On a total aside in a post on McCain’s (lack of) campaign strategy, Daniel Nichanian at Campaign Diaries has this remark, between parentheses, about Sarah Palin’s recent telephone interview with Bill Kristol:

(Kristol acknowledged that it sounded like Palin was being coached by staffers while on the phone with him)

No way. She had staffers sitting in on a phone interview with a sycophantic columnist to make sure she didnt goof even in that setting?

But it’s true: in his complete softball of an interview, Kristol playfully asked Palin whether, “since she seemed to have enjoyed the debate, [..] she’d like to take this opportunity to challenge Joe Biden to another one.” Silence followed: “There was a pause, and I thought I heard some staff murmuring in the background (we were on speaker phones).” Eventually she passed on the notion of a challenge.

Now I’m a layman, I’ve never accompanied any candidate on his or her business — is this normal?

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God knows what got in the daily tracking polls today, because they’re all out of sorts.

Daily tracking polls update, 10/8: click to enlarge

Yesterday, the Diageo/Hotline poll suddenly had Obama’s lead drop by four points, from +6 to +2. That’s an unusually steep drop for a tracking poll. It was the biggest day-on-day change in any of the daily tracking polls since 7 September, over a month ago. It was all the stranger because none of the other tracking polls showed something similar: Obama’s lead dropped by one in the R2000/Kos poll, increased by a point in the Gallup poll, and was unchanged in Rasmussen’s.

Today, the weirdness continues. The Hotline poll has Obama’s lead down another point to +1. Rasmussen has his lead dropping by two points as well, from +8 to +6. But Gallup has it storming ever upward, today from +9 to +11; it has Obama at 52% of the vote. That result, as Gallup’s Jeff Jones points out, is “the best for Obama during the campaign, both in terms of his share of the vote and the size of his lead over McCain.”

So which is it? Is Obama up by 11%, 6% or 1%? That’s quite the difference. And is he moving up or down?

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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.

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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.

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Check out this graph from Gallup:

What jumped out at me when I saw this graph was that 1980 was the year Ronald Reagan was elected, and 1992 was the year Bill Clinton was elected. The numbers for 2008 lead to a rather obvious prediction, then.

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.

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A classmate of my daughter’s told her (yes, even second-graders are talking politics) that his neighbor has a McCain/ Palin sign in his yard, with a twist. The neighbor likes McCain but hates Palin, so crossed out her name from the sign. Heh.

Don’t you just hate it when a routine traffic stop results in the revelation of your second family, the destruction of your career, and the end of a local political dynasty?  Yeah, I hate that too.

Vito Fossella (R-Staten Island): Family man

GOP congressman Vito Fossella had the distinction of representing the only district in New York City that apparently contained any Republicans.  NY-13, which consists of Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, had previously been represented by Susan Molinari, the perkiest damned Reagan Republican ever to appear on the American political stage.  In a 1997 special election, Fossella replaced Molinari, who left the House for a brief-but-perky stint with CBS news, and he was re-elected by comfortable margins to the congressional seat thereafter.  Safely ensconced in Washington, Fossella had a rather undistinguished legislative career, which, apparently, contrasted sharply with the torrid private life that he conducted during his free time.

In the early hours of May 1, Fossella was pulled over by an Alexandria, VA patrolman and arrested for driving while intoxicated.  According to the police report, Fossella, when asked to recite the alphabet from D to T as part of a field sobriety test, responded: “D, E, F, H, G, H, I, J, L.”  Oooh, so close!  The congressman later recorded a 0.17 blood alcohol level, twice the legal limit and good for an automatic five-day stay in the pokey if convicted of driving while intoxicated.

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