I think it is safe to say that when the Presidential candidates were picking their #2's,Barack Obama considered, among many factors, the impact that his choice would have among Jewish voters. John McCain didn't.

Before they picked their veeps, it was considered possible that McCain would make inroads among those Jewish voters who make their decision based on support for Israel. That is a minority of Jewish voters but probably enough to swing a state like Florida or even Nevada.

The Obama campaign wants those voters. It does not necessarily need the 78% of the Jewish vote that went to John Kerry, but it certainly wants more than 70%. That requires some outreach to Jewish voters -- mostly seniors -- who were not comfortable with Obama.

Then Obama picked Biden who is about as close to the pro-Israel community as any member of either house. Biden is rated 100% by AIPAC (while at the same time being a strong supporter of the two-state solution). He is also the most knowledgeable Member of Congress on Arab-Israeli issues. When he goes to the synagogues in Florida, he goes not as a visitor but as "mishpocha." The Jews simply love the guy.

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This is great.

Not only is she the least qualified candidate for national office in decades, not only is she virulently anti-choice and anti-environmentalist, she's a Pat Buchanan supporter.

At least with Joe Lieberman, Mc Cain could have picked up my Aunt fanny in Miami. Now she's voting for Obama!

You've got to listen to this clip, courtesy Matt Yglesias. But be sure you're sitting down.

This was evidently recorded on Aug. 14. The would-be vice-president, ready to command American's world force on Day 2 (after a briefing or two), does not live on Planet Earth.

"While [the McCain-Palin] policies would take America in the wrong direction, Governor Palin will add an important new voice to the debate." Thus speaks Senator Clinton.

If the recent mayor of Wasilla is "an important new voice," why would that be? Because what she says makes sense? Or because her creationism, radical anti-abortionism, drilling lust, and attachment to oil comanies come out treble?

I was in the hall when HRC delivered her deeply stirring speech Tuesday night. My eyes watered more than once. I was stirred, as I was meant to be, by her quotation from Harriet Tubman: "If you hear the dogs, keep going. If you see the torches in the woods, keep going. If they're shouting after you, keep going. Don't ever stop. Keep going. If you want a taste of freedom, keep going." I was standing in front of some TeamHillary members of the Ohio delegation. (For more on them and the Hillary marchers earlier their day, see this.) They soared. Their champion delivered the solidarity goods. I soared with them. I was not embarrassed to feel gratitude that she came through.

Three days later, she heralds a flagrantly insulting--to women, to men--nomination as an "important new voice." This is the barest, most unreflective style of identity politics. It does not hearten.

We are tremendously heartened by the choice of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin for Vice President, since she will lead the Republican Party's march to Socialism. Her state government ranks Number 1 in spending per capita. The State has taken into its hands a good bit of the means of production, owning $28 billion in assets, as well as $36 billion in a "Permanent Fund." They return this hoard to the People, in the form of annual checks. In 2007 it was $1,654 for every man, woman and child, of all races, colors, creeds, sexual orientations, disability, genders, and views on evolution. Free money! You don't have to work for it!! What could be better? And where does all this dough come from, you might ask? The answer is, the state government taxes the bejesus out of its oil production. Obama's pissant windfall profits tax is a pimple on the arse of the Alaskan proletarian's ability to milk the profits of his petroleum reserves. His birthright, or if you move there, his squatter's right.

I have seen the future and it works.

Many people are unfamiliar with Feminists for Life and wonder what the choice of Sarah Palin, who is against abortion rights, signals to the electorate.

Well, let me tell you something about Feminists for Life. In 2003, I decided to investigate this group and its energetic leader, Serrin Foster.
What did it mean, I wondered, to be a feminist and actively fight against the right to choose when or whether to have a child?

So I went to a church in sprawling, suburban, wealthy Danville, California to hear Serrin Foster, president of Feminists for Life, speak on "The Feminist Case Against Abortion"
to a huge crowd of mainly high-school students.

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I guess Mc Cain decided he can't win.

The last time anyone picked a VP with this little experience was Goldwater in '64. He picked William Miller, who no one had heard of, because "he drives Johnson nuts" and Goldwater knew he was going to lose anyway.

Romney would have been a serious choice. This is anything but. It suggests that Mc Cain himself is not a serious person. He's just playing.

