A lot of people have made the observation that Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska and running-mate of John McCain, is obviously not qualified to be president. Like, for instance, columnist George Will, who said that Palin is “obviously not qualified to be president.” Others who have pointed out the obvious are Chuck Hagel, Madeleine Albright, David Brooks, and politically astute members of a newly discovered species of carnivorous sponges found living in the waters off the coast of Antarctica. For good measure, McCain economic advisor Carly Fiorina added that Palin isn’t qualified to run a major corporation either. Fiorina, it should be noted, mysteriously disappeared after making that remark.
OK, so we’ve established that she isn’t qualified to be president of the United States or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. If we were so inclined I’m sure we could add a wide range of jobs for which Palin is also not qualified, such as astronaut, cowboy, school crossing guard, ship ballast, etc. But is Palin qualified to be vice president? Senator Barbara Boxer of California, speaking of Palin, seems pretty certain: “She isn’t qualified to be vice president.” Ouch, that’s gotta’ sting.
Joefromchicago was straight on the case here yesterday to comment on the death of Jörg Haider, the charismatic far right leader who has left such an imprint on Austrian politics these last two decades.
Joerg Haider
Haider was the scourge of Austria, and his self-inflicted death by speeding will not be mourned by many democrats. Unfortunately though, his death does little to stop the renewed momentum for the extreme right in the country.
After suffering an electoral rout in 2002 and a bitter split in 2005, the Austrian far right has demonstrated its resilience, regrouping and coming right back up again to score its best elections result ever earlier this year. And the story of its resurgence offers a sobering lesson for those European democrats who believed that the far right could be defeated through cooptation. It provides a similar reality check for those who were still betting on the far right’s dependency on rare charismatic leaders.
I love Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville.” Not for the tune though that’s fine, it’s always been about the lyrics for me. I enjoy hearing the evolution of the singer’s viewpoint, the self examination, the final conclusion. Reading Republican commenators these days is like listening to the “Margaritaville” applied to real life.
The results after Haider uncharacteristically passed on the left
Shortly after one o’clock on a foggy Saturday morning Jörg Haider, governor (Landeshauptmann) of the Austrian province of Carinthia, lost control of his VW Phaeton on a street in the town of Lambichl, near the provincial capital of Klagenfurt. The car hit the embankment and a concrete fencepost before flipping over. The 58-year old Haider died in the crash. And thus ended the career of one of the most controversial political leaders produced by Austria since the end of the Second World War.
Haider’s death follows by less than two weeks the parliamentary elections in which the party he led, the Alliance for Austria’s Future (BZÖ), captured close to eleven percent of the votes and 21 seats in the 183-seat lower house of parliament. A BZÖ spokesman said that Haider’s death was “like the end of the world for us.”
Alex Massie at The Debatable Land has been digging through the video archives of the Museum of the Moving Image at The Living Room Candidate. It’s a website devoted to historical campaign commercials, and “contains more than 300 commercials, from every presidential election since 1952.” And he’s come up with some true gems.
There’s classics like the relentlessly cheerful, ferociously flirty lounge singer doing her thing for Adlai Stevenson: “I love the Gov!“. (Sarah Palin didn’t invent the polit-power of the wink, you know.) There’s a bit of scare-mongering anno 1992 that made Massie quip, “Verily, Arkansas is a land visited by the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”. There’s a Barry Goldwater ad that starts off with 30 seconds of cult mayhem that would suit the best of Russ Meyer movie trailers; any moment you expect a warning about She-Devils on Wheels.
A strong contender for the most amazing find is the surprisingly psychedelic, hippie-go-lucky sing-a-long “Nixon Now” from 1972. An eerie illustration of the ad world’s reality inversion … catchy, though. (Weirdly enough, Nixonnow.com now is the website of a watch brand.) That one is overwhelmed still in the cutesy stakes by “the jaunty music and the fab 70s kitsch” of a Ford commercial from four years later – and much of it could have been a seventies ad for the car brand. (Bonus feel-good points for the unabashed inclusion of sundry happy ugly people: no shame of the natural back then! It’s like walking into a remote Slovak village.)
Meanwhile, there’s plenty of relativation, too. You thought Hillary’s 3 AM ad was an outrageous bit of scare-mongering? Ha! Nixon would have shown her a thing or two. You think McCain’s panders to evangelical America are worrying? Carter offered the real thing. Imagine the outcry if Republicans would air ads like those today.
But two of the ads Massie dug up stand out. Two videos that evoke distant eras, and yet are as topical as ever before. In fact, the Obama campaign could run touched up versions of them right now.
To his credit, yesterday John McCain tried to do some damage control and express opposition to some of the more out-there ideas expressed by his supporters.
