Michele Bachmann and the Conservative Future

GOP Representative Michele Bachmann, from Minnesota's 6th District, has lost a double-digit lead to Democratic challenger Elwyn Tinklenberg following her appearance on Hardball with Chris Matthews on October 17.

A new poll finds Elwynn with a slight, statistically-insignificant lead over Bachmann, 45-43 percent.

Bachmann's under fire for criticizing the Democratic nominee, saying, for example, "the people who Barack Obama has been associating with are anti-American, by and large." The ensuing left-wing backlash has engulfed her campaign and put her political career in jeopardy.

As noted, I made a contribution to Bachmann's reelection campaign the other day.

I've been moved by the controversy surrounding, as I see Bachmann as an embattled foot-soldier in the culture wars following September 11, 2001, which have now reached manic pitch on the eve of the presidential election.

Bachmann's been eviscerated by the netroots left and its allies in the liberal press corps, and she's taped a new campaign advertisement saying, "I may not always get my words right but I know that my heart is right because my heart is for you, for your children and for the blessings of liberty to remain for our great country."

This is not the big "apology" some folks on the left were anticipating, and I'm glad: Bachmann's got nothing to be ashamed of, and no need to apologize:

• When the Senate Majority Leader, a Democrat, gets up to the podium and proclaims, "The Iraq war is lost!" in an effort to counteract any positive consequences of an upcoming change in strategy, is that pro-American?
• When "Jihad Jack" Murtha scores a propaganda victory for Jihadists who are killing our soldiers by unjustly and without evidence labelling Marines "cold blooded murderers," is that likewise pro-American?
• When an entire party, in the name of politics, tries to undermine the efforts of our troops in harms' way during wartime, is that pro-American?
• When Obama's long-time self-confessed mentor and pastor of over 20 years stands in the pulpit and screams, "G*D DAMN AMERICA!" is that being pro-American?
• When another long-time Obama Associate, William Ayers, bombs the pentagon and other targets, and later regrets only that he didn't cause more murder and mayhem, is that also pro-American?

But notice the video above, which features Bachmann in a congressional district debate in November 2005. During the talk Bachmann proclaims that "not all cultures are equal," to which the Huffington Post responds:

One comment she has never explained came during a debate she had while running for Congress the first time in November 2005. Prompted by a question on the rioting in France and Europe at the time, Bachmann said "not all cultures are equal, not all values are equal," letting it be known that she thought that people of the Muslim faith had an inferior culture to that of the United States and the West.

She held forth on the European unrest, referring to a generation of unassimilated Muslim French youth addicted to cable television, led in her imagination by al Jazeera to wreak havoc. Yet it was Bachmann who seemed entranced by cable news. Her knowledge of what was actually happening in France seems to have come entirely from a FOX news-style script. In fact, the unrest was no jihad, had nothing to do with religious faith or Muslim culture or al Jazeeera. It was more akin to the riots in the U.S. for expanded civil rights in the 1960s or those that followed from the Rodney King police beating in Los Angeles in 1991. The European riots came after two suburban youth were killed in a police chase. The unrest centered on decades of discrimination that had manifested itself, for example, in school acceptances and hiring practices and police force racial profiling.

Actually, that's not quite accurate.

In fact, Bachmann pretty much nails the analysis, and Huffington Post is spinning Bachmann's comments as a purportedly earlier example of beyond-the-pale extremism.

Note, for example, Robert Leiken's analysis in, "Europe's Angry Muslims," from the July/August 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs:

Jihadist networks span Europe from Poland to Portugal, thanks to the spread of radical Islam among the descendants of guest workers once recruited to shore up Europe's postwar economic miracle. In smoky coffeehouses in Rotterdam and Copenhagen, makeshift prayer halls in Hamburg and Brussels, Islamic bookstalls in Birmingham and "Londonistan," and the prisons of Madrid, Milan, and Marseilles, immigrants or their descendants are volunteering for jihad against the West. It was a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe, who murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November. A Nixon Center study of 373 mujahideen in western Europe and North America between 1993 and 2004 found more than twice as many Frenchmen as Saudis and more Britons than Sudanese, Yemenites, Emiratis, Lebanese, or Libyans. Fully a quarter of the jihadists it listed were western European nationals - eligible to travel visa-free to the United States.

Also, here's Robert Spencer rebutting the notion that "the unrest [of 2005] was no jihad, had nothing to do with religious faith or Muslim culture":

Why have the riots happened? From many accounts one would think that the riots have been caused by France’s failure to implement Marxism....

One might get the impression from this that France is governed by top-hatted, cigar-smoking capitalists, building their fortunes on the backs of the poor, rather than by socialists and quasi-socialists who have actually strained the economy by spending huge amounts of money on health and welfare programs. Nor does the idea that the rioting has been caused by economic inequalities explain why Catholics and others who are poor in France have not joined the Muslims who are rioting. Of course, all the news agencies have either omitted or mentioned only in passing that the rioters are Muslims at all. The casual reader would not be able to escape the impression that what is happening in France is all about economics — and race.

