Open Left: Chris Bowers:

Here is the campaign at a glance:

Victory Chart
Obama needs one of these states to win it all

* = If Obama only wins Nevada among these seven, that would force a 269-269 tie, which would almost certainly result in a victory in the House of Representatives, given the large Democratic lead there

Electoral College: Obama 306, McCain 171 Toss-up 61 (270 to win)

(Dark Blue (277): Obama +7.0% or more
Lean Blue (29): Obama +2.6%-+6.9%
White / Toss-up (61): Obama +2.5% to McCain +2.5%
Lean Red (35): McCain +2.6%-+6.9%
Dark Red (136): McCain +7.0% or more)

Complete Tracking poll average

* = Gallup is an average of their expanded and traditional likely voter models
** = Yesterday’s numbers

I notice two things about these numbers. First, Obama is well ahead, with only 14 days left. Second, the number of states where he holds a statistically significant lead has shrunk to its lowest point since October 1st, at least in my reckoning. While that isn’t the most heartwarming trend, with only 14 days left, there is good reason to be thankful that Obama built such a large advantage earlier in the month.

Chris Bowers :: Presidential Forecast 10/21: 14 Days Left

Der Spiegel:

Barack Obama, the man most Europeans would like to see elected the next US president, plans to visit Berlin, Paris and London soon. The Democratic candidate is looking for statesmanlike images to boost his campaign and German politicians will be hoping some of his popularity rubs off on them.

What will the new US president mean for Europe? And above all, what will he want from Europe? A group of Europeans and Americans recently engaged in heated debate on the subject on the sidelines of a trans-Atlantic conference at California’s Stanford University.

Charles Kupchan, the former top advisor to Bill Clinton and one of America’s best experts on Europe, gave a less than euphoric assessment. What will happen, he asked his audience, if the popular Barack Obama comes to Europe as US President and demands much more help in Afghanistan or Iraq? How will the Europeans respond?

These difficult questions won’t arise in earnest until next year at the earliest but German politicians will soon be able to meet Barack Obama in person. The Democratic contender made a surprise announcement at the weekend that he plans to visit Europe during the election campaign. In addition to Paris and London, he also intends to visit Berlin.

“France, Germany and the United Kingdom are key anchors of the trans-Atlantic alliance. And I look forward to discussing how we can strengthen our partnership in the years to come,” said Obama.
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ST. PAUL, Minn. — Cheered by a roaring crowd, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois laid claim to the Democratic presidential nomination Tuesday night, taking a historic step toward his once-improbable goal of becoming the nation’s first black president. Hillary Rodham Clinton maneuvered for the vice presidential spot on his fall ticket without conceding her own defeat.

“America, this is our moment,” the 46-year-old senator and one-time community organizer said in his first appearance as the Democratic nominee-in-waiting. “This is our time. Our time to turn the page on the policies of the past.”

Clinton praised Obama warmly in an appearance before supporters in New York, although she neither acknowledged his victory in their grueling marathon nor offered a concession of any sort.

Instead, she said she was committed to a unified party and would spend the next few days determining “how to move forward with the best interests of our country and our party guiding my way.”

Obama’s victory set up a five-month campaign with Republican Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a race between a first-term Senate opponent of the Iraq War and a 71-year-old former Vietnam prisoner of war and staunch supporter of the current U.S. military mission.

And both men seemed eager to begin.
Continue Reading »

The Raw Story:
GRAND RAPIDS, Mich., May 14 - Former Democratic U.S. presidential candidate John Edwards endorsed Barack Obama’s White House bid on Wednesday, a campaign spokeswoman said, giving a big boost to the Illinois senator in his effort to rally the party around his candidacy.

Edwards, the 2004 vice presidential nominee, dropped out of the Democratic race in January and was heavily courted by both Obama and rival Hillary Clinton in the past few months. He made the endorsement at a Grand Rapids rally Wednesday evening.

“I am fired up!” were Obama’s first words to the raucous crowd, who cheered wildly when the Illinois senator introduced his “special guest,” Edwards. The former North Carolina senator took time before endorsing Obama to kindly acknowledge Sen. Clinton’s efforts.

The endorsement comes the day after Clinton defeated Obama by more than 2-to-1 in West Virginia. The loss highlighted Obama’s work to win over the “Hillary Democrats” — white, working-class voters who also supported Edwards in large numbers before he exited the race.

The blog Michigan Messenger has a rough transcript of the endorsement. Video follows…

OpenLeft, Chris Bowers:

Obama has won North Carolina’s pledged delegates 63-52, according to Green Papers. Their estimates are usually accurate to within one delegate either way, so I trust them. Obama also appears to have won the North Carolina popular vote by 226,500 or so, which is almost identical to Clinton’s margin in Pennsylvania and Indiana combined.

