***Dave Does the Election – Mid-Week Madness!

You would think that Margie being out of town would make it a lot easier to get these things cranked out. *Sigh*

Okay … where to begin?

Well, first, perhaps, with a bit of humor. Back in the 60s, Batman was turned into a TV show, and one of the episodes was about an improbable Gotham City mayoral campaign between Batman and the Penguin. It so happens the two candidates had a debate, one that has eerie echoes from today’s campaign rhetoric. I won’t draw a further connection between a short, angry candidate who engages in smear campaigning squaring off against a tall, handsome force for justice and honesty …

Speaking of roles, the whole McCain/Obama “thing” on going after Osama bin Laden if we had him in our “sights” in Pakistan and the Islamabad government wouldn’t give permission to take him out is really kind of screwy on the face of it. I mean, if it were Obama saying that he wouldn’t act except with the permission of the Pakistanis, you just know that every right-wing pundit would be all over his “naivete” and “internationalist” and “surrender-monkeyness” in a heartbeat. Instead, it’s Obama who says he’d go in one way or the other, and McCain reiterating that he’d let Osama bin Laden go free.

Or, maybe not. After all, McCain’s criticized Obama for revealing his true intentions in the matter. We have every reason to believe that McCain is simply giving that answer in pursuit of not torquing off the Pakistanis, choosing instead to torque them off when he goes after OBL and is thus revealed as a liar.

Though if they took him at face value, that might explain why al-Qa’eda is endorsing McCain. (To be fair, I am no more concerned about who al-Qa’eda claims they favor in the presidential race any more than I am interested in the opinions of Fred Phelps or Kim Jong-Il.)

Making folks angry seems to be the forte of the McCain/Palin campaign, and the results have been stunningly clear — even if the inciting messages are occasionally off-kilter (if the only “real pro-Americans” are the ones out in the countryside and in small towns, does that mean the NYC and Pentagon victims of 9/11 aren’t real Americans? Oops!). No matter how you quasi-apologize for it, this sort of divisive rhetoric and flag-waving (or flag-dragging) has probably only frothed up the already-devoted followers, and turned off more and more of the undecided.

And yet, in the face of this, the other day we had something actually positive coming out of the McCain/Palin camp: a group of McCain supporters, both Christian and Muslim, facing down some hate-mongering agitators at a McCain rally. It was actually kind of inspiring — which means, of course, the campaign itself had to screw up the whole moment by, at the last moment, preventing that Muslim campaign organizer from appearing on CNN to talk about it.

Mercifully, all the terrorist fear-mongering seems to be working less and less well. Perhaps it’s because the Internet is changing the information equation, so that when McCain today calls ACORN a threat to democracy, we can see where a few years ago he was calling it “what makes America special” — not to mention learning what a huge passel of distortions the whole ACORN thing is.

Though if McCain wants to talk about voter registration fraud, he might be advised to speak very softly, lest he be hit by echoes bouncing back at him.

No wonder the Obama campaign is assembling the nation’s “largest law firm” to challenge voting irregularities come November.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the McCain ticket, Gov. Palin is still trying to figure out what a VP does (pssst! Sarah! Not even Cheney thought that he “ran” the Senate). She’s also trying to figure out whether the National Review is one of those unfair filtering nassssty media outlets that she keeps railing against.

But what she seems to be spending more time figuring out is … well, what to wear. After all, when the party forks over $150,000 in campaign contributions to buy some nice Saks and Needless-Markup outfits for you and your kinfolk — well, one hopes that’s bought a few years worth of wardrobes. (After all, Sarah, you’ll need something to wear to all those evangelical political action meetings you’ll be a regular at in the coming years.)

Obama, on the other hand continues to garner increasing support and endorsements. Some are sincere, some are opportunistic, but they all add to his momentum. The biggest most recently was Colin Powell, of course, which has led to outrage from the Right (and a few pointed questions from the Left).  The irony is, while right-wing pundits claim it’s all about “race” (as if suddenly noticing that Powell is black, and without explaining why he’s not ever lifted a finger to assist Jackson or Sharpton in their presidential bids), the reality may be that in addition to simply thinking that Obama’s a reasonably good candidate, the wingnuts and social conservatives on the Right who’ve long mistrusted him may have pushed him to it. Wouldn’t that be a neat irony?

Elsewhere, Obama also gathers support from more and more newspapers (including some former Bush-backers in Texas) and more formerly staunch conservatives, even as he draws in dedicated volunteers. Some of that, as in Powell’s case, may be disgust with how the GOP has been handling itself. Some may simply be because the man’s record is simply impressive. Some may be even more simply because he “won’t put on the hat” (gosh, wouldn’t it be nice to have a president who isn’t constantly doing or saying something cringeworthy — not because you necessarily disagree with it, but because it’s just so frelling embarrassing how it’s mangled or miscued). 

Obama, of course, suspended personal campaigning (um, for real, Sen. McCain) in order to go home to Hawaii to visit his failing grandmother, who broke her hip a few weeks back. That particular bit of “family values” and “compassion” didn’t seem to move the charming All-Americans at FOX News or the Free Republic. (“Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?” Given the nature of the denizens there and their affinity to the person those questions were originally posed to, probably not.)

Despite that, Obama maintains his significant lead in the polls, both popular and, more important, electoral, to a degree that increasingly people are seeing his election as inevitable (or as inevitable as anything else in politics). While an AP poll out today showed Obama and McCain as neck-and-neck, not only is it a huge outlier, but it’s seriously statistically suspect (unless you believe the number of evangelicals voting has doubled since 2004).

So assuming an Obama win — then what happens. Well, a lot of people end up reconsidering their assumptions, both Left and Right. The GOP goes through some hard times — a wilderness period, if you will, wherein (one might hope) the Rovean neo-con theo-con traits of the party will be seared away, to leave a Republican party more in the mold of Eisenhower and Ford than of Nixon and Bush. Hey, in a year when a black man seems likely to become president, perhaps other, stranger dreams can come true …

Whoever wins, they face the the challenge of proving to the world that the American ideals of protecting liberty and a free market have not been shattered by the diplomatic and economic disasters we currently face. I don’t envy either man running for the Oval Office in dealing with that — but I know which one I think stands a better chance of doing so.

And a few items that don’t quite fit into the narrative above, but which are worth publishing:

• Both candidates (McCain especially, but Obama as well) have pursued big money beyond campaign limit by hosting/encouraging joint donations to both their campaign and to national and state party organizations.
• All that innuendo about illegal foreign contributors to Obama, based on the odd values of many small contributions. Duh, that’s not conversion from foreign currency, that’s informational.
• The BBC offers a guide to all the ‘Joes’ in the campaign.
• An Aussie offers an interesting perspective on our voting process. Most of what’s questioned is actually a result of our (sometime good, sometimes bad) federalist system of states rights.
• Okay, it’s a cheap shot, but a damned funny one: They’re Pinky and the Brain…

And so it goes …