This from a friend who lives in the deep South:

 (I)f the Dems had even a half a lick of sense, this is the ad they would be running in response (to the one McCain "objects" to):

 

Unflattering photo of John McCain.  Voiceover: “When John McCain’s political party wanted to run a controversial advertisement, John McCain vowed to stop it.”  Roll footage of him saying the stuff about how he will bring to bear everything he could to stop it.  Cut to a black screen with graphics that read:  “The ad ran anyway.”  Cut to second black screen reading: 84 times (or however many it is, if it’s a lot).  Cut to another unflattering shot of McCain.  Voiceover:  “If John McCain can’t even lead his own political party, how can we expect him to effectively lead our nation?”

 

But of course the Dems would never run an ad like that.  It is much too effective.

In case you didn't bother finishing Paul Krugman's column today,  "Clinging to a Stereotype,

sure seems like he's accepting the inevitable in the last paragraph:

"And one more thing: let’s hope that once Mr. Obama is no longer running against someone named Clinton, he’ll stop denigrating the very good economic record of the only Democratic administration most Americans remember."

Just wondering if anybody else protested that disgrace of a "debate" last night by making a campaign contribution to Obama today?

I haven't been more eager to send in some cash since the New Hampshire primary--a day that Obama's campaign netted more than $1.2 million in 24 hours:

Obama raised $1.2 million the day after winning the Iowa caucuses and he raised even more in the 24 hours after losing in New Hampshire.

The fact that Hillary's two biggest cheerleaders here in Pennsylvania, Michael Nutter and Ed Rendell, are both Penn alumni couldn't have anything to do with this, right?

Clinton, on the other hand, is ready to lead this nation now. A successful champion for change, her experience in the Senate and as first lady gives her a better understanding of how Washington works. She has the ability to turn policy into reality. And her mastery of causes central to the Democratic Party's platform makes her better suited to challenge presumptive Republican nominee John McCain. 

Take her leadership on health-care issues. In 1993, then-first lady Clinton urged America to embrace universal health care during her keynote speech at Penn's commencement. Unfortunately, she was far ahead of the times. Her proposal was met with fierce resistance and ultimately rejected. 

Refusing to give up, Clinton helped to expand children's health insurance in the late 90's instead. More than a decade later, her new policies - and the concept of universal health care itself - enjoy wider support because of her past work. Indeed, of all the candidates still in the race, she offers the most comprehensive health care proposal. And as with most of her plans, she also has a way to fund it.

Some doubt Clinton's ability to bring the country together. But, in New York, her senatorial campaigns united a surprisingly wide coalition of supporters across political and socioeconomic boundaries. She can do the same this November. 

Others are concerned with her support for the Iraq War Resolution. But since then, she has pressed the Bush administration for accountability and demanded a responsible end to the war. She also has far more exposure to national security and foreign policy.

Ultimately, we are confident in Clinton's ability to implement her agenda. It's this quality that has brought leaders like Mayor Michael Nutter and Governor Ed Rendell to her side. And it's this quality that convinces us to support her as well. 

Why does any newspaper, let alone a student-run one, feel the need to endorse political candidates? I find it incredibly divisive. And this sounds like boilerplate copy from the Clinton press packet. Let's hope it motivates students and faculty to cast their votes for Obama on Tuesday.

(I think that annual gift I was finally going to send in this year can go to Obama's campaign instead.)

For those of you with kids at home and a shortage of 21st Century televisions, you no doubt had a difficult conversation with them last evening: 
"Kids, tonight Mommy and Daddy are going to be watching a Very Important Debate between two U.S. Senators--one of whom will be facing John McCain to determine who our nation's next Commander-In-Chief will be. Pennsylvania is a Way Cool State this year for Democrats because our votes could determine who will face the Vast Right-Wing Smear Machine this fall . . . No, no, sweetheart, Sen. Clinton is a Democrat. . . "
"Anyway, we're very sorry, but we've made an Executive Decision that we will be recording the results of American Idol for you to watch them tomorrow--or you may go watch them on the old television. . . Yes, I know it will be hard to see David Archuleta through all that snow, but I'm sorry. The decision is final."
By 8:55, Daddy had slunked off into the other room, choosing the insufferable Ryan Seacrest and FOX Television's 60-minute display of shameless cross-promotion over the befuddled Charlie Gibson.
"He's too old to be doing this," my husband declared of Mr. Gibson, after the first farcical question.  
"He's like 62," I replied, generously failing to point out how few years separate him and Charlie.
"I don't care; he needs to retire." 
"He's 10 years younger than John McCain!" 
Exactly.
By 9:05 we were all enjoying Our American Idols doing this week's group number to a Mariah Carey song on our flat screen TV. Surely there is no sadder commentary on what a ridiculous waste of time that ABC debate was last night.

