Fox News anchor Shepard Smith blows off the notion that the “liberal MSM” elected Barack Obama.Pay attention to this, because my read is that Fox owner Rupert Murdoch regrets going with the Republicans. Murdoch has personally embraced the climate change issue, and his adult children were mostly for Obama.
** OBAMA’S AMERICA: OBSERVING THE OBSERVANCE OF VETERANS DAY. It’s just a week since the election of Barack Obama, and we’ve already seen a telling new approach to one of America’s most venerable holidays, Veterans Day.
President Bush downplayed the cost of war. He appeared frequently with able-bodied heroes he was decorating for bravery, but to my knowledge never attended even one of the thousands of funerals for those Americans killed in action in Iraq and Afghanistan.
In stark contrast to this sweep-it-under-the-rug approach favored by the outgoing administration, the president-elect yesterday laid a simple wreath at Chicago’s Soldier Field to honor our nation’s military veterans. He was accompanied by Illinois veterans affairs director Tammy Duckworth, a decorated Iraq War veteran and Army major who lost both her legs when the helicopter she piloted was shot down by Iraqi insurgents.
Without making a big deal of it, Obama thus acknowledged the cost of war in a way that the current administration — which cut taxes and borrowed endlessly to finance its largely misbegotten strategies — has never dared. … From my new column.
** PALIN WANTS TO PAL AROUND WITH OBAMA. Remember Sarah Palin’s nasty attacks against Barack Obama as un-American, a guy who “pals around with terrorists?” Well, it seems all previous statements are inoperative, as someone once put it. Now embarked on a feverish media tour to rehab her image, Palin was on CNN today and had this remarkable exchange with anchor Wolf Blitzer:
PALIN: It’s historic and I think this time is full of optimism. And it’s an opportunity for everybody to get it together and start working together. For us as Republicans to reach out to Barack Obama and the new administration that will be ushered in and offer the solutions that we see for meeting some of America’s great challenges right now.
This is an opportunity to all be working together. And of course, President-elect Obama had promised also bipartisan efforts to meet the challenges. So let’s seize this opportunity, let’s take him up on that offer. And let’s start working together.
BLITZER: Are you ready to help him?
PALIN: Absolutely. Especially on energy independence, energy security that we need for this nation, being the governor of an energy-producing state knowing that we have the domestic solutions there in our state and in other energy-producing states.
I’m more than willing and able to help President-elect Obama to start tapping into the domestic solutions that we have now so we can quit being so reliant on foreign sources of energy.
BLITZER: So if he reaches out to you and says, Governor Palin, I need your help on energy or some other issues, kids with special needs, for example, and says, I want you to be part of a commission, you would be more than happy to say, yes, Mr. President.
PALIN: It would be my honor to assist and support our new president and the new administration, yes. And I speak for other Republicans, other Republican governors also, they being willing also to, again, seize this opportunity that we have to progress this nation together, a united front.
** OBAMA DISPATCHES ENVOYS TO THE G-20 MEETING. Barack Obama will not attend the G-20 (group of 20 industrialized nations) summit on the global financial crisis hosted later this week in Washington by President Bush, but he is dispatching two envoys to attend the summit and meet with international leaders. They are former US Secretary of State Madeline Albright, a Democrat, and former Iowa Congressman Jim Leach, a Republican. Albright served under President Bill Clinton, and was also US ambassador to the United Nations. She backed Hillary Clinton during the primaries. Leach is a moderate Republican who endorsed Obama over John McCain.
ATTENTION NEW WEST NOTES READERS: Now that the crush of the election season is out of the way, New West Notes is moving to its own server. I had planned to have the move, which these days can happen quite quickly and in a pretty straightforward way, completed over the weekend.
However, because of several underlying tech-related issues with Pajamas Media, there has been a delay. As it has always been, New West Notes will be available through NewWestNotes.com. So if you have bookmarked the Pajamas Media version, remember this instead … New West Notes is www.newwestnotes.com.
** COMING UP: My new column on the enduring value of Veterans Day in the new age of Obama.
** QUINNIPIAC POLL: STRONG NUMBERS FOR OBAMA. President-elect Barack Obama now has very high favorables in not only the Gallup Poll, previously reported, but also the Quinnipiac Poll. Obama is favored by 67% of American voters. Just 19% have an unfavorable view of him.
In contrast, President Bush has a 23% favorable rating and a 71% unfavorable rating.
If you want to hang your hat on one fact about this election, there it is.
Big majorities think that Obama will restore credibility and honor to the White House, and make a big impact on America’s looming problems. And which problems are those? In this poll, the top issues selected by US voters are: 68% economy, 5% war, 3% terrorism, 2% energy crisis, and 2% health care.
President-elect Barack Obama visited President Bush in the White House on Monday.
** OBAMA TODAY. President-elect Barack Obama and Vice President-elect Joe Biden hold a series of private meetings today in Chicago. While no appointments are expected this week to the national security and economic teams of the new administration, that is a principal focus of today’s meetings. Obama is also walking back the characterization of former Senate Armed Services Commitee Chairman Sam Nunn’s role. He is a senior advisor to Obama, but he is not the sherpa of the defense transition. As I’ve already reported, I expect current Defense Secretary and former CIA Director Bob Gates to remain as Obama’s defense secretary.
Leaders of the G20 group of top industrialized nations are beginning to converge on Washington for a summit on the global financial crisis hosted by President Bush. But Obama will not be in attendance, and I’m told has no plans for separate meetings with any of the leaders.
In related action, the Republican Governors Association conference kicks off today in Miami. Sarah Palin, who has been more available to the press since her defeat than she was for her entire campaign, will be much in evidence.
That cheering you hear is from the Democratic Party, which wants to run against Palin in 2012.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger meets today with the Fresno area Chamber of Commerce to discuss the deepening nature of California’s chronic budget crisis.
** THE AMERICA THAT CAN BE/THE AMERICA THAT HAS BEEN.It was the America That Can Be vs. the America That Has Been. The future won. Yet there is much in the past that is of enduring value.
I must say that this campaign, for all its excitement, its twists and turns, and its thrilling outcome, was something of a disappointment. In Barack Obama and John McCain, we had the two most compelling figures in the two parties, representatives of an emerging set of values and an enduring tradition. … From my new Huffington Post column.
** DEMOCRATS: THE NEW WESTERN STRATEGY IS PAYING OFF. The election hasn’t happened yet, so it’s too soon to start counting electoral votes from the Democrats’ new Western strategy. But the dramatic re-shaping of the electoral battlefield is already clear enough. While the current party leadership deserves credit for a new path to presidential power, much of the new Western strategy has long been championed by former Senator Gary Hart.
The new strategy came into clear focus, fittingly for a party that knew it had to gamble on a new route to the White House, in Las Vegas, in January 2007 over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The snow on the famed Las Vegas Strip the day before seemed only a little less unlikely to many in the national media and political establishments than the new moves that were unfolding. … From my October 31st column.
** GLOBAL OBAMA: BIG OPPORTUNITIES, BIGGER CHALLENGES. If he wins, Obama will have the global popularity that no American president has had in a great many years. But what sort of challenges will counter the global opportunity that an Obama presidency might afford America? … From my October 24th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti.
While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. After crashing over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, crude oil, on word of a new internation energy assessment forecasting declining energy demand with the slumping global economy, is now trading in the $57 to $58 per barrel range.
The drop of $90 per barrel since the record high over the summer comes on acknowledgment that the weak US economy will cut future demand and on the easing of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. It is clear that that, contrary to much chatter, neither the US nor Israel is about to launch a strike against Iran. And the Russian war with Georgia, confounding much speculation and reporting to the contrary, actually decreased the geopolitical risk premium in the oil market.
Former U.S. Navy Secretary-turned-U.S. Senator Jim Webb, the most highly decorated Marine combat officer of the Vietnam War, introducing Barack Obama three weeks ago in Roanoke, Virginia.
** NEW AWARD: MOST INCREDIBLY OBNOXIOUS WEB SITE – MATT DRUDGE. The poor aging kludge boy, a former dumpster diver who was at his best then, has a horrible, out of tune, audio track attached to his illiterate maunderings. Maybe it sounds good in those Miami discos.
Now, not to put too fine a point on it, but this fellow, as I can assure you from far more direct knowledge than this poor soul has, is quite irrational in his “assessment.”
But … this is relatively standard fare for the far right precincts of the blogosphere and talk radio.
Oh, and as I think goes naturally without saying these days, poor Mr. Broun never wore the uniform of the US Armed Forces. Happy Veterans Day, sport.
But daddy was a Democratic state senator, which is why this poor soul has his misbegotten political career in the first place.
ATTENTION NEW WEST NOTES READERS: Now that the crush of the election season is out of the way, New West Notes is moving to its own server. I had planned to have the move, which these days can happen quite quickly and in a pretty straightforward way, completed over the weekend.
However, because of several underlying tech-related issues with Pajamas Media, there has been a delay. As it has always been, New West Notes will be available through NewWestNotes.com. So if you have bookmarked the Pajamas Media version, remember this instead … New West Notes is www.newwestnotes.com.
** COMING UP: My new column on the enduring value of Veterans Day in the new age of Obama.
** OBAMA TODAY.
Barack Obama lays a wreath at Chicago’s Soldier’s Field to honor America’s veterans, accompanied by Illinois veterans affairs director Tammy Duckworth, a disabled veteran of the Iraq War.
His transition director John Podesta, former Clinton White House chief of staff, current director of the Center for American Progress, and one of the world’s biggest X-Files fans, holds a pen-and-pad today with the press in Washington.
Obama sources also leaked out some details of the president-elect’s private meeting yesterday in the Oval Office with outgoing President Bush. The leaks focused on Obama’s desire to salvage the US auto industry. The iconic General Motors is at death’s door. Bush, while eager to bail out the financial industry, has been slow to deal with the auto industry, the long-time backbone of American manufacturing.
In many respects, Bush is responsible for the woes of US automakers. The Bush/Cheney Administration refused to prod Detroit into keeping up with foreign automakers in fuel efficiency.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger has no public appearances today. His office announced that among the co-hosts of his Governors’ Global Climate Change Summit in LA on November 18-19 are Florida Governor Charlie Crist, Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius, and Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle.
Russian media is having some fun with a tale of President-elect Barack Obama’s brief 2005 detention at an airport in Perm.
** THE AMERICA THAT CAN BE/THE AMERICA THAT HAS BEEN.It was the America That Can Be vs. the America That Has Been. The future won. Yet there is much in the past that is of enduring value.
I must say that this campaign, for all its excitement, its twists and turns, and its thrilling outcome, was something of a disappointment. In Barack Obama and John McCain, we had the two most compelling figures in the two parties, representatives of an emerging set of values and an enduring tradition. … From my new Huffington Post column.
** DEMOCRATS: THE NEW WESTERN STRATEGY IS PAYING OFF. The election hasn’t happened yet, so it’s too soon to start counting electoral votes from the Democrats’ new Western strategy. But the dramatic re-shaping of the electoral battlefield is already clear enough. While the current party leadership deserves credit for a new path to presidential power, much of the new Western strategy has long been championed by former Senator Gary Hart.
The new strategy came into clear focus, fittingly for a party that knew it had to gamble on a new route to the White House, in Las Vegas, in January 2007 over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The snow on the famed Las Vegas Strip the day before seemed only a little less unlikely to many in the national media and political establishments than the new moves that were unfolding. … From my October 31st column.
** GLOBAL OBAMA: BIG OPPORTUNITIES, BIGGER CHALLENGES. If he wins, Obama will have the global popularity that no American president has had in a great many years. But what sort of challenges will counter the global opportunity that an Obama presidency might afford America? … From my October 24th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti.
While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. After crashing over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, crude oil, on word of a new internation energy assessment forecasting declining energy demand with the slumping global economy, is now trading in the $58 to $59 per barrel range.
The drop of $89 per barrel since the record high over the summer comes on acknowledgment that the weak US economy will cut future demand and on the easing of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. It is clear that that, contrary to much chatter, neither the US nor Israel is about to launch a strike against Iran. And the Russian war with Georgia, confounding much speculation and reporting to the contrary, actually decreased the geopolitical risk premium in the oil market.
President-elect Barack Obama behind the scenes in this 2007 NWN video. You observe the then underdog candidate without entourage.
ATTENTION N.W.N. READERS: Now that the crush of the election season is out of the way, New West Notes is moving to its own server. I had planned to have the move, which these days can happen quite quickly and in a pretty straightforward way, completed over the weekend.