The delegate count in Indiana is murkier, largely because the votes are coming in slower. In the extremes we have Democratic Convention Watch, which currently projects Clinton 35-33 Obama with four undecided, and CBS, which projects Clinton 38-29 Obama with five undecided. While these are not incompatible projections I am strongly prone to lean toward the DIY independent site, since such sites have shown, time and time again, to be way ahead of established news sites in delegate counts. In terms of the popular vote, Clinton is currently ahead by 20,000 and dropping with 92% reporting. I don’t regret declaring her the popular vote winner at all, since I’ll still be proven correct and since only one delegate is decided by the popular vote. I’ve been wrong about individual delegates before, and really that is all that is at stake in the popular vote.

Still, a very, very big night for Obama. The media has been giving him stupid rules to follow (pierce your nipples with flag pins or we will run Rev. Wright 24 / 7!), and he beat those rules tonight. I don’t like those rules, but Obama played them, and won. The narrative will reward him as a result.

TPM, Josh Marshall

Remember that woman from the debate last night who the moderators showed videotape of asking whether Barack Obama “believes in the flag”? Her name is Nash McCabe.

I remember thinking it was sort of odd to have a couple one-off uses of ordinary voter question when it didn’t really seem like it was part of the format. But I was too distracted by the general inanity of the debate to focus on this issue too closely.

Well, it turns out TPM Reader JL did give some thought. And he came up with something very interesting (see JL’s post at the DrexelDems blog). He did a little googling and found out Nash is pretty popular with the traveling press now in Pennsylvania. It turns out McCabe was featured in an April 4th story in the Times which begins like this …

Ask whom she might vote for in the coming presidential primary election and Nash McCabe, 52, seems almost relieved to be able to unpack the dossier she has been collecting in her head.It is not about whom she likes, but more a bill of particulars about why she cannot vote for Senator Barack Obama of Illinois.

“How can I vote for a president who won’t wear a flag pin?” Mrs. McCabe, a recently unemployed clerk typist, said in a booth at the Valley Dairy luncheonette in this quiet, small city in western Pennsylvania.

Mr. Obama has said patriotism is about ideas, not flag pins.

“I watch him on TV,” Mrs. McCabe said. “I keep looking for that lapel pin.”

Now, it does seem like McCabe is not a fan of Sen. Obama’s. And I think we can assume that it’s not a coincidence that McCabe managed to show up featured in the Times and also as the sole outside questioner in the ABC debate. Presumably, a researcher for ABC or Gibson saw the piece in the Times, figured, hey, this lady hates Obama and is seriously ginned up about the lapel issue. Let’s send a camera crew Obama and film her slamming Obama to his face. It’ll be great in the debate.

Now, as JL noted in his email to TPM, I’m not sure precisely what’s any less ethical about finding Nash at random to come on and slam Obama about whether he believes in the flag versus seeing her in the Times and saying, ‘Wow, this woman clearly has it in for Obama. Wouldn’t that make for great TV giving her a chance to crap on Obama’s head in front of a nationwide audience?

I think there’s something wrong with it. And part of it is that you usually assume that these citizen questions come from people who are at least partly conflicted about their support if not undecided. But it does reinforce my sense that the disgraceful nature of the debate wasn’t just something that came together wrong, some iffy ideas taken to far, but basically engineered to be crap from the ground up.

–Josh Marshall

Trivia and biased questions dominate Democrats’ debate

ACTION:
Ask ABC why debate moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson so often derailed the debate away from issues of concern to voters and, in a debate that was supposed to help Democratic voters choose their party’s candidate, framed so many questions from a right wing perspective.

CONTACT:
ABC News
Email: netaudr@abc.com
212-456-7777

The ABC sponsored Democratic debate in Philadelphia on April 16 emphasized trivial matters of little concern to voters, while the actual policy questions were often based on misleading right-wing spin.

During the first half of the debate, ABC moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson avoided any mention of policy issues. As the Los Angeles Times noted (4/17/08), “With the moderators and Clinton raising assorted questions about Obama’s past for the first half of the debate, issues received relatively short shrift. Not until 50 minutes in was a policy issue– Iraq–asked about by the moderators.”

The trivial line of questioning touched on well-worn campaign non-issues: Clinton’s gaffe about Bosnia, Obama’s recent characterizations about “bitter” small-town voters, the rhetoric of his former pastor Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and the fact that Obama rarely wears an American flag pin on his lapel. (This is not the first time ABC has seemed unusually interested in this distraction–see FAIR Media Advisory, 10/10/07.)