Aha! 
A surefire way to get Republicans and "Reagan Democrats" to vote for Obama. If he's elected, the French (saddled with that gauche “Sarko l’Américain”) will be vert with envy! What could possibly make a Republican happier than sticking it to those true elites, the French?

Every French president since the liberation has cooked up some such pharaonic new museum or opera house or library or initiated some legacy-minded cultural program, until now. Mr. Sarkozy’s taste is said to be for Lionel Ritchie and Celine Dion. (Mitterrand mulled over Dostoyevsky; de Gaulle consumed Chateaubriand.) The current president’s fondness for showbiz pals, his marriage to the Italian model-turned-singer Carla Bruni and the appointment of a culture minister, Christine Albanel, who is intelligent but widely regarded as weak among Mr. Sarkozy’s ministers, have combined to produce something of a culture shock.

“A rupture,” is what the political scientist Pascal Perrineau calls it.

“An incredible change,” said Jean Lacouture, de Gaulle’s biographer. One recent afternoon he sat in his study overlooking the Seine, meditating on this turn of events. “When de Gaulle returned to a liberated France in 1944,” he recalled, “he made a show of visiting famous writers like Paul Valéry and François Mauriac. It was his way of declaring a renewed sense of French glory.”

...

“Sarko l’Américain” is another common insult. The French, though, may soon have to think up a fresh one if (and you can almost hear Mitterrand starting to turn in his grave) the United States elects a president who delivers speeches like the one Senator Barack Obama gave on race while this country has its first modern leader not to have graduated from the country’s upper-crust schools, a head of state who on a recent visit to the Vatican arrived late, with an exceptionally crude French stand-up comic named Jean-Marie Bigard in tow. The coup de grâce: the hyperactive Mr. Sarkozy reportedly text-messaged somebody or other while with the pope.

That incident infuriated some French Roman Catholics along with many stodgy Gaullists and other traditional French conservatives who, though they helped elect him, now find Mr. Sarkozy, to put it bluntly, vulgar.

. . . for Arlen Specter's senate seat or was I just having a bad dream? Does he still live here in Pennsylvania or is he going to move back in with his mother? And which party exactly will he be running in???

Gee, what were the odds that George Will would dust off one of his oh-those-silly-out-of-touch-elite Democrats columns to phone into his Washington Post editors today? 

The iconic public intellectual of liberal condescension was Columbia University historian Richard Hofstadter, who died in 1970 but whose spirit still permeated that school when Obama matriculated there in 1981. Hofstadter pioneered the rhetorical tactic that Obama has revived with his diagnosis of working-class Democrats as victims -- the indispensable category in liberal theory. The tactic is to dismiss rather than refute those with whom you disagree.

Obama's dismissal is: Americans, especially working-class conservatives, are unable, because of their false consciousness, to deconstruct their social context and embrace the liberal program. Today that program is to elect Obama, thereby making his wife at long last proud of America.

Hofstadter dismissed conservatives as victims of character flaws and psychological disorders -- a "paranoid style" of politics rooted in "status anxiety," etc. Conservatism rose on a tide of votes cast by people irritated by the liberalism of condescension.

Oh, George, surely you get the irony, sitting there with your natural hair toupee and throwing around all your fancy, high-falutin' words (although I notice you judiciously avoided them in this particular piece) and your affected airs.

 Now let's review your Wikipedia bio, George: 

George graduated from University Laboratory High School of Urbana, Illinois, and attended Trinity College, in Hartford, Connecticut (B.A.). He received his M.A. from the University of Oxford and his Ph.D. in politics from Princeton University. His 1968 Ph.D. dissertation was entitled Beyond the Reach of Majorities: Closed Questions in the Open Society. 

Will then taught political philosophy at James Madison College, at Michigan State University, and at the University of Toronto. He taught at Harvard University in 1995 and again in 1998. From 1970 to 1972, he served on the staff of Senator Gordon Allott (R-CO).

Oh, yeah, George, you "get" my "story." You "get" my experience living in blue-collar, working-class, inner-ring, suburbia, where college aspirations were looked down on with all the contempt you and your ridiculous Republican spin-meisters hold for latte-drinking, Volvo-driving, New York Times-reading, urban cultural elites. 

My god, George, have you no shame? 

Certainly Obama should never have characterized small-town Americans the way he did, but to pretend that you know more about what it means to struggle against economic adversity and bigotry than he does is disingenuous at best and diabolically cynical at worst. 

Enjoy that big fat RNC paycheck waiting for you when you get home. You earned it.

The Philadelphia Daily News's John Baer has a great column in today's paper:

SOME THOUGHTS on the latest diversion of Campaign '08, a campaign apparently hell-bent on keeping the nation mired in its own stupidity.