However, because of several underlying tech-related issues with Pajamas Media, there has been a delay. As it has always been, New West Notes will be available through NewWestNotes.com. So if you have bookmarked the Pajamas Media version, remember this instead …
New West Notes is www.newwestnotes.com
** SECRET SERVICE CODENAMES.
Barack Obama: Renegade
Michelle Obama: Renaissance
Sasha Obama: Radiance
Malia Obama: Rosebud
Joe Biden: Celtic
Jill Biden: Capri
** THE U.S. MARINE CORPS ANNIVERSARY. Today is the 233rd anniversary of the founding of the U.S. Marine Corps. The then Continental Marines began as detachments of sea-going soldiers on the sailing ships of the Continental Navy in the war of the 13 American colonies for independence from Great Britain. They served as boarding parties during naval battles and as amphibious detachments for raids on coastal targets.
Today, of course, the Marines have a much more expansive role in the US military portfolio. I’ve know quite a few Marines, and they are proud, tough bunch. Which you would expect. But the Marines have also been perhaps the most innovative of the armed services, frequently embracing reform doctrines much sooner than their counterparts. So let’s hear it for the Marines! And if anybody posts “gung hay fat choy” instead of “gung ho,” it will not be pretty.
** THE IRISH COFFEE ANNIVERSARY.Today is the 56th anniversary of the launch of Irish coffee in America. San Francisco Chronicle columnist Stanton Delaplane discovered a version of it in, naturally, Ireland, and brought what he’d learned of the concoction to Jack Koeppler, owner of San Francisco’s Buena Vista Cafe.
The two experimented with versions of the ingredients – the principal of which are coffee and whisky, topped with a thick dollop of whipped cream – and loosed the beverage on an unsuspecting America. It’s hard to beat on a chilly morning, or blustery day, or a foggy evening, for that matter. Irish coffee, like the Buena Vista – with its view of the bay just beyond – has endured, and then some.
The Morning Column: OBAMA BEHIND THE SCENES.
What a spectacular election, for all its ugliness, and for all that it went as anticipated for months on New West Notes.
This has been, clearly, a powerful election result. Between the 2006 elections and the 2008 elections, Democrats have picked up at least a dozen seats in the U.S. Senate and more than 50 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Barack Obama, the freshman Illinois senator who was still a state legislator just four years ago, took no less than nine red states away from the Republicans, with one more state still up for grabs (though I have Missouri in the McCain column). With a decisive 53% to 46% victory over John McCain in the popular vote, and at least 365 electoral votes – he picked up one last week, as I expected, in Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, based in what many called Obamaha (Omaha) during the primaries (Nebraska being one of only two states which split electoral votes) – he is in a commanding position.
And that’s before you get to the demographics. Obama carried every age group of voters under 65. He won voters 18 to 34 by 2 to 1. That positions Obama and the Democrats for the future, as partisan identification usually sets in at a young age. He split college-educated white voters, previously a Republican bulwark. He won Latino and Asian American voters by better than 2 to 1, African American voters 95-5. For all the caterwauling about him as a “Manchurian candidate” out to destroy Israel, Obama did even better with Jewish voters than John Kerry, beating McCain 78-22, despite the fact that McCain is a longstanding great friend of Israel.
Obama carried independent voters and moderate voters by healthy margins.
The truth is that the fearmongering of the far right failed in this election. Polling even by the Republican-owned Rasmussen organization showed that it backfired. Take, for example, Obama’s attenuated relationship with ’60s vintage domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, now a professor accepted by the business establishment of Chicago. Most voters felt that raising that issue hurt McCain and the Republicans. Nobody outside the conservative Republican base cared.
The Wright Stuff, i.e., the oft-replayed snippeted rantings of Obama’s long-time pastor Jeremiah Wright, achieved over-exposure in the primaries. When a 527 committee spent millions on ads pushing it again at the close of the campaign, it made no difference. Some on the right believe that McCain should have made it a major focus of his campaign. They’re wrong. Once again.
Bittergate, as I dubbed it, Obama’s tortured explanation to supporters at a private San Francisco fundraiser about why some small town Pennsylvanians weren’t supporting him? Obama won Pennsylvania by a bigger margin than any Democrat in decades, 55-44.
Fox News anchor Brit Hume put it well on election night. These attacks and more – Obama the “socialist” who “pals around with terrorists” – didn’t work because voters have taken the measure of the man. They don’t see it. The people who push those themes seem delusional.
And so we have Karl Rove and others now claiming that Obama ran as a “centrist.” But, wait, he was the most dangerously radical presidential candidate in history just a few days earlier. The truth is that Obama is center-left, which is where most of the country is, along with being future-oriented.
As I said all along, McCain had much bigger problems being linked to President Bush and Vice President Cheney than Obama had with those dust-ups.
In fact, when Obama meets with Bush today at the White House – and steps inside the Oval Office for the first time (hmm, I’ve been in the Oval Office before) – he may be extra nice, knowing how much he has to thank Bush for.
It’s not often that a candidate gets to run against a party that has lashed itself to the mast of a presidency responsible for mismanaging two wars and the economy.
Of course, as you can see in the video above, Obama is a naturally cool and collected customer, whip-smart and grounded in reality. Who is nonetheless able to rouse crowds into feverish passion.
It wasn’t all ice cream and roses for Obama. He bombed in the first Democratic presidential forum he participated in, last year in Las Vegas, seen in this NWN video.
It’s been a very long campaign, beginning two years ago with the dramatic Democratic victories in the 2006 congressional elections and the plunge in popularity of the the Bush/Cheney Administration. Now what may be even more interesting has begun.
It was about 22 months ago that I decided I had better check out this fellow Barack Hussein Obama. I’d seen him give a great speech keynoting the 2004 Democratic national convention. I had his latest book which was sitting in a pile. But there’s more to running for president than being a great speaker and a fine writer.
So I traveled to several cities to scout Obama at his appearances, meet him, spend time in the vicinity, and study it all. Obama was pretty tentative at first. I filmed him bombing in a candidate forum in Las Vegas. But the thing was, he kept improving. He had a strong and very smart campaign organization. He had policies in the center-left groove where most of the country lives today. In other words, he had what it took to win the presidency.
Now we’ll see if he has what it takes to be the president. I expect him to be very good indeed.
The very first Democratic presidential forum – which Obama was the only candidate to skip – was in Carson City, Nevada. Watch an amusing encounter in the box lunch line with future Vice President Joe Biden and a later exchange with him on the crumbling situation in Afghanistan in this NWN video.
The West was key for the Democrats in winning this sweeping and historic victory. The Western strategy first championed by Gary Hart decades ago came to fruition in this election, with Obama sweeping the West Coast and increasingly dominating the Rocky Mountain West, winning big in Colorado, New Mexico, and Neva.
Since California provided one-fifth of the electoral votes needed to win the White House (though Barack Obama won 95 more electoral votes than he needed), about a fifth of Obama’s campaign money in contributions of $200 and up, nearly a third of is national popular vote margin over John McCain, and thousands of volunteers who helped push Obama over the top in various swing states, the Golden State is in pretty good with the new president-elect of the United States.
So which Californians will be joining the Obama Administration? It’s still emerging obviously, and it’s early, though Obama has hit the ground running, much faster than did Bill Clinton. But some names are clearly in play.
The biggest name that has been out there, for some months, is that of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. To be some sort of climate change/energy czar. There’s always been one big problem with that. Schwarzenegger has over two years left as governor of California. So that makes it virtually impossible for him to play that sort of role with Obama, at least in the first part of Obama’s first term as president. Obama and company didn’t take Schwarzenegger’s criticisms of him the Friday before the election at a Columbus, Ohio rally, Schwarzenegger’s only McCain campaign event of the fall, all that seriously. They shrugged off the hit on Obama’s purported tax program and, when the former Mr. Universe dubbed Obama to be “scrawny,” Obama chief strategist David Axelrod said only that they were looking forward to getting Arnold on the basketball court after the election.
In any event, Obama won Ohio, as expected, so, in basketball terms, no harm/no foul. But if Schwarzenegger were to take a post with Obama later on in Obama’s first term, California First Lady Maria Shriver could have a major role as well. She was a prominent backer of Obama.
The Californian who is apparently very much in the running now for the Obama Cabinet is former state Controller and ex-eBay honcho Steve Westly. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who ran a near-miss campaign for the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial nomination, is one of Obama’s earliest and biggest supporters, having served as Obama’s first California chair, a national finance co-chair, and as chair of a coalition of greentech business people for Obama.
Westly, who also co-chaired the winning California redistricting reform initiative with Schwarzenegger, is clearly in the mix to be U.S. Secretary of Energy. He’s also considering another run for governor in 2010.
Schwarzenegger’s choice as chair of the California Air Resources Board, Mary Nichols, is reportedly in the mix to head the Environmental Protection Agency. She first chaired the ARB under then Governor Jerry Brown, was assistant chief of the EPA under Clinton, and served as California resources secretary under then Governor Gray Davis.
Intriguingly, the structure of energy and environmental policy-making in the Obama Administration may be in flux. Former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, co-director of the Obama transition and one of the world’s biggest X-Files fans, now heads the Center for American Progress. CAP has issued a report calling for a National Energy Council, to operate alongside the National Economic Council set up under Clinton. Which was set up to elevate economic issues to the same cross-cutting stature as was done with the decades ago establishments of the National Security Council.
Professor Laura Tyson, currently head of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, is under consideration for very high economic posts. After being co-director of the Silicon Valley-centric Berkeley Roundtable for the International Economy in the ’80s, she went on to head the National Economic Council under Clinton. Obama sources describe Tyson as a brilliant briefer on economic issues, one well-suited for Sunday show appearances.
Tyson’s UC Berkeley colleague, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, is also under consideration for major posts. Reich is more associated with Harvard, of course, where he was a prominent senior lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government. He was one of the first Clinton Cabinet members to break with the Clintons and go with Obama.
Bay Area Congressman George Miller, a major ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, chairs the House Education and Labor Committee. He came out for Obama right after Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary, and could have a major post with regard to the workforce and education issues.
Oakland lawyer Tony West is a top litigator who raised a lot of money for Obama and has an easy rapport with the president-elect, as you can see on the NWN behind-the-scenes video. West is a Harvard-educated former assistant US attorney.
His sister-in-law, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, is another up-and-comer who played a major role with Obama as California co-chair. The charismatic Harris is interested in running for California attorney general in 2010 if former Governor-turned-Attorney General Jerry Brown moves toward a third term in the office he held in the ’70s and early ’80s.
** OBAMA TODAY.
Barack and Michelle Obama visit George and Laura Bush today in the White House. Obama sets foot in the Oval Office for the very first time. The visit begins at 11 AM Pacific. Expect a little TV coverage …
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger tours the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory this morning with Lawrence Lab director George Miller and former US Secretary of State George Shultz. Schwarzenegger will focus on the lab’s research into new energy systems and explore the nearly completed National Ignition Facility (NIF). Expected to be completed in March 2009, NIF will be the world’s largest laser system.
** THE AMERICA THAT CAN BE/THE AMERICA THAT HAS BEEN.It was the America That Can Be vs. the America That Has Been. The future won. Yet there is much in the past that is of enduring value.
I must say that this campaign, for all its excitement, its twists and turns, and its thrilling outcome, was something of a disappointment. In Barack Obama and John McCain, we had the two most compelling figures in the two parties, representatives of an emerging set of values and an enduring tradition. … From my new Huffington Post column.
** DEMOCRATS: THE NEW WESTERN STRATEGY IS PAYING OFF. The election hasn’t happened yet, so it’s too soon to start counting electoral votes from the Democrats’ new Western strategy. But the dramatic re-shaping of the electoral battlefield is already clear enough. While the current party leadership deserves credit for a new path to presidential power, much of the new Western strategy has long been championed by former Senator Gary Hart.
The new strategy came into clear focus, fittingly for a party that knew it had to gamble on a new route to the White House, in Las Vegas, in January 2007 over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The snow on the famed Las Vegas Strip the day before seemed only a little less unlikely to many in the national media and political establishments than the new moves that were unfolding. … From my October 31st column.
** GLOBAL OBAMA: BIG OPPORTUNITIES, BIGGER CHALLENGES. If he wins, Obama will have the global popularity that no American president has had in a great many years. But what sort of challenges will counter the global opportunity that an Obama presidency might afford America? … From my October 24th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti.
While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
The drop of $86 per barrel since the record high over the summer comes on acknowledgment that the weak US economy will cut future demand and on the easing of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. It is clear that that, contrary to much chatter, neither the US nor Israel is about to launch a strike against Iran. And the Russian war with Georgia, confounding much speculation and reporting to the contrary, actually decreased the geopolitical risk premium in the oil market.
President-elect Barack Obama on election night in Chicago.
** CALIFORNIA AND THE OBAMA TRANSITION. Since California provided one-fifth of the electoral votes needed to win the White House (though Barack Obama won 95 more electoral votes than he needed), about a fifth of Obama’s campaign money in contributions of $200 and up, nearly a third of is national popular vote margin over John McCain, and thousands of volunteers who helped push Obama over the top in various swing states, the Golden State is in pretty good with the new president-elect of the United States.
So which Californians will be joining the Obama Administration? It’s still emerging obviously, and it’s early, though Obama has hit the ground running, much faster than did Bill Clinton. But some names are clearly in play.
