Saturday, September 27, 2008

Bible Spice

John Cole sums up how I'm feeling about the campaign:

Apparently there is a debate tonight. The funny thing about it is I really don’t even care. There is, quite honestly, nothing Obama could say that would make me not vote for him. His opening statement could be “My name is Barack Hussein Obama, and I am a muslim, and winning this election is all part of a plot to turn the United States into my own personal caliphate,” and I would shrug and vote for him anyway because at least he would go about it in a competent manner. Compared to the last eight years with C+ Augustus and Darth Cheney and the possibility of four more with Johnny Drama and Bible Spice, that would be preferable.

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At this point, after seeing the John McCain of September 2008 I'm having a hard time understanding why Obama isn't up by 30 points, even given his relative lack of experience and his race. Before the primaries ended I could imagine John McCain winning this election on the merits, that is to say, I assumed McCain could have won a straight up race based on his experience, Vietnam hero-hood, the success of the surge (and our paying off our Sunni insurgents) in shoving Iraq off the front page and cable network leads, with his picking a competent, respected, if however unglamorous, VP. But McCain September 2008 threw all that away, and has run a truly mind-boggling campaign. Of course, it remains highly possible, maybe even likely, that McCain will still pull it off. If he does, one wonders who will be minding the store in a McCain-Palin administration. The bloom is off the Palin-rose, if responses by ordinary folks to the Couric interview are any consideration. And McCain himself seems scarcely cognizant of where he is. Reports are he uttered nary a comment in the now infamous WH Pow Wow on the Bail Out he was supposedly so central in forcing. The McCain campaign itself seems the strangest sort of effort we've seen in many a year, maybe ever. Unlike VP Biden, VP Palin is nowhere on the teevee challenging the opposition. Once upon a time you could count on the Republicans to run well-organized, purposefully directed campaigns (even if they didn't govern so well), but GOP 2008 seems to be conducting an experiment in campaigning like the party governs. All sneers and hit jobs, based on, um, celebrity POW and Bible Spice candidates.

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