Loving America Means Having Small-Town Values

There's a lot of talk this election about anti-Obama dog-whistles and coded racial language.

But this essay by Rosa Brooks, on Sarah Palin's recent "pro-America" commnents, really got me thinking:

According to Sarah Palin, she and John McCain "believe that the best of America is in these small towns that we get to visit, and in these wonderful little pockets of what I call the real America, being here with all of you hardworking, very patriotic, um, very, um, pro-America areas of this great nation."

Um, very, um. ... Yeah....

The GOP code isn't hard to crack: There's the America that might vote for Obama (a suspect America populated by people with liberal notions, big-city ways and, no doubt, dark skin), and then there's the "real" America, where people live in small towns, believe in God and country, and are ... well ... white.

I sometimes don't know what it is with lefttists, but for conservatives to speak of traditional values - heartland values - as racist by default is bothersome, if not sickening.

Brooks notes this interesting statistic in making the case against small-town values:

About 80% of Americans live in metropolitan areas, not small towns. A third of us are ethnic and racial minorities, but that's changing: Already,nearly 45% of children under 5 are minorities. Although 88%of us believe in God, 70% think that religions other than our own are equally valid routes to truth. And while 59% of us think that wearing an American flag pin is a decent way to show patriotism, even more of us (66%) think that protesting U.S. policies we oppose is a good way to show patriotism. These days, more than half of us say we prefer the Democratic Party to the Republican Party.

Given this, why do McCain, Palin and their team keep pushing the message that the America where most of the electorate lives isn't "real"?

Eighty percent of Americans live in the cities?

That sounds like an awfully high number, so I checked around: The left-wing Brookings Institution published a piece a couple of weeks back seeking to debunk Palin's talk of "small-town America." The essay, "A Small-Town or Metro Nation?", has this:

Wasilla, Alaska, is currently the most famous small town in America, thanks to its former mayor Sarah Palin. A healthy part of her appeal is that she seems to embody small-town values, nurtured in Wasilla and America's other hamlets and burgs. As she said in her firecracker acceptance speech, small-town people live lives of "honesty, sincerity, and dignity" and "do some of the hardest work in America."

Palin was tapping into a widespread belief that small-town America represents the country at large. In April 2008, as the Democratic primary contest ground through Pennsylvania, Gerald Seib of The Wall Street Journal declared that "Rural and small-town voters are the best indicators of whether a candidate is connecting with the values of Middle America. 'They are America,' says Peter Hart, a Democratic pollster. ... 'If you can speak to [them], then you relate to the rest of America.'"

But the idea that we are a nation of small towns is fundamentally incorrect. The real America isn't found in cities or suburbs or small towns, but in the metropolitan areas or "metros" that bring all these places into economic and social union. Palin's positioning may appeal to a certain nostalgia that Americans have about small-town life, but the Manichean dichotomy of city versus small town (not to mention "urban" candidate versus "rural" one) no longer describes the radically connected and interdependent way Americans live and work....

Two-thirds of our population lives in the top 100 metropolitan areas, and 84 percent of Americans live in all 363 metros. Being in a metro means being tied to someplace else; the Census Bureau defines metropolitan areas as a city of 50,000 or more, plus the adjacent counties that have close social and economic ties to the urban core.

There's a big problem with this analysis.

It's a longstanding truism of American politics that culture is language, or more specifically, an epistemic language of cultural identity defines the political orientation of ideological communities.

Conservative have long spoken in terms of "race, rights, and taxes," which fulfilled the normative function of deligitmizing Democratic Party welfare politics as outside the mainstream of American values. Was there a racial component to this? Perhaps. But more importantly, to the extent there's been a legitimate element of race in politics, the larger opposition to the entitlement, big-government agenda that goes along with it remains the driving spur of socio-cultural affirmation for those on the political right.

Bill Clinton knew this when he dissed Sister Soljah in 1992 and passed welfare reform in 1996. Hillary Clinton knew this during the primaries that Barack Obama was having difficulties "among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans," that is, traditional white working-class constituencies.

So, the question is not how many people live in defined urban/rural and metropolitan/nonmetropolitan census tracks. It's the types of values people adopt, which are less contingent on geographic space than the predominant socio-cultural attributes and traditions that define traditional heartland communities.

As Geoff Nunberg argues, America has been urbanizing for over 100 years, but we still love our small-town - "mainstreet" - values:

When Sarah Palin calls herself a main streeter, she isn't saying just that she's ordinary or middle-class. She's suggesting that her small-town background has given her a special insight into our core values -- she can see America from her window. In response, Joe Biden pumps up his own Main Street cred by mentioning his frequent trips to Home Depot and his youth in Scranton and a Delaware steel town.

In the introduction to his novel, Sinclair Lewis wrote that Main Street is "our comfortable tradition and sure faith." That hasn't changed; 80 years after it was coined, "Wall Street vs. Main Street" is still a potent political slogan. We still feel the need to write our moral differences on our geography, so we can put some literal distance between ourselves and the bad guys.

The problem for the Democratic-left is not so much that Sarah Palin campaigns on a platform appealing to "small-town" values. It's that the Democratic Party is explicitly hostile to those values, and its advocates are relegated to citing raw numbers of urban dwellers rather than recognizing that while you can take a country boy to the city, but you can't take the country out of the boy.

Words Fail: McCain Backer Maimed by Pro-Obama Attacker

UPDATE: Ashley Todd admits her story's a fraud, "McCain Volunteer Admits Maiming Attack a Hoax."

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UPDATE: See, "Ashley Todd Hoax Theory: Backward B?"

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I would say this is shocking, but we're beyond that place in American politics today.

********ADDED: Video via Newsbusters:

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At some level, the Obama phenomenon has worked some bedevilment into society's lower quarters, as evidenced by Ashley Todd, who was allegedly attacked and maimed by a supporter of Barack Obama:

A 20-year-old woman who was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield was also maimed by her attacker, police said.

Pittsburgh police spokeswoman Diane Richard tells Channel 4 Action News that the victim was robbed at knifepoint on Wednesday night outside of a Citizens Bank near Liberty Avenue and Pearl Street just before 9 p.m.

Richard said the robber took $60 from the woman, then became angry when he saw a McCain bumper sticker on the victim's car. The attacker then punched and kicked the victim, before using the knife to scratch the letter "B" into her face, Richard said.

Can we make broader generalizations from this case? Probably not, although Todd's mutilation was clearly politically motivated.