Compare Spencer to Bachmann's intitial comments in the video:

I just want to say only in France, only in France could you have suburban youth rioting because the welfare benefits aren't generous enough. And that's... That's what they're telling us now is happening there. And only in France could that happen.

Representative Bachmann is more attuned to France's "Muslim street" than are her detractors on the radical left.

And that's why I've contributed to her campaign, and I hope others will as well (go to Bachmann's campaign page, here).

Michele Bachmann's fighting the fight conservatives need to wage. She's now a bit chastened by the backlash, but as the comments in her new advertisment indicate, she's sticking to "what's right in her heart."

That's a stand for traditional values, a stand for ideals, and a refusal to cave to intense political pressures from nihilist moral relativists.

Unfortunately, two-thirds in the Minnesota National Public Radio poll disagree with Bachmann's comments on Barack Obama's radical associations, for more reasons than I can discuss here.

Thus, in the microcosm of American politics that is Minnesota's 6th congressional district, we're seeing the battle for the conservative soul unfold in miniature, at the level of an individual GOP policy-maker beseiged by the hordes of moral equivalence who're now emboldened by the prospects of a Barack Obama administration, a candidate who will represent the very values against which Bachmann's so courageously warned.

The Economic Consequences of Obama

Here's the powerful new anti-Obama ad from Let Freedom Ring:

See also, Investor's Business Daily, "The Audacity of Socialism."

Neoconservative Racism?

One day after declaring himself a socialist radical, Matthew Yglesias has one of more disturbing titles for a post I've seen: "Neoconservatism Today, Neoconservatism Tomorrow, Neoconservatism Forever!

Yglesias is attacking Charles Krauthammer's endorsement today of John McCain for president (a fabulous read, by the way). He first trots out the old antiwar tripe on the Bush administration's foreign policy:

America’s standing in the eyes of the world is at its lowest ebb ever. Our level of influence in Latin America has declined precipitously on Bush’s watch. Israel’s security is more at risk than it was eight years ago, and Palestinian suffering is more intense than it was eight years ago. Osama bin Laden remains at large.

Yeah, yeah ... where have I heard that before?

Next follows Yglesias' neocon excoriation:

We’ve been following Krauthammer’s advice for years. Has it delivered a peaceful and secure world? No, it has not. Not just according to me, but according to Krauthammer himself. To Krauthammer the “solution” to the peace and prosperity of the Clinton years was neoconservatism. With neoconservatism having created a dangerous and insecure world, his solution is — more neoconservatism. And yet somehow it’s supposed to be the people who want to stop pursuing failed policies who are said to be blind to the troubled nature of the present.

Readers may recall that I've read Yglesias' Heads in the Sands, and I'm unimpressed (but don't take my word for it, see Jamie Kirchick's devastating indictment of the book). So, I guess it takes one advocate of a "failed approach" to understand another.

The problem: Krauthammer's inconsistent, with all due respect. In an essay back in late-2006, when the U.S. was facing the darkest times in Iraq, Krauthammer proclaimed the end of U.S. international hegemony:

What is becoming clear is that the overall international strategic situation in which we had unchallenged hegemony for the first decade and half the unipolar moment is now over. We are seeing on the horizon the rise of something that is always expected in any unipolar era, which is an alliance of others who oppose us.

Krauthammer's claim was not only wrong, but rather disheartening, considering he wrote what I considered some of the most importantt tracts on the theory underlying the Bush Doctrine, "The Unipolar Moment Revisited." Of course, Krauthammer's earlier works might be having a lingering effect on Yglesias, despite the fact that the WaPo columnist appeared at one point as a fair-weather neocon.

That said, what's particular disgusting here is the title to Yglesias' post, which draws on Alabama Governor George Wallace's Inaugural Address, January 14, 1963:

I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny . . . and I say . . . seregation today . . . segregation tomorrow . . . segregation forever.

Yglesias makes no specific reference to a racial nexus in neoconservative ideology.

But with his radical associations and demonic attacks on American foreign policy in the Bush years, the logical implication is that Yglesias adopts the same type of theory of American history as does William Ayers and Bernadette Dohrn: The United States is irredeemably racist, at home and abroad, and in some twist of logical contortion, Charles Krauthammer, a Jewish psychiatrist and one-time researcher to President Jimmy Carter, fits into that alleged abmonation of American imperialism like a puzzle piece.

Toward a Rightroots Movement?

While I don't discount a further last-minute tightening in the presidential race, nor even a McCain victory, I'm excited about the GOP rebuilding movement that's already underway among conservative commentators.

