When discussing Presidential politics, the Old North State rarely rates a mention.  As part of the “Old South”, one of the most homogenous geographic regions in United States, Republican candidates have come to expect that North Carolina will follow the lead of its more conservative cousins to the south.  An AP article on swing states mentioned North Carolina in passing saying

And, the Republican has found himself having to defend GOP turf in North Carolina after Obama spent a couple of months running ads and dispatching workers to the state in hopes that blacks and young voters would help him prevail. McCain initially ignored the Obama action but recently countered with his own ads and staffers. He still has an edge there, and an Obama victory will be difficult.

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Ben Smith shares an email he received from an Obama volunteer who canvassed in a white, working-class area of Philadelphia:

“What’s crazy is this,” he writes. “I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n—-r and mention how they don’t know what to do because of the economy.

Around here, political yard signs are often grouped together by party — a McCain sign will often stand right next to signs for Republicans running for congress, judge, etc. The other day I passed a yard that had one of those Republican groupings, but there was no McCain sign in the crowd. Instead, there was a sign that said the following:

IT TOOK A CARTER

TO GIVE US REAGAN

BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA 2008

Is this guy really going to vote for Obama? Or is he just being provocative (and not a little obscure)? Why this instead of a McCain sign?

What I’m curious about is how many of these people will stay home rather than vote for McCain — or even, maybe, just go ahead and vote for the black guy.

Earlier today, I wrote “Can we Wordle? Yes, we can!” Wordle being a toy for generating “word clouds” from any given text. I created a Wordle of all of Obama’s answers during last night’s debate. (Again, the hat-tip for the idea goes to The Monkey Cage, which did a Wordle of the Vice-Presidential debate, both candidates in one).

Still using the of same transcript, here’s the Wordle for John McCain’s words:

Click to see large.

So how do the two compare? And what words stand out for prominence – or absence?

Process-wise, what struck me is that Obama spoke slightly more (some 6,720 words) than McCain (about 6,550), and that McCain made more short quips and interjections. The dynamic of frontrunner versus underdog? McCain needed to be on the attack after all, push for some kind of break to revive his chances, while Obama’s main goal must have been to keep ‘er steady and not disrupt his comfortable lead in the polls.

An easily recognizable word in the McCain Wordle is friends – as in, “my friends”, McCain’s catchphrase. Another marked feature of the McCain Wordle is that America, Americans and to a lesser extent American are among the most prominent words. United and States are big too. The American President America is waiting for! In the Obama Wordle, America, American and Americans are all present, but very small.

The prominence of Well, like and look in McCain’s Wordle makes him look curiously like a Valley girl. But he’s also got thank fairly large in there, and Tom (Brokaw). Obama had less time for such niceties and spoke more directly to the audience, over Tom’s head.

Seems to be the big moment from the debate. I’m seeing reference to it everywhere and just saw it on CNN.

It doesn’t seem that horrible to me but is definitely of a piece with the disdain/ condescension takeaway from the first debate (when McCain couldn’t manage to make eye contact with Obama).

Not good for McCain.

John McCain and Barack Obama shake hands to begin debate.

I don’t have enough thoughts to write up a whole debate review, but I would like to point out two answers from Obama last night that I thought stood out. This is the second debate and the umpteenth time we’ve heard these two speak so there is very little that we have not already heard. That said, I thought Obama’s response about health care was effective. I won’t go in to how the primary candidate who took such heat for not having a mandate in his health care plan now has to answer to charges of forcing people to get health care. His best answer was about deregulation of the insurance industry and allowing insurance companies to sell their products across state lines.

And the reason that it’s a problem to go shopping state by state, you know what insurance companies will do? They will find a state — maybe Arizona, maybe another state — where there are no requirements for you to get cancer screenings, where there are no requirements for you to have to get pre-existing conditions, and they will all set up shop there.

That’s how in banking it works. Everybody goes to Delaware, because they’ve got very — pretty loose laws when it comes to things like credit cards.

And in that situation, what happens is, is that the protections you have, the consumer protections that you need, you’re not going to have available to you.

That is a fundamental difference that I have with Senator McCain. He believes in deregulation in every circumstance. That’s what we’ve been going through for the last eight years. It hasn’t worked, and we need fundamental change.

He gets a little bit muddled in that first paragraph, but his overriding point — that allowing companies to sell their products across state lines without having to comply with the regulations of the state they are selling too will give us the lowest common denominator of consumer protection. It is exactly what happened with the credit card industry, just as he said. The reason I think this was such an effective answer is that this is the first time that I have heard a candidate articulate this problem, and I think Americans are more open than ever to this argument.

Can we Wordle?

Yes, we can!

Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes.

Well, here goes: this is the Wordle of all of Obama’s answers during last night’s debate, on the basis of this transcript.

Click to see large.

A hat-tip is in order: I got the idea when I saw the Wordle on The Monkey Cage of the Vice-Presidential debate. That Wordle was of everything both candidates said though, which seemed less revealing to me than what you’d get Wordling each candidate’s words separately.

I’ll do one for McCain later today..

Over time, the place which the Afghanistan war retains in the American political conversation has become reduced to a marginal subject with an overwhelmingly symbolic role. As debate raged over the rightness or wrongness of the Iraq invasion, Afghanistan became more of an abstraction: the blank screen upon which the opponents projected the contrast and comparison they needed for their argument.