Mc Cain thinks feminists still upset about Hillary will support a right-wing, anti-choice woman simply because she's a woman. He thinks it will drive the Democrats crazy. It won't. But it will cause the Republicans to think that Mc Cain has lost his mind,

He hasn't. But he has lost the election.

He did it.

And he did it by listening to the critics and delivering not soaring rhetoric but detailing an agenda, bashing John Mc Cain and explaining precisely how he differs from the Republicans

What a change. I desperately wanted Al Gore and John Kerry to win. But they disappointed me over and over again by not changing when their message and the manner of its delivery were failing. Gore kept being Gore and Kerry kept being Kerry.

But Obama has watched and listened over these past weeks and months, seen what works and doesn't work, heard the critics and delivered big time.

In other words, Obama listens, learns, and, when necessary, retools. And that is why he is not Gore and Kerry, but FDR, Kennedy, and Clinton.

He's a resilient, deft politician and he's going to win. He will do what he has to do, just like he did tonight.

When I think of the future of the Democratic Party I think of Ted Kennedy's 1980 convention speech where he defined his party in terms of its values, "old values," as he described them, "that will never wear out. Programs may sometimes become obsolete, but the ideal of fairness always endures. Circumstances may change, but the work of compassion must continue."

Famously, Kennedy's speech ended: "For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die." At this year's convention, both Michelle Obama and Kennedy himself echoed those words.

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Tonight at Mile High will be extraordinary, I am sure; and I am so pleased that my twenty-year-old son Michael, heading the Brown Daily Herald news team, will be there to witness Obama's acceptance speech. But for me personally it would be hard to top last night at the Democratic Convention, listening to Bill Clinton and Joe Biden set the stage for Obama and bring the nation and the Democratic Party to the brink of the most important political watershed in the past four decades.

As Michigan State college students in 1966 and 1967, my hustand-to-become Bill and I met while working on a Civil Rights project in Mississippi. We participated in a small way in the fight for American fulfillment through the enfranchisement of blacks and in the repudiation of racial segregation that our generation helped to junp-start. Then, in 1968, we cried with millions of others when the hopes of the era took a dark turn after the assassinations of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. We watched as increasingly viscious right-wingers tore blacks from whites, and pitted the middle class against the less privileged -- all the while constructing a predatory U.S. state by and for the crassest of the super rich, and bringing our politics to a shameful nadir that McCain has now embraced, to his ever-lasting shame.

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As Bill Clinton was squashing most of the media's hopes for a Clintonista uprising against Barack Obama last night, Charles Kaiser, the veteran reporter and scourge of bad faith in journalism, was up in Newsweek squashing a perverse Clinton dead-ender, the increasingly and pathetically power-hungry Princeton professor Sean Wilentz.

As late as this week, Wilentz was still damning Obama with faint praise in a column - also in Newsweek -- that reeked of the empty ressentiment of someone thwarted in a desperate bid to become Hillary Clinton's presidential historian.

Pretending to worry anxiously about whether Obama is ready to lead, Wilentz signaled Newsweek readers that Obama isn't -- just as Bill Clinton was preparing to assure the country that he is. Kaiser deftly shows how many times and ways Wilentz tries to insinuate this, and he knocks him out of the park.

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This is a repost of what I wrote here in TPM in 2006.

I just came across a troubling incident that Bob Woodward reports in his new book. Very troubling.

On page 344, Woodward describes the doings at the White House in the early morning hours of Wednesday, the day after the '04 election. The Bushies were worried that Kerry would dig in and fight. They needed the election wrapped up.

But, apparently, Kerry had decided not to concede. There were 250,000 outstanding ballots in Ohio.

So Kerry decides to fight. In fact, he considers going to Ohio to camp out with his voters until there is a recount. This is the last thing the White House needs, especially after Florida 2000.

So what happened?

James Carville gets on the phone with his wife, Mary Matalin, who is at the White House with Bush.

"Carville told her he had some inside news. The Kerry campaign was going to challenge the provisional ballots in Ohio -- perhaps up to 250,000 of them. 'I don't agree with it, Carville said. I'm just telling you that's what they're talking about.'

"Matalin went to Cheney to report...You better tell the President, Cheney told her."