Ace of Spades initially suggested the story was a hoax, but as more information came in, he deleted those passages, saying:

CNN will quote me when they say "Even conservatives smell a hoax..." CNN only quotes conservative blogs when they make points helpful to the liberal cause. I've been quoted there three times and it's always been to attack Republicans. They've never once found me quite so interesting when I'm, say, noting Barack Obama's unprecedented voter and donor fraud.

So, yes, there's certainly much political weight to this story, however folks want to spin it.

My thoughts and prayers go out to Ashley Todd.

See also, Wake Up America, "Obama Supporter Attacks McCain Supporter and Carves Letter B Into Her Face."

UPDATE: Captain Ed addresses the "hoax" issue:

I spoke with two executives at the College Republicans on the record about this story. Charlie Smith, the National Chair, and Ethan Eilon, the Executive Director, both say the photo is legitimate and that it came from Ashley Todd, the victim in this case. The attack began at 8:50 pm ET and Ashley called the police at 9:30 PM ET. Initially, she was robbed, ran away after the robbery, and the robber followed her to her car. At that point, he became enraged at the bumper sticker and began beating her and scratched the ‘B’ into her face. Ashley went to the hospital early this morning after initially refusing medical attention last night, and had an MRI and/or a CAT scan. Doctors believe her cheek will heal fully.

I'm interested in the backward "B", which Kyle Moore says is a dead givaway for a fake attack:

She is then punched, kicked, and has the letter B carved backwards in her face. Again, the backwards bit is a pretty big deal because either her attacker was not just convenient enough to be big, black, scary, and an Obama supporter, but also dyslexic (Go ahead, just write a B backwards. I’m not saying it’s impossible, or even difficult. But it is something you have to physically think about–you have to intentionally write it backwards, and I find it highly suspect that someone in the thrill of the moment is going to take the time to stop and think about carving that B backwards).

A further note on that letter B. Though it is backwards, it is nearly perfect.

It’s not jagged, there are no off shooting lines you might expect if you are struggling for your life, which is what you would be doing in this kind of situation (No, seriously, you would go into fight or flight at this point). Even if the assailant had control of the victims head, she would likely move around enough to get the assailant to err at least once.

This attack has the lefties worried, in any case. It's a potential Pennsylvania Willie Horton game-changer for the Keystone State.

Sarah Palin in 2012, Pro-American Frontrunner

In the event of a Democratic victory on November 4th, it's certainly likely that Alaska Governor Sarah Palin will emerge as the GOP's frontrunner for 2012. Recall last week's controversy over Palin's "pro-American" comments, seen here:

Well, it turns out Marc Ambinder's got an interest blurb this morning on the buzz surrounding Palin in 2012:

There's a suspicion in some McCain loyalist precincts that Gov. Sarah Palin is beginning to play the Republican base against John McCain -- McCain won't let her campaign in Michigan...McCain won't let her bring up Jeremiah Wright... McCain doesn't like her terrorist pal talks....

Think ahead to 2010...2011...2012.

Palin is ambitious. Very ambitious.

And if she wants the job, she's easily the frontrunner to become THE voice of the angry Right in the Wilderness. She is a favorite of talk radio and Fox News conservatives, and speaks their language as only a true member of the club can. (Her recent Limbaugh interview was full of dog whistles that any Dittohead would recognize. Including her actual use of the word ditto.)

Palin will have plenty of time to become fluent on national issues. She will easily benefit from the low expectations threshhold, and will probably even garner positive reviews from the MSM types who disparage her today.

Palin will be judged to be "ready" in four years....

Palin is an enormously talented politician. When she knows what she's talking about, or even when she knows enough to fake it, she is very, very appealing, and very good at redirecting questions to whatever her message is.

If people think American politics is polarized now, wait until after an Obama administration takes office in January.

Either way, these next four years are going to be extremely interesting.

Michele Bachmann's Truth to Power

The Republican Congressional Campaign Committee has caved to pressure from the netroots left by withdrawing campaign support for Representative Michele Bachmann's relection to Congress from Minnesota's 6th District.

Bachmann appeared on Hardball with Chris Matthews last week and spoke openly about Barack Obama and the Democratic Party's widespread anti-Americanism. For speaking truth to power, Bachmann's now the target of a vicious smear campaign of leftist McCarthyism. The story's even made the frontpage at today's Los Angeles Times:

On Friday afternoon, Bachmann appeared on MSNBC's "Hardball with Chris Matthews" and made what has been dubbed the million-dollar mistake: Bachmann, 52, alleged that presidential candidate Barack Obama may hold "anti-American" views, and proposed a media investigation into "the views of the people in Congress [to] find out: Are they pro-America or anti-America?"

While Sen. Obama's presidential bid has transformed the way campaigns use the Internet to reach volunteers and donors, the technology has also become a way for the public to instantly react -- even to races in which they can't vote.

Those quick reactions, often in the form of donations, can influence the outcome of a campaign, said Julie Barko Germany, director of the Institute for Politics, Democracy & the Internet at George Washington University's Graduate School of Political Management.

Barko German said "the Internet can be an amplifier," enabling viewers to react instantly to something that incites strong support or fury.

"It's an excellent fundraising tool," she added, citing research indicating that "when you show someone a video online, they donate 10% more."

Bachmann's interview has turned the race into one of the country's most intensely watched. It also unleashed an online backlash against Bachmann, who many local political observers assumed would easily win reelection.

President Bush won the district in 2004 with 57% of the vote. In 2006, former state Sen. Bachmann was heralded as the first female Republican to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives from the district, which is dominated by blue-collar and farming communities.

And this summer, one of the few polls conducted in the race showed that Bachmann held a 13-point lead over Tinklenberg.

But on Wednesday, the National Republican Congressional Committee pulled all of its TV advertising supporting Bachmann in the 6th District, according to a GOP source. Since her "Hardball" appearance, Bachmann's lawn signs have been vandalized. Callers spew profanity at volunteers and obscenities about the congresswoman at her district campaign office.

I wrote in defense Bachmann here, and the Hardball video's here:

At one point Bachmann says "the people who Barack Obama has been associating with are anti-American, by and large."

Is that statement objectively in doubt? Can people honestly deny Bachmann's comments?

Even her concluding remark for the media to "investigate" the views of Members of Congress is hardly controversial, if one remembers that holding government accountable is the responsibility charged to the press by the Founding Fathers of this nation.

Michelle Bachmann has the honesty and integrity to speak truth to power. I want to direct readers to Bachmann's campaign website, Bachmann for Congress. Please join me in making a financial contribution to an outstanding Republican Congresswoman.

Conservatives need to stand up for moral clarity and traditional values. Michelle Bachmann's doing just that. Let's help her get across the finish line with a strong reelection win on November 4th.

Unexamined: Ayers and Dohrn Against White Supremacy

From Little Green Footballs:

Former Weather Underground terrorists (and Barack Obama associates) William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn have a new book coming out; showing how much they love their country, the theme of the book is that the dominant political system in the United States is white supremacism: Race Course Against White Supremacy: William C. Ayers, Bernardine Dohrn: Books.

Here's the book's product description:

White supremacy and its troubling endurance in American life is debated in these personal essays by two veteran political activists. Arguing that white supremacy has been the dominant political system in the United States since its earliest days—and that it is still very much with us—the discussion points to unexamined bigotry in the criminal justice system, election processes, war policy, and education. The book draws upon the authors' own confrontations with authorities during the Vietnam era, reasserts their belief that racism and war are interwoven issues, and offers personal stories about their lives today as parents, teachers, and reformers.

Unexamined bigotry?

Hardly.

Race relations and the black freedom struggle constitute the founding crises of our country. The fact that Barack Obama's on the verge of being elected president of the United States casts deep skepticism on the Ayers/Dohrn project. Like all radicals, perpetuation of racial grievance is a central meme in delegitimizing the state. That's what they've been doing since their Weather Underground days.

The fact that over 3000 professors have signed a statement in support of Ayers just shows that America really is a place of fresh starts, even for unrepentent terrorists.

Obama's Suspicious Fundraising

Barack Obama is the greatest campaign fundraiser in American history. He's got a darkly secretive side to his success, however, as today's Wall Street Journal notes:

Mr. Obama may ... have to answer after the election for some of his fund-raising practices. The campaign won't release the list of donors who gave $200 or less, and under current law it doesn't have to. This raises suspicions that some individuals are bundling their contributions in small numbers to give more than the law allows. Mr. Obama calls his many donors a new system of "public finance," but if so where is the disclosure? His donor list is the least transparent in a generation.

The Democrat first promised to abide by federal campaign spending limits when he was a long-shot in the primaries. But once he showed he could raise $265 million against Hillary Clinton, he took the rational (if cynical) route by opting out of the government-run program in the autumn. A Republican would have been tarred and feathered by the media, with reports night after night about the "fat cats" funding his campaign; Mr. Obama is getting a pass.

This monumental flip-flop should finally bust the illusion that campaign finance reform is somehow about better government. It is really about power. Liberals campaign for limits when they serve their election purposes but abandon them when they don't. Bill Clinton proved that in 1996 and we are learning that lesson again this year.

Readers may recall that Bill Clinton ran short of hard-money campaign funds in 1995-96, when he ran early advertising against the GOP following the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.

Going broke, he called up the DNC and directed it to funnel million of dollars in soft-money into Democratic Party issue-advertisments. The controversy over this soft-money loophole led directly to the McCain-Feingold Act of 2002, which has had the perverse effect of putting John McCain's presidential campaign at a distinct disadvantage this fall, as he's bound to $85 million in public money for the general election campaign (and Obama will raise more than twice that much this month alone, while he continues to build a massive campaign organiztion and media exposure).

Barack Obama's run the most secretive presidential election operation since the Nixon years. He's got a lot to hide, so voters should not be surprised when the Pandora's Box of corruption and impropriety is cracked open next year upon the accession of the Democrats to power.

See also, "Who Is John Galt? A Contributor to Collectivist Obama's Campaign, Of Course!"

The Crisis in Presidential Polling

The new Associated Press-GfK poll has John McCain trailing Barack Obama by just one percentage point. The findings look questionable, and after the huge leads Obama's had in public opinion the last couple of days, it's no wonder many of my readers say they don't pay attention to the surveys.

As PoliGazette suggests, "most pollsters have no idea what they’re doing when it comes to this year’s elections."

D.J. Drummond provides some perspective:

In 1985, the Coca-Cola company dominated the beverage industry around the world, and it's flagship product was its first, the Coca-Cola soft drink, literally an icon of Americana. It would seem to be the most obvious of strategic decisions, to leave the base of the company alone. Instead, in a move never explained let alone justified by the company, Coca-Cola announced that they were eliminating Coca-Cola, and replacing their number 1 product with a new formula, called "New Coke". Everything about the promotion was an unmitigated disaster, and later that year Coca-Cola re-introduced what they claimed was the "original formula", named "Coke Classic". The company tried to push "New Coke" on a public that never wanted it, and eventually gave up the next year. The "New Coke" strategy and promotion have become textbook lessons on the worst possible way to listen to customers and meet their expectations. Pretty much everything was done the wrong way, especially the arrogant way that Coca-Cola assumed their customers would accept the elimination of their favorite drink. Near as I can figure it, the essential problem came down to the fact that the company's marketing people made all the key decisions internally, without once stepping out into the real world to test their assumptions. What seemed a great idea in development, failed miserably in Reality. Obviously, Coca-Cola never wanted to enrage its customers, to drive them to Pepsi, or to put a bullet in their stock value, but that all happened because they made an incalculably stupid strategic decision, and they lacked an effective Deming loop to test assumptions and correct the process.

This is actually not all that uncommon in business....

This brings us back to the polls. The thing most folks forget about polls which get published in the media, is that the polls' first need is not to accurately reflect the election progress and report on actual support levels; it's about business. A poll needs clients to survive, and the media - always - wants a good story more than they want facts. So polls sell that story, and what would actually be a gradual development of support, with modest changes brought about as the public learned about candidates' records and positions, is instead sold as an exciting roller-coaster race, careening madly all over the place. If a candidate appears to be popular and charismatic, he might be allowed a strong lead, or the poll might tighten things from time to time just to keep attention on the polls. That's where that whole "bounce" thing after the conventions comes from - do you really think republicans or independents got more excited about Obama because of his convention, or that democrats and independents were more likely to vote for McCain because of the GOP convention? When you think about it, it should be obvious that these bumps are artificial unless there is a clear cause to show a change in support. And when you take apart the polls and drill down to the raw data, what you find is a close race with a gradually declining but still large pool of undecided voters, which is consistent with the known facts and actions we see from both campaigns.

That's an absolutely amazing theory, and it's plausible to some extent.

As a political scientist, however, I generally stick with the "drilling down the the raw data" part, and for the most part I've seen the polls as pretty reliable this year.

If there are going to be big discrepancies on November 4th, they'll be mostly from sampling errors.

As for racial voting and the Bradley effect (which may indeed play a role), note what Sal Russo had to say earlier this week:

Tom Bradley enjoyed the same type of love affair from the media that Barack Obama does today. Both candidates have appeared larger than life and hardly fallible. Indeed, both have compelling stories and project as decent, well-intentioned public servants. That is part of their appeal. But when the lights of the campaign shined brightly on the candidates, their flaws became more apparent.

In short, Mr. Bradley was defeated because he was too liberal, not too black.

We have thirteen days left in this race. I'm convinced that Barack Obama is outside the mainstream of America, and if he wins, it may very well be that the same liberalism that sank Mayor Bradley in 1982 ends up helping the Democrats this year- and then God help us.

Can't Beat Left's Smear Campaigns

This campaign's been the nastiest in memory, and if one were without a countervailing frame of reference, folks would be led to believe that the evil Republican attack machine is the most vicious ever.

Don't believe it for a second. The attacks on John McCain and Sarah Palin are the result of years of sharpened attacks by the radical left's demon-machine cadres.

Jamie Kirchick has the run down, "Who Are Left-Wing Haters to Point Fingers at John McCain?":

In his endorsement of Barack Obama last week, former Bush administration Secretary of State Colin Powell said that "I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, 'He's a Muslim and he might be associated [with] terrorists.' "

This is a serious accusation to level, and Powell ought to have had the courage to name names.

Nonetheless, the notion that the McCain campaign, and conservatives more broadly, have stooped to an unprecedented level of "sleaziness" with negative, nasty and mendacious campaign tactics has become the accepted media narrative over the past several weeks. "Smear" is the word you most often hear nowadays next to "Republican." But while it may be true that some in the conservative fever swamps have resorted to ugly tactics, they don't hold a candle to the left's rhetoric over the past eight years.

Liberal pundits are attempting to outdo one another in describing just how unscrupulous conservatives have become. In The New Yorker last week, Hendrik Hertzberg referred to McCain-Palin rallies as "blood-curdling hate-fests." Frank Rich went one step further in The New York Times, decrying the "Weimar-like rage" of the Republican Party base, evidenced by a few attendees at a Sarah Palin rally who shouted "terrorist" and "off with his head" when she mentioned Barack Obama. Rich's fellow Times columnist Paul Krugman remarked that attendees at GOP gatherings have been "gripped by insane rage" at the prospect of an Obama presidency. Ascribing the oafish behavior of a handful to an entire political party, The Nation magazine slams the "GOP's machinery of hate" in an editorial patronizingly entitled, "Waiting for the Barbarians."

If my inbox is to be believed, there are certainly people on the right who believe that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim lying in wait to foist jihad upon the United States. And there are people who oppose him because of his name or his race. But one has to have been asleep during the Bush years to think that nuttery is exclusively a conservative phenomenon.

What about the left's conspiracy theories? A not insignificant portion of liberals in this country believe that a small group of Jews, er, the "neocons," took control of the government following 9/11 to fight wars on behalf of Israel. Is not this slander as odious as the Internet rumors about Barack Obama?

Time columnist Joe Klein fits the profile of the liberal hypocrite beset with disappointment over McCain's alleged degradation. He recently apologized to readers for writing earlier that John McCain was "honorable." This from a man who just a few months ago alleged that "Jewish neoconservatives" were disloyal Americans because their "plump[ing]" for war in Iraq and now Iran "raised the question of divided loyalties: using U.S. military power, U.S. lives and money, to make the world safe for Israel."

Rich's use of the term "Weimar-like rage," ironically in a column decrying Republican scare tactics, is but one example of the left's careless usage of Nazi allegories to describe people and policies they don't like. Since 9/11, major anti-war rallies have included people holding signs and puppets comparing President Bush to Adolf Hitler. Leftist writer Naomi Wolf, who has expressed fears that the feds were monitoring her children's letters from summer camp, recently published a book titled, "The End of America," which likens the Bush administration to a fascist junta.

MSNBC's Keith Olbermann spews over-the-top, hateful rhetoric in his "Special Comments" on a regular basis. He has said that the Bush administration threatens America with a "new type of fascism," referred to the GOP as the "leading terrorist group in this country" on the fifth anniversary of 9/11, and has said that Fox News is "worse than Al Qaeda" and "as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan ever was."

Have the journalists now bemoaning the low tactics of the McCain campaign and its supporters never set eyes upon the wildly popular Huffington Post? That Web site hosts countless angry rants, many examples of which are too vulgar to document in a family newspaper. In 2004, Nicholson Baker wrote a novel imagining the assassination of President Bush. Last week, Fox's "Family Guy" depicted Nazis donning McCain-Palin buttons....

By imputing the crazy views of a few right-wing extremists to all conservatives, Obama supporters cut off legitimate concerns about their candidate's positions and qualifications for office. Anyone troubled by the Democratic presidential candidate's years-long association with unrepentant terrorist William Ayers and his dismissal of that individual as "a guy who lives in my neighborhood" becomes a right-wing lunatic. Anyone who raises the Rev. Jeremiah Wright is answered with an eye roll.

Kirchick is fair to note that smears are a staple of both right and left, although the depths of the partisan firebombing against McCain/Palin this last month or is unprecedented.

Police Prepare for Black Unrest Nationwide

From The Hill:

Police departments in cities across the country are beefing up their ranks for Election Day, preparing for possible civil unrest and riots after the historic presidential contest.

Public safety officials said in interviews with The Hill that the election, which will end with either the nation’s first black president or its first female vice president, demanded a stronger police presence.

Some worry that if Barack Obama loses and there is suspicion of foul play in the election, violence could ensue in cities with large black populations. Others based the need for enhanced patrols on past riots in urban areas (following professional sports events) and also on Internet rumors.

Democratic strategists and advocates for black voters say they understand officers wanting to keep the peace, but caution that excessive police presence could intimidate voters.

Sen. Obama (Ill.), the Democratic nominee for president, has seen his lead over rival Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) grow in recent weeks, prompting speculation that there could be a violent backlash if he loses unexpectedly.

Cities that have suffered unrest before, such as Detroit, Chicago, Oakland and Philadelphia, will have extra police deployed.

In Oakland, the police will deploy extra units trained in riot control, as well as extra traffic police, and even put SWAT teams on standby.

“Are we anticipating it will be a riot situation? No. But will we be prepared if it goes awry? Yes,” said Jeff Thomason, spokesman for the Oakland Police Department.

What's interesting is that rioting could break out with either an Obama victory or a loss.

If he wins, we may see urban hooliganism, when the release of frustration and victimology erupts in righteous mayhem. If Obama loses, anger and outrage over being "shafted" by "the man" may result in violence and looting as rootless thugs seek to destroy the appendages of American apartheid's white supremacist regime.

Both Democratic strategist James Carville and the NAACP's Hilary Shelton have warned of race riots on November 4th.

Will Republican street thugs riot in the event of a McCain defeat? Counterintuitively, the projections are coming in on GOP thuggery.

The Moral Abomination of Robert Farley

Some time back, I wrote about Robert Farley's review of David Horowitz and Ben Johnson's Party of Defeat.

Recall that Farley completely bombed in his attempt at making even the slightest dent in the Horowitz and Johnson's thesis, a thesis holding that the Democrats - pandering to their antiwar base - turned against a war they had nominally supported, an about face unprecedented in the domestic politics of American warfare.

Horowitz and Johnson show in exacting yet excruciating detail that today's Democrats have demonstrated a eager willingness to abandon objective national security threat assessments for narrow partisan political gain. Where once the party of John F. Kennedy led the fight against communism worldwide, the heirs of Democratic containment have sought to appease terrorism and coddle dictators. From Nancy Pelosi and John Murtha, to Harry Reid and Barack Obama, at no time in our historical memory has a political party sought to weaken American standing in war and diplomacy abroad.

As I noted in my post, "Farley's essentially dishonest in his review," which was apparent in the baseless allegations he made in his essay alleging "the summary field execution of Afghan civilians" in the war in Afghanistan.

It should be no surprise now, then, that Farley acknowleges - in an essay today at the blog Lawyers, Guns and Money - his own unseriousness and shallow motivations for undertaking a book review of a serious study of American foreign policy - a book he knew in advance would fundamentally challenge his ideological beliefs.

Here's how Farley explains his approach to reviewing Party of Defeat, noting his response to an e-mail from Frontpage Magazine offering $1000 to formally comment on the book:

My first thought was "Have I read the book yet? Heh." My second thought was "$1000. That sure could buy a lot of whiskey sours." My third thought was "200. It could buy 200 whiskey sours, if I go to the right places. Maybe with a few Manhattans sprinkled in for variety." My fourth thought was "Hey, it could even pay for whiskey sours that I've already bought, and that are still hanging around on my credit card balance." It's fair to say, then, that I found the offer appealing from the get go.

I immediately IMed Matt Duss, who told me that the offer had been floating around the DC blogging/journalism community for a while. Duss (and others) had given thought to taking the deal, but then decided that engaging with Horowitz would grant him too much legitimacy. This, I thought, was true enough; it was the reason that Horowitz was willing to pay an outrageous sum for lefties to review his book. He was trying to buy legitimacy. The point was to create the illusion that there was something in Party of Defeat that was worth engaging with, and consequently that David Horowitz was a man of ideas, rather than a thug and second rate polemicist. As such, engagement with the work as meaningful scholarship could be fundamentally dishonest, in that it accorded the book a level of respect greater than the typical bar bathroom scrawl.

Given these sentiments, why accept the offer?

There was a certain comfort in the recognition that Horowitz' effort was transparent; taking the money to review the book was, in itself, subversive of the notion that Horowitz was a serious thinker. Of course, I would accept money to review a book that I had an interest in reading, but I would never read Horowitz were it not for the money.

Readers might carefully ponder all of this.

One thousand dollars is a great sum to write a brief book review, and self-interest alone might explain Farley's decision. Yet, if that's the only motivation, there's logically little need for an intellectual investment in performing what most would consider a professional obligation: to review the work with good faith and rigor. Yet, Farley's self-expose reveals nothing of the sort, as seen in his experience in first wading into the book after agreeing to write the review:

And so on a Monday evening I set out for the Mellow Mushroom with Party of Defeat and a yellow notepad. I ordered a pitcher of beer and a pepperoni, pineapple, and jalapeno pizza, and settled in, expected to read roughly a third of the book. And then, about halfway down the first page, I noticed a serious problem with my plan. The. Book. Is. Unimaginably. Terrible. You may think you can guess how bad it is, but you can't. It's Benji Saves the Universe Terrible. It's notes on each of the first seventy pages terrible. It's spitting up your valuable, valuable beer terrible. There's just nothing there. It can't be engaged with, any more than the homeless dude with the tinfoil hat can. It's a disaster, and I just couldn't understand how I could possibly come up with a thousand words that could conceivably be termed "engagement", and still have any pretence to intellectual honesty.

As I so often do, I sought solace in alcohol. I gave some thought to bagging the project, because I didn't think that the $1000 was worth having to do a genuinely dishonest appraisal. Then again, I'd spent some time and intellectual energy; I also really wanted the thousand dollars. Finally, I latched onto the idea of treating the book as if it were a work of historical fiction, or perhaps even the novelization of some crazy right wing movie.

I recommend that readers see for themselves what's so shocking in Party of Defeat. The introduction is here, and includes this:

What nation can prevail in a war if half its population believes that the war is unnecessary and unjust, that its commander-in-chief is a liar, and that its own government is the aggressor? What president can mobilize his nation if his word is not trusted? And what soldier can prevail on the field of battle if half his countrymen are telling him that he shouldn’t be there in the first place?

It was July 2003, only four months after American forces entered Iraq, when the Democratic Party launched its first all-out attack on the president’s credibility and the morality of the war. The opening salvos were reported in a New York Times article: “Democratic presidential candidates offered a near-unified assault today on President Bush’s credibility in his handling of the Iraq War signaling a shift in the political winds by aggressively invoking arguments most had shunned since the fall of Baghdad.”

While American forces battled al-Qaeda and Ba’athist insurgents in the Iraqi capital, the Democratic National Committee released a television ad that focused not on winning those battles, but on the very legitimacy of the war. The theme of the ad was “Read His Lips: President Bush Deceives the American People.” The alleged deception was sixteen words that had been included in the State of the Union address he delivered on the eve of the conflict.

These words summarized a British intelligence report claiming that Iraq had attempted to acquire fissionable uranium in the African state of Niger, thus indicating Saddam’s (well-known) intentions to develop nuclear weapons. The report was subsequently confirmed by a bipartisan Senate committee and a British investigative commission, but not until many months had passed and the Democratic attacks had taken their toll.[18] On the surface, the attacks were directed at the president’s credibility for repeating the British claim. But their clear implication was to question the decision to go to war—in other words, to cast doubt on the credibility of the American cause. If Saddam had not sought fissionable uranium in Niger, it was suggested, then the White House had lied in describing Saddam as a threat.

In the midst of a war, and in the face of a determined terrorist resistance in Iraq, Democrats had launched an attack on America’s presence on the field of battle. This separated their assault from the normal criticism of war policies.

The problem for Farley, seen in his original review, but also in his blog post, is that he refuses to engage Horowitz and Johnson at a genuine intellectual level. It's all a "conspiracy" to him, and thus easily dismissed as unworthy of rigorous engagement.

Yet, David Horowitz, et al., is hardly the first person to argue that the Democrats have relinquished any sense of force of backbone since the Vietnam era.

In 2002, a few presidential wannabes - like Hillary Clinton and John Edwards - and some Democratic partisans confused over changes in international politics - like Harry Reid - rode the tide of national outrage over 9/11 into a vote authorizing intervention in Iraq. Many others in the Senate did not. The House vote, further, saw a majority of Democrats oppose the legislation.

A good case could be made, therefore, that on a straight roll-call analysis, the party - with the exception of a few aberrant members - stood fast in its ideological framework in opposition to a war considered ill-conceived and hastily arranged.

Farley doesn't do this, however.

Instead, he attacks Horowitz himself as a wild-eyed bozo too crazed for a modicum of respect.

Indeed, as Farley admits at his post:

I decided simply to not engage at all with Horowitz' use of evidence; factual claims in the book were designed for "truthiness" rather than for truth, and trying to start an argument about Plame or McGovern or Reagan or whatever else wouldn't be productive.

To argue against "factual claims," it seems, wouldn't be productive, since Party of Defeat makes its case so well.

Farley basically throws up his hands in opposition to the book based on faith, and faith alone. Evidence in debate doesn't count when all-encompassing leftist ideology provides comprehensive, irrefutable answers to the universe. With Howowitz and Johnson as "truthers" - selling a conspiracy to justify a con of the American people - Farley can keep sucking back a few drinks and take the money and run.

And that's basically what he did.

Robert Farley pissed on David Horowitz. He wrote a cheap rebuttal to a genuine and serious work of critical research on the Democrats and Iraq, all because the book challenged untouchable leftist shibboleths. This is anti-intellectualism, at the least, and certainly outright fraud of the first order.

Farley is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Kentucky's Patterson School. I know many untenured faculty members wouldn't put themselves this far out on a scholarly limb. No matter in this case, of course, as it's clear that Farley doesn't care one way or the other, not about reputation nor rigor.

This man's not only an academic mountebank, but a moral abomination as well.

McCain's Long Odds

Pew's got some pretty spectacular numbers for Barack Obama:

Barack Obama’s lead over John McCain has steadily increased since mid-September, when the race was essentially even. Shortly after the first presidential debate on Sept. 26, Obama moved to a 49% to 42% lead; that margin inched up to 50% to 40% in a poll taken just after the second debate. Currently, Obama enjoys his widest margin yet over McCain among registered voters, at 52% to 38%. When the sample of voters is narrowed to those most likely to vote, Obama leads by 53% to 39%.

Obama’s strong showing in the current poll reflects greater confidence in the Democratic candidate personally. More voters see him as “well-qualified” and “down-to-earth” than did so a month ago. Obama also is inspiring more confidence on several key issues, including Iraq and terrorism, than he did before the debates. Most important, Obama now leads McCain as the candidate best able to improve economic conditions by a wider margin (53% to 32%).

Obama’s gains notwithstanding, a widespread loss of confidence in McCain appears to be the most significant factor in the race at this point. Many more voters express doubts about McCain’s judgment than about Obama’s: 41% see McCain as “having poor judgment,” while just 29% say that this trait describes Obama. Fewer voters also view McCain as inspiring than did so in mid-September (37% now, 43% then). By contrast, 71% of voters continue to think of Obama as inspiring.

If there's a bright spot here for McCain, it's on the question of patriotic values:

Most voters continue to view McCain as patriotic (89%), well-qualified (72%) and honest (61%), and just more than half (54%) see him as down-to-earth....

Obama continues to be described as inspiring by seven-in-ten voters (71%) and the share who say he is down-to-earth rose from 65% a month ago to 71% now. More people now say he is well-qualified (53%) than said so in mid-September (47%), though he still trails McCain by 19 points on this measure.

While two-thirds (67%) say that Obama is patriotic, roughly a quarter (26%) say he is not. Still, views of Obama’s patriotism have improved slightly – last April, 61% said they thought of him as patriotic while 32% said he was not. A slim majority of Republicans (51%) and McCain supporters (52%) say they think Obama is not patriotic.

So, if voters find Barack Obama as less patriotic AND less qualified, what's going on?

Mostly, it's the economy, but also the public's mediocre perception that McCain's run a strong campaign (these stand out for me, but see Pew's survey for more information).

Today's Gallup numbers are also favorable to the Democrats, and Gallup's separate review of more than 40,000 interviews from the last month shows the economy as the driving factor in voter support for Obama. Gallup concludes:

These data suggest that one of McCain's best hopes of improving his positioning against Obama in the remaining two weeks of the presidential campaign would be for a sharp drop to take place in the percentage of Americans holding negative views of the U.S. economy. Although McCain has been roundly castigated by his opponent for his September comment that the "fundamentals" of the U.S. economy are strong, these data would suggest that the statement was not necessarily an illogical effort on McCain's part, for it appears that if Americans come to believe things are not as bleak as they may seem, he gains.

With exactly two weeks left it seems improbable that the McCain campaign will be able to turn around public perceptions on the economy.

Other than that, there's some hope for McCain in the battleground states. The good news is that some polls show the GOP ticket coming back in Florida and Ohio, two states vital to GOP hopes at retaining the White House.

The odds are long. McCain can't afford to lose other key states, like Missouri, that went for George W. Bush in 2004. Open Left, of all places, has a nice run-down of the top battlegrounds to watch for the remainder of the contest.

Ugly, In-Your-Face Demonization of Sarah Palin

Via Little Green Footballs:

The media keep yammering on about John McCain and Sarah Palin’s imagined “subtle racism,” yet they don’t write a word about the ugly, in-your-face demonization and hatred you can easily find everywhere Obama supporters hang out. This morning’s example: A Truly Frightening Prospect.

Meanwhile, USA Today has a report up on the mainstreaming of the Ku Klux Klan,"White Supremacists Target Middle America."

The article essentially argues that the Republican Party is at home with National Socialists. Yet the piece notes that "fewer than 50,000 people are members of white supremacist groups" nationwide.

Compare that number to the "million" readers at Daily Kos, and we can see which side's really attracting the true extremists in America.

Ken Adelman Doesn't Speak for GOP Base

Folks are making a big to-do out of Kenneth Adelman's endorsement of Barack Obama.

If there was ever a lukewarm endorsement, this one's it.

But besides that, the endorsement's ringing in what it's telling us about the schisms in the GOP. The Booman Tribune points the way:

It's somewhat unsettling to see swine like Ken Adelman endorsing Barack Obama, but it's telling. Yes, a lot of people are beginning to see what side of the bread the butter is spread on. But there's more to it than that. Adelman didn't express any disappointment with McCain's tactics. His big concerns were with Palin and with McCain's erratic performance during the economic meltdown. But the elites within the Republican Party are definitely seeing the race-hatred that McCain and Palin are stirring up. And they don't want to be associated with it. They've tolerated the whole anti-abortion, war on Christmas, anti-science-gibberish trend of modern Republicanism because indulging those people gave them the votes they needed for lower taxes, less regulation, and bigger defense budgets. But outright calling your opponent an anti-Ameican, socialist, terrorist-coddling, welfare-king? That's too over the top for the likes of Ken Adelman or Colin Powell or Peggy Noonan or Lincoln Chafee, or Chuck Hagel, or Dick Lugar, or the editorial boards of countless right-leaning newspapers, or George Will, or David Brooks, or pretty much anyone with an ounce of self-respect and respect for others.

It's an excellent sign for Obama's presidency that he has such a broad range of elite support. He will have a nice honeymoon. But, what about the rancid, snarling, remnant of the modern conservative movement? Is this it? Railing against imaginary socialism? How long will it take for the GOP to regroup and retool enough that they can begin to attract back the Adelmans and Powells and Brooks and Wills and Chafees and Lugars and Hagels?

Once you get past Booman's teeth-grinding commentary, we can see what's really going on: Leftists like this think the new Republican Party, starting with Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, but likely to be carried forward in the years ahead by the likes of Sarah Palin, is some demonic pseudo-fascist aberration - a subterreanean trend of ideological extremism that will fade away after a term or two of Democratic Party rule.

First, I think Booman's getting ahead of himself. It's not good form to talk of an Obama presidency, essentially, in the present tense. We have two more weeks to go, and Adelman's endorsement is hardly a game-changing October surprise.

More fundamentally, though, is this notion that people like Colin Power, Kenneth Adelman, and Chuck Hagel, etc., speak for the contemporary conservative base of the Republican Party. If these folks are a kind of proxy for the Rockefeller Republicans of days gone past, and this is the true legitimate backbone of the party, then Booman needs to wake up.

Powell's an elder statesman, and he's looking for a few more golden years in Washington after turning-in a troubled tenure at State. Adelman's a largely-forgotten arms control expert whose greatest moments came during the Reagan administration in the 1980s. Throw-weights and MIRVs aren't on the tips of the tongue for most policy wonks nowadays, although maybe Adelman might be of use to Obama in the event of Tehran's acquisition of intermediate range ballistic missiles. And Hagel's RINO, to put it simply. His criticisms of the Bush administration and the Iraq war might as well been published at Daily Kos or the Huffington Post.

Pundits now are talking about people like Gingrich and Palin leading the GOP field for the presidential nomination in 2012. Beyond that, we might see folks like Bobby Jindal, Mike Huckabee, Mitt Romney, and Tim Pawlenty as the top GOP leaders in the next couple of election cycles.

Among journalists, Robert Kagan and William Kristol are likely to have more influence than David Brooks or Peggy Noonan. It's fun to buck the tide with some iconoclastic commentary, but when push comes to shove, those pumping up the party line will have the inside track on the presidential beat of power during the next Republican era.

And keep in mind, I'm not throwing my hands up on McCain/Palin right now. This race is going down to the wire, no matter what the overconfident netroots hacks have to say about it.

Bush Will Keep Guantánamo Open

Via Memeorandum and New York Times:

Despite his stated desire to close the American prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, President Bush has decided not to do so, and never considered proposals drafted in the State Department and the Pentagon that outlined options for transferring the detainees elsewhere, according to senior administration officials.

Mr. Bush’s top advisers held a series of meetings at the White House this summer after a Supreme Court ruling in June cast doubt on the future of the American detention center. But Mr. Bush adopted the view of his most hawkish advisers that closing Guantánamo would involve too many legal and political risks to be acceptable, now or any time soon, the officials said.

The administration is proceeding on the assumption that Guantánamo will remain open not only for the rest of Mr. Bush’s presidency but also well beyond, the officials said, as the site for military tribunals of those facing terrorism-related charges and for the long prison sentences that could follow convictions.

The effect of Mr. Bush’s stance is to leave in place a prison that has become a reviled symbol of the administration’s fight against terrorism, and to leave another contentious foreign policy decision for the next president.

This story may well be the top controversy covered today by the netroots left - ahhh!! ... the evil Bush/Cheny cabal!!

Meanwhile, the administration's decision means that terrorist detainees will not be returning to the battlefield anytime soon.

Thank you President Bush.

Night of the Living Democrats

Via Dr. Sanity:

Bill Clinton and Al Gore clearly weren't bulls**ting us when they urged Democrats to build "a bridge to the 21st century". But they forgot that a bridge is something that goes both ways; and it can be used to escape back in the opposite direction from forward; and that's the direction today's living Dems are stampeding - all the way back to the golden age of '60s radicalism and violence.

And you don't have to be a Weatherman to know which way the wind is blowing.

You can say that again: "We Didn't Do Enough? The Ayers-Weatherman Terrorist Attack."

Rationalizing Obama: "This Country Was Founded by Terrorists"

Fox News is on the story of Barack Obama's book review of William Ayers', A Kind and Just Parent: Children of the Juvenile Court.

It turns out Ayers mentions Obama in the book:

The book, which details life at the Chicago Juvenile Court prison school, mentions Obama by name on page 82 when it describes Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood:

"Our neighbors include Muhammad Ali, former mayor Eugene Sawyer, poets Gwendolyn Brooks and Elizabeth Alexander, and writer Barack Obama. Minister Louis Farrakhan lives a block from our home and adds, we think, a unique dimension to the idea of 'safe neighborhood watch': the Fruit of Islam, his security force, has an eye on things twenty-four-hours a day."

Meanwhile, Patterico notes this comment during " an actual conversation with an unidentified Obama supporter":

This country was founded by terrorists.

It takes a lot of rationalization to dismiss Obama's radical associations.

Meanwhile, "progressives" are starting their victory dance.

God help this country on January 20th if these folks come to power.

See also, "We Didn't Do Enough? The Ayers-Weatherman Terrorist Attack."

We Didn't Do Enough? The Ayers-Weatherman Terrorist Attack

The Weathermen were a Marxist-Leninist militant organization that declared war on the United States in 1969. Check this video for some background on the group's terrorist activities:

Here's this, from Wikipedia:

On March 6, 1970, during preparations for the bombing of an officers' dance at the Fort Dix U.S. Army base and for Butler Library at Columbia University, there was an explosion in a Greenwich Village safe house when the nail bomb being constructed prematurely detonated for unknown reasons. WUO members Diana Oughton, Ted Gold, and Terry Robbins died in the explosion. Cathy Wilkerson and Kathy Boudin escaped unharmed ... The bomb preparations have been pointed out by critics of the claim that the Weatherman group did not try to take lives with its bombings. Harvey Klehr, the Andrew W. Mellon professor of politics and history at Emory University in Atlanta, said in 2003, "The only reason they were not guilty of mass murder is mere incompetence. I don't know what sort of defense that is."

Barack Obama appeared with Ayers on a panel on juvenile justice organized by Michelle Obama on November 20, 1997.

Obama now claims Ayers has been rehabilitated and he denies writing book reviews favoring Ayers' theories of criminal justice.

If the Democratic nominee's relationship to Ayers - who wished he could have done more to destroy the U.S. - doesn't make your skin crawl, I doubt anything would.

Obama Denies Reviewing Ayers Book on Juvenile Justice

This is almost unbelievable.

The Barack Obama campaign is denying Senator Obama wrote a book review, dated December 21, 1997, of William Ayers', "A Kind and Just Parent: The Children of Juvenile Court."

As Zombietime has shown, the facts on record are completely irrefutable, unless there's more than one Barack Obama who appeared on a panel with William Ayers in November 1997 to discuss the book (a panel organized by none other than Michelle Obama).

Here's Zombietime:

The following images are pretty much unnecessary; yet because of the intense nature of this campaign, and because every single tidbit of news is dissected, analyzed, doubted and challenged, I am posting these pictures to prove beyond any doubt that the photo of the Obama-Ayers review shown above is authentic, and not some Photoshop hoax, as I’m quite sure Obama’s defenders would claim if I didn’t pre-emptively debunk their accusations.

Barack Obama told George Stephanopoulos in April that William Ayers was just "a guy who lives in my neighborhood."

Now his campaign's denying he reviewed Ayers' juvenile justice book.

Add to this all of the other untruths making the shady Illinois Democrat a systematic - if not pathological - liar, and you can see why I said "this is almost unbelievable."

Damn, That Liberal Press!

Mike's America assured me some time back that relentless attacks on my blog by the nihilist leftosphere were a "badge of honor."

It seems I must have really earned that "badge" this past couple of days, as I'm a target of two - back-to-back! - posts at LGM (here and here), as well as another I just found from the lower 9th-tier blog, The Poorman.

The best one, of course, is the photoshop of me as a masterbating "clown" blogger, posted in response to my essay on Proposition 8 and this photo of two lesbians kissing, which I found at the "choice cunts!" nightlife page of New York's libertine Village Voice.

Of course, the LGM crowd thought I had a porno collection on my pc, so when regular LGM reader, Fauxmaxbaer, remarked here in the comments, "Teh hot!," I thought that pretty much summed up Dave Noon's perverted readership:

Looks like Fauxmaxbaer, one of your regular readers, is doing some one-handed blog surfing:

http://americanpowerblog.blogspo...ols.html#166553

I'm sure all of your LGM readers - Lesbians, Gays, and Marriage? - will be right at home.

A direct hit, no doubt, which triggered LGM's desperate comeback today, hoping to land a knockout against my Michelle Obama "lobster snack" post.

Well, the fun thing about blogging is that sometimes the best smears, even when short of facts, hit close to home neverthless. And that's why I began my post noting:

Michelle Obama is said to have ordered lobster appetizers, two whole steamed lobsters, Iranian caviar, and French champagne while hanging out at the Waldorf-Astoria during a trip to New York with her husband, Barack, aka "The One."

Notice the "is said" verb qualifier, which reflects the eyebrow-raising nature of the source, New York Magazine, which noted this:

Michelle Obama ordered lobster apps, two whole steamed lobsters, Iranian caviar, and Champagne at the Waldorf Wednesday afternoon when she was there with O for a meeting.

Now, while perhaps you can't trust the gossip blogs at liberal New York magazines, no doubt David Noon and his followers will be checking the Village Voice "choice cunts!" page next time they're in the city!

Hey, all in a day's work, and I'm glad I could be of help.

Obama Lowers Expectations

Howard Kurtz argues that the "poll-driven press" has gone out on a limb in predicting an Obama lanslide, yet "polls change, as many journalists were reminded when they wrongly predicted that Obama would beat Hillary Clinton in the New Hampshire primary."

Perhaps Obama's being careful about not getting caught up on the landslide euphoria, as this piece from The Hill indicates:

Barack Obama, coming off a weekend where he shattered the single month fundraising record and received the endorsement of retired Gen. Colin Powell, said Monday he expects the race for the White House to tighten.

The Democratic presidential nominee said on NBC’s “Today Show” that there is “no doubt” that Republican rival Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) has a path to victory, despite the Illinois senator's leads in many battleground states and in national polls.

“We think that the race will tighten, just because that’s what happens at the end of campaigns. They always have,” Obama said, adding, “And in each of these battleground states, you’ve got a lot of close races. One of the messages that I’ve had to my team is that we don’t let up. We do not let up.”

Obama noted that “every time we’ve gotten in trouble in this campaign, it’s because we started trying to play ball-control offense.”

Obama's lowering expectations a bit (after Democratic insiders predicted an Obama landslide last week).

It's a good thing, too, as a number of media outlets have noted that the race is tightening and McCain's closing the gap in some polls.