Here's this from The Next Right:

Aaron Shaw at Fringe Thoughts responds to some things Patrick Ruffini and I have written recently.

A few recent posts at The Next Right have confirmed that John Henke and Patrick Ruffini are the only conservative bloggers I know of seriously considering how to build a netroots movement on the right. [...] The irony here is that Henke’s (and Ruffini’s) analysis mirrors the claims made by Markos Moulitsas over the past five years on Daily Kos as well as in his books Taking On the System and Crashing the Gate.

Actually, I don't think it's ironic at all that the analysis of problems on the Right is similar to the arguments made by the Netroots Left. For one thing, the "claims made by Markos Moulitsas" are in many ways intentional recycling of the movement on the Right.

The underlying systemic inputs are very similar. The political/electoral culture and incentives, and the emergence of the internet as an important social and technological phenomenon impacted both the Left and Right at approximately the same time.

The difference in uptake and evolution is predominantly due to the political cycle. Democrats went through the wilderness from 1995 to 2003; they found their way from 2003 to 2008. Republicans entered their wilderness in 2007, though I would argue that the Right has been in the wilderness for longer. How long the Right wanders in the wilderness depends, in large part, on how seriously they take the lessons they can learn from the Left.

I have to say, right away, that the comparison to Daily Kos is not only disgusting, but inaccurate and unproductive as well.

Markos Moulitsas is a diabolical loser. Over the past year, I've chronicled a number Kos posts that constitute some of the most represhensible political commentary on the web.

A quick check, for example, indicates that the annihilationist anti-Semitic post, "Eulogy before the Inevitability of Self-Destruction: The Decline and Death of Israel," remains available at Daily Kos - and that's just one example. Conservatives will not emulate that level of hatred, I guarantee it.

Not only that, Kos failed badly in his efforts to elect Ned Lamont to the Senate in 2006, and the record for House races is mixed (or at least it's awfully hard to generalize from a single case of success).

Certainly the online model of campaign fundraising that the netroots left is worthy of emulation, but web-based campaigning has origins that precede Markos Moulitsas' angry hordes.

Beyond that, on the deeper question of whether GOP partisans will organize as well as those on the Democratic-left have over the last few years, just repeat three words before answering: BARACK HUSSEIN OBAMA.

McCain Volunteer Admits Maiming Attack a Hoax

Well, I'm giving some credit to Kyle Moore here, whose suspicions proved accurate that the Ashley Todd attack and maiming story was a hoax.

Pittsburgh's KDKA has the report:

Police tell KDKA that a campaign volunteer has now confessed to making up a story that a mugger attacked her and cut the letter B in her face after seeing her McCain bumper sticker.

Ashley Todd, 20, of Texas, initially told police that she was robbed at an ATM in Bloomfield and that the suspect became enraged and started beating her after seeing her GOP sticker on her car.

Police investigating the alleged attack, however, began to notice some inconsistencies in her story and administered a polygraph test.

Authorities, however, declined to release the results of that test.

Investigators did say that they received photos from the ATM machine and "the photographs were verified as not being the victim making the transaction."

This afternoon, a Pittsburgh police commander told KDKA Investigator Marty Griffin that Todd confessed to making up the story.

The commander added that Todd will face charges; but police have not commented on what those charges will be.

Keep in mind that both presidential campaigns responded to the story, with John McCain and Sarah Palin contacting Todd's family, and Barack Obama issuing a statement.

The netroots left will have a field day with this, and the liberal press will excoriate the GOP for its "Atwaterite" tactics, while conveniently forgetting the dozens upon dozen of vicious rumors against Sarah Palin and her family upon her announcement as McCain's running-mate.

Oh well, let the "reality-based community" bask in its nihilist righteousness for the day.

Meanwhile, we've got a campaign to win.

Ashley Todd Hoax Theory: Backward B?

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

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Ace of Spades updates the Ashley Todd backward "B" hoax theory:

This speculation is silly.

Others have made this point, but Devil's Advocate at Copious Dissent took the simple step of turning the picture upside down to graphically demonstrate how ridiculous it is to keep talking about the backwards B.

There are so many sensible explanations for this that to cry "hoax" over this one point is silly.

Allahpundit notes that Ms. Todd has now taken a polygraph, but authorities have not released the results:

Why not release the details of the polygraph? If she passed it, it’s mighty irresponsible to suppress that information while whispering to the press about “inconsistencies” in her story.

The local CBS news-video report from Pittsburgh is here.

See also, "Words Fail: McCain Backer Maimed by Pro-Obama Attacker."

More later...

Obama's International Crisis

Here's John McCain's new ad buy, "Ladies and Gentlemen":

This is powerful, although it remains to be seen how much traction this message gets as the economic crisis continues.

See Captain Ed for a little more optimism.

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.