As a native-born, small-town Pennsylvanian, a son of native-born, small-town Pennsylvania parents - one from the coal region, one from Lancaster County - let me assure you that the so-called offensive, condescending things Barack Obama said about the people I come from are basically right on target.

"Bitter" perhaps best describes my late mother, an angry Irish Catholic who absolutely clung to her religion.

Dad, also a journalist, wasn't really bitter as far as I know, but he sure liked to hunt.

So, despite carping from Hillary Clinton and annoying yapping from her surrogates (really, it's like turning on the lights at night in a puppy farm), I take no offense.

What's offensive to me is suggesting that small-town, working-class, gun-toting and/or religious Pennsylvanians are somehow injured by a politician's words.

Are you kidding me?

They're injured all right, but the injury is long-term and from lots more than "just words."

They've been injured from decades of neglect by political cultures in Washington and Harrisburg driven by special interests.

They're injured by a system of isolated, insulated political leadership that protects itself and the status quo above all else.

They've been harmed by a lack of political guts to fix a health-care system that works against the poor and forces middle-class families to pay more for less, while at the same time giving politicians the best coverage taxpayer money can buy.

They've been taken for granted by political parties and candidates who stay in power by - and this was the apparent gist of Obama's remarks - forcing attention and debate on issues tied to guns, religion and race (precisely because such issues resonate) rather than real problems such as health care and the economy.

They've been consistently made fools of by their own elected representatives who, year after year, pull fat salaries ($169,000 for every member of Congress; $150,000 in salary, perks and benefits for every state lawmaker) with automatic raises no matter how little gets done.

A new Associated Press poll shows Congress' approval rating at 23 percent. And don't even get me started on the Pennsylvania Legislature.

Insulting?

What's insulting are the sizes of salaries and perks of politicians in a state where the median household income is $43,714.

What's insulting is the ongoing failure of elected "leaders" to deal with long-term, working-class worries while insuring their own futures with hefty, over-rich pensions.

And, look, what Obama said, given a charged atmosphere close to a critical primary, was ill-advised - not because he's wrong, but because it changes the discussion.

The 24-hour broadcast-news cycle will jabber on this for days - the irony being that Obama's "words," which had positioned him so well, now threaten to trip him up.

Another irony is that the candidate running to effect change where change is needed, and to offer hope to those without it, is suddenly tagged as somehow diminishing those he seeks to serve.

So the question is whether Obama effectively defuses this, as he did the controversy surrounding his former minister. And that remains to be seen.

Just don't tell me that he insulted a state or, given his background, that he's an out-of-touch elitist.

And I especially don't want to hear such arguments from a candidate who spent decades in the bubble of a governor's mansion, the White House and the U.S. Senate, and under the blanket of $109 million income during the last eight years.

Pennsylvanians might cling to religion and guns. I hope they don't cling to stupidity.

An update to his earlier post, "Roger Lott (my son) v. Barack Obama"

UPDATE: I have gotten some emails asking about Roger's grandmother, his mom's mom, who died in Sweden. His grandmother was complaining of abdominal pain and got an appointment with a GP. The GP set up an appointment with a specialist, but she had to wait about three months before the first opening was available. The week before her appointment with the specialist she had to be rushed to a hospital for emergency surgery because the tumor that was producing her pain was blocking her small intestines. After the surgery, it took 8 months before she was able to get an MRI (to speed things up we offered to pay for an MRI in the US, but Swedish doctors would not approve her travel because they said she was too ill). After her MRI, it took another 7 months before her chemo started. By that time though there was apparently little that they could do to help her.

I'd sure like somebody in the press to verify this story. Anybody speak Swedish?

I attended Obama's Town Hall meeting last week at Strath Haven High School in Wallingford, Pa. As one expects at these kinds of campaign events, most of the questions were friendly, but Obama got a somewhat hostile question from a red-headed student who failed to identify himself but asked Obama if he was advocating a government-run healthcare system like they have in Europe. The teen said his grandmother had died in Sweden while waiting for treatment. 

 

It turns out the kid, Roger Lott, is the son of conservative economist John R. Lott Jr., the author of Freedomnomics and The Bias Against Guns. 

 

John Lott proudly mentions the back-and-forth on his blog:

 

Barack Obama recently gave a talk at my son Roger's high school . . . You might note that Roger obviously has quite a reputation there at the school. There is quite the ruckus as soon as it is clear that he is the one who is about to ask the next question.

 

In another post on his blog, Lott says he knows Obama from their years at the University of Chicago Law School. I wonder if Obama remembers him!

And I'd also be curious to learn more details about Lott's mother or mother-in-law's situation. 

Anybody TPM Muckrakers care to do some fact-checking???