The biggest name that has been out there, for some months, is that of Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger. To be some sort of climate change/energy czar. There’s always been one big problem with that. Schwarzenegger has over two years left as governor of California. So that makes it virtually impossible for him to play that sort of role with Obama, at least in the first part of Obama’s first term as president. Obama and company didn’t take Schwarzenegger’s criticisms of him the Friday before the election at a Columbus, Ohio rally, Schwarzenegger’s only McCain campaign event of the fall, all that seriously. They shrugged off the hit on Obama’s purported tax program and, when the former Mr. Universe dubbed Obama to be “scrawny,” Obama chief strategist David Axelrod said only that they were looking forward to getting Arnold on the basketball court after the election.
In any event, Obama won Ohio, as expected, so, in basketball terms, no harm/no foul. But if Schwarzenegger were to take a post with Obama later on in Obama’s first term, California First Lady Maria Shriver could have a major role as well. She was a prominent backer of Obama.
The Californian who is apparently very much in the running now for the Obama Cabinet is former state Controller and ex-eBay honcho Steve Westly. The Silicon Valley venture capitalist, who ran a near-miss campaign for the 2006 Democratic gubernatorial nomination, is one of Obama’s earliest and biggest supporters, having served as Obama’s first California chair, a national finance co-chair, and as chair of a coalition of greentech business people for Obama.
Westly, who also co-chaired the winning California redistricting reform initiative with Schwarzenegger, is clearly in the mix to be U.S. Secretary of Energy. He’s also considering another run for governor in 2010.
Schwarzenegger’s choice as chair of the California Air Resources Board, Mary Nichols, is reportedly in the mix to head the Environmental Protection Agency. She first chaired the ARB under then Governor Jerry Brown, was assistant chief of the EPA under Clinton, and served as California resources secretary under then Governor Gray Davis.
Intriguingly, the structure of energy and environmental policy-making in the Obama Administration may be in flux. Former Clinton White House chief of staff John Podesta, one of the world’s biggest X-Files fans, now heads the Center for American Progress. CAP has issued a report calling for a National Energy Council, to operate alongside the National Economic Council set up under Clinton. Which was set up to elevate economic issues to the same cross-cutting stature as was done with the decades ago establishments of the National Security Council.
Professor Laura Tyson, currently head of the UC Berkeley Haas School of Business, is under consideration for very high economic posts. After being co-director of the Silicon Valley-centric Berkeley Roundtable for the International Economy in the ’80s, she went on to head the National Economic Council under Clinton. Obama sources describe Tyson as a brilliant briefer on economic issues, one well-suited for Sunday show appearances.
Tyson’s UC Berkeley colleague, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich, is also under consideration for major posts. Reich is more associated with Harvard, of course, where he was a prominent senior lecturer at the Kennedy School of Government. He was one of the first Clinton Cabinet members to break with the Clintons and go with Obama.
Bay Area Congressman George Miller, a major ally of Speaker Nancy Pelosi, chairs the House Education and Labor Committee. He came out for Obama right after Hillary Clinton won the New Hampshire primary, and could have a major post with regard to the workforce and education issues.
Oakland lawyer Tony West is a top litigator who raised a lot of money for Obama and has an easy rapport with the president-elect, as you can see on an NWN behind-the-scenes video. West is a Harvard-educated former assistant US attorney.
His sister-in-law, San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris, is another up-and-comer who played a major role with Obama as California co-chair. The charismatic Harris is interested in running for California attorney general in 2010 if former Governor-turned-Attorney General Jerry Brown moves toward a third term in the office he held in the ’70s and early ’80s.
** THE MARATHON RACE, AND THE TRANSITION TO POWER. After near 24/7 coverage of this election marathon – I remember thinking that I would just have to be prepared for a sprint from Christmas to Super Tuesday, then it would all ease off, haha – I still find myself automatically starting the “troll for polls” late at night and early in the morning. Fortunately, as it were, I’m so run-down that I will probably forget soon enough.
This has been, clearly, a powerful election result. Between the 2006 elections and the 2008 elections, Democrats have picked up at least a dozen seats in the U.S. Senate and more than 50 seats in the U.S. House of Representatives.
Barack Obama, the freshman Illinois senator who was still a state legislator just four years ago, took no less than nine red states away from the Republicans, with one more state still up for grabs. With a decisive 53% to 46% victory over John McCain in the popular vote, and at least 365 electoral votes – he picked up one yesterday, as I expected, in Nebraska’s 2nd congressional district, based in what many called Obamaha (Omaha) during the primaries – he is in a commanding position.
I’ll be covering and analyzing the transition to presidential power for Obama and the Democrats. Just not as intensively as the campaign.
Update: Okay, I’ve found the missing items using a little Internet trick. One is just above. The other is below the Bond trailer. Presumably the problem will not recur.
NOTE: TECH GREMLINS STRIKE. I see that two items that were previously here, as well as two videos, have disappeared. I’ve restored the videos. I may re-write the items later.
** THE AMERICA THAT CAN BE/THE AMERICA THAT HAS BEEN.It was the America That Can Be vs. the America That Has Been. The future won. Yet there is much in the past that is of enduring value.
I must say that this campaign, for all its excitement, its twists and turns, and its thrilling outcome, was something of a disappointment. In Barack Obama and John McCain, we had the two most compelling figures in the two parties, representatives of an emerging set of values and an enduring tradition. … From my new Huffington Post column.
** WHERE OBAMA IS THIS WEEKEND.
President-elect Barack Obama is at home in Chicago reviewing US economic reports, situation reports from around the world, and making choices for appointments to top economic and national security posts. He and First Lady-to be Michelle Obama go to the White House on Monday to meet with President George W. Bush and First Lady Laura Bush.
Obama delivers the Democratic national radio address on Saturday. You can listen to it via this link and read the text here: On Tuesday, Americans stood in lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen. It didn’t matter who they were or where they came from; what they looked like or what party they belonged to – they came out and cast their ballot because they believed that in this country, our destiny is not written for us, but by us. We should all take pride in the fact that we once again displayed for the world the power of our democracy, and reaffirmed the great American ideal that this is a nation where anything is possible.
This week, I spoke with President Bush, who graciously offered his full support and assistance in this period of transition. Michelle and I look forward to meeting with him and the First Lady on Monday to begin that process. This speaks to a fundamental recognition that here in America we can compete vigorously in elections and challenge each other’s ideas, yet come together in service of a common purpose once the voting is done. And that is particularly important at a moment when we face the most serious challenges of our lifetime.
Yesterday, we woke to more sobering news about the state of our economy. The 240,000 jobs lost in October marks the 10th consecutive month that our economy has shed jobs. In total, we’ve lost nearly 1.2 million jobs this year, and more than 10 million Americans are now unemployed. Tens of millions of families are struggling to figure out how to pay the bills and stay in their homes. Their stories are an urgent reminder that we are facing the greatest economic challenge of our lifetime, and we must act swiftly to resolve them.
In the wake of these disturbing reports, I met with members of my Transition Economic Advisory Board, who will help guide the work of my transition team in developing a strong set of policies to respond to this crisis. While we must recognize that we only have one President at a time and that President Bush is the leader of our government, I want to ensure that we hit the ground running on January 20th because we don’t have a moment to lose.
We discussed several of the most immediate challenges facing our economy and key priorities on which to focus in the days and weeks ahead to ease the credit crisis, help hardworking families, and restore growth and prosperity.
First, we need a rescue plan for the middle class that invests in immediate efforts to create jobs and provides relief to families that are watching their paychecks shrink and their life savings disappear.
Then, we’ll address the spreading impact of the financial crisis on other sectors of our economy, and ensure that the rescue plan that passed Congress is working to stabilize financial markets while protecting taxpayers, helping homeowners, and not unduly rewarding the management of financial firms that are receiving government assistance.
Finally, we will move forward with a set of policies that will grow our middle-class and strengthen our economy in the long-term. We can’t afford to wait on moving forward on the key priorities that I identified during the campaign, including clean energy, health care, education and tax relief for middle class families.
Let me close by saying I do not underestimate the enormity of the task that lies ahead. We’ve taken some major actions to date, and we will need further actions during this transition and subsequent months. Some of those choices will be difficult, but America is a strong and resilient country. I know that we will succeed if we put aside partisanship and work together as one nation. And that is what I intend to do.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger is delivers the featured address at Saturday night’s fundraising gala for the Panetta Institute at California State University, Monterey Bay. Leon Panetta was President Clinton’s White House chief of staff and budget director, following a long career as a leading Democratic congressman from California. On Sunday, Schwarzenegger appears on CNN’s Late Edition.
In his weekly radio address, Schwarzenegger hails the election of Barack Obama as the first African American president and discusses the victory of the Proposition 11 redistricting reform initiative. “Senator Obama,” notes Schwarzenegger, “was elected the first African-American president in our history. What a great day for our nation and I am eager to work with our next president on the many tough challenges ahead.
“In electing Senator Obama the people sent a resounding message. They want a new direction.
“They want Washington to end the bitter partisanship and begin working together for the people. Here in California the voters sent the same message to Sacramento that they wanted to change how government performs. Their yes vote on Proposition 11 will change the way the legislative lines are drawn. …”
Quantum of Solace, the immediate sequel to the smash 2006 Bond franchise reboot, Casino Royale, opens wide across the US next Friday. It’s already playing around the world, and set a new British box office record for its opening weekend.
** WHO DID THE MOVIE ACTION HEROES BACK FOR PRESIDENT? With the latest Bond film opening, let’s look at this incredibly important question which I somehow did not get to before the election.
For Barack Obama: Daniel Craig (the current James Bond), Pierce Brosnan (the previous James Bond), Harrison Ford (Indiana Jones, among others), Matt Damon (Jason Bourne), Christian Bale (Bruce Wayne/Batman), Brad Pitt, George Clooney, Val Kilmer, and so on. Yes, I know that Craig is a Brit. He could barely contain himself speaking out for Obama as he promoted the new Bond film.
For John McCain: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, and Chuck Norris.
Neutral (officially): Clint Eastwood.
** THE TV AD WARS CONCLUDE. The TV ad wars between Barack Obama and John McCain are finally coming to an end. Obama is closing out with a ton of positive advertising, leavened with deft negatives linking McCain to President Bush and his failed economic policies, in a pair of ads that began running around the country on Friday. McCain has been mostly negative, befitting his trailing position in the race, though he has a positive closer ad. Nevertheless, despite his pledge this spring not to make Rev. Jeremiah Wright an issue in the campaign, at least one official organ of the party he now heads is running a hit spot on the Wright Stuff. … From my Monday Huffington Post column.
** DEMOCRATS: THE NEW WESTERN STRATEGY IS PAYING OFF. The election hasn’t happened yet, so it’s too soon to start counting electoral votes from the Democrats’ new Western strategy. But the dramatic re-shaping of the electoral battlefield is already clear enough. While the current party leadership deserves credit for a new path to presidential power, much of the new Western strategy has long been championed by former Senator Gary Hart.
The new strategy came into clear focus, fittingly for a party that knew it had to gamble on a new route to the White House, in Las Vegas, in January 2007 over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The snow on the famed Las Vegas Strip the day before seemed only a little less unlikely to many in the national media and political establishments than the new moves that were unfolding. … From my October 31st column.
** GLOBAL OBAMA: BIG OPPORTUNITIES, BIGGER CHALLENGES. If he wins, Obama will have the global popularity that no American president has had in a great many years. But what sort of challenges will counter the global opportunity that an Obama presidency might afford America? … From my October 24th Huffington Post column.
** THE BATTLE FOR BEST IN THE WEST. Saturday night in the LA Memorial Coliseum, it’s the USC Trojans vs. the California Golden Bears. USC, with the leading defense in the country, has an outside shot at the national championship after inexplicably dropping a game to Oregon State. Cal has a shot at the Pacific 10 Conference title. If it can get past USC. The Trojans are 21-point favorites. Who am I for? Well, I’m a graduate of Cal, and a senior fellow of USC.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti.
While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
** TRACK GLOBAL AND NATIONAL ENERGY PRICES IN NEAR REAL TIME VIA BLOOMBERG ENERGY MARKET WATCH. After crashing over $147 for yet another record on July 11th, crude oil closed at $61.04 per barrel on Friday. Energy markets are closed on the weekend.
The drop of $85 per barrel since the record high over the summer comes on acknowledgment that the weak US economy will cut future demand and on the easing of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. It is clear that that, contrary to much chatter, neither the US nor Israel is about to launch a strike against Iran. And the Russian war with Georgia, confounding much speculation and reporting to the contrary, actually decreased the geopolitical risk premium in the oil market.
John McCain delivered a graceful concession speech Tuesday night in Phoenix.
** THE AMERICA THAT CAN BE/THE AMERICA THAT HAS BEEN.It was the America That Can Be vs. the America That Has Been. The future won. Yet there is much in the past that is of enduring value.