Image used under a CC license from Flickr user vendrán mañana

For Republicans, Afghanistan was Iraq’s little brother, mostly ignored but useful as illustration for the case that we’re fighting a global, interconnected War on Terror. For most Democrats and Obama supporters, meanwhile, Afghanistan has become “the good war”, the other war, the war you do support. The waning fortunes of the allied troops in Afghanistan appear most only as useful demonstration for the argument that Bush dropped the ball on Al-Qaeda and that Iraq was a ‘distraction’.

Either way, the answer seems almost unanimous: we need to stay in Afghanistan. And finish the job. The Republicans think it’s important – they’re totally about the War on Terror. Hey, it was their idea! The Democrats, too, want to invest more resources in Afghanistan; their very urge to do so is the proof of their military toughness bona fides, the deflection of any accusation of pacifism.

I adore politics. My job is politics-related. I’ve been watching this election cycle closely from the very beginning.

So it’s kind of hard for me to remember that there are a whole lot of people out there who just don’t care very much about politics. Now is when they start to pay attention.

And Barack Obama has shown over and over again that when people pay closer attention to him, he benefits (and his opponent suffers).

Take these three graphs from Pollster, indicating voter preferences in the lead-up to the Democratic primaries in Ohio, Wisconsin and Missouri.

Ohio

Wisconsin

Missouri

See how that orange Obama line goes up-up-up, but especially in the very last stretch before the primary?

Voter Suppression Wiki Home

A sad feature of our modern political climate is organized and intentional voter suppression.  Below is a list of current efforts at voter intimidation in several states.  While many of the efforts are in swing states, it seems to be going on across the country.  This is by no means comprehensive and it paints a sad picture of our democracy where the importance of winning is greater than the importance of the integrity of our system.  Oh, one other thing.  In every case, Republicans are leading the charge to disenfranchise students, minorities, the poor, everyone who might not support their agenda.  On to the list…

For the last one hundred years, Missouri has been the “bellwether” state for the union.  Missouri’s status as the state with the best historical tracking record in the country for Presidential politics regularly makes the press and the University of Missouri even makes note of it on their web site.

“There is no other state like Missouri,” said Marvin Overby, professor and Frederick A. Middlebush Chair in the Department of Political Science. “Missouri is the southernmost northern state, northernmost southern state, easternmost western state and westernmost eastern state. It is geographically and demographically in the middle. It’s in a unique position that tends to reflect well where the rest of the country is politically.”

Can Missouri do it again?

Sometimes, it’s awfully nice to live in a battleground state.

AP/ Terry Gilliam

Barack Obama has paid us a call here in Columbus, Ohio several times already and I’m sure he’ll be back again before election day. And yesterday, Bruce Springsteen came to town to give a free concert and get out the vote.

It was a gorgeous fall day — sunny but cool, with blue-blue skies and leaves just beginning to turn. My daughter was excited about going to her first real concert. (“Rock star” is currently her career goal.) I expected a madhouse but the crowds descended upon the Oval at OSU in a relaxed, strolling way. Lots of smiles.

No tickets were required for the concert, but tickets existed — they could be picked up at various Obama field offices. I didn’t bother. As we were walking, a young guy asked me if I had a ticket. I said “no…” fearing that the rules had changed or I’d misunderstood something. He said “here” and thrust a ticket at me. Uh, thanks!

Then a guy next to him looked at my daughter and asked if we needed another ticket. Well… He handed his over. Wow, thanks!

So, red tickets in hand (indicating that we were Brian and Sam, respectively), we worked our way towards the SPECIAL entrance (closer-up!) for ticket holders.

There were a bazillion people (evidently 10,000 total!) and this took awhile, with much winding and meandering of lines, even though everything moved pretty fast.

There were a small pack of protestors — about five — waving McCain/ Palin signs. I caught the eye of one guy who was smiling fixedly and walked straight towards him instead of diverting around their patch of turf. His eyes widened a bit and he got out of my way. A woman took his place and waved her “NOBAMA!” sign at me. I said, pleasantly, “Why do you support them?”

The daily tracking polls have been relatively stable over the last three days, since the previous polling update here; hence also the absence of intermittent updates. But today’s polls are interesting because they do not, or hardly, include any impact the Veep debate might have. So they can be used as a yardstick for measuring any such impact in three days’ time, when most of the tracking polls will have a sample completely from after the debate.

(There’s some trickiness involved, of course, in that the Veep debate will hardly be the only development impacting opinions; what about the Senate vote for the bailout bill, for example? Or, as Gallup points out, “the new Labor Department report out today, showing a bigger job loss in September than many analysts had predicted”?)

Daily tracking polls, 10/3 (click to enlarge)

Here’s the graph. Gallup’s poll bounced around a little the last few days, with Obama’s lead shrinking from 8% to 4% between Monday and Wednesday, and increasing to 7% again by today. The Rasmussen and Hotline poll have remained almost entirely stable and similar, showing an Obama lead of 5-7%. And the Daily Kos tracking poll, conducted by Research 2000, is off on its lonesome showing a significantly larger Obama lead of 10-11%.

Quickpost this image to Myspace, Digg, Facebook, etc.!

Reviewing the average of the four polls, however, there’s a hint of new movement today.