Josh Marshall asks his readers for their take on McCain’s body language in those clips. What I see is someone who is bothered on two fronts — one, with the substance of what is being said, and two, with the idea that this is now his base.
McCain has long cultivated two distinct groups, sometimes doing a better job of convincing one or the other that he is one of them.
American writer and satirist H. L. Mencken wrote “The demagogue is one who preaches doctrines he knows to be untrue to men he knows to be idiots.” Patricia Roberts-Miller in her book “Democracy, Demagoguery, and Critical Rhetoric” defined demagoguery as “polarizing propaganda that motivates members of an ingroup to hate and scapegoat some outgroup(s), largely by promising certainty, stability, and what Erich Fromm famously called ‘an escape from freedom’.” Hilter was a infamous demagogue, blaming the woes of a post WWI Germany on the Jews. Joe McCarthy looked for Communists around every corner. Today, the American financial system is in its worse crisis since the Great Depression, Americans are facing uncertainty in employment, prices are rising and savings are falling. The time is right for the rise of the Demagogues.
On October 2, Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York City, announced that he was seeking reelection to a third term. Under normal circumstances, the announcement by an incumbent officeholder that he intended to run again would hardly qualify as major news, except that Bloomberg is currently prohibited by law from serving more than two consecutive terms in office. The announcement came as something of a surprise, as Bloomberg had earlier opposed the extension of term limits, but for the Democrat-turned-Republican-turned-Independent billionaire, consistency to principle has never been a significant hurdle when it was placed in the path of personal ambition.
Michael Bloomberg: proponent of term limits, just not his own
The New York City term limits law was itself the product of thwarted ambition. Ronald Lauder, heir to the cosmetics fortune, spent $14 million of his own money for the privilege of losing the 1989 GOP mayoral primary to Rudy Giuliani, who then proceeded to lose (at far less cost to himself) to David Dinkins in the general election. After that experience, Lauder began to see the wisdom of term limits. This time Lauder spent a paltry $1 million to get a referendum on term limits approved by the voters in the 1993 election. Unfortunately for Lauder, it proved unnecessary to pass a referendum to put a term limit on Dinkins, as Giuliani and the voters of New York took care of that themselves. Just as the Republican framers of the 22nd Amendment sought to prevent another Democrat from being elected again to more than two terms only to see their own Dwight Eisenhower become its first victim, so too did the New York GOP push for term limits only to have it take effect right when Rudy Giuliani entered office.
Nimh makes an excellent point about the often overlooked impact of plain old prosaic advertising on poll numbers.
AP
While I agree that advertising dollars are important (and adore the graphs!), the post got me thinking about some of the other factors involved in Obama’s surge. Advertising is an underestimated piece of the puzzle, but still just one piece of the puzzle. So here are some of the other elements that I think are at play:
Obama’s 50-State Strategy
This has a lot to do with the Obama campaign’s relatively large advertising budget — but it’s not just about advertising. Obama’s been spreading McCain very thin in many different ways, as McCain has to spend time and resources defending red states, rather than being able to focus on battleground states. The thinner things are spread, the less McCain is able to campaign effectively (not just advertising but field offices, rallies, paid staff, etc.).
The University of Wisconsin Advertising Project “codes and analyzes nearly all of the political advertising that is aired in 2008 federal and gubernatorial races across the country.” Yesterday it released a very interesting report on the two presidential candidates’ advertising in the week of September 28-October 4 (h/t Marc Ambinder). There’s a bunch of goodies in there, data-wise.
$28 million in one week
First of all, there’s the sheer volume of advertising that’s going on. Baffling amounts of money are being spent on equally stunning numbers of ads. In that one week alone, the two campaigns spent over $28 million on TV advertising.
That’s almost twice as much as in the first week of September. It’s also one and a half times as much as “the Bush and Kerry campaigns and their party and interest group allies spent” in the equivalent week of 2004. (Remember the reports back then about the unprecedented role money played in a record-breaking year of campaign spending?)
$28 million in one week. I mean, you could have 28 million young Africans immunised against meningitis for that. Just saying.
The result was that in the Las Vegas media market, Obama ads were aired 1,288 times in one week, and McCain ads 712 times. That’s a lot of ads.
Charting the ads
Secondly, the sheer extent to which Obama is outspending McCain on the airwaves. And the revealing differences in where they spend their money. In this one week, “the Obama campaign spent just under $17.5 million while the McCain campaign and the RNC spent just under $11 million combined.” I’ve graphed it, of course. This is by how much Obama is outspending McCain – and where:
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Oct 14, 2008 
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Sarah Palin
I love Jimmy Buffet’s “Margaritaville.” Not for the tune though that’s fine, it’s always been about the 