I must say that this campaign, for all its excitement, its twists and turns, and its thrilling outcome, was something of a disappointment. In Barack Obama and John McCain, we had the two most compelling figures in the two parties, representatives of an emerging set of values and an enduring tradition. … From my new Huffington Post column.
** OBAMA’S FIRST PRESS CONFERENCE AS PRESIDENT-ELECT. Barack Obama held his first post-election press conference today, in Chicago, after meeting for a few hours with most of his transition economic advisory board. The list is below in yesterday’s edition of NWN. What we saw was a rather somber president-elect, mindful of unemployment reaching a 17-year high and the fresh distress of America’s auto industry, with General Motors saying it’s running out of money.
Obama made it clear that he won’t allow the auto industry to go down, calling it the backbone of American manufacturing. He wants another stimulus package, which the current president seems not to. He also called for extension of unemployment benefits.
His focus seemed to be much more on stimulating job growth and economic development than on redistribution.
The atmospherics were impressive and meant to be reassuring. Indeed, the stock market went up after his presentation. Obama was flanked by the collection of economic heavyweights on his advisory board, with American flags splashed across the backdrop.
Obama meets with President Bush at the White House on Monday, and repeatedly had to emphasize that he will not be inaugurated as president until January 20th. Clearly, the attention of the country and much of the world has turned to Obama. Which will make how he plays Bush’s hosting of next week’s global financial summit especially interesting.
** PLOUFFE WON’T JOIN THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE. Barack Obama’s ace campaign manager, David Plouffe, will not join his consulting partner David Axelrod in the White House. Plouffe is a longtime partner in Axelrod’s consulting firm. He will probably continue to direct the vast Obama campaign apparatus.
Tina Fey as Sarah Palin. The comedy star nailed Palin with her impersonation.
The Morning Column: TERMINATING: THE SARAH PALIN CHRONICLES.
(With apologies to the lovely Lena Headey, star of 300 and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.)
First a little news about the presidential race, in which votes are still being counted. Barack Obama continues to go up. His share of the popular vote is now approaching 53%, with John McCain around 46%. And he will pick up another electoral vote. In Nebraska, where after the remaining votes from early and provisional voters are counted, Obama will win the Omaha-based congressional district. (Nebraska is one of only two states, Maine being the other, that splits its electoral votes.) It must have been the Warren Buffett endorsement. That brings Obama to 365 electoral votes, with 270 needed to elect.
Now, to Sarah Palin …
What goes up, must come down. Unless it achieves escape velocity. Sarah Palin did not achieve escape velocity.
The knives are out, the stories are flowing. She was reluctant to study during debate prep. Perhaps because it turned out she had so much to learn.
The Alaska governor, who would have been a heartbeat away from the Presidency had John McCain and she been elected, thought that Africa was a country, rather than a continent.
She was not all that familiar with NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Agreement, one of the biggest issues of the past 15 years, and a major bone of contention in this presidential race. In part because she wasn’t sure which countries are in North America.
Sarah Palin discusses Russia with CBS News anchor Katie Couric. The word Palin is groping towards is “caricature.”
She didn’t know anything about Russia. It goes on and on.
Then there are the clothes. Reports have emerged that it was not merely $150,000 spent at Saks 5th Avenue and Neiman Marcus – hardly stores where one encounters her ostensibly beloved Joe Sixpacks (Neiman Marcus doesn’t even take Visa) – but much more.
$150,000 is an annual clothing budget for a billionaire’s wife. I have some experience dealing with women’s fashion, and Palin could easily have been made over in designer style for a fifth that amount.
Told to buy a few suits and get her hair done, Palin went very much overboard, getting outfits not only for herself but for her working class hero hubster Todd and the kids.
Lena Headey as Sarah Connor in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles.
But she still has an image of being one tough cookie, a “Sarah Connor” type, at least amongst her true believers. And that is very good news for the Democrats.
Palin stirred up the far right elements of the Republican Party. They love the conceit that someone with no expertise should be running things.
But that’s not how most voters in the mainstream of American life view things. You actually have to know things at this level of politics, and most Americans get that.
President Barack Obama can only pray that the Republicans would nominate Palin to run against him in 2012. He would win that match-up in an easy landslide. There’s only one downside for Democrats in a Palin-led Republican Party. She stirs up a lot of angry and frankly dangerous sentiment among some in the country.
I doubt it will come to that. In a snap election night poll, Palin ran third behind Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee in the first soundings for the Republicans in 2012.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, fresh off the historic victory of the Proposition 11 redistricting reform initiative, holds private meetings and discussions today in LA.
** THE TV AD WARS CONCLUDE. The TV ad wars between Barack Obama and John McCain are finally coming to an end. Obama is closing out with a ton of positive advertising, leavened with deft negatives linking McCain to President Bush and his failed economic policies, in a pair of ads that began running around the country on Friday. McCain has been mostly negative, befitting his trailing position in the race, though he has a positive closer ad. Nevertheless, despite his pledge this spring not to make Rev. Jeremiah Wright an issue in the campaign, at least one official organ of the party he now heads is running a hit spot on the Wright Stuff. … From my Monday Huffington Post column.
** DEMOCRATS: THE NEW WESTERN STRATEGY IS PAYING OFF. The election hasn’t happened yet, so it’s too soon to start counting electoral votes from the Democrats’ new Western strategy. But the dramatic re-shaping of the electoral battlefield is already clear enough. While the current party leadership deserves credit for a new path to presidential power, much of the new Western strategy has long been championed by former Senator Gary Hart.
The new strategy came into clear focus, fittingly for a party that knew it had to gamble on a new route to the White House, in Las Vegas, in January 2007 over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The snow on the famed Las Vegas Strip the day before seemed only a little less unlikely to many in the national media and political establishments than the new moves that were unfolding. … From my October 31st column.
** GLOBAL OBAMA: BIG OPPORTUNITIES, BIGGER CHALLENGES. If he wins, Obama will have the global popularity that no American president has had in a great many years. But what sort of challenges will counter the global opportunity that an Obama presidency might afford America? … From my October 24th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti.
While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
The drop of $85 per barrel since the record high over the summer comes on acknowledgment that the weak US economy will cut future demand and on the easing of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. It is clear that that, contrary to much chatter, neither the US nor Israel is about to launch a strike against Iran. And the Russian war with Georgia, confounding much speculation and reporting to the contrary, actually decreased the geopolitical risk premium in the oil market.
Bruce Springsteen’s musical introduction of the Obama family at a Cleveland rally of 80,000 on Sunday presaged not only Obama’s capture of Ohio but the breaking of the old red state coalition.
NOTE: NEW COLUMN COMING UP – “THE AMERICA THAT CAN BE/THE AMERICA THAT HAS BEEN.” Drawing from the best of Barack Obama and the best of John McCain. Things are a bit slow, as I seem to have my post-election case of bronchitis.
** OBAMA MEETS WITH TRANSITION ECONOMIC ADVISORY BOARD, HOLDS FIRST PRESS CONFERENCE AS PRESIDENT-ELECT TOMORROW AT 12:30 PM PACIFIC. President-elect Barack Obama holds his first post-election press conference tomorrow in Chicago after meeting with his economic policy transition team. Here’s who he conferring with tomorrow prior to his first presser as president-elect: Vice President-elect Joe Biden, David Bonior (Member House of Representatives 1977-2003), Warren Buffett (Chairman and CEO, Berkshire Hathaway), Roel Campos (former SEC Commissioner), William Daley (Chairman of the Midwest, JP Morgan Chase; Former Secretary, U.S. Dept of Commerce, 1997-2000), William Donaldson (Former Chairman of the SEC 2003-2005), Roger Ferguson (President and CEO, TIAA-CREF and former Vice Chairman of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve), Jennifer Granholm (Governor, State of Michigan), Anne Mulcahy (Chairman and CEO, Xerox), Richard Parsons (Chairman of the Board, Time Warner), Penny Pritzker (CEO, Classic Residence by Hyatt), Robert Reich (University of California, Berkeley; Former Secretary, U.S. Dept of Labor, 1993-1997), Robert Rubin (Chairman and Director of the Executive Committee, Citigroup; Former Secretary, U.S. Dept of Treasury, 1995-1999), Eric Schmidt (Chairman and CEO, Google), Lawrence Summers (Harvard University; Managing Director, D.E. Shaw; Former Secretary, U.S. Dept of Treasury, 1999-2001), Laura Tyson (Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley; Former Chairman, National Economic Council, 1995-1996; Former Chairman, President’s Council of Economic Advisors, 1993-1995), Antonio Villaraigosa (Mayor, City of Los Angeles), and Paul Volcker (Former Chairman, U.S. Federal Reserve 1979-1987).
** OIL DROPS BELOW $60 PER BARREL. Crude oil dropped below $60 per barrel for the first time since March 2007 before settling at a close of $60.19 per barrel.
** WAS RAHM EMANUEL THE INSPIRATION FOR JOSH LYMAN ON THE WEST WING?I say no, they don’t have much in common. But the AP says yes. Of course, they had nothing to do with the show.
** ELECTORAL COLLEGE AT 2 PM PACIFIC: OBAMA 364, MCCAIN 173. North Carolina, as I said it would yesterday, has now officially gone to Barack Obama. There is only one outstanding electoral vote left, that of Omaha, Nebraska’s congressional district. (Almost uniquely, Nebraska allocates electoral votes by congressional district.) It’s a dead heat in Omaha’s congressional district between Obama and John McCain.
** ANOTHER OBAMA TRANSITION: DAVID AXELROD. The Axe, an amusing nickname for a relatively low-ley guy – at least as far as political consultants go – will be senior advisor to President Obama in the White House. Axelrod is Barack Obama’s long-time chief strategist. He has worked with many black candidates in the past. In fact, he’s worked with all kinds of folks.
I first met Axelrod 12 years ago, when I had drinks with him and Garry South at the fabulous Hyatt at Capitol Park in Sacramento, which is now Arnold Schwarzenegger’s home away from home. Axelrod had come on, for a time, as Gray Davis’s media consultant. It didn’t quite work out.
Axelrod set the tone for the “No Drama Obama” campaign. He is yet another Jewish American at the top of an operation that the far right has imagined is out to destroy Israel. Get a grip on reality, folks.
** SCHWARZENEGGER’S BUDGET CRISIS PLAN. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger this morning, in a live webcast event, announced that he proposes to deal with the deepening of California’s chronic budget crisis – the current budget is now $11.2 billion out of whack – though a combination of cuts and tax hikes. Here are the taxes he proposes to raise: A temporary 1.5 cent sales tax increase, for three years.
New service taxes on currently untaxed services (all services are currently untaxed) such as appliance repair, furniture repair, vehicle repair, golf and veterinarian services, amusement park, and sports events.
A new oil severance tax, at a rate of 9.9% of the gross value. California is the only major oil producing state without an oil severance tax.
An increase in the alcohol tax by a nickel a drink.
And an increase in the car tax, or vehicle registration fee, of $12 per vehicle.
** TRANSITIONS. Chicago Congressman Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee in 2006 when the Democrats seized the majority in the House of Representatives, will be President Obama’s White House chief of staff.
Emanuel, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Forces, whose father served in the Irgun – known as a terrorist organization during Israel’s struggle for independence – was the White House political director under President Bill Clinton. He is a center-left Democrat, and one tough customer. His brother Ari is a well-known Hollywood agent, early Obama supporter, and role model for a character in the hit HBO series Entourage. Rahmbo, as he is known, is close to the Clintons, and has been an Obama confidante for years.
This is a big move for Emanuel, who swiftly became a member of the House leadership and wanted to become speaker of the House. But Obama is a history-making president and being his White House chief of staff is something the former Clinton fundraising chieftain may be even better suited for.
Robert Gibbs, the cool and clever traveling senior advisor at the center of the Obama circus, will be the White House press secretary. Gibbs had a memorable shoot-out on Fox News last month.
Defense Secretary Bob Gates, a former CIA director and lifelong intelligence professional, will be staying on, at least for a time, as defense secretary. Gates was a member of the Iraq Study Group, the advice of which, notwithstanding the pasting it got from the far right, has essentially been followed, albeit in super slo-mo, as I wrote that it would be at the end of 2006.
** SENATE: DEMS UP TO 57, AND COUNTING. Democrat Jeff Merkley has defeated Republican Senator Gordon Smith in that tight Oregon race with late counting of votes in liberal-leaning Portland and Eugene. This brings the Democrats up to 57 in the new Senate, with a recount in Minnesota and still undecided races in Alaska and Georgia.
With this victory in Oregon, Democrats now hold all US Senate seats from the West Coast.
Fox News reporting yesterday on the intellectual unpreparedness of Sarah Palin. Among other things, she thought that Africa was a country rather than a continent.
The Morning Column: THE REPUBLICAN RIGHT IN CRISIS.