Matalin does, advising Bush that "somebody in authority needed to get in touch with J. Kenneth Blackwell, the Republican Secretary of State in Ohio who would be in charge of any challenge to the provisional votes." An SOS goes out to Blackwell. And the corrupt Blackwell took care of it.

The rest is history.

And now Carville is trying to sink Obama.

Last night Hillary Clinton had one singular objective: tell her recalcitrant supporters to accept her defeat in the Democratic primary and support Barack Obama in November. From that perspective, it's hard to judge her speech as anything but a rollicking success.

To be sure, I don't see any long, soulful walks on the beach or late night gab sessions over beers in their future. They are, and remain, political rivals and as the saying goes, politics ain't bean bag.

It was in this vein that Hillary Clinton delivered her remarks last night, eschewing a more effusive personal endorsement or even a no-holds barred attack on John McCain and instead offering her supporters a more interest-based rationale for supporting Obama. 'You may not like this guy,' she seemed to be suggesting, but 'if you share my values and my concerns then you need to hold your nose and vote for him. '

On the surface, this may not seem like the most generous or warmest endorsements of Obama but it is the smartest. It's the sort of pragmatic approach to politics that Democrats have at times avoided; preferring instead to be right than making sure they do what has to be done to win. Last night Hillary Clinton took the most direct approach to satisfying her supporters, by reminding them that the alternative to Obama is to deny the whole rationale for her campaign. As she plaintively told the audience, "Were you in this campaign just for me?"

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Like most of us, I've been following a great deal of the presidential "coverage," and like most fervent supporters of Barack Obama, I am starting to have that sinking feeling.  This has little to do with the candidate, or even his campaign, and a lot to do with what Obama's called "the silliness."  Philip Roth once said that when he was in graduate school in the early 50s he assumed that the score would be University of Chicago 22, Popular Culture 6.  The most serious reason for queasiness is that I assumed, well, serious reason could squeak out a victory this time.

What's Obama's problem? Bill Maher--whom MSNBC rolled out for the opening of its convention coverage, and then seems to have taken out back and shot--caught the mood (or, at least, mine) when he remarked that, with every election, the talk seems to be getting dumber, and the country will no doubt get the leaders it deserves. Maher then threw a left hook at Mormonism, as he has at all religions (Mitt Romney came up and, lucky for Jews, not Joe Lieberman) which prompted Chris Matthews to reassure his viewers that he--or was it the management of MSNBC?--considered Mormons "a great religion," an endorsement that seemed in tone and trenchancy about right for a Chevy, and was really (Maher no doubt thought) more of the disease that presumes itself the cure.

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Check this out.

It's from the Israeli daily, Ha'aretz and it's by an Israeli journalist who is covering our election from New Orleans.

This is his take.

"What may frighten some Americans about Barack Obama is his very excellence. His fiercest critics have so far had little else to go on.

"But if he is truly that scary, why is it so necessary to lie about him?

"If the real truth about him is so frightening, why is it so necessary for someone like Daniel Pipes to ingeniously resuscitate the lie that Obama is a Muslim?

"If the actual facts are so damning, why was it so necessary for Fox and others to pump up the packet of hardbound fictions called Obama Nation, a miserable book whose manipulative distribution propelled it to a debut at the top of The New York Times best seller list?

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Suppose you come home and find a strange man rifling through your bedroom drawers looking for the family jewels. When you apprehend this man and call the police, he tells you that he had been held and tortured as a prisoner of war for five years. Would you still call the police?

Most of us would. Maybe the judge should show some leniency in sentencing, but even former POWs don't have license to steal the family jewels. This is the story of the McCain candidacy.

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Look for this obituary in tomorrow's paper:

Trickle-down economics died yesterday morning at 10AM. The cause of death was a data release from the US Census Bureau, but trickle-down had been ailing from lack of empirical support for decades. Also known as "supply-side economics," trickle-down was the love child of Ronald Reagan, Arthur Laffer, and Jude Wanniski. It is survived by Larry Kudlow and Co., and the editorial page of the Wall St. Journal.

That's what you should see, but you probably won't. Let me explain.

