Obama to wanting to vote for McCain. Then I guess he was done, because he shut mouth with the bright yellow (just the tips) teeth still glowing in our brains. Puck and I still can't come up with why he would have his teeth stained just in that way. Any ideas for yellow tipped teeth across the entire upper row and they aren't gold?

One house where two older guys were in their garage working on restoring an antique chevy (weren't on the list) but I waved and commented, "nice truck" to the guys. One responded and sounded like you would if you were trying to talk while spitting at the same time, "I know". So I kept on walking with no response but to kind of tell Puck what a prick that guy was. So we do the rest of the houses on that street and as we're walking to the next street on the other side of the street the guy yells out, "Have any McCain Palin signs?" followed by the type of chuckling laughter you'd hear from Boss Hog. I should have not replied, but I politely said no, of course to more laughter from them. All my mean comebacks were right at the tip of my tongue, worst of which was that he probably spends so much time working on old cars because because the even older model inside refuses to be worked on because he doesn't have the tool to fix her.

For all the bitching in the last two paragraphs, walking around wasn't thankless. There were at least two homes where the person specifically thanked Puck and I for walking around for a campaign. One of the two I remember specifically because he had a yankees sticker on the back window of his car and I thought to myself, 'oh boy, a smug guy awaits'. A big, burly Puerto Rican guy answered the door and was as nice as can be. You could tell he was a former new yorker as soon as he opened the door.

Anyways when we were done and walking back to the car I asked Puck if her feet hurt and she said hers did, which made me feel better because last week the guy I was with said his didn't hurt at all and I should probably go see a podiatrist. When we turned our stuff in the volunteers asked us how things went and when I mentioned the canvasser weariness of one of the two neighborhoods we visited and they kind of nodded like I wasn't the first person to say that. I stupidly signed up for next weekend against my better judgment. I think the annoyance will be worse next weekend because a lot of people are just going to be annoyed at being canvassed multiple times when they've already voted. We were canvassed by two young ladies around 11 A.M. Oh yeah, we voted yesterday after we canvassed. We voted at a little office on the side of our neighborhood Albertson's supermarket.

Oh yeah, that reminds me. There were two or three older (55+) voters who would only say they voted and although were registered democrats, refused to state who they voted for. Scary little subgroup of voters there because these people were labeled as in the pocket of Obama either by phone polling or how they represented themselves to previous canvassers. Something to think about when the news people are trying to bury the Bradley effect.

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Surprise, Nobody Won

There was a zinger moment with McCain telling Obama that if he wanted to run against Bush he should have run four years ago. Besides that, McCain looked angrier, rolled his eyes, let out an angry sigh, and attacked Obama to not that much effect, at least in my opinion and you know I'm biased. Obama didn't win despite this. No quick and witty retorts to any of the serious attacks made by McCain. His Bill Ayers response was emotionally muted. That's good in a way but I'd guess the McConverted would take that as an admission of guilt. Anyways, I would have wished that he'd worked in the phrase "guilt by association" and had a quick association that would have embarrassed McCain followed by a declaration that he can bring up these things if he wants but he'd rather discuss the issues that affect the american people instead of playing the 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon with each other.

Obama did well by sticking to the issues and seeming to have more of a command and more specifics. McCain went back and forth between rhetoric (and we'll take care of those autistic kids and people and the government will open up their wallets for those young americans) policy/rhetoric (I'll reform the schools and I won't raise anyone's taxes to do it) and policy (I am against what Obama's tax policy will do to Joe Plumber!).

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What I Learned From FOX news

Like we couldn't see this coming...

I guess it really isn't much news anymore because once I googled it the mainstream news articles start at least as far back as 10-03-08. 

Hustler is making a Sarah Palin adult movie titled 'Nailin' Paylin'.  I only had it on Fox news for a minute around 6:45 AM or so and that's what I saw, with a screenshot. Weeyuhd. I'm not linking to anything dirty,but here is the latest newspaper article about the latest on it from the The Post Chronicle.   The older 10-3 article is from this link to the nydailynews.com.  I'm going to assume the TMZ article that the Post Chronicle discusses wouldn't be safe for work.  I haven't looked at it.  O.K. now I have hehe.  Nothing dirty in the TMZ pics but I wouldn't visit that at work.  My conclusion...They could have gotten a much comelier looking woman to play Palin.

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How To Knock Out McCain (or Kick Him While He's Down if That's Your Opinion)

update about 1 hour after I started writing and hadn't posted this yet, I was watching the dodgers and saw this...I saw this ad (that is pretty old but hadn't aired in NV for all I know yet. Puck and I were floored in a good way. Let me know if you had already seen that ad in your state, Biz. Youtube shows it's over three weeks old. I can't believe he'd sit on this so long before airing it over here in a tossup state instead of the usual response to attack type ads. The comments to the vid show a lot of people got as fired up about that ad as I did. Anyways, on to my crazy campaign strategy.

The general attitude of many democrats these last few days or so based on the polling showing Obama increasing his lead seems to be a semi-smug conclusion that the possibility of McCain winning this November is nil. I'm not that optimistic. I think I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm not elated when I see those polls for a few reasons. I don't think the campaign should start taking its eyes off the ball because the ball has been moving with a lot of late break this last week or two. I don't think Obama's campaign has based on the very brief and shallow depth I got into it. They seem to be extremely aggressive and smart. The importation of Californians into Nevada to try to help win Nevada for Obama still kind of floors me.

I think Obama should re-tool his stump/rally speech. He should go Ross Perot-lite. He should include a huge screen and make his speech interactive. There should be graphs and numbers that compliment the speech Obama already gives. It should have a side-by-side with charts representing the implications of some of McCains policies on certain economic numbers.

It should be like a really large scale powerpoint+campaign speech presentation. Even if the average voter doesn't scrutinize the charts, I believe the use of ultra-hard visual aids at large venues to augment the spoken message by Obama would legitimize and instill confidence in Obama's policies, campaign, and would widen the lead he already has on the economy over McCain. If people respond to this new "speech" and it grabs headlines, people on the fence and the news media will be questioning or expecting some kind of response to what McCain thinks of Obama's numbers and why McCain cannot provide more detailed information in his speeches regarding the economy. His best response would be a "me too" copying of Obama's innovation. Worst outcome would be that Obama's charts are innaccurate without offering any numbers of his own. This strategy I think would be effective because it would at least seem to give the american people what they keep saying they want--specifics they can understand about how bad is the economy and how will your policies fix it--. It is probably even more important in that it pushes the campaign discourse back to the economy and forces McCain to react on the fly.

The biggest mistake either candidate could make would be going too populist. Oversimplifying complex issues can backfire like it eventually did to Ross Perot. McCain has fumbled at it because his message is inconsistent and contradictory, and Obama was kind of already populist by being a democrat, but he hasn't really used the populist angle that much. Numbers that are too easily or quickly debunked/discredited by media is the next biggest mistake a candidate could make because then the candidate loses all credibility and becomes untrustworthy.

I guess if they have more ads like that one off in a can somewhere, I guess they really don't need to attempt to re-invent the wheel a bit to stamp out the last embers of the burnt-out fire that used to be John McMaverick's campaign.

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