Final Projection: Obama 349, McCain 189 Electoral Votes

Throughout the campaign, the most-reliable polling information came consistently from Nate Silver's website, fivethirtyeight.com.

Starting from his adoration of baseball statistics - a love I happen to share with him, by the way - Silver created a thoroughly incomphrensible maze of logrithems, regressions and who-knows-what-else to run all of the polls through his computer regressions, statistical analyses and simulations. He didn't just take information from one poll or a few of them, he took data from all of the polls, adjusting for past accuracy, internal polling bias and other abberant behavior.

Throughout the campaign, Silver's numbers have been dead-eye accurate.

The final projection from fivethirtyeight.com: Obama 349 electoral votes, McCain 189.

Here's the last election report Silver filed before returns begin showing up in five hours.

It's Tuesday, November 4th, 2008, Election Day in America. The last polls have straggled in, and show little sign of mercy for John McCain. Barack Obama appears poised for a decisive electoral victory.

Our model projects that Obama will win all states won by John Kerry in 2004, in addition to Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, Florida and North Carolina, while narrowly losing Missouri and Indiana. These states total 353 electoral votes. Our official projection, which looks at these outcomes probabilistically -- for instance, assigns North Carolina's 15 electoral votes to Obama 59 percent of the time -- comes up with an incrementally more conservative projection of 348.6 electoral votes.

We also project Obama to win the popular vote by 6.1 points; his lead is slightly larger than that in the polls now, but our model accounts for the fact that candidates with large leads in the polls typically underperform their numbers by a small margin on Election Day.

This race appears to have stabilized as of about the time of the second debate in Nashville, Tennessee on October 8th. Since that time, Obama has maintained a national lead of between 6 and 8 points, with little discernible momentum for either candidate. Just as noteworthy is the fact that the number of undecided voters is now very small, representing not much more than 2-3 percent of the electorate. Undecided voters who committed over the past several weeks appear to have broken roughly equally between the two candidates.

Our model forecasts a small third-party vote of between 1 and 2 points total; it is not likely to be a decisive factor in this election except perhaps in Montana, where Ron Paul is on the ballot and may garner 4-5 percent of the vote.

Any forecasting system is only as good as its inputs, and so if the polls are systematically wrong, our projection is subject to error as well. Nevertheless, even as we account for other cycles in which the polling numbers materially missed the national popular vote margin (such as in 1980), a McCain win appears highly unlikely. It is also possible, of course, that the polls are shy in Obama's direction rather than McCain's, in which case a double-digit win is possible.

Nor does McCain appear to have much chance of winning the Electoral College while losing the popular vote; in fact, our model thinks that Obama is slightly more likely to do so. McCain diverted many of his resources to Pennsylvania, a state where he narrowed Obama's margins somewhat, but which our model concludes that Obama is now virtually certain to win. This may have allowed Obama to consolidate his margins in other battleground states, particularly Western states like Colorado and Nevada to which McCain has devoted little recent attention.

Thank you for placing your trust in FiveThirtyEight.com over the course of the past several months. We hope that you will join us both on the website and on HDNet tonight, where I'll be providing election coverage for Dan Rather's team. FiveThirtyEight intends to continue to apply our unique approach to politics after the election, and we hope to have several announcements about our future plans in the coming days and weeks.

Thank you, Nate!

Quote Of The Day

"If I were to give one reason why I believe electing Barack Obama is essential tomorrow, it would be an end to this dark, lawless period in American constitutional government." – Andrew Sullivan, The Atlantic

"Rosa Parks sat so that Martin Luther King could walk. Martin Luther King walked so that Obama could run. Obama's running so that we all can fly. I can't wait until November 5 and I'm going to say 'Hello, Brother President'." – JZee, rapper

"Ok guys, let's go home. It will be fun to see how the story ends." – Barack Obama to reporters on his campaign plane last night en route to Chicago.

The Last Les MisBarack Video

Here's the final Les MisBarack video. If you don't have tears at the end, you are not human!

I Tremble For My Country

The American author and naturalist Terry Tempest Williams once wrote, "The eyes of the future are watching us and they are praying that we learn to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with clasped hands that we might act with restraint, leaving room for the life that is destined to come."

Described as a "visionary" by the Utne Reader, Williams’ prayerful hope sums up how I feel this morning, the day before what will be the most-critical election of our time. Maybe any time since Lincoln was elected in 1860. Yet I also tremble for my country as it stands on the eve of electing its 44th president.

I tremble because we stare numbly at a world in crisis due largely to America’s catastrophic wars of choice and “in your face” foreign policy.

I tremble because we live terrified in an economy melting faster than a snow cone in August thanks to the unbridled greed and “grab all you can before someone else gets any” philosophy nurtured by a president who has no moral compass.

I tremble because as we shiver in the cold, early days of winter, a cold, shivering chill runs down our spines when we hear John McCain and Sarah Palin throw smears and platitudes like red meat to starving animals instead of discussing real issues like 11% of the country not working when unemployment claims are added to the number of people who’ve become discouraged and stopped looking for a job, or that 18% of American children go hungry every day, or one-sixth of the country is praying and hoping they and their kids don’t get sick or injured because they have no insurance.

I tremble because we’ve endured eight years of seeing America’s honor in the world torn to shreds, the Constitutional rights that protected us for 225 years from government abuse of power and authority systematically stripped and pillaged, the virgin American ideal of equal justice and equal rights and equal opportunity and equal protection raped repeatedly by an ideologically-driven Supreme Court where one Republican-appointed justice is angry he was born black, a second is a mental midget and a third accepts the far right notion that those who have it are worth more under the law than anyone who doesn’t.

I tremble because if We the People of the United States of America have another election stolen out from under us there will be hell to pay at home and around the world. One of the most laconic women I know told me last night that if somehow McCain confounds the reams of polls and wins, there will be rioting in the streets and “I’ll be out there throwing bricks myself.” Ironically, a deposition is being taken today in Ohio of the man who may have been responsible for the illegal, computerized vote switching and disappearing votes in the Buckeye State in the infamous Ken Blackwell 2004 Presidential Election Vote Switcheroo.

I tremble for my country because there is not enough Loraizapam™ in the world to calm me down if Obama loses. I should be celebrating my birthday today but instead I sit worried, fearful, frightened and trembling.

538 And Rasmussen: Obama Still Has Healthy Lead

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll once again shows Barack Obama with 51% of the vote while John McCain is five points back at 46%. This is the 38th straight day that Obama's support has stayed between 50% and 52%.

In the Electoral College projections, Rasmussen shows Obama leading 260 to 160. When states that are leaning in one way or the other are included, Obama leads 313 to 160. A total of 270 Electoral College votes are needed for victory.

At Nate Silver’s five thirtyeight.com, Obama's position became somewhat stronger since its Sunday afternoon update. Silver has him with a 5.8 point lead in the national popular vote, and winning the election 96.3 percent of the time. Earlier, those figures were 5.4 and 93.7, respectively.