When you lose one big national election, and pretend it was a fluke, that’s a problem. When you lose two big national elections in a row, and pretend there’s nothing wrong with your analysis and ideas, there’s another name for that.
The Republican right is in crisis. John McCain, the nation’s most famous Vietnam War hero, with a decades-in-the-making “maverick” brand, was the only Republican who would have been competitive after two terms in the White House for President Bush and Vice President Cheney. And he was. Yet freshman Illinois Senator Barack Obama still beat him handily, as I expected. McCain was simply carrying too much baggage.
The far right, of course, imagined the exact opposite. That it was Obama who would be destroyed by all his supposed baggage. But the attacks, which McCain ultimately indulged himself, to his detriment, which went to the swampy notion that Obama is a “Manchurian candidate,” simply didn’t work. As even the Republican-owned Rasmussen poll demonstrated. Nasty innuendo about Obama’s tangential relationship with ex-domestic terrorist Bill Ayers excited the party’s hyperpartisan right-wing base, but repelled moderates and independents, who actually determine the winner of the White House.
President George W. Bush declaring “Mission accomplished” in Iraq on May 1, 2003.
It goes without saying that the president who is arguably the most unpopular in history was a drag on McCain. Especially since the old maverick voted with him 90% of the time, including, fatefully, on his deregulationist approach to financial markets and tax cuts for big corporations and the wealthy.
Bush was staunchly defended by most of the far right throughout his term in office, notwithstanding the fact that he expanded government through borrowing – the budget surplus he inherited from Bill Clinton is now a record budget deficit – and expanded government intrusions into private lives.
I actually like Bush personally, but having mismanaged not one but two wars and run the economy into the ditch, he is clearly a very bad president. And the public understands this all too well.
A group of about 20 prominent standard-bearers of the far right are meeting today in the Virginia countryside to talk about next steps. Next week, the Republican Governors Association meets to assess the damage, which is not only the loss of the White House – Obama took away no fewer than nine red states on Tuesday — but at least another half-dozen seats in the Senate and at least 20 more seats in the House.
Now, to listen to the likes of Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh and so forth (who notably tried and failed to beat McCain in the Republican primaries, the problem is that the Republicans weren’t conservative enough. Weren’t pro-Bush (and Cheney, their real favorite, whose extraordinary unpopularity and bad calls on national security and the economy make Bush appear a candidate for Mount Rushmore) enough.
They think Sarah Palin is the cat’s meow. Well, no.
She is, as I wrote immediately after she became McCain’s shock pick for the vice presidency, utterly unqualified. She did less as a local government official by the age of 42 than I did in high school. And I didn’t do all that much. I had checked her out and was convinced she would never be picked, because she didn’t know anything and, far worse, imagined that she knew everything.
Now it ‘s coming out – well, it’s no surprise to anyone in the mainstream of American life after her disastrous interviews – that she is quite ignorant and quite arrogant. A deadly combination. And rather avaricious.
There is a lot coming from the McCain campaign about her wild shopping sprees. And the fact that she thought Africa was a country, and not a continent. See the Fox News report above. Of course, this should be no surprise, as she is a creationist who brandishes her anti-intellectualism as a weapon in the culture wars. Which Republicans really should abandon unless their goal is to be a permanent minority party nationally as they are in California.
But Palin said a lot of stuff that many on the far right – professional warhawks, theocrats, and so forth – want to hear. And they were taken with her attractiveness and charisma.
Scheuneman, of course, was the Washington lobbyist for Georgian President Misha Saakashvili, whose utterly boneheaded offensive against the breakaway procince of South Ossetia provided Russia with its longed-for pretext to invade and eviscerate Georgia.
Somebody gave the youthful and impressionable Saakashvili the feeling that he had a greenlight from the US and would be back-stopped in his idiotic moves against the obviously vastly superior Russian forces.
Palin, notwithstanding her obvious ignorance, has become a great favorite of the tiny neoconservative faction in American politics, of which Scheuneman is a long-time member.
If the right tries to rebuild around Sarah Palin, they will only be building a wall around their existing echo chamber.
A Palin candidacy in 2012 would almost certainly lead to the biggest landslide since Lyndon Johnson crushed Barry Goldwater in 1964.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, fresh off the victory of the Proposition 11 redistricting reform initiative, holds a Capitol press conference this morning at which he outlines the deepening magnitude of California’s chronic budget crisis, calls a special emergency session of the lame-duck Legislature, proposes solutions and an economic stimulus package for the state, and lays out a timetable for action.
** THE TV AD WARS CONCLUDE. The TV ad wars between Barack Obama and John McCain are finally coming to an end. Obama is closing out with a ton of positive advertising, leavened with deft negatives linking McCain to President Bush and his failed economic policies, in a pair of ads that began running around the country on Friday. McCain has been mostly negative, befitting his trailing position in the race, though he has a positive closer ad. Nevertheless, despite his pledge this spring not to make Rev. Jeremiah Wright an issue in the campaign, at least one official organ of the party he now heads is running a hit spot on the Wright Stuff. … From my Monday Huffington Post column.
** DEMOCRATS: THE NEW WESTERN STRATEGY IS PAYING OFF. The election hasn’t happened yet, so it’s too soon to start counting electoral votes from the Democrats’ new Western strategy. But the dramatic re-shaping of the electoral battlefield is already clear enough. While the current party leadership deserves credit for a new path to presidential power, much of the new Western strategy has long been championed by former Senator Gary Hart.
The new strategy came into clear focus, fittingly for a party that knew it had to gamble on a new route to the White House, in Las Vegas, in January 2007 over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The snow on the famed Las Vegas Strip the day before seemed only a little less unlikely to many in the national media and political establishments than the new moves that were unfolding. … From my October 31st column.
** GLOBAL OBAMA: BIG OPPORTUNITIES, BIGGER CHALLENGES. If he wins, Obama will have the global popularity that no American president has had in a great many years. But what sort of challenges will counter the global opportunity that an Obama presidency might afford America? … From my October 24th Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti.
While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
The drop of $87 per barrel since the record high over the summer comes on acknowledgment that the weak US economy will cut future demand and on the easing of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. It is clear that that, contrary to much chatter, neither the US nor Israel is about to launch a strike against Iran. And the Russian war with Georgia, confounding much speculation and reporting to the contrary, actually decreased the geopolitical risk premium in the oil market.
President-elect Barack Obama delivers his victory speech Tuesday night before 150,000 people in Chicago.
NOTE: The America That Can Be/The America That Has Been … new column coming tomorrow. During the day.
** OBAMA’S ANTICIPATED SWEEPING VICTORY. I’m exhausted and very run down at the end of this marathon campaign, a final big trip delivering a exclamation point on that. I’ll have much more to say about this topic.
But suffice to say for now, Barack Obama has won a sweeping victory over John McCain, as long anticipated here on NWN. Which gives him the privilege of dealing with two troubled wars, an epic financial crisis, and an economy that began contracting months ago.
He’s the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win a majority of the popular vote, and only the second since 1964. In fact, he won more votes than any candidate in history as part of the big turn-out in this election, the largest as a proportion of the population in a century.
Obama defeated McCain in the popular vote, 52% to 46%.
Obama defeated McCain in the electoral vote, 364 to 174. (I believe that Obama has won North Carolina, where he leads with all precincts reporting, by 12,000 votes.)
Obama won states throughout the country. The new Western strategy (see link below to my column) worked like a charm, as big wins on the West Coast were matched by easy wins in the Mountain West states of Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada.
Obama won nine red states. McCain won no blue states.
Here are lists of state victories for the two candidates.
OBAMA WINS: Vermont, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware, DC, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio, New Mexico, Virginia, California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Indiana, North Carolina
MCCAIN WINS: Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, North Dakota, Wyoming, Louisiana, West Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Utah, Kansas, South Dakota, Nebraska, Idaho, Arizona, Alaska, Montana, Missouri
These are the red states taken away by Obama: Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, Florida, Indiana, and North Carolina.
The Republicans look now like a party of the Deep South and the rural Plains states.
Obama built his victory on several pillars: Young voters, African Americans, Latinos, and college-educated whites, running nearly even with McCain in the latter group after previous Democratic candidates lost badly with that group. There was, as I wrote in a column linked to from a few weeks ago, no “Bradley Effect.”
Obama won big with moderates and independents. Those two voter groups, along with college-educated whites – obvious some overlap there – were repelled by McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, his ties to the extraordinarily unpopular President Bush, and by much of the slashing tone of the campaign and the various attacks relating to Bill Ayers and the whole “Manchurian candidate” fantasy about Obama pushed by elements of the right which I discuss in that column. For all her rock star status with the right-wing base, Palin’s prospects for 2012 appear very clouded, with this poll showing her running third behind Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. Team Obama would love to run against her.
Democrats picked up at least five new seats in the Senate, with a few races still undecided. In the House, Democrats picked up at least 18 new seats, with several still undecided.
In another piece, I’ll go over the key breakpoints of the campaign.
** CALIFORNIA STORY. A massive win for Barack Obama in the nation’s largest state, 61% to 37%. Even bigger than I expected, and I expected big. Obama won in all age groups and demographic groups, and was at least competitive in every region of the state.
In his wake, running in gerrymandered districts designed to be held by one of the two parties, California Democrats took three state Assembly seats from Republicans, but lost another as the outgoing incumbent campaigned for the Republican in a Central Valley family feud. That gives Democrats 50 out of 80 in the chamber, four short of those needed to render Republican members irrelevant in budget and fiscal matters. Democrats picked up one seat in the state Senate, giving them 26 of 40, just one short of the two-thirds mark. In Congress, retired Colonel Charlie Brown appears to have come up just a few hundred votes short of beating right-wing icon Tom McClintock, a termed-out state senator from Southern California seeking to extend his political career in the Sierra foothills 400 miles north of his legislative district.
Speaking of gerrymandering, the redistricting reform initiative spearheaded by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger eked out a narrow victory, 50.6% to 49.4%. He and reformer allies are discussing the victory – first in the nation for such a venture – today in in LA. (See item below.)
Proposition 8, the initiative to ban same-sex marriage, also eked out a narrow victory, 52.2% to 47.8%. The No on 8 campaign stabilized late in the going, after being rocked by hard-hitting ads claiming that same-sex marriage – a right granted by the Republican majority state Supreme Court – would mean that that gay and lesbian lifestyles would be taught in the schools. The ads featured San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom exulting that same-sex marriage is here to stay, “whether you like it or not,” and noted that 1st graders attended a same-sex wedding of their teachers at San Francisco City Hall. This same message was used to close out the campaign by the Yes on 8 forces, heavily funded by fundamentalists and Mormons from outside the state.
The Prop 5 drug crimes decriminalization measure went down hard, 60-40, opposed by all five California governors. The idea of rehabilitation is good, and proponents should consult with Schwarzenegger and others to fine tune it.
Prop 1A, the big high-speed rail bonds measure, bucked the bad economy to win, 52.3% to 47.7%. And Prop 2, an initiative to stop cruelty to farm animals, won easily. But two flawed alternative energy inititiaves – mostly opposed by environmentalists – went down big.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joins with leaders of Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, AARP, and the LA Chamber of Commerce this morning outside Los Angeles City hall to discuss the victory of Proposition 11, the redistricting reform initiative.
This is the first victory for a redistricting reform initiative in America, taking the drawing of legislative district lines out of the hands of legislators and placing it with an independent citizens commission.
Schwarzenegger will then hold private meetings and discussions in and around the state Capitol.
On Thursday, he will announce the special emergency session of the lame-duck state Legislature to deal with the profound deepening of California’s chronic budget crisis amidst the epic financial crisis. The former action superstar will lay out the nature and extent of the problem, his ideas on how to deal with it, and a timetable for action.
** THE TV AD WARS CONCLUDE. The TV ad wars between Barack Obama and John McCain are finally coming to an end. Obama is closing out with a ton of positive advertising, leavened with deft negatives linking McCain to President Bush and his failed economic policies, in a pair of ads that began running around the country on Friday. McCain has been mostly negative, befitting his trailing position in the race, though he has a positive closer ad. Nevertheless, despite his pledge this spring not to make Rev. Jeremiah Wright an issue in the campaign, at least one official organ of the party he now heads is running a hit spot on the Wright Stuff. … From my Monday Huffington Post column.
** DEMOCRATS: THE NEW WESTERN STRATEGY IS PAYING OFF. The election hasn’t happened yet, so it’s too soon to start counting electoral votes from the Democrats’ new Western strategy. But the dramatic re-shaping of the electoral battlefield is already clear enough. While the current party leadership deserves credit for a new path to presidential power, much of the new Western strategy has long been championed by former Senator Gary Hart.
The new strategy came into clear focus, fittingly for a party that knew it had to gamble on a new route to the White House, in Las Vegas, in January 2007 over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The snow on the famed Las Vegas Strip the day before seemed only a little less unlikely to many in the national media and political establishments than the new moves that were unfolding. … From my Thursday column.