Perhaps the most irrelevant line of questioning came when Stephanopoulos asked about Obama’s contacts with University of Illinois at Chicago professor William Ayers, who was once a member of the radical Weather Underground group. Obama’s “ties” to Ayers have been an obsession of Fox News host Sean Hannity, who reportedly pressed Stephanopoulos to ask about Ayers at the debate (Salon.com, 4/17/08; MSNBC 4/16/08).

Framing the question as a “follow up” on “the general theme of patriotism,” Stephanopoulos challenged Obama to “explain to Democrats why it won’t be a problem,” given that Ayers had never apologized for the bombings the group carried out in the 1970s. “In fact,” said Stephanopoulos, “on 9/11 he was quoted in the New York Times saying, ‘I don’t regret setting bombs; I feel we didn’t do enough.’” (Actually, that quote appeared in the Times on September 11, 2001; it was not, as Stephanopoulos seemed to imply, made on the day of the attacks.)

But even when the questions turned to issues of actual substance, things hardly improved. It was not until a full three quarters of an hour into the debate that the candidates were asked the question about what Stephanopoulos
acknowledged was “the No. 1 issue on Americans’ minds”– the
economy.

Stephanopoulos’ first question to Clinton, though, was clearly pitched from the right:

“Can you make an absolute, read-my-lips pledge that there will be no tax increases of any kind for anyone earning under $200,000 a year? And if the economy is as weak a year from now as it is today, will you persist in your plans to roll back President Bush’s tax cuts for wealthier Americans?”

The assumption would seem to be that there’s something economically or politically dangerous about raising taxes, particularly on the wealthy. Charles Gibson picked up on that theme, pressing Obama about his plan to raise capital gains tax rates to levels of the early 1990s—a position that struck Gibson as bizarre, since lowering these taxes increases government revenue:

“In each instance, when the rate dropped, revenues from the tax increased. The government took in more money. And in the 1980s, when the tax was increased to 28 percent, the revenues went down. So why raise it at all, especially given the fact that 100 million people in this country own stock and would be affected?”

This question rests on two false assumptions. The capital gains tax is paid by a small percentage of the population. As Citizens for Tax Justice pointed out (3/16/06), “The wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers enjoyed 90 percent of the capital gains eligible for this special tax break.” Gibson’s reference to the 100 million Americans who own stock is irrelevant, since this tax is applied to the sales of stocks and real estate—not the act of having a retirement account.

Gibson’s other point–”History shows that when you drop the capital gains tax, the revenues go up”–might be popular in certain conservative circles, but the evidence to support it is thin. As the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities pointed out (7/12/07), there is little causal relationship between the capital gains tax cuts and increased federal tax revenue. Economist Jason Furman of the Brookings Institute pointed out the the “Joint Committee on Taxation and Treasury both score raising capital gains taxes as raising revenues” (New Republic, 4/16/08).

In addition, both candidates were pressed by Stephanopoulos about whether they would “treat an Iranian attack on Israel as if it were an attack on the United States.” Stephanopoulos opened this question with a flagrantly misleading statement, saying to Obama: “Iran continues to pursue a nuclear option. Those weapons, if they got them, would probably pose the greatest threat to Israel.” According to the latest National Intelligence Estimate, Iran discontinued its alleged nuclear weapons program in 2003.

Pundits often justify their decision to exclude “second-tier” candidates from debates on the grounds that they distract attention away from the real issues. If presenting a distraction from the real issues is really the problem, perhaps moderators such as Stephanopoulos and Gibson should seriously think of excusing themselves from future debates.

ACTION:
Ask ABC why debate moderators George Stephanopoulos and Charles Gibson so often derailed the debate away from issues of concern to voters and, in a debate that was supposed to help Democratic voters choose their party’s candidate, framed so many questions from a right wing perspective.

CONTACT:
ABC News
Email: netaudr@abc.com
212-456-7777

BlogPAC just sent out an email asking people to contact George Stephanapoulos and Charlie Gibson to explain their substance free moderation. You can send an email here.

Moveon also has a petition, which you can sign here.

And finally, Obama spoke out against the debate in a town hall meeting.

Apparently, the company that produced Path to 9/11 to tarnish Bill and Hillary Clinton and that worked to undermine labor and screenwriters is also shitting on Obama. Weird!

TPM:

The new poll of Pennsylvania by Franklin and Marshall College, one of the state’s most prominent pollsters, confirms that the Democratic race is a close one. There’s been significant movement since their last poll from just under a month ago:

Clinton 46% (-5)
Obama 41% (+6)

Pollster Terry Madonna thinks the “small town” flap has yet to fully play out with the voters: “With the new commercial and the San Francisco statements, can she push the lead back to double digits?”