Obama's win percentage ticked upward for a couple of reasons, Silver maintains.

Firstly, he's gotten some relatively good numbers out of Pennsylvania with PPP and Zogby giving him leads of 8 and 14 points, respectively, and Rasmussen showing his lead expanding to 6 points after having been at 4 before.

Second, Silver reports, McCain's clock has run out. While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.

Moreover, there are very few true undecideds left.

After accounting for a third-party vote which looks as though it will come in at an aggregate of 2%, Silver shows only about 2.7% of voters left to allocate between the two major-party candidates. He predicts that even if John McCain were to win 70% of the remaining undecideds, it would only be worth a net of about a point for him. Frankly, McCain's winning scenarios mainly involve the polls having been wrong in the first place – because of a Bradley Effect or something else. It is unlikely that the polls will "tighten" substantially further – especially when Obama already has over 50% of the vote.

A couple of quick notes from Silver on yesterday’s individual state and national polling:

• He says people shouldn't worry too much about the SurveyUSA result in Minnesota which shows Obama just 3 points ahead. SurveyUSA's polling in Minnesota has been “very weird” all year; they've never shown Obama with larger than a 6 point lead in their likely voter model and had McCain ahead in the state as recently as October 1st. SurveyUSA does not have a Republican lean in general but, in Minnesota, it has consistently had a huge one.

• A couple of the national polls have started to predict how undecided voters will behave and allocate them between the two major-party candidates. Silver uses versions of these surveys before any such allocations are made as he doesn’t believe a pollster's job is to be in the prediction business.

I Couldn’t Wait

– Guest post by Dick Price of LAProgressive.com

I didn’t really mean to do it. I usually have more self-control. Something just came over me. I couldn’t restrain myself. Please forgive me.

I voted Friday.

I don’t have an excuse. I’ll be in town on Election Day and had planned to vote then like I always do. I’ve even taken off work Monday and Tuesday, making myself available to pitch in where needed, which would give me plenty of time to vote Tuesday, no matter how long the lines.

And, ordinarily, I like voting at our local polling place here in Mount Washington; I like bumping into our neighbors and silently congratulating each other in this bluer-than-blue neighborhood for striking our blow for what we hope will be freedom and justice. Oftentimes, I take my 14-year-old daughter along, making it a family affair that I hope will rub off on her.

But after a long, antsy day at the office in Los Alamitos, I found myself behind the wheel Friday afternoon, headed back through the Orange Curtain, to the Los Angeles County Registrar’s Office in Norwalk. It’s probably no more than 10 miles as the crow flies, but I was confined to surface streets, which were crowded with moms driving their kids to Halloween parties. As usual, I took a couple wrong turns to make the trip more of an adventure than necessary, then had to circle to the large parking lot several times to find an open spot.

Once I processed in at the Registrars, I spent the better part of an hour in a huge, makeshift tent with hundreds of my fellow Angelenos—some who had spent hours there already—until my number was finally called and I could mark my ballot for Barack Obama and Joe Biden—and for our new friends Cynthia Loo and Lori-Ann Jones for LA Superior Court, for Xavier Becerra for Congress and Kevin de Leon for the Assembly, and against Prop 8.

And I’ve got to tell you, damn, did it feel good! Damn, damn, damn!

An Essential Sea Change

Since you’re reading this, I don’t have to tell you how important this election is.

Aren’t we all heartsick at the way the Bush-Cheney Administration has combined wrong-headed incompetence with wrong-hearted bellicosity to bring our country to its knees on so many fronts? Now, doesn’t the prospect of another Republican administration, led by an ill-tempered John McCain and an ill-informed Sarah Palin, leave a pit in all our stomachs?

America would survive a McCain-Palin Administration—Americans are resilient folk—but it would be another four years of grinding through an administration that simply doesn’t represent policies that reflect my views or those of most people I know.

On the other hand, Barack Obama’s performance through this endless campaign, the measured way he has addressed the economic and military crises that have arisen, the galvanizing way he has inspired millions of Americans as no one has for decades, the growing sense that this man and his Vice President, Joe Biden, would put together an administration that would get something done that we all want done—well, it vindicates every hope Sharon and I expressed before the California primary.

And, obviously, we’re not alone.

Even in states that have seemed to have gone over entirely to the Dark Side, the Obama-Biden ticket has a shot just three days out:

• The New York Times reports that in Colorado “close to 1.5 million votes, or about 46 percent of the registered total, are already in the can, cast and waiting to be counted.”
• In Georgia, the Washington Post reports that a “record-breaking 2 million people cast early ballots in the U.S. state of Georgia, an indication of high enthusiasm over Tuesday’s presidential election that could help Democratic candidate Barack Obama.”
• And in North Carolina, where I lived for a couple years as kid, The Nation reports that Obama has a chance: “Obama’s North Carolina campaign, undergirded by 1,700 volunteers, 40 offices and close to 400 paid staffers (McCain has 30 offices but only 30 paid staff), has outregistered Republicans five to one in the state this year and drawn even in the polls heading into the campaign’s last weeks. In the first week of early voting, in mid-October, almost three times as many Democrats as Republicans were casting ballots in a record turnout; while African-Americans are only 22 percent of the state’s population, almost 40 percent of early voters were black.”

Long lines are reported in virtually every state that has established early voting. Not all the absentee and early voters will go for Obama and Biden, of course, but early returns are looking good for the Democratic ticket, darned good. These early returns, the long lines, the masses of Obama volunteers, and the mountains of small donations his campaign has amassed month after month tell us that something is clearly afoot.

America is on the move.

Bringing More of Us In The Tent

The crowd in the tent at Norwalk looked a lot like Los Angeles: African Americans, Latinos, Asians, and Whites in roughly equal measure. Working class folk and young professionals. Young and old, but a lot of the young. More than a few who struggled with English.

I don’t suppose everyone there cast a vote for Obama. There was no electioneering, in the tent or outside. No one wore an inappropriate button or shirt — my Obama-Biden button was in my pocket and my “No on 8” T-shirt under my regular shirt. Still, there were enough winks and nods and high-signs to say that the Democratic ticket was having a good day up and down the line.

I ran into our young friend Francisco Cendejas, who needed to vote early because he had decided to help get out the vote for Manuel Perez’s California Assembly race in Indio and Palm Springs and also pick up a ballot for his girlfriend Ana Mascarenas, who had returned to her home state of New Mexico to help with a Congressional race there. It was nice to see a friendly face in what was a friendly crowd despite the long waits, close quarters, and a bullhorn that rattled your teeth.

This election isn’t about race anymore than it’s about income redistribution. But an Obama Administration is going to make a big difference in race and class relations in this country. As our friend, Anthony Asadullah Samad wrote recently, America is finally letting one of the disenfranchised “drive the car.” ust the fact that a black man will be our President and a black woman our First Lady, two people who grew up in the straightened circumstances many Black Americans know, will send the clear signal to all the disenfranchised across America that they’re more fully inside the tent with the rest of us.

And that will be a good thing.

So let’s all make sure that good thing comes to pass so we can spend the next four years a dream, not a nightmare.

Along with his wife Sharon, Dick Price edits a daily e-news and opinion magazine at www.LAProgressive.com

How Obama Will Do It

– Guest post by Denis Campbell of VadimusPost.com

If you think this campaign was about tons of money for slick television advertising, you’re wrong. The money helped Obama take his message into additional ‘red’ states, but this election was about getting to know the voter – the customer, if you will – and giving them a voice and a say. Yes, Obama built a classic door-to-door retail unprecedented political machine but he made the election about us. No-drama Obama is only part of the story.

The wizard behind the curtains is soft-spoken and determined David Plouffe, 41, Obama’s campaign manager. Said strategist David Axelrod, “David Plouffe has done the most magnificent job of managing a campaign that I’ve seen in my life of watching presidential politics. To start something like this from scratch and build what we have built was a truly remarkable thing.”

These are the seven deadly virtues of Obama-Plouffe and the decidedly disciplined and unsexy way in which they did it:

1. The Pharaoh’s Already Dead

Invert the pyramid. In this election, ground-level organizing and excitement trumped traditional thinking. Plouffe turned the organization upside down and decentralized everything: He put the campaign in the hands of incredibly loyal, door-to-door, face-to-face organizers in the highest of high-touch ways. Half of the campaign money raised went to community organizing and was indeed a triumph of average voters over high powered lobbyist political machines.

The Clinton and McCain campaigns brought in “the usual suspects” and relied on models from the last three elections. They wheeled out 90’s-era lobbyists and strategists from past campaigns such as Rick Davis and Mark Penn, architect of Hillary’s “3AM ad” who stilled is owed $7-million by the campaign.

This is how campaigns are run. McCain was in Alexandria, Virginia next to Washington, they could all be important, lunch at The Palm on the campaign’s nickel, opine on national TV, sit together in high level HQ meetings, dictate strategy and, as we saw, in-fight and destroy the campaign from the inside-out.

Obama put his top people and surrogates out in the field. Now with 4,000 paid staffers and millions of volunteers, I got calls from US phone banks here in the UK despite having voted six weeks ago via absentee ballot. Plouffe had the good sense to give them more than they could possibly use or need, get out of the way and then let volunteers and field staff do their thing as opposed to issuing HQ fiats and edicts and deflating their enthusiasm.

The election was always about them.

2. Sacred Cows Make the Best Burgers

In a traditional campaign, you follow a prescribed timetable and calendar which breaks at different times over your opponent. Well, there never was a sacred cow in the Obama campaign. They went against conventional wisdom at every turn: Obama never got the memo.

As a result, his campaign made sure everyone knew this was not the 1992, ’96, ’00 or ’04 election. This was to be the first YouTube, Facebook, Blogger, MySpace, Twitter election. The Internet was where it would be won or lost. So he set out to:

• Attract and excite those who had never voted,
• Energize young people on college campuses, and
• Lure back those who felt so disenfranchised by the seeming theft of the last two elections that they’d given up.

The problem was the Democratic Party, a group that had won only three Presidential elections in the last 40 years. Democratic voters are like Rolling Stones fans. They are so busy getting ready for the concert they forget to vote. I’ve loved the Stones for decades, been to most of the concerts and I’ve never purchased an album. Point made?

Obama got them enthused and kept them disciplined. He warned of complacency until the last poll closed, even producing a brilliant ad showing a guy celebrating and falling off his bike before crossing the finish line, crashing because he took his hands off the handlebars and the second-place rider – with a McCain paste-on face – passing him at the line. Obama and his team always warned of celebrating too early despite the encouraging news.

Obama spoke to enormous rallies and got them to vote by using his relentless follow-up machine.

3. Lies, Damned Lies And Statistics

Pollsters can ask any question in any way to get the result they want. What they did not count on was the wonkish Nate Silver, head of über statistical firm and website www.fivethirtyeight.com.

The gold of 538 is it represents the number of electoral votes up for grabs; the first to obtain 270 state-by-state is the winner. All states except Nebraska and Maine are winner take all contests with Nebraska and Maine apportioning electoral votes by Congressional district.

If you followed the daily tracking polls as a barometer of what was happening, you got only half the story because those pollsters did not factor in new voters, those brought back by Obama or cell phone-only households (15% of the US ). The “Likely Voter Model” was based on those who had voted in the last two Presidential elections.

Silver grew up following baseball stats so he developed mathematical formulae and algorithms based on all factors before issuing his polls and predictions. As expected, he gets it right more often than the vaunted television network news desks and traditional pollsters such as Gallup, Zogby and Rasmussen. Team Obama knew this and their internals always showed a strong advantage; this was why they had an 18-state battleground strategy which included many red states.

4. Obama’s Ground Game

There was an 80%+ total turnout, the largest since 1960 and one third of the vote was cast in the weeks before Election Day. The subplot to this is the enormous registration effort in key battleground states. This is referred to as Obama’s Ground Game (OGG). While the Republicans, Sarah Palin in particular, joked about “what is it a community organizer does?” they got schooled and gamed.

The OGG was registering voters methodically and consistently all throughout the summer and on into September. Using sophisticated data-tracking tools such as Geographic Information Systems, used by Bill Gates’ foundation to target areas of greatest need for food and vaccinations, Obama’s field offices and millions of volunteers kept reaching out to the newly registered. Indiana, a traditional Republican red state had four million registered voters in the 2004 election; the OGG machine registered 400,000 new Democrats this time around. Pennsylvania had five million voters in 2004; the OGG registered 500,000 new Democrats.

Up and down the battleground state map, new voters and volunteers for change was the order of the day.

5. Money, Money, Money

By enthusing the base and reaching out to people who never before voted, the Obama campaign generated $650-million dollars or $86 per person. More importantly, he brought 3.2-million people onboard via his website.

His standard “ask” was $5 or $10 per person, knowing that once he motivated you to contribute a small amount, do something you had likely not previously done, the battle was won. He could e-mail and have your neighbors call you. You were more likely to listen to your neighbor than a candidate or a pundit.

Polio was defeated by raising $2 rolls of dime coins for President Roosevelt; it later became the “The March of Dimes.” Everyone could empty their pocket. Folks thought this a mad way to raise campaign cash – until it worked and raised more than ever before.

6. Play The Game On The Other Guy’s Half Of The Field

Obama’s campaign forced McCain to defend and protect his turf against Obama’s overwhelming push. Hope for a mistake is how McCain had to play this election game. Make him play defense all of the time.

McCain had quite a bit of money yet played the game throughout the month of October in his own end of the field and was forced to spend money defending even his home state of Arizona, Georgia which, normally, is very Republican and North Dakota, a state George Bush won by 27 points in 2004. Obama said from the beginning he wanted to end partisan Red vs. Blue politics and build a center from where the best ideas could be grown and implemented.

7. The Internet Is Not A Series Of Tubes

Soon-to-be former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens once called the internet “a series of tubes.” The Obama Internet was a fund raising, organizing and data mining juggernaut.

• Fund Raising - Team Obama picked up where Howard Dean left off. The DNC Chair raised $6 million dollars over the Internet for his 2000 presidential primary election campaign. Everyone wanted to know how to do that. Last month Obama shattered the record he himself had set the previous month ($150 million dollars raised in September vs. $66 million in August) and long after this election ends we will learn he raised another $100 million dollars or so for October and the first three days of November. That’s ¾ of a billion dollars or more raised for one candidate.
• Organizing - If you registered at www.barackobama.com there was a wealth of Internet tools to use, making it possible to download everything from position papers to brochures and desktop wallpaper. You could find hints on how to organize debate watching parties, find other supporters in your area and suggested talking points. You knew where phone banks would be held and could even organize car pools to help elderly or handicapped voters get to the polls online. You could also report attempts at voter suppression by the other side and other bad actors. You had access to the campaign and they treated you as the real reason for the campaign.
• Data Mining - The real gold for the campaign was mining and manipulating the real-time databases behind the website that made their data mining effort unprecedented. They used a variety of tools to reach out and ask for help because they knew where and how to find you.

They also used their social networking tools from sites such as Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter to collect friends and surrogates all working for one thing. Through data mining, they also helped individuals find like-minded people around the globe. The breadth of their technological reach was breathtaking and it grew and merged over time into an unstoppable juggernaut.

I live in the UK and registered at my mother’s address in the USA. With two clicks of my mouse, I knew of every like-minded person in my neighborhood, county, state and region. I found out where debate-watching house parties were to be held and how door-to-door campaigning efforts were organized. I knew of union and private phone banking efforts every day for the last five months and could join in if I chose or someone called me to make sure I was invited.

My mother took 17 calls – sorry, Ma – by different volunteers saying thanks for the support and if she or I had any questions. Even she was impressed.

By the way, she is still waiting for her first McCain phone call.

This is high touch customer embracing action and once you commit to it, you literally become the Biblical mustard seed that moves a mountain.

* * * * *

This is a generational change and wave election. As revolutionary as it was, it never lost site of the fact that we needed to first connect with and learn from each other before casting our vote.

Obama made it easier and acceptable again for us to talk with each other over a cup of coffee at the back fence. David Plouffe and Barack Obama have revolutionized the way political organizing is done.

Obama knew he had to shatter the red state-blue state paradigm and expand the base; otherwise he could not govern and lead.

Obama brought confidence, change and hope as his message. Everyone worked hard and pulled together in the same direction. No one ever took anything for granted, especially based on the past, and this is what will win it. It also helped that people really understood the consequences of the Bush years and despite a $10-trillion deficit, there was absolutely nothing to show for it.

Forty years ago, Martin Luther King’s proclaimed, “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.”

We are almost there yet there is much work to do.

Denis Campbell is editor-in-chief of www.VadimusPost.com.

New CD From ‘Billionaires For Bush’

Claiming that their checks to the Obama campaign were refused and the lobbyists rebuffed, the organization called Billionaires For Bush is fighting back. They ripped out every page from their old playbook, Fear and Voting in America, even going so far back as to plot another hostage crisis in Iran.

Now, with most of their eggs in John McCain's hand-basket, they fear the worst. So the group is shoring up its tax shelters and intend to ride this one out, but are sending this last dispatch before they may have to shove off for awhile.

The group has recorded a new CD at http://thebillionaires.org/stay-the-course-cd called Stay The Course which includes titles “We’re Spying On You,” “The Hurricane,” and “The K Street Tango” among 12 others. It’s available on-line for free.

One Final, Desperate Smear

With 72 hours remaining in the campaign, the McCain brain trust finally recognizes that its effort to link Barack Obama to "unrepentant domestic terrorist" Bill Ayers is having as much of an impact on voters as the “experience” argument.

So it is trying trotting out a new smear, another milestone on McCain's low road to the White House.

It is blasting Obama for consorting with unrepentant domestic Palestinian Rashid Khalidi. Never mind that he is a distinguished professor of Arab studies at Columbia, Khalidi once taught at the University of Chicago where he and Obama knew each other. Taking one last stab at instilling shadowy associations between Obama and Arabs in the minds of uninformed voters, the McCain team is slandering a thoughtful and respectable man.

Appearing on CNN Friday, McCain’s shameless and utterly unrepentant flack Michael Goldfarb chirped, "Barack Obama has a long track record of being around anti-Semitic, anti-Israel and anti-American rhetoric." Challenging Goldfarb, anchor Rick Sanchez asked, "Can you name one other person besides Khalidi who he hangs around with who is anti-Semitic?" Goldfarb couldn't, but the damage had been done – not to Obama, but to Khalidi, whose anti-Semitism had been presented as a matter of accepted fact.

Neither A Bigot Or Anti-Jewish

I don't know Khalidi personally though I've read his recent book Resurrecting Empire. But I know that there is nothing in his record to justify smearing him as a bigot. While the McCain campaign has presented him as a "PLO spokesman" – and it wouldn't be a crime if he were – in fact, Khalidi was simply an outside adviser to the Palestinian delegation at negotiations convened by Republican secretary of state James Baker during Bush The Elder's administration.

Apparently, McCain is now so hostile to diplomacy that participating in American-sponsored talks is deemed anti-American.

Yes, Khalidi is a supporter of Palestinian rights and a serious critic of Israel and of American policy in the Middle East, and he is well to the left of Obama. But he condemns violence, criticised Yasser Arafat's corruption and cronyism, and has consistently acknowledged Jewish suffering. Fair-minded friends of Israel have praised his writing. New York Times columnist Thomas Freidman, hardly a Jew-hater, described Under Siege, Khalidi's book about PLO decision-making during the 1982 Lebanon war, as "extremely valuable" and "generally objective, lucid and incisive".

Professor Khalidi is on the board of sponsors of the Palestine-Israel Journal, a publication founded by prominent Palestinian and Israeli journalists to encourage dialogue between the two sides. By the degraded standards of McCain and Palin, McCain himself could be branded as an enemy of the Jews. As has been widely reported, under McCain's leadership the International Republican Institute gave nearly a half-million dollars to a Palestinian research center Khalidi co-founded.

Yet McCain's attacks on Khalidi are categorically different than his attacks on Ayers.

Condemning Violence

The Ayers attacks were unfair to Obama, who was not particularly close to the man and never gave a hint of condoning Ayers’ youthful violence. Ayers did shameful things so his public excoriation was not entirely undeserved. This is not true of Khalidi. He is guilty of nothing. The dangerous implications of McCain's assaults on him stretch beyond this election, suggesting that friendship with prominent Arabs is grounds for suspicion and thus dangerous for ambitious politicians – unless the Arabs belong to the Saudi royal family.

Given our leader’s failure to even try understanding Arab grievances, no wonder the Bush administration made catastrophic foreign policy blunders in the region that could take decades to repair. Obama's engagement with a prominent, moderate Palestinian intellectual should be a point in his favor. In any rational society, it would be.

By trying to turn their acquaintance into evidence of subversion, McCain does more than disgrace himself even more than he already has. His reckless rhetoric threatens to push legitimate criticism of Israeli and American policy even further outside the bounds of acceptable political discussion, making straight talk on the Middle East ever more elusive.

Palin Gets Punked

The image of the humorless Canadian just got whacked apart like a piñata.

A pair of Montreal radio comedians, one of whom pretended to be Nicholas Sarkozy, managed to get Palin to believe she was speaking with the French president for nearly five minutes yesterday. Among other things, she laughs and agrees to go helicopter hunting with Sarkozy when he said he likes to kill “small animals.” Palin also gushes over Carla Bruni, Sarkozy’s model-singer wife.



When the radio comic tells her they have a lot in common because he can see Belgium from his house, Palin agrees noting the analogy between the American relationship with Russia and the French relationship with Belgium.

The “Special Relationship” Frays: British Gov’t Investigating CIA Officers For Torture

So much for the “special relationship” between the United States and Great Britain. If it is not in complete tatters, it is fraying badly this morning.

The British Attorney General says he will investigate allegations that a British resident arrested by the US in Pakistan before being “rended” to Morocco, shipped to the black hell hole prison at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and is now at Guantanamo Bay was brutally tortured after being arrested and questioned by American intelligence officers beginning in 2002.

According to The Independent, British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith wants the attorney general, Baroness Scotland, to bring criminal proceedings against American CIA officers said to be responsible for the rendition and abuse of Binyam Mohamed when he was held in prisons in Morocco and Afghanistan as a result of US rendition.

This follows sharp criticism of US prosecutors by British judges who read secret evidence of torture committed against Mohamed, including allegations his torturers used a razor blade to cut his penis repeatedly. The Attorney General's investigation is expected to include allegations that MI5 colluded in Mohamed's rendition. Mohamed, 30, an Ethiopian national and British resident, was arrested in Pakistan in 2002, where he was questioned by an MI5 officer before being handed over to the Americans.

On Tuesday, Government lawyers wrote to the judges hearing Mohamed's case against the UK government in the High Court. In the letter they said "the question of possible criminal wrongdoing to which these proceedings has given rise has been referred by the Home Secretary to the Attorney general for consideration as an independent minister of justice." Baroness Scotland has been sent secret witness statements given to the court and public interest immunity certificates for the proceedings.

Mohamed, 30, accuses MI5 agents of lying about what they knew of CIA plans to transfer him to a prison in North Africa, where he claims he was subjected to horrendous torture to extort a confession. Last night, his lawyer Clive Stafford Smith, said, "This is a welcome recognition that the CIA cannot just go rendering British residents to secret torture chambers without consequences, and British agents cannot take part in US crimes without facing the music."

The US State Dept. had no comment this morning on the British claims, a spokeswoman telling me, “we do not comment on matters before foreign courts.” A spokesman for the CIA did not return several phone calls.

McCain’s Dirty Hands

That the CIA was able to do this is partly the responsibility of John McCain. Once a strong campaigner against the US using torture, he caved in to the Bush administration by allowing an ammendment to an anti-torture bill he sponsored and shepherded through Congress that exempted the CIA from the law’s key provisions.

Human rights groups have sharply criticised the British government for allowing CIA “torture flights” to refuel in England as well as fly through its airspace. A special European Parliament investigation condemned the US for its policy of “extraordinary rendition” where individuals suspected of participating in terrorist activities are flown to third countries that use torture as a matter of routine when questioning political prisoners.

“If John McCain had held firm in barring torture by any US government agency, Mr. Mohammed would have avoided being tortured whicforced him to confess to crimes he did not commit,” a spokesman for Human Rights Watch in Britain told me this morning.

“As a result of capitulating to White House demands,” she added, “McCain’s dirty hands are all over this case.”

Another Bush Lie

Torture under any circumstances violates Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention which both the US and Great Britain have signed. At the time of Mohammad’s rendition, George Bush lied repeatedly when he stated at news conferences between 2004 and 2006 “the US does not torture. Period.”

In August, two judges ruled allegations of torture were at least arguable in Mohammad’s case and stated that MI5 information relating to Mohamed was "not only necessary but essential for his defence.” The judges have read statements and interviews with Mohamed between July 28 and 31, 2004, when he says he was forced to confess to terrorism. The judges said, "This was after a period of over two-and-a-half years of incommunicado detention during which Binyam Mohamed … was tortured."

He was first held in Pakistan in 2002, where a British agent interrogated him; he was then sent to Morocco by the CIA and allegedly tortured for 18 months. He was rendered to the secret "Dark Prison" in Afghanistan, where his torture is alleged to have continued. Since September 2004, Mohammad has languished at Guantanamo Bay.

If the British Attorney General finds that the charges of torture are true – which will require merely going through MI5 and MI6 files – then criminal warrants could be issued against Americans who were involved in Mohammad’s torture, rendition and custody. It is doubtful that the Bush Administration would extradite the officers but it could be one of the first diplomatic issues facing the new president in January. If McCain is somehow elected, the officers involved wouldn’t be sent for trial in London but their travelling days and vacations will be limited to the United States.

Another reason to vote for Barack Obama.

Stop The Presses!

The McCain campaign’s latest attempt to portray the press as liberal puppets of Barack Obama — by painting the Los Angeles Times’s refusal to release a videotape of the senator at a farewell dinner in 2003 for Rashid Khalidi, the Palestinian scholar and advocate, as part of a vast left-wing conspiracy — is much ado about nothing.

McCain’s previously-discredited spokesman, Michael Goldfarb, accused the Times of “intentionally suppressing information that could provide a clearer link between Barack Obama and Rashid Khalidi.” Goldfarb went on to mention a potentially vote-altering moment wherein the tape could have possibly captured Obama’s reaction to a “hate speech”-filled poem recited at the dinner.

This “intentional suppression” has caused plenty of consternation in the blogosphere. Many writers saw the Times’ refusal as evidence of liberal bias; others were just confused by the paper’s intransigence.

Yesterday, the Times published an article explaining its decision to withhold the video. Editor Russ Stanton said, “The Los Angeles Times did not publish the videotape because it was provided by a confidential source who did so on the condition that we not release it. The Times keeps its promises to its sources.”

Stanton’s explanation is more than plausible; in fact, such deals with sources are quite common in journalism. At one time or another, nearly every reporter has access to a document, allowed to take notes on the document and write a story based on the notes but not allowed to publish or otherwise distribute the document. So unless we’re prepared to call Stanton a liar, there shouldn’t be any problem taking him at his word.

As Bill Sammon, deputy managing editor of FOX News’s Washington bureau – of all people – put it, had LA Times reporter Peter Wallsten who wrote story based on the tape, buckled under the demands of the McCain campaign, sources would have good reason to question his trustworthiness in the future.

Sammon went on to add, “A deal is a deal, even if it’s a dumb deal. Besides, there may be a perfectly legitimate reason for withholding the tape, such as the possibility that it contains footage that would compromise an unnamed source’s identity.”

Furthermore, it’s not clear that the Times even still has the tape but if it does, and it chose to break its promise, what exactly do the McCain folks expect to find? They talk of wanting to see Obama’s reaction to the poem, but do they really think the camera was just zeroed in on the senator all night long, waiting for him to do something suspicious? A terrorist fist-bump, perhaps? Watching with bated breath for a glimpse of the senator as he reacts to a controversial banquet speech is the essence of deliberate oversimplification.

What we do wish the Times had done is be as transparent as possible about how the story came about. Tell us what they can about the source’s motivations and why the editors agreed to grant anonymity and to the restrictions on the use of the tape. This would go a long way toward reassuring the rational public that there is no conspiracy here. For everyone else, it doesn’t matter what the Times does or says.

Sarah Winks For Obama

The Obama campaign released a new ad this morning that goes after both John McCain's non-understanding of the economy and his selection of Sarah Palin.

Titled "His Choice," the spot begins with quotes from McCain admitting his lack of economic know-how. The last one has McCain declaring, "I might have to rely on a vice president that I select" for expertise on economic issues.

"His choice?" the visual asks before cutting to footage of Palin winking at the vice presidential debate.



Including Palin shows how large a liability Obama – indeed, the entire political community, including many Republicans – thinks she is for the GOP.

When Did The US Start Valuing Stupid Politicians?

How did it happen? How did politics in the US come to be dominated by people who make a virtue out of ignorance?

Was it charity that permitted mankind's closest living relative to spend two terms as president?

How did Sarah Palin, Dan Quayle and other such gibbering mulyuks succeed?

How were Republican rallies in 2008 drowned out by screaming ignoramuses insisting that Barack Obama was a Muslim and a terrorist?

The US has the world's best universities and attracts the world's finest minds. It dominates discoveries in science and medicine. Its wealth and power depend on the application of knowledge. Yet, unique among the developed nations, learning is a grave political disadvantage in America.

There have been exceptions over the past century: Franklyn Roosevelt, Jack Kennedy and Bill Clinton tempered their intellectualism with the common touch and survived. But Adlai Stevenson, Al Gore and John Kerry were successfully tarred by their opponents as cerebral elitists, as if this were a disqualification to be president. Perhaps the defining moment in the collapse of intelligent politics was Ronald Reagan's response to Jimmy Carter during the 1980 presidential debate. Carter – stumbling a little, using long words – carefully enumerated the benefits of national health insurance. Reagan just smiled and said, "There you go again." His own health program would have appalled most Americans had he explained it as carefully as Carter had done, but he had found a formula for avoiding tough political issues and making his opponents look like wonks.

It wasn't always like this.

This great Republic’s founding fathers – Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, John Adams, Alexander Hamilton and others – were among the greatest thinkers of their age. They felt no need to make a secret of it. How did the project they launched degenerate into George W. Bush and Sarah Palin?

Dumb Is As Dumb Does

On one level, this is easy to answer. Ignorant politicians are elected by ignorant people. US education, like the US health system, is a failure. In the most powerful nation on earth, one adult in five believes the sun revolves round the earth; only 26% accept evolution; two-thirds of young adults are unable to find Iraq on a map; two-thirds of US voters cannot name the three branches of government; the maths skills of 15-year-olds in the US are ranked 24th out of the 29 countries of the OECD.

But this merely extends the mystery: How did so many US citizens become so stupid and so suspicious of intelligence? Susan Jacoby's book The Age of American Unreason provides the best explanation I’ve read so far. She shows that the degradation of US politics results from a series of interlocking tragedies.

One theme is both familiar and clear: Religion generally, and fundamentalism specifically, makes you stupid. The US is the only rich, developed country in which Christian fundamentalism is vast and growing.

Jacoby shows that there once was a certain logic to its anti-rationalism. During the first few decades after The Origin of Species was published, Americans had good reason to reject the theory of natural selection and treat public intellectuals with suspicion. From the beginning, Darwin's theory was mixed up in the US with “social Darwinism” and the British writer Herbert Spencer. Spencer's doctrine, promoted in the popular press with help from Andrew Carnegie, John D. Rockefeller and Thomas Edison, suggested that millionaires stood at the top of a scala natura established by evolution. By preventing unfit people being weeded out, government intervention weakened the nation. Gross economic inequalities were both justifiable and necessary.

In other words, Darwinism became indistinguishable from the most bestial form of laissez-faire economics. Many Christians responded with revulsion. It is totally ironic that the doctrine rejected a century ago by prominent fundamentalists like William Jennings Bryan is now central to the economic thinking of the Christian right. Modern fundamentalists reject the tested science of Darwinian evolution but embrace the pseudoscience of social Darwinism.

Local Control

But there are other, more powerful, reasons for the intellectual isolation of fundamentalists. The US is alone in giving control of education to local authorities. Teaching in the southern states was dominated by the views of an ignorant aristocracy of planters and a great educational gulf opened.

"In the south", Jacoby writes, "what can only be described as an intellectual blockade was imposed in order to keep out any ideas that might threaten the social order."

The Southern Baptist Convention, now the biggest denomination in the US, has done more than any other force to keep the south stupid. In the 1960s it tried to stave off desegregation by establishing a system of private Christian schools and universities. A student can now progress from kindergarten to an advanced degree without any exposure to secular teaching.

Worse, Southern Baptist beliefs pass intact through the public school system as well. A 1998 survey by researchers at the University of Texas found that 25% of the state's public school biology teachers believe humans and dinosaurs lived on earth at the same time.

This tragedy has been assisted by the American worship of self-education. Though he greatly regretted his lack of formal teaching, Abraham Lincoln's career is repeatedly cited as evidence that good education is unnecessary; all that is needed to succeed is determination and rugged individualism. This might have served people well when genuine self-education movements like the one built around the Little Blue Books in the first half of the 20th century were in vogue.

But in the age of infotainment, it is a recipe for confusion.

Subversive Intellectuals

Besides fundamentalist religion, perhaps the most potent reason intellectuals struggle in elections is that intellectualism is equated with subversion. The brief flirtation of some thinkers with communism nearly 80 years ago has been used to create an impression in the public mind that all intellectuals are communists. Every day, Rush Limbaugh and Bill O'Reilly rage against the "liberal elites" destroying America.

The spectre of pointy-headed alien subversives was crucial to the election of Reagan and Bush. A genuine intellectual elite – like the neocons, some of them former communists, surrounding Bush – has managed to pitch the political conflict as a battle between ordinary Americans and an over-educated pinko establishment. Any attempt to challenge the ideas of the rightwing elite is successfully branded as elitism.

Barack Obama has a lot to offer the US and the world but none of this will stop if he wins. Until the great failures of the US education system are reversed or religious fundamentalism withers, there will be political opportunities for people like Bush and Palin who flaunt their ignorance.

Hope

The final six minutes of Barack Obama’s “closing argument” speech in Canton Ohio left me with tears in my eyes.

GOP Voter Suppression May Stop Joe The Plumber From Voting

It might be the supreme, ironic, twist of Republicans efforts to keep people from voting. It turns out that Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – the infamous Joe the Plumber – may not be able to vote.

The Republican Party in Ohio lost a battle it took all the way to the US Supreme Court to force the Secretary of State to use “exact matches” against driver license or Social Security lists to purge voters. It turns out that Wurzelbacher is registered as Worzelbacher and might have found himself blocked from voting.

While this is happening everywhere, it is compounded by a protracted Republican effort to disenfranchise Democratic voters under the guise of combating voter fraud. Voter fraud is a serious issue.

The trouble is that it barely exists.

In the six years since the Bush administration made it a priority, barely 100 people have been convicted and fewer than 200 have been charged with voter fraud. The overwhelming majority either were people who thought they were eligible but weren't such as immigrants and felons or individuals registering fictitious people who couldn’t turn up to vote in any event.

A Worse Fraud

Knowingly false cries of “voter fraud” are a much worse fraud the GOP is trying to foist on the country than the actual crime itself – which doesn’t exist in any event. But its real purpose is to intimidate voters, especially those who are uneducated, poor and black or brown when they show up to vote.

"If they found a single case of a conspiracy to affect the outcome of a Congressional election or a state-wide election, that would be significant," Richard Hasen, an election law expert at Loyola University Law School, told the New York Times last year. "But what we see is isolated, small-scale activities that have not shown any kind of criminal intent."

This doesn’t stop Republicans from trying.

Over the weekend, Pres. Bush sent Attorney General Michael Mukasey a letter asking him to investigate the Ohio case already rejected by the Supreme Court. And don’t forget that five of the 12 US attorneys fired last year in the scandal that led to the resignation of Alberto Gonzales were illegally fired because they refused to pursue voter fraud with sufficient zeal to satisfy their ideologue masters in Washington. It also explains the Republican attacks on Acorn, which pays people to register voters in low income and minority areas. A tiny handful of Acorn workers made up names this year, which was condemned by both Acorn and the Obama campaign; in fact, Acorn flagged suspicious registration forms before submitting them to county clerks, something the GOP vote suppressors never mention when doing cable news interviews.

But there is absolutely no evidence – none, nada, zip – that Acorn or anyone else resulted in a single fraudulent vote ever being cast since Acorn began its large-scale drives in 2004.

While attempts at voter suppression are partisan in intent, they are racial in effect.

The Democrats have not won an election without the black vote since 1964. The most effective and crude way to undermine their base is to minimise the vote in black areas. This is just what happened in Florida in 2000, where Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris lowered dramatically the threshold for including someone on the "purge list." By the time Harris and her minions were done, African-Americans were 88% of purged names even though they account for only 11% of the actual electorate.

Kaftaesque Nightmares

As I wrote here on Oct. 22 (http://thepoliticalcurmudgeon.blogspot.com/2008/10/mccain-aide-acknowledges-voter.html), McCain insiders say that the campaign and the Republican National Committee are allegedly conspiring with outside groups to supress voter registration and turnout. Bush’s weekend letter to Mukasey is another piece of damning evidence that the GOP plans to keep people from voting since they cannot be convinced to vote for McCain.

When I first read Franz Kafka in high school, it struck me that the dark tales he spun were from a society, time and place far removed from the safety of Minneapolis. As I re-read Kafka over the years, the stories became increasingly real – and hit much closer to home. A few nights ago, I had a Kafkaesque nightmare where a group of people kept standing in front of me at a voting machine so I couldn’t cast a ballot.

Despite the legions of voter rights groups and the armies of lawyers on stand-by for any hanky-panky on Nov. 4, I’m convinced by my own reporting and other pieces I’ve read that the Republican Party intends to steal the presidential election if it cannot win it. It’s why a landslide is the only way to prevent this from happening: The GOP can steal a state but it cannot steal an entire country.

But if, somehow, that happens I shudder to think what will become of America and her experiment in democracy.

The "Wassup" Boys Hit Hard Times

Eight years ago, Budweiser’s “Wassup?” boys said good by to each other and to America. Now they catch up with each other.



Turns out everyone is looking for change.

Excuse Me, But I Am A Real American

For the past several weeks, John McCain, Sarah Palin and their surrogates have been busily dividing America into two categories: Real and, I guess, pretend Americans.

To Republicans, Election 2008 is junior high school all over again, complete with cliques and slam books. Us and them. The cool kids and the geeks. The jocks and the nerds.

I’m left trying to figure out what a “real American” might be, at least in the minds of the McCain campaign who see the world in white and black – and I use those words deliberately given the nature of this campaign.

Joyce Lipari, a Cortez Colorado real estate agent, defined a “real” American" to McClatchy as "being normal, having a mom and pop making it in a business, and paying their fair share of taxes."

Oh dear. Her definition eliminates most of the fat cat contributors to the Republican Party, the wealthiest 5% of the nation who didn’t make it in a business, they made it by moving other people’s money around and who often pay no taxes at all let alone their fair share. Remember the hedge fund managers pleading with Congress to remain exempt from income taxes on some flimsy rationale?

"A real American is the average person who works 9 to 5 for an average pay check," says Jan Gardner, a nurse from Dolores, Colorado.

Well, as a writer and journalist, I usually work from 7 to 6 for below-average pay checks. Does this mean I am overqualified to be a “real American” or am I a foolishly unreal American?

A Long Line

I come from a long line of “real Americans.”

My mother’s family washed ashore not long after the Civil War as part of the massive immigration wave from Central and Northern Europe. They worked in Chicago and Milwaukee factories, eventually producing my grandfather and grandmother who started a business in the late 1920s and retired in the early 1970s. Beginning with the 1932 election, they never voted for a Republican and believed to the core of their very soul that FDR saved America and them, personally, from ruin and destruction.

One and two at a time, my father’s family came to the United States from Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. By the end of World War I, my grandfather and grandmother were in the US and produced my father, the first of three children. Grandpa worked for a laundry and grandma took in both boarders and laundry to make ends meet through the depression. Although grandmother died in the mid-1950s, grandpa worked until he was 70, retiring to live with one of his daughters. They considered themselves “real Americans” and from the time they became citizens always voted for Democrats because "Republicans drive Cadillacs. Feh" My grandfather drove a Hudson until the company went out of business and then drove a Nash.

So I am a product of “real Americans” and resent being cast as something else, something almost evil, by the McCain-Palin slime machine.

What makes me as real an American as the throngs yelping and whooping “Kill him!” at GOP rallies? It is my system of beliefs about democracy.

Belief In Democracy

Besides the fact that I vote, I am a real American because I believe in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.

I am a real American because I use my right to Freedom of Speech to boast about the US when it is at its best and reveal inconvenient truths about my country when it is wrong. I lost friends and incurred public wrath and scorn in 2002 and 2003 when I stated unequivocally that George Bush and his brown shirts were lying about WMDs in Iraq.

I am a real American because I don’t believe anyone should be held without charge or trial, regardless of whatever crime they may or may not have committed.

I am a real American because I don’t believe the government has an inherent right to read my mail, real or e-, or listen to my phone calls or rummage through my life without first demonstrating probable cause to a judge and getting a warrant.

I am a real American because I believe US laws and treaties signed by the United States banning the use of torture must be honored.

I am a real American because I think the rich should pay higher taxes than the poor. If that’s socialism, so be it; we’ve been engaging in socialism for the rich since Ronald Reagan stumbled into the White House and turned the tax tables on its head.

I am a real American because I believe black and yellow and red and white and polka-dot people are all the same regardless of the political party they support, the house of worship they attend (and even if they don’t go to a house of worship at all), or the sex of the person they love.

I am a real American because I believe that people who think the exact opposite of me are also real Americans. More than anything else, I think this is what separates so-called “real Americans” from the “Us vs. Them” crowd hanging out with McCain and Palin. I believe even those folks are real Americans.

A Happy Saturday Update On Everything From Polls To Joe The Plumber

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Saturday shows Barack Obama attracting 52% of the vote while John McCain has dipped to 44%. This eight point advantage matches Obama's biggest lead of the year in a race that has been remarkably stable down the stretch.

Meanwhile, at Nate Silver’s totally wonkish fivethirtyeight.com, where a large group of polls are run through massively complex mathematical formulas, regressions, equations and weighting every day before ginning out numbers that mean something, today’s projection sits at:

Electoral Votes
Obama............348.4
McCain...........189.6

Popular Vote
Obama............52.0%
McCain...........46.5%

Senate Seats
Democrats........56.6
Republicans......41.4
Independent...... 2.0

Finally, a bit of levity.

James Carville has a theory on why the McCain campaign found Joe the Plumber. It was because "the Republicans wanted to find someone hanging around a toilet other than Larry Craig," he explains to Politico.com. Meanwhile, when asked if Gov. Sarah Palin is ready to be president, Sen. Joe Lieberman tells the Stamford (CT)Advocate "Thank God she's not going to have to be president from day one."

Or ever.

The GOP Hope Chest: Three Possible “October Surprises”

With Barack Obama’s lead over John McCain increasing on an almost daily basis, the GOP is left with “a-wishin’ and a-hopin’” for a so-called October surprise that could upset the likely election outcome in the remaining 11 days.

Authoritative sources in and out of government indicate three possibilities.

1. Killing bin Laden

The upsurge in US attacks on “suspect Taliban and al Qaeda hideouts” inside Pakistan has one overriding objective: Find and kill Osama bin Laden, even if by accident.

At the same time, three independent sources in the intelligence community say that the Army’s super secret Delta Force crosses the Afghan-Pakistani border regularly to search out bin Laden and other high-ranking al Qaeda officials, sometimes following hard intelligence leads and sometimes following rumors and hear-say. In 2001, before the Afghan invasion, at one point Delta Force was within 500 metres of bin Laden, watching him head down a mountain to trucks waiting to take him and his security guard across the border to Pakistan before being ordered by Washington to stand down, according to Kill Bin Laden by Dalton Fury and Col. David Hunt (R).

Given his universally low approval ratings, handing McCain the head of bin Laden is the only thing George Bush can do directly to try helping the Republican ticket.

2. Israel Attacks Iran

This possibility dropped dramatically when Ehud Ohlmert resigned as Israel’s prime minister and leader of the Kadima Party in the wake of a corruption scandal. He remains as PM but heading a caretaker government which, by law, cannot launch any new initiatives.

In widely published reports, Dick Cheney urged Israel to strike at Iran’s nuclear facilities. Ohlmert resisted, mostly because the Mossad and his Air Force commanders doubted such a strike would be successful in anything but launching an all-Arab war against Israel. Moreover, Condaleeza Rice intervened with Pres. Bush, thwarting Cheney’s insane idea.

Yet with Iraq threatening to blow up again at any moment – perhaps before the American election – as American-paid Sunni militias become increasing angry with the al-Maliki government the Bush Administration may be looking for a distraction and a US air strike against Iran is not out of the question. But it is doubtful the Pentagon’s service chiefs would go along willingly with such an expansion of the war.

3. Terrorist Attack Inside the US

This does not mean another 9/11-style attack; in fact, no known terrorist organization in the world has the strength or capability right now to launch such a strike.

Rather, national security sources are more interested in monitoring possible attacks against Western or Arab targets inside the United States, perhaps embassy bombing or grabbing foreign diplomats as hostage. One such scenario has terrorists gaining entrance to an embassy using a plant inside the embassy and then threatening to blow up a “suitcase nuke” even though finding the processed uranium either inside the US or smuggling it into the country is extremely unlikely. Nonetheless, the security services would have to take such a threat seriously.

Another scenario puts Arab speaking and looking Mossad agents at the heart of the operation. If elements inside the Israel government are worried about the policy of an Obama administration towards Israel, they are said by intelligence sources in the US to not be above “staging” an attack before Nov. 4 to sway the election to McCain. Sources confirm that both the Mossad and AIPAC are being monitored, along with the usual al Queda channels.

Reality Or Fantasy?

There are other possibilities, perhaps involving North Korea although with Kim Il Jung reportedly very ill the likelihood of an Army adventure are remote. Russia might cause mischief somewhere in what it sees as its area of influence – in former Soviet republics or in the Baltic countries – but Vladimir Putin is no fool. He’s viewed as not wanting to try influencing the American election, especially anything that might elect McCain who the Kremlin views as irrational and unpredictable. China is too involved in trying to avoid the worst of a Western recession to worry much about American politics.

The question is whether an engineered October surprise is reality or fantasy.

Although chances are remote, the bin Laden scenario is seen as having the greatest possibility of happening. The issue is whether bin Laden would cooperate by staying still long enough for either Predator overflights or a Delta Force squad to swoop down and nail him. It is thought that he and his lieutenants have abandoned satellite and even cell phones under the assumption that every call is monitored and pinpointed by the CIA and National Security Agency.

With the days dwindling before the election, time is running out on any sort of October surprise. This doesn’t mean it cannot happen; it just means it becomes increasingly difficult to engineer and pull off successfully.