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No speech sends more shivers up the spine of a presidential nominee than the second place finisher's moment on the convention dais. Ask George Bush Sr. how that whole Pat Buchanan "culture war" speech worked out for his re-election campaign or what Jimmy Carter thought about Ted Kennedy's "the dream will never die" speech, which mentioned the incumbent President once.
The specter of both these speeches and the political disunity they underscored hangs over the head of Barack Obama as Hillary Clinton prepares to deliver her speech tonight at the Democratic National Convention.

Now on one level, the speech tonight will be offered in a far different context than those of Buchanan and Kennedy. Both had significant ideological differences with their party standard bearer. The fissures that separate the Clinton and Obama camps are much more about personality than policy and thus, on the surface, more easily bridgeable.

But considering Obama's continued weakness among Hillary supporters, the stakes could not be higher (according to some polls, as many as 30 percent of Clinton voters may not support Obama).

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You don't need to be in Denver right now to see the future of the Democratic Party. The future is not in the big money donors or the high-priced consultants, but in the men and women working every day to change, not only, the Party, but the United States. It can be found in local campaign offices where thousands of volunteers come out every day to knock on doors and make phone calls to voters. It can be found in the citizen activists who have gotten involved in unprecedented numbers over the last eight years and especially during this election season. It's in the every day Americans who want a better life for themselves and their families.

The future of the Democratic Party is in people like Donna Edwards who's primary upset of a Bush Democrat went on to win her a seat in Congress. When Donna Edwards said, "I will not be silent" she was speaking for millions of Americans who have been cut off from the political process by the tired and misdirected Washington culture that values power and influence over judgment and representation. Over the years, something happened to the fundamental idea that our republic is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people. Donna Edwards is a perfect example of someone who understands that she is accountable to her constituents and not to the influential lobbyists who came to control her predecessor. Rep. Edwards' people-powered campaign was built on a framework of involvement by volunteers and small dollar donors who still know that the party that empowers people will be the party in power.

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I've never thought Sen. John McCain was mentally ill, not even after George W. Bush tried to discredit his intelligence and wit in 2000. But now I worry about the obvious deterioration of his health. Look back at clips from 2000 and you see a candidate who made the press swoon, so smitten were they with his sharp conversational skills, his quick wit, his charming accessibility.

Now I watch Sen. John McCain and I see the kind of change I witnessed in Ronald Reagan. As he entered his second term as President, I happened to be watching film clips of a younger and sharper Governor Ronald Reagan. The difference was staggering. Earlier, he had been a quick wit, fast on his feet, feisty as well as charming. By 1984, however, he seemed confused and distracted; I watched him with shock and saw an individual clearly slowed by the early signs of a terribly deteriorating disease.

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As Republicans have become more effective at smearing honorable Democrats, from McGovern and Dukakis to Kerry and (they hope) Obama, they've spun off some operatives who are more genteel and circumspect, but no less lethal.

These GOP fellow-travellers loathe liberal Democrats as deeply as do Karl Rove and Fox News. But they're too intelligent and self-regarding not to feel embarrassed by their own side's tactics and even by John McCain, who may not be stable or competent enough to be President.

What to do? It depends on how perverse a genteel Republican operative really is. One of them has become so perverse that he reminds me of Vladimir Posner, a smooth, American-born Soviet apologist who popped up on American TV in the 1970s. Posner sidled up solicitously to wavering moderates and liberals and offered, in a folksy American idiom, his understanding, good fellowship, and sage advice at the dawn of a post-ideological era whose solutions lay beyond the stale paranoia about Communist totalitarianism.

Now, Posner's GOP double similarly heralds a trans-partisan, post-ideological age, but, like Posner, he's really working not to advance it but to soften up wavering liberals for the kill. This takes a special perversity. Look closely at David Brooks, the Posner of a sclerotic Republican regime he ought to have outgown and of a neoconservative foreign policy I doubt he'll ever give up.

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The U.S. wants a relatively loose agreement that allows us to keep troops in Iraq.

But the prime minister is under intense political pressure to take a hard line against the Americans, even as his government engages in the back-and-forth of negotiations. Graffiti can be seen on the walls in Shiite districts of Baghdad saying, "Iraq for sale: See Maliki."

To further prove his independance, Maliki is getting ready to sign a big oil deal with China. Russia is probably next. We spend $2 Trillion on what Greenspan called "a war for oil", and our global rivals get half the oil. We continue to live in Dick Cheney's old colonial illusion that our military power gives us some mercantile advantage.