** TV AD WARS: MCCAIN TAKES HIS LAST SHOT(S).For all the rumor-mongering about Obama as a “Manchurian candidate,” there is no silver bullet to defeat the vampire that haunts the nightmares of the far right. Reality is dawning. … From last Tuesday’s column.
** GLOBAL OBAMA: BIG OPPORTUNITIES, BIGGER CHALLENGES. If he wins, Obama will have the global popularity that no American president has had in a great many years. But what sort of challenges will counter the global opportunity that an Obama presidency might afford America? … From my October 24th column.
** INSIDE THE “BRADLEY EFFECT.”Barack Obama has won all three presidential debates over John McCain. He has a solid lead in the polls. What could go wrong for him? Well, many say the polls could be wrong, skewed by a hidden racist vote.
The “Bradley effect” — the notion that white voters lie to pollsters when a black candidate is in the race — has become widely known. But what you think you know from the campaign that gave rise to the phrase, then Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s ultimately near-miss race for governor of California in 1982, isn’t so.
I was in the middle of that, doing opposition research for Bradley’s campaign. I vividly recall election day that November, as reports from the exit polling done by California’s leading polling organization, the Field Poll, circulated. It seemed that Bradley, the first black mayor of Los Angeles, was headed for a big win as California’s first black governor. … From my recent Huffington Post column.
Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, in a wide-ranging state of the nation address as America elected Barack Obama, declared that Russia will forward deploy offensive missiles in Kaliningrad and employ electronic jamming technology to defeat the Bush Administration’s prospective anti-missile shield.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti.
While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
The drop of $81 per barrel since the record high over the summer comes on acknowledgment that the weak US economy will cut future demand and on the easing of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. It is clear that that, contrary to much chatter, neither the US nor Israel is about to launch a strike against Iran. And the Russian war with Georgia, confounding much speculation and reporting to the contrary, actually decreased the geopolitical risk premium in the oil market.
President-elect Barack Obama delivers his victory speech Tuesday night before 150,000 people in Chicago.
NOTE: The America That Can Be/The America That Has Been … new column coming tomorrow. During the day.
** OBAMA’S ANTICIPATED SWEEPING VICTORY. I’m exhausted and very run down at the end of this marathon campaign, a final big trip delivering a exclamation point on that. I’ll have much more to say about this topic.
But suffice to say for now, Barack Obama has won a sweeping victory over John McCain, as long anticipated here on NWN. Which gives him the privilege of dealing with two troubled wars, an epic financial crisis, and an economy that began contracting months ago.
He’s the first Democrat since Jimmy Carter to win a majority of the popular vote, and only the second since 1964. In fact, he won more votes than any candidate in history as part of the big turn-out in this election, the largest as a proportion of the population in a century.
Obama defeated McCain in the popular vote, 52% to 46%.
Obama defeated McCain in the electoral vote, 364 to 174. (I believe that Obama has won North Carolina, where he leads with all precincts reporting, by 12,000 votes.)
Obama won states throughout the country. The new Western strategy (see link below to my column) worked like a charm, as big wins on the West Coast were matched by easy wins in the Mountain West states of Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada.
Obama won nine red states. McCain won no blue states.
Here are lists of state victories for the two candidates.
OBAMA WINS: Vermont, Pennsylvania, Illinois, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Maryland, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, Delaware, DC, New York, Michigan, Wisconsin, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Iowa, Ohio, New Mexico, Virginia, California, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, Indiana, North Carolina
MCCAIN WINS: Kentucky, South Carolina, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Alabama, Georgia, North Dakota, Wyoming, Louisiana, West Virginia, Texas, Mississippi, Utah, Kansas, South Dakota, Nebraska, Idaho, Arizona, Alaska, Montana, Missouri
These are the red states taken away by Obama: Ohio, Iowa, New Mexico, Colorado, Nevada, Virginia, Florida, Indiana, and North Carolina.
The Republicans look now like a party of the Deep South and the rural Plains states.
Obama built his victory on several pillars: Young voters, African Americans, Latinos, and college-educated whites, running nearly even with McCain in the latter group after previous Democratic candidates lost badly with that group. There was, as I wrote in a column linked to from a few weeks ago, no “Bradley Effect.”
Obama won big with moderates and independents. Those two voter groups, along with college-educated whites – obvious some overlap there – were repelled by McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate, his ties to the extraordinarily unpopular President Bush, and by much of the slashing tone of the campaign and the various attacks relating to Bill Ayers and the whole “Manchurian candidate” fantasy about Obama pushed by elements of the right which I discuss in that column. For all her rock star status with the right-wing base, Palin’s prospects for 2012 appear very clouded, with this poll showing her running third behind Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. Team Obama would love to run against her.
Democrats picked up at least five new seats in the Senate, with a few races still undecided. In the House, Democrats picked up at least 18 new seats, with several still undecided.
In another piece, I’ll go over the key breakpoints of the campaign.
** CALIFORNIA STORY. A massive win for Barack Obama in the nation’s largest state, 61% to 37%. Even bigger than I expected, and I expected big. Obama won in all age groups and demographic groups, and was at least competitive in every region of the state.
In his wake, running in gerrymandered districts designed to be held by one of the two parties, California Democrats took three state Assembly seats from Republicans, but lost another as the outgoing incumbent campaigned for the Republican in a Central Valley family feud. That gives Democrats 50 out of 80 in the chamber, four short of those needed to render Republican members irrelevant in budget and fiscal matters. Democrats picked up one seat in the state Senate, giving them 26 of 40, just one short of the two-thirds mark. In Congress, retired Colonel Charlie Brown appears to have come up just a few hundred votes short of beating right-wing icon Tom McClintock, a termed-out state senator from Southern California seeking to extend his political career in the Sierra foothills 400 miles north of his legislative district.
Speaking of gerrymandering, the redistricting reform initiative spearheaded by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger eked out a narrow victory, 50.6% to 49.4%. He and reformer allies are discussing the victory – first in the nation for such a venture – today in in LA. (See item below.)
Proposition 8, the initiative to ban same-sex marriage, also eked out a narrow victory, 52.2% to 47.8%. The No on 8 campaign stabilized late in the going, after being rocked by hard-hitting ads claiming that same-sex marriage – a right granted by the Republican majority state Supreme Court – would mean that that gay and lesbian lifestyles would be taught in the schools. The ads featured San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom exulting that same-sex marriage is here to stay, “whether you like it or not,” and noted that 1st graders attended a same-sex wedding of their teachers at San Francisco City Hall. This same message was used to close out the campaign by the Yes on 8 forces, heavily funded by fundamentalists and Mormons from outside the state.
The Prop 5 drug crimes decriminalization measure went down hard, 60-40, opposed by all five California governors. The idea of rehabilitation is good, and proponents should consult with Schwarzenegger and others to fine tune it.
Prop 1A, the big high-speed rail bonds measure, bucked the bad economy to win, 52.3% to 47.7%. And Prop 2, an initiative to stop cruelty to farm animals, won easily. But two flawed alternative energy inititiaves – mostly opposed by environmentalists – went down big.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger joins with leaders of Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, AARP, and the LA Chamber of Commerce this morning outside Los Angeles City hall to discuss the victory of Proposition 11, the redistricting reform initiative.
This is the first victory for a redistricting reform initiative in America, taking the drawing of legislative district lines out of the hands of legislators and placing it with an independent citizens commission.
Schwarzenegger will then hold private meetings and discussions in and around the state Capitol.
On Thursday, he will announce the special emergency session of the lame-duck state Legislature to deal with the profound deepening of California’s chronic budget crisis amidst the epic financial crisis. The former action superstar will lay out the nature and extent of the problem, his ideas on how to deal with it, and a timetable for action.
** THE TV AD WARS CONCLUDE. The TV ad wars between Barack Obama and John McCain are finally coming to an end. Obama is closing out with a ton of positive advertising, leavened with deft negatives linking McCain to President Bush and his failed economic policies, in a pair of ads that began running around the country on Friday. McCain has been mostly negative, befitting his trailing position in the race, though he has a positive closer ad. Nevertheless, despite his pledge this spring not to make Rev. Jeremiah Wright an issue in the campaign, at least one official organ of the party he now heads is running a hit spot on the Wright Stuff. … From my Monday Huffington Post column.
** DEMOCRATS: THE NEW WESTERN STRATEGY IS PAYING OFF. The election hasn’t happened yet, so it’s too soon to start counting electoral votes from the Democrats’ new Western strategy. But the dramatic re-shaping of the electoral battlefield is already clear enough. While the current party leadership deserves credit for a new path to presidential power, much of the new Western strategy has long been championed by former Senator Gary Hart.
The new strategy came into clear focus, fittingly for a party that knew it had to gamble on a new route to the White House, in Las Vegas, in January 2007 over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The snow on the famed Las Vegas Strip the day before seemed only a little less unlikely to many in the national media and political establishments than the new moves that were unfolding. … From my Thursday column.
** TV AD WARS: MCCAIN TAKES HIS LAST SHOT(S).For all the rumor-mongering about Obama as a “Manchurian candidate,” there is no silver bullet to defeat the vampire that haunts the nightmares of the far right. Reality is dawning. … From last Tuesday’s column.
** GLOBAL OBAMA: BIG OPPORTUNITIES, BIGGER CHALLENGES. If he wins, Obama will have the global popularity that no American president has had in a great many years. But what sort of challenges will counter the global opportunity that an Obama presidency might afford America? … From my October 24th column.
** INSIDE THE “BRADLEY EFFECT.”Barack Obama has won all three presidential debates over John McCain. He has a solid lead in the polls. What could go wrong for him? Well, many say the polls could be wrong, skewed by a hidden racist vote.
The “Bradley effect” — the notion that white voters lie to pollsters when a black candidate is in the race — has become widely known. But what you think you know from the campaign that gave rise to the phrase, then Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s ultimately near-miss race for governor of California in 1982, isn’t so.
I was in the middle of that, doing opposition research for Bradley’s campaign. I vividly recall election day that November, as reports from the exit polling done by California’s leading polling organization, the Field Poll, circulated. It seemed that Bradley, the first black mayor of Los Angeles, was headed for a big win as California’s first black governor. … From my recent Huffington Post column.
Russian President Dmitri Medvedev, in a wide-ranging state of the nation address as America elected Barack Obama, declared that Russia will forward deploy offensive missiles in Kaliningrad and employ electronic jamming technology to defeat the Bush Administration’s prospective anti-missile shield.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti.
While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
The drop of $81 per barrel since the record high over the summer comes on acknowledgment that the weak US economy will cut future demand and on the easing of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. It is clear that that, contrary to much chatter, neither the US nor Israel is about to launch a strike against Iran. And the Russian war with Georgia, confounding much speculation and reporting to the contrary, actually decreased the geopolitical risk premium in the oil market.
Barack Obama addressed 100,000 people in his election eve rally in Manassas, Virginia, site of the first major battle of the Civil War.
** THE PRESIDENTIAL RACE WILL FORMALLY BE CALLED FOR OBAMA AT 8 PM PACIFIC TIME. That’s when the polls close in California. Which will itself be a landslide win for Barack Obama.
** GAME OVER. IT’S PRESIDENT-ELECT BARACK OBAMA.
At 6:20 PM, Fox News called Ohio for Barack Obama. Unless some virtually impossible things happen, he is the next President of the United States. More to follow.
One big shift. College-educated whites are shifting from Republican to Obama.
** SCHWARZENEGGER ON THE POLLS. Speaking this morning after voting in his LA neighborhood, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger had a little fun. But I think the polls are looking very good for McCain, obviously. There’s a 50 percent in the latest polls, 50/50. I mean, that’s in our own house. (Laughter) And then there are very good poll numbers coming out, like it’s 100 percent of the votes, McCain, and that is amongst Austrian-born bodybuilders. So there’s all kind of great action going on, so I feel very optimistic today.
** SCHMIDT ON PALIN: PLENTY OF TIME TO TALK ABOUT IT LATER. Old NWN friend Steve Schmidt, interviewed during the last swing of the John McCain campaign plane, demurred when asked about Sarah Palin.
Schmidt, who ran Arnold Schwarzenegger’s near-flawless 2006 re-election campaign as California’s governor, took over the McCain campaign at a low ebb at the beginning of July.
Schmidt was asked about Palin by reporters on the plane. Here’s what he said: “You know, we’ll uh, I’m not going to do, there’ll be time for all the post mortems in the race.”
Asked if he was happy with what she had done for the ticket, Schmidt again deflected the question.
“I think that, you know, I think we’ll know in a few hours what the results are, you know and I, there’ll be a time for all the post mortem parts of it,” Schmidt said. “That’s not this afternoon before the polls close.”
Barack Obama, speaking yesterday at a rally in North Carolina, discusses his grandmother, who passed away earlier in the day in Honolulu.
