I heard it again this morning, this time from Mara Liasson on Fox News Sunday. She complimented Obama's selection of Biden, then she added, "But people don't vote for Vice-President; they vote for President."
This time, instead of just shaking my head and grimacing in frustration at the fuzzy thinking that this nugget of Conventional Wisdom represents, I decided to address it directly.
I've always liked Joe Biden; would have voted for him in '88 if he hadn't blown his own campaign out of the water. (Well, I would have voted for him or Gary Hart, who also blew his own campaign out of the water. 1988 was a very bad year for Dem presidential candidates.)
But I wasn't thrilled with him as a Veep for Obama. Primarily because having spent more than half his life in the Senate, I thought he would undermine the core message of Change.
After listening to his speech, I'm here to say there are two fundamental reasons I was DEAD wrong.
We've had almost 8 years of one puppet president. We don't need another. Yet despite his claim to mavericky maverickness, the evidence suggests that is exactly what McCain would be.
Yesterday I posted a mopey diary, to clean out the McNastiness that accumulated in my brain over the weekend. But after several joyous events in the past 24 hours, I'm starting to feel something remarkably like . . . HOPE.
Ben Smith used the phrase "playing the POW card" to describe McShame's post-Saddleback shenanigans, and others have used that phrase here. This should be our rallying cry. Say it loud, say it proud, and say it often. We need to get that phrase mainstreamed. It's not only a pithy soundbite, it has the distinction of being true, and in fact encapsulating the most egregious sins flaws of the McCain campaign.
KO ripped McCain several new ones in an absolutely KICK-ASS Special Comment that gave eloquent voice to nearly all strands of the pent-up frustration I've been feeling lately. And he and Rachel M shredded McKingOfTheWorld for basically accusing Obama of treason in his VFW speech Monday.
There are too many unpleasant things floating around in my head from this weekend. I need to do a brain dump here to get several of them out of there. As you might imagine, they all relate to John McPOW.
I'll start by sharing with you this inspring image, which is apparently the winner of a poster contest on Magoo's website. I can't decide whether the irony is hilarious or just disturbing.
But it could be worse. Check after the flip for one that didn't win.
Meanwhile, something struck me about the Saddleback Forum that I don't think has been discussed here yet. People have been expressing wildly varying opinions about which voters each candidate lost and gained, and whether Obama is a hero for standing up to the RR, or a goat for letting them play him. I see it a little differently.
I think the significance of the forum was that it put into very stark relief the nature of the referendum that this election represents -- and it's not about left or right, religious or non-religious.
More on this, the losing poster, and an additional thought about the No-Cone controversy, below . . .
Problem #1: If 4 people can sit at 1 table, 8 people can sit at 2 tables, and 12 can sit at 3 tables, and this relationship continues, write an expression to describe the number of people who can sit at n tables and tell how many people can sit at 67 tables.
Problem #2: The table shows the total cost of purchasing different quantities of equally priced DVDs.
______________________________________
number purchased 025 ______________________________________
total cost $0$10$25 ______________________________________
Graph the ordered pairs (0,0), (2, 10), and (5, 25) and the line connecting the ordered pairs. Use the line to determine the total cost when 3 DVDs are purchased.
The title of this diary comes from a comment by dragon5616.
I've just read mconvente's diary, "Obama campaign passes 2 million donors."
Early on in the primaries, a lot of people (including me) wrote here that they were donating, canvassing, phonebanking, or otherwise actively participating in a campaign for the first time in their lives.
I haven't seen a lot of those stories lately. In recent months, the inspiration that initially motivated many of us to force ourselves out of our comfort zones has too often been overshadowed by drama, by nail-biting and pollwatching, by discord about Obama's shifting positions, by anger and frustration at the opposing campaigns and the media for their slurs, attacks and distortions.
But there were a couple of things about the comments to mconvente's diary that got me thinking and led to this diary.
Martial law has been declared in an Arkansas town.
The 24/7 curfew permits residents to leave their homes only if they have a reason good enough to satisfy the armed police patrols. The measure is a clear violation of the 4th Amendment.
THIS IS AN ACTION DIