Hey, That’s My Name

President Obama Reads “Where The Wild Things Are” (via brothafer) He growls and roars. It’s pretty fantastic. :)

In his first full day as President, Barack Obama requested a 120-day halt to the military tribunals at Guantanamo, called Mideast leaders regarding the situation in Gaza, froze all White House salaries over $100,000, set tighter restrictions on the role of lobbyists in his administration and met with military advisors to discuss plans for drawing down troop levels in Iraq and retooling the situation in Afghanistan.

Not bad for a first day.

Word is that tomorrow he’ll sign an executive order calling for the closure of the prison at Guantanamo.

Today was definitely something special, but I’ll tell you what, I’m more excited about tomorrow. I can’t wait to see what this President, this Congress and this administration will do. I’m sure they’ll disappoint from time to time, it’s only natural. But after eight years of my adult life (the 2000 election was my first), I finally feel like I’m breathing fresh air.

I could probably go on for entirely too long about all the muck that’s been dredged about Sarah Palin in the weeks since her unveiling as the GOP presidential candidate, but there has only ever been one way in which she should be discussed by the Obama campaign. Until now it seemed like the Democratic candidate was content to pretend like she wasn’t even there (which, personally, I’m mostly okay with). But in the latest Obama ad, they set their sights on undermining McCain’s judgment by highlighting his choice of the Governor of Alaska as his running mate, in light of a previous comment he had made about needing to look to his Vice Presidential candidate for guidance on the economy.

Is this a huge blow to the McCain campaign, not very likely. But if you’ve been paying attention to any of the newspaper endorsements Obama has been receiving from publications that endorsed Bush in 2004, there’s a common theme: McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin has been a major factor in convincing traditionally conservative publications (like, say, the Chicago Tribune). Colin Powell even cited her lack of readiness as a factor in his endorsement of Obama.

The Obama campaign’s a little late to the game in making this argument, but I’m glad that they’re not afraid to make the case that McCain knew he needed more expertise in the economy and when he had the opportunity to aid his ticket (and, were he to be elected, his administration), he instead chose to select someone that would placate the extreme right-wing base and give him a news cycle or two. How’s that for “Country First.”

I talk to lot of Democrats, loiter around left-leaning blogs and just generally consume a lot of media that tends to fit my political views. Amongst the company I keep, I’ve gotten the same impression from these fellow lefties, that regardless of how good the polls look, how pleased I am with the strategic moves of the Obama campaign and how laughable McCain’s campaign continues to be, we’ cannot be convinced this is a slam dunk. Whether it’s Dukakis posing on a tank or the Supreme Court deciding that all the votes in Florida shouldn’t be counted, victory has been taken away from the Democratic party on election day on too many occasions and in too many ways for us to feel settled. Personally, I find it difficult to discuss, in a matter-of-fact way, what life will be like after November 4 without feeling like I’m jinxing it – and I’m NOT a superstitious person. The Obama campaign has been taking no chances, either, encouraging their supporters at rallies and via e-mails and phone calls to not stop the fight just because they’re ahead. I’d love to be able to walk around with my head held high, believing that in two weeks everything will be hunky dory, but it just hasn’t been happening for me, no matter how many positive polls and electoral maps I see.

That was…until yesterday.

Late last night I came home and was running through the stories in my RSS feeds and saw a few mentions of a recent strategic move by the McCain campaign. The campaign has decided to pull out of Colorado, Iowa and New Mexico and funnel their resources into Florida, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio, Virginia and Pennsylvania. At first blush I didn’t really pay that news a whole lot of mind. Yeah, it’s good news for the Obama campaign that McCain is conceding a few more states, much like the calls that were made regarding Michigan and Wisconsin recently. But when I actually sat down to look at my daily dose of state polls and projected electoral maps I saw something bigger that reminded me of when Rudy Guiliani killed his candidacy by deciding to focus all his efforts in the Republican primary on Florida. Now, I don’t expect you all to have dedicated as much of your lives to reading the polls and maps as I have (I don’t blame you, it’s an incredibly nerdy obsession of mine), so let me explain to you what I’m seeing here, because I think we can learn a lot about the mismanagement of the McCain campaign from this latest decision.

Iowa

First, we’ll start with Iowa. McCain should have been out of Iowa ages ago. This point cannot be stressed enough. Iowa is not now, nor has it ever been a McCain state. McCain came in fourth, behind Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney and Fred “Law & Order” Thompson in the 2008 Republican primary. He didn’t win a single county (while Ron Paul won one). And this was true eight years ago, to an even greater degree. In the 2000 primary, John McCain had 5% of the vote in Iowa, putting him in second to last place behind George W. Bush, Steve Forbes, Alan Keyes and Gary Bauer. McCain has never, not once, been ahead of Obama in the Iowa polls and in the past six weeks or so, Obama’s been leading him by double digits. The fact that McCain was still showing up in Iowa as recently as 12 days ago shows how friggin’ deluded about his standing in this state he’s been. It was purely stubborn to believe that just because Iowa went for Bush 2004 that they would vote for McCain this time around. The candidate was wasting his valuable time less than four weeks out from election day and the campaign was wasting valuable resources in a state he cannot and will not win. But really, when you take a look at that kind of ridiculously mismanaged strategy, does it really surprise you? Doesn’t that kind of represent the way this campaign has approached a lot of issues?

Colorado and New Mexico

The decisions to pull out of Colorado and New Mexico on their own don’t seem that extraordinary. This is especially true in the case of New Mexico. The state only boasts five electoral votes and McCain hasn’t lead in the polls there since April, Obama’s been leading ever since and his lead has been growing every month. The Pollster composite currently has him ahead of McCain with 50.4%. This move actually seems pretty wise, especially since New Mexico governor Bill Richardson has a been a strong Obama supporter and is very popular in his home state. Colorado is a little more complicated. It’s generally listed as a state that’s currently “leaning” Democratic, with Obama having a 5-6% lead. It’s true that in the past month, the gap has been widening and that McCain’s chances of winning this state seemed a lot better before the economy went kerplooey on him. However, the big deal with this move in Colorado is that it leaves McCain with only path to the election.

Pennsylvania is this year’s Ohio/Florida

If you add up the electoral votes of all of the states John Kerry won in 2004 (252) to the electoral votes of Colorado (9), Iowa (7) and New Mexico (5), you get 273, three electoral votes more than a candidate needs to win the presidential election. The website FiveThirtyEight.com currently projects that Obama has 91.55% chance of winning all of the Kerry states. With McCain throwing up his hands in the afforementioned three states, it means that he has to pick off a Kerry state in order steal victory from Obama, and if you look at the list of states he’s directing his last two weeks of money into, only one of them went to John Kerry in 2004: Pennsylvania.

Now, I suppose if you’ve reading a lot of newspapers and watching a lot of cable news clips from this past April, you might think that that sounds like a great idea. Back then, the popular commentary was that Barack Obama wouldn’t possibly be able to win Pennsylvania in the general election because he lost the primary vote to Hillary Clinton there 54%-35%. Turns out that narrative was never really based much on facts because if you check the below Pollster graph, you’ll see that McCain hasn’t lead Obama in Pennsylvania since April and, like Colorado and a lot of other state polls, the gap in the past month has widened at a devastating rate:

Let’s not forget that Obama already benefits from a better ground game all over the country, but especially in places like Pennsylvania, because he had to fight that extremely contentious primary battle with Clinton. Let’s also not forget that you generally have a better ground game in places where you have local politicians like governors and congressmen in your court, and not only is Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell a Democrat, but 11 of Pennsylvania’s 19 congressional districts (as well as one of their senate seats) are held by Democrats. In fact, Rendell’s popularity has been credited with Kerry winning the state in 2004. And then there’s great spokespeople like Patrick Murphy, of the 7th Congressional district who was an early Obama supporter and the only person in Congress to have served in the Iraq war. I’d argue for Jack Murtha’s weight, as well, but he’s gotta stop referring to Western Pennsylvania (which is, by the way, where his district is located) as a bunch of racists.

This looks like an extraordinary uphill climb for McCain and it makes you wonder why he didn’t try go after some smaller states where Obama’s lead in the polls is a little slimmer like Colorado and New Hampshire, rather than go for a big 21-electoral-vote dog like Pennsylvania. This is a major make or break move and McCain and Palin are going to have to pull out all the stops to win this state, to say nothing of the fact that they’ll still have to upset Obama in most of the swing states (peeling away Pennsylvania puts Obama’s electoral vote total at 252, 18 votes away from victory) and stop bleeding support in traditionally strong Republican states like Montana and North Dakota (where he’s up by 4 points and tied, respectively). And they’ll have to do all this with a fraction of the money that Obama has.

And, of course, this isn’t even taking into account the normal every day hi-jinks that John McCain and Sarah Palin get themselves into. Like, say, this gem from yesterday:

And this, folks, is why I can almost bring myself to say “we’re gonna win” without breaking into hives. But, of course, I am a Democrat and so, I’ll now go knock on every wooden item I can find in my house just for typing those words.