** ABOUT THE EXIT POLLS. A huge number of people have already voted this year. We know that Barack Obama was doing significantly better than John McCain with early voting. But we don’t know exactly how much better. As to the election day vote, we know that exit polls tend to skew Democratic, as more conservative voters are generally older, less gregarious and less interested in being polled by somebody in a parka.
What we do know is that some 60% of those polled in exit polls so far saw the economy as the biggest issue, dwarfing the second biggest issue, Iraq. And that Obama was favored amongst both groups. The only major issue that McCain did best on was terrorism, and that was down in the single digits of emphasis.
** COMING UP FOR MY IMMEDIATE POST-ELECTION COLUMN: “THE AMERICA THAT CAN BE/THE AMERICA THAT HAS BEEN.” It’s about bringing together the best of Obama and the best of McCain.
** DOES MURDOCH REGRET NOT ENDORSING OBAMA? Global media magnate Rupert Murdoch’s conservative tabloid New York Post has what some are calling “Obama coronation cover” today, featuring a hero shot of the Democratic presidential nominee in front of a huge American flag with a screaming headline: “Brink Of History.” The author of a a forthcoming Murdoch biography, New York magazine media critic Michael Wolff, says that Murdoch – who owns Fox News amongst many other mostly conservative media properties around the world, including the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London (see the link below to a Times story debunking a favorite far right story about Obama and Bill Ayers – regrets allowing the Post to endorse John McCain instead of instructing it to endorse Obama.
What happened is that Murdoch and the Post made a mistake. For Murdoch it’s a galling mistake because he had wanted to endorse Obama.
In conversations with Murdoch over the past year, I’ve been privy to his mounting enthusiasm for Obama—indeed, Murdoch has reflected the enthusiasm of his entire family. And yet he punted.
This might be my fault: In a column I wrote for Vanity Fair in September, I said that Murdoch had a crush on Obama. The Post’s McCain endorsement, which came a week later, might have been a way to say nobody tells Murdoch what he’s going to do.
The other likely reason might have had to do with Murdoch having a Palin moment. Sarah Palin, especially in the days after the acceptance speech, seemed like a perfect Fox News ideal and Murdoch, with knee-jerk conservatism, went for it.
But he was left kicking himself.
Indeed, he is left with a news media operation whose conservatism makes him look like the one thing he cannot abide looking. . . old. The historic change that the Post announces today is as much about Murdoch trying to catch up with historic change as it is about an Obama victory.
This ad against California Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative, features Samuel L. Jackson decrying the measure as another extension of a long history of discrimination, and is airing in key markets around the state.
** PALIN SAYS SHE’LL BE LESS PARTISAN IN THE FUTURE. Sarah Palin, after voting in home state Alaska, where her governorship is now catching some serious flak, said she will be a less partisan figure in the future. Palin has become a very divisive, hyperpartisan figure, the “pitbull with lipstick,” as she herself put it.
As she waited for her beverages, a local reporter asked the governor how she envisions her role in national politics if McCain loses the election. Palin did not hesitate to muse about a future that might not include being vice president come January.
“You know, if there is a role in national politics it won’t be so much partisan,” she said. “My efforts have always been here in the state of Alaska to get everybody to unite and work together and progress this state.”
“It would certainly be a uniter type of role,” she added.
Barack and Michelle Obama voting early this morning in Chicago. Video of John and Cindy McCain voting in Arizona is not yet available.
** THE CANDIDATES’ LATE TRAVELS. Barack Obama went to Indianapolis, Indiana after voting this morning in Chicago. What’s he doing in the longtime red state? He thinks he can win it.
Joe Biden is going to Richmond, Virginia to try to lock down that longtime red state. Obama’s leading there, but there has been tightening.
John McCain? He’s off to New Mexico and Colorado, trying to pull these two Mountain West states back into the longtime Republican column.
Sarah Palin made the long flight to Alaska after her last rally of the campaign, in Elko, Nevada. She cast her vote this morning in hometown Wasilla, where she has most of her political experience as a local government official. She’s the only candidate not to appear in a battleground state today. She’s gotten a lot of criticism in Alaska since her shock naming to the Republican ticket.
** CALIFORNIA CALLING, AGAIN. Barack Obama is going to win very big in the nation’s largest state, but his organization is still playing a major role in the rest of the campaign. In addition to providing 20% of Obama’s funds, California’s Obama volunteers have fanned out around the country to battleground states. In addition, they are making phone calls into battleground states. Over the weekend, they called 2 million swing state voters. Yesterday, another 1.5 million. And today, they expect to complete another 1.5 million calls to get out the swing state vote.
** BOND IS BACK. AGAIN. The new Bond film, Quantum of Solace – an hour-later sequel to the smash Bond franchise reboot of 2006, Casino Royale – doesn’t open in the US until November 14th. It did open in Britain over the past weekend. And racked up the biggest opening weekend box office in UK history, $25.3 million.
Barack Obama’s new TV ad entitled “One day to change the world.”
** FINAL RASMUSSEN NATIONAL TRACKING POLL: OBAMA BY 6. The Rasmussen robopoll is the favorite public poll for most Republicans, with the possible exception of the Fox News polls. (FNC has Obama up 7 in its final national poll.) That’s for two reasons: It has a daily tracking poll, which began running months ago, and it’s owned by a fundamentalist conservative Republican, Scott Rasmussen.
The final Rasmussen national tracking poll: Barack Obama 52%, John McCain 46%. These numbers are from Saturday through Monday night. The Rasmussen Market gives Obama a 92.7% chance of winning the Presidency tonight.
“Barack Obama is reaching a generation that is trying to change the world in 160 characters or less,” said David All, a political consultant who advises Republicans on Internet strategy.
** EARLY RETURNS: DIXVILLE NOTCH AND HART’S LOCATION. These two hamlets vote just after midnight in New Hampshire in one of the charming little traditions of American politics. Not really a bellwether, except usually for the Granite State. Barack Obama became the first Democrat since 1968 to take the votes there. In Dixville Notch, it’s Obama over McCain, 15-6. In Hart’s Location, it’s Obama over McCain, 17-10.
** MANASSAS: 100,000 TURN OUT FOR OBAMA’S ELECTION EVE RALLY AT THE VIRGINIA SITE OF THE CIVIL WAR’S FIRST MAJOR BATTLE.Barack Obama held his last pre-election rally late Monday night in Manassas, drawing some 100,000 Virginians. Obama will appear this morning in Indianapolis, Indiana before returning to Chicago for his election night party in Grant Park.
Speaking before midnight, Obama said: “This is the last rally of a campaign that began almost two years ago. Whatever happens tomorrow, I have been deeply humbled by this journey.”
Obama kicked off his general election campaign in Virginia, which seemed an odd choice to many, given that it has not gone Democratic in a presidential race since 1964. There is a good chance that changes this year.
Manassas was the site in 1861 of the first major land battle of the Civil War. To the Union side, it was the First Battle of Bull Run. To the Confederate side, it was the First Battle of Manassas.
The Union side expected an easy win. Some spectators made the journey out into the Virginia countryside from Washington to witness the upstart Confederates being put down. They ended up fleeing back to the capital with the Union troops as the rebel forces turned the battle into a rout. President Lincoln sacked the commanding general following the debacle It was at the Battle of Manassas that Confederate General Stonewall Jackson got his nickname.
The Second Battle of Bull Run (or Manassas) took place in 1862. This ended in another victory for the Confederacy.
Since Rove has spent a lot of time denigrating Obama’s prospects in the past, this is interesting.
** FROM THE DEPT. OF WISHFUL THINKING: “AYERS WROTE OBAMA’S BOOK!” Conservative Republicans tried to hire an Oxford don famed for proving literary fakery to demonstrate that Barack Obama’s acclaimed first book, Dreams From My Father, was actually written by former domestic terrorist Bill Ayers. The offer of $10,000, to Dr. Peter Millican, was made by Robert Fox, a California businessman and brother-in-law of Chris Cannon, a Republican congressman from Utah.
It’s become an article of faith amongst some on the far right that Obama, being barely competent, did not write his youthful memoir and that it was instead written by Ayers. They cite supposed similarities between Dreams From My Father and Ayers’ Fugitive Days.
Fox sent Millican electronic copies of both books. Millican said he would run the text analysis so long as the results would be made be public even if Ayers was not the writer. The conservatives then backed away.
Millican took a preliminary look at the work and found the charges “very implausible.”
Said the Oxford don: “I thought it was extremely unlikely that we would get a positive result. It is the sort of thing where people make claims after seeing a few crude similarities and go overboard on them.”
** WHOOPS! The California Republican Party chose yesterday to file a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission about Barack Obama using his campaign plane in late October to fly to Hawaii to visit his ailing grandmother. Unbenownst to them, she had just died.
Lest we forget, as I noted yesterday, Rush Limbaugh claimed that Obama’s emergency trip to visit her less than two weeks ago was really about covering up his non-existent American citizenship.
John McCain’s upbeat, high-energy, closing web video.
** WHERE THEY ARE TODAY.
Barack Obama is in Indianapolis, Indiana and Chicago.
Joe Biden is in Richmond, Virginia and Chicago.
John McCain is in Grand Junction, Colorado; Albuquerque, New Mexico and Phoenix, Arizona.
Sarah Palin is in Wasilla, Alaska and Phoenix, Arizona.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger votes this morning in Los Angeles and holds a press conference outside his polling place to discuss the election, including the Proposition 11 redistricting reform initiative he’s championing.
On Wednesday, he calls a special session of the lame duck Legislature to deal with California’s chronic budget crisis, which is deepening.
** THE TV AD WARS CONCLUDE. The TV ad wars between Barack Obama and John McCain are finally coming to an end. Obama is closing out with a ton of positive advertising, leavened with deft negatives linking McCain to President Bush and his failed economic policies, in a pair of ads that began running around the country on Friday. McCain has been mostly negative, befitting his trailing position in the race, though he has a positive closer ad. Nevertheless, despite his pledge this spring not to make Rev. Jeremiah Wright an issue in the campaign, at least one official organ of the party he now heads is running a hit spot on the Wright Stuff. … From my new column.
** DEMOCRATS: THE NEW WESTERN STRATEGY IS PAYING OFF. The election hasn’t happened yet, so it’s too soon to start counting electoral votes from the Democrats’ new Western strategy. But the dramatic re-shaping of the electoral battlefield is already clear enough. While the current party leadership deserves credit for a new path to presidential power, much of the new Western strategy has long been championed by former Senator Gary Hart.
The new strategy came into clear focus, fittingly for a party that knew it had to gamble on a new route to the White House, in Las Vegas, in January 2007 over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The snow on the famed Las Vegas Strip the day before seemed only a little less unlikely to many in the national media and political establishments than the new moves that were unfolding. … From my Thursday column.
** TV AD WARS: MCCAIN TAKES HIS LAST SHOT(S).For all the rumor-mongering about Obama as a “Manchurian candidate,” there is no silver bullet to defeat the vampire that haunts the nightmares of the far right. Reality is dawning. … From last Tuesday’s column.
** GLOBAL OBAMA: BIG OPPORTUNITIES, BIGGER CHALLENGES. If he wins, Obama will have the global popularity that no American president has had in a great many years. But what sort of challenges will counter the global opportunity that an Obama presidency might afford America? … From my October 24th column.
** INSIDE THE “BRADLEY EFFECT.”Barack Obama has won all three presidential debates over John McCain. He has a solid lead in the polls. What could go wrong for him? Well, many say the polls could be wrong, skewed by a hidden racist vote.
The “Bradley effect” — the notion that white voters lie to pollsters when a black candidate is in the race — has become widely known. But what you think you know from the campaign that gave rise to the phrase, then Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s ultimately near-miss race for governor of California in 1982, isn’t so.
I was in the middle of that, doing opposition research for Bradley’s campaign. I vividly recall election day that November, as reports from the exit polling done by California’s leading polling organization, the Field Poll, circulated. It seemed that Bradley, the first black mayor of Los Angeles, was headed for a big win as California’s first black governor. … From my recent Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti.
While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
The drop of $81 per barrel since the record high over the summer comes on acknowledgment that the weak US economy will cut future demand and on the easing of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. It is clear that that, contrary to much chatter, neither the US nor Israel is about to launch a strike against Iran. And the Russian war with Georgia, confounding much speculation and reporting to the contrary, actually decreased the geopolitical risk premium in the oil market.
Bruce Springsteen, singing and playing snippets of “The Rising,” introduces Barack Obama and his family at a rally of 80,000 people yesterday in Cleveland, Ohio.
** TOMORROW – GAME DAY: NOVEMBER 4.
** THE TV AD WARS CONCLUDE. The TV ad wars between Barack Obama and John McCain are finally coming to an end. Obama is closing out with a ton of positive advertising, leavened with deft negatives linking McCain to President Bush and his failed economic policies, in a pair of ads that began running around the country on Friday. McCain has been mostly negative, befitting his trailing position in the race, though he has a positive closer ad. Nevertheless, despite his pledge this spring not to make Rev. Jeremiah Wright an issue in the campaign, at least one official organ of the party he now heads is running a hit spot on the Wright Stuff. … From my new column.