Uncle Sucker.

This is depressing.

I agree with Herbert that Obama is clearly behind NOW. But I think that can change and that our ground operation on Election Day can make the difference. In any case, once the Democratic choice came down to an African-American and a woman, it was inevitable that racism or sexism would be a significant factor. If we wanted a 10 point lead, we should have nominated a southern white male (like the late lamentable Edwards).

I have been keeping tabs of my favorite phrase white Democrats use to justify their anti-Obama sentiments. Obviously, they can't say, "hey, he's black." So they say "who is he" or "I don't know anything about him."

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While eyes are on Denver, Secretary Rice has slipped into Jerusalem for the seventh time since November, in an apparent effort to advance an Israeli-Palestinian peace. The goal is a so-called "shelf agreement," which would sketch out the broad lines of a comprehensive treaty (something diplomats and lawyers could presumably finish up).

Rice, writes Haaretz's Aluf Benn, "will have to pave the way between the contradictory viewpoints of her hosts in Jerusalem." It would be truer to say that she has to choose between her hosts' contradictory viewpoints about Jerusalem. For--make no mistake--Jerusalem is the problem, and no amount of patient mediation can advance what an arbitrator's power must. Other core issues, like refugees and territory, are not simple, but they are actually more or less dependent on a larger conundrum, which "Jerusalem" subsumes. Saying that the only problem left for the diplomats is Jerusalem is like saying that the only problem left for a divorcing couple is custody of the children.

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This week at Cafe, we've asked a host of prominent figures-- party leaders, grass roots organizers, movers and shakers and shapers-- to weigh in on their vision of the future of the Democratic party. Want to know Arianna Huffington or Speaker Pelosi's forecast? They'll be trickling in throughout the week. We also want to hear from you, loyal readers. Tell us-- how do you think the landscape of the party should look and change? I'll be looking closely at reader blogs, but feel free to point any excellent ones in my direction.

Greg Sargent reports on Howard Wolfson's acknowledgment that there is a Clinton-Obama rift and that Barack had better reach out and heal it.

This is crazy. Did John Kerry have to deal with Gephardt and Dean's hurt feelings in '04. Did Gore have to demonstratively feel Bill Bradley's pain? Did Clinton have to reach out and touch Jerry Brown and Paul Tsongas?

It's bizarre. It reminds me of what LBJ had to do to appease the Kennedys after the assassination. It didn't do any good either. Bobby did everything he could to sink LBJ anyway. But that was more understandable. Kennedy was killed and his people were grieving.

But the Clintons merely lost a nomination fight. Big deal. There are winners and there are losers and until now no nominee has had to suck up to the other side. As we say on Passover, "why is this nominee different than any other nominee?"

Why indeed?

You have to marvel at just how bad Bill Kristol is. I don't mean because he's a conservative. So are David Brooks and George Will, two popular conservative columnists who are smart.

But Kristol is ridiculous. He is actually the only New York Times columnist who simply pastes his party's talking points into his space on the op-ed page. The Times pays his for this?

Anyway, today he endorses Joe Lieberman for VP. He tells Republicans not to worry about Joe's rather traditional Democratic positions on most things they care about. They should pick Lieberman anyway because....they should.

It just goes to show what I've always said about the neocons. They are neither Republicans nor Democrats. They are simply Mideast hawks. Kristol is no more "pro-life" than I am. It's all a game.

I don't think the GOP will choose Lieberman although I hope they do. Imagine a Biden-Lieberman debate!

But read Kristol. You have to love the whole tears for Hillary shtick. If this is the best these neo-nuts can do, they are really finished.

I have been seeing John McCain ads that say things like "economy in shambles," "soaring food and energy prices," and "you are worse off than you were four years ago." I haven't been able to understand these statements because the person currently in charge is George W. Bush who is pursuing the same economic policies that Senator McCain has endorsed in his campaign.

It doesn't make any sense to tell people how bad things are if you intend to pursue the same policies that brought on the disaster. I mean Ronald Reagan was able to effectively use the line, "are you better off now than you were four years ago?" precisely because he was running against the person who was in the White House. It wouldn't have made any sense for Jimmy Carter to ask "are you better off now than you were four years ago?"

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