** NEVADA POLL: OBAMA BY 4. The new Public Policy Polling survey of battleground Nevada finds Barack Obama leading John McCain, 51% to 47%. Obama has a huge lead among those who have already voted, which is a majority of the Silver State electorate.
** INDIANA POLL: OBAMA BY 1. The new Public Policy Polling survey of surprise battleground state Indiana finds Barack Obama edging John McCain, 49% to 48%. Obama will visit Indianapolis on the morning of election day in his last public event outside of his home base of Chicago. Indiana has been reliably Republican since the Democratic landslide with Lyndon Johnson in 1964.
** RUSH LIMBAUGH’S COMMENTS WHEN OBAMA VISITED HIS GRANDMOTHER IN HAWAII. SHE JUST PASSED AWAY TODAY. Rush Limbaugh didn’t buy it when Barack Obama suspended his campaign for two days in late October to visit his ailing grandmother, who largely raised him, in Hawaii.
Here’s the Rushbo from his October 23rd radio broadcast, on the day that Obama flew from Chicago to Honolulu to see his grandmother for the last time: Who announces days in advance they’re rushing to the side of a loved one who is deathly ill, but keeps campaigning in a race that’s said to be over, only to go to the loved one’s side days later? See, I think this is about something else. You know what’s really percolating out there? And I’ve been laying low on this because it just — it hasn’t met the threshold to pass the smell test on this program. But this birth certificate business, this lawsuit that a guy named Phillip Berg filed in Philadelphia in August for Obama to produce his genuine birth certificate, and he still hasn’t replied, he hasn’t done so.
** OBAMA’S GRANDMOTHER PASSED AWAY TODAY IN HONOLULU. Barack Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham, died today at the age of 86 in Honolulu. Obama took a two-day break from the campaign trail on October 23rd and 24th to visit her in Hawaii for what turned out to be the last time.
It’s interesting to note that the right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh speculated that Obama’s trip to Hawaii was not to see his grandmother – who played a huge role in raising him after his mother died – but to hush up a supposed controversy about Obama not having a birth certificate and hence, not really being an American.
** MOSTLY RED STATE BATTLEGROUND SURVEYS: OBAMA MOSTLY AHEAD. The new Public Policy Polling surveys of a raft of battleground states, mostly red states, shows Barack Obama with a continuing though in some cases tightening edge over John McCain in a game being played mostly on McCain’s side of the field.
Here are the numbers. Montana: Obama, 48-47. Georgia: McCain, 50-48. Florida: Obama, 50-48. North Carolina: Obama, 50-49. Ohio: Obama, 50-48. Pennsylvania: Obama, 53-45. Virginia: Obama, 52-46.
** SUNDAY CROWDS. Barack Obama drew much bigger crowds in his Sunday events than did John McCain and Sarah Palin. Rolling across Ohio, Obama drew 60,000 in Columbus, 80,000 in Cleveland (where he was joined by the Boss, Bruce Springsteen), and 25,000 in a Sunday night rally in Cincinnati. McCain and Palin drew in the thousands in their venues yesterday.
** CALIFORNIA CALLING. Obama state communications director Gabriel Sanchez advises that the California branch of Obama for President is on target to make 1.5 million phone calls on Monday to swing state voters. Volunteers are spilling out of call centers into parking lots. Obviously using their cell phones.
Barack Obama’s brand-new web video, on the road to tomorrow’s election.
The Morning Column: MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACK.
With the election finally looming, Barack Obama and the Democratic Party he now leads are poised on the verge of an historic national victory tomorrow. As anticipated for months on NWN.
We also have a very important California election. California, of course, is Obama country now, and not competitive in the least, but his supporters here gathered at 10 Obama offices around the state over the weekend to make 2 million phone calls to swing state voters.
It’s been a very long campaign, beginning nearly two years ago with the dramatic Democratic victories in the 2006 congressional elections and the plunge in popularity of the the Bush/Cheney Administration. Now it’s nearly over. Then what may be even more interesting will begin.
It was about 22 months ago that I decided I had better check out this fellow Barack Hussein Obama. I’d seen him give a great speech keynoting the 2004 Democratic national convention. I had his latest book which was sitting in a pile. But there’s more to running for president than being a great speaker and a fine writer.
So I traveled to several cities to scout Obama at his appearances, meet him, spend time in the vicinity, and study it all. He was pretty tentative at first. But the thing was, he kept improving. He had a strong and very smart campaign organization. He had policies in the center-left groove where most of the country lives today. In other words, he had what it took to win the presidency.
Now we’ll see if he has what it takes to be the president.
John McCain’s brand-new web video features gun owners worried about an Obama Presidency.
As readers know, I’ve liked John McCain for a long time. I was a member of Veterans for McCain in 2000. I have friends running his campaign. But with the state of the Bush presidency and the Republican Party, the key question was always how Obama would do. How would he handle the slings and arrows of the outrageous fortune that is presidential politics? Could he keep to his course, which was the correct one for this election, while making needed adjustments? What would happen when people, including himself, discovered that he was not the perfect candidate?
We mostly know those answers now. We’ll know for certain tomorrow night.
Democrats will pick up 5 to 7 additional seats in the Senate, perhaps more. It’s unlikely they will get to the magic 60 needed to prevent filibuster. It is likely that they will frequently be able to pick up a few Republicans to go along with them.
Democrats will pick up 25 to 35 additional seats in the House. This will strengthen the hand of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi – the San Francisco Democrat and daughter and sister of Baltimore mayors – who has long been a private and finally public Obama supporter.
The question of the future direction of the federal government after President Bush and Vice President Cheney is for another moment. But given what is about to happen, and the deep and widespread popular rejection of both figures, it will be quite different.
This closing ad against California’s anti-gay marriage initiative, Prop 8, features Dianne Feinstein, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Barack Obama.
In California, Obama will win a huge vote, making it possible for Democrats to add to their majorities in both houses of the Legislature, especially the Assembly. One possible wrinkle. If Obama is clearly winning the presidency before polls close in the Golden State at 8 PM, Democratic turnout might be decreased.
That could affect the prospects for Prop 8, the attempt by religious conservatives to constitutionally ban same-sex marriage in California. The state’s Supreme Court, with a Republican chief justice writing the opinion, tossed out an earlier ban as unconstitutional. Prop 8 had been trailing earlier in the campaign, appeared to pull ahead narrowly on the strength of strong ads claiming that its failure would mandate the teaching of homosexuality in the schools and showing San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom saying that same-sex marriage is here to stay, “Whether you like it or not.”
The No on 8 campaign has recently settled on a set of strong TV ads rebutting that. But the Yes on 8 forces have sent out mailers featuring Obama’s personal opposition to same-sex marriage, claiming, incorrectly, that he would support their initiative. Which he does not.
Arnold Schwarzenegger and the allies listed below are poised to pull off an historic first; the first redistricting reform initiative in America which takes the power of drawing legislative district lines out of the hands of legislators and places it in a citizens commission. Prop 11 is leading in public and private polls going into the election, and the no vote is not growing.
On other initiatives … It looks like a new attempt to decriminalize the drug crimes system will go down to defeat, opposed by a broad coalition including all five living California governors of both parties. Proponents should talk with Governor Schwarzenegger and other leaders next time around to better calibrate their proposal. But an effort to provide more humane treatment to animals looks set to pass. However, a big bond measure to develop high-speed rail, a useful thing in the 21st century with the airlines in disarray, is ahead but may be the victim of bad economic times.
Speaking of which, Schwarzenegger will convene the Legislature for a special emergency session on the state’s chronic budget crisis, worsening amidst the epic financial crisis, after the election. Though we shouldn’t expect to see anything happen till late in the week.
** WHERE THEY ARE TODAY.
Barack Obama is in Jacksonville, Florida; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Manassas, Virginia.
Joe Biden is in Lee’s Summit, Missouri; Zanesville and Copley, Ohio; and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
Michelle Obama is in North Las Vegas, Nevada and Littleton, Colorado.
John McCain is in Tampa, Florida; Blountville, Tennessee; Moon Township, PA; Indianapolis, IN; Roswell, New Mexico; Henderson, NV; abd Prescott, Arizona.
Sarah Palin is in Lakewood, Ohio; Jefferson City, Missouri; Dubuque, Iowa; Colorado Springs, Colorado; and Reno and Elko, Nevada.
** FROM THE ARNOLD FILE. Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger campaigns around the California today for the redistricting reform initiative, Proposition 11. The initiative is leading in the polls and the former action superstar is hoping to drive home a victory for the first initiative in America to take the power of legislative redistricting away from legislators and place it in the hands of a citizens commission.
Schwarzenegger and his fellow Yes on Prop 11 campaign co-chair former State Controller Steve Westly go to San Jose this morning to join forces with former Clinton White House chief of staff Leon Panetta, Silicon Valley Leadership Group CEO Carl Guardino, San Jose City Councilmember Kansen Chu, State President of AARP California Jeannine English and President of the the League of Women Voters of San Francisco Karen Clopton to urge the passage of Prop 11.
This afternoon, Schwarzenegger goes to San Diego and joins Dan Gross, Executive Vice President of Sharp Healthcare, Dede Alpert, former state Senator and member of the Sharp Hospital board, Bonnie Dumanis, San Diego District Attorney and Jeannine English, State President of AARP California to urge the initiative’s passage.
** DEMOCRATS: THE NEW WESTERN STRATEGY IS PAYING OFF. The election hasn’t happened yet, so it’s too soon to start counting electoral votes from the Democrats’ new Western strategy. But the dramatic re-shaping of the electoral battlefield is already clear enough. While the current party leadership deserves credit for a new path to presidential power, much of the new Western strategy has long been championed by former Senator Gary Hart.
The new strategy came into clear focus, fittingly for a party that knew it had to gamble on a new route to the White House, in Las Vegas, in January 2007 over the Martin Luther King holiday weekend. The snow on the famed Las Vegas Strip the day before seemed only a little less unlikely to many in the national media and political establishments than the new moves that were unfolding. … From my Thursday column.
** TV AD WARS: MCCAIN TAKES HIS LAST SHOT(S).For all the rumor-mongering about Obama as a “Manchurian candidate,” there is no silver bullet to defeat the vampire that haunts the nightmares of the far right. Reality is dawning. … From Tuesday’s column.
** GLOBAL OBAMA: BIG OPPORTUNITIES, BIGGER CHALLENGES. If he wins, Obama will have the global popularity that no American president has had in a great many years. But what sort of challenges will counter the global opportunity that an Obama presidency might afford America? … From my October 24th column.
** INSIDE THE “BRADLEY EFFECT.”Barack Obama has won all three presidential debates over John McCain. He has a solid lead in the polls. What could go wrong for him? Well, many say the polls could be wrong, skewed by a hidden racist vote.
The “Bradley effect” — the notion that white voters lie to pollsters when a black candidate is in the race — has become widely known. But what you think you know from the campaign that gave rise to the phrase, then Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley’s ultimately near-miss race for governor of California in 1982, isn’t so.
I was in the middle of that, doing opposition research for Bradley’s campaign. I vividly recall election day that November, as reports from the exit polling done by California’s leading polling organization, the Field Poll, circulated. It seemed that Bradley, the first black mayor of Los Angeles, was headed for a big win as California’s first black governor. … From my recent Huffington Post column.
** 24/7 LIVE TV NEWS FEED FROM RUSSIA TODAY. Russia has re-emerged as one of the world’s great powers. Click here for a live TV news feed on your computer, bringing you English-language, jargon-free, fast-paced coverage of global and Russian news from the new Russia Today channel. You probably already know about CNN International, BBC World, and Al Jazeera. Russia Today, which also features culture, entertainment, and sports, is based in Moscow and is owned and operated by the TV Novosti division of Russia’s state news agency, RIA Novosti.
While it’s quite foolish to expect to see, say, criticism of Vladimir Putin on Russia Today, which I know as a former DemRussia advisor, the channel is very interesting nonetheless. With U.S. cable news chattering away as it does, this sort of respite can be informative. The NWN live link to RT does not constitute an endorsement of the channel’s views. It’s presented as an otherwise unavailable new media window.
Among them is what I’m sure is the first piece examining Schwarzenegger’s legacy as governor of California. Since he will actually be governor of California until 2011. No technology known to be disruptive to the space/time continuum was used in its preparation.
The drop of $82 per barrel since the record high over the summer comes on acknowledgment that the weak US economy will cut future demand and on the easing of geopolitical tensions in the Middle East. It is clear that that, contrary to much chatter, neither the US nor Israel is about to launch a strike against Iran. And the Russian war with Georgia, confounding much speculation and reporting to the contrary, actually decreased the geopolitical risk premium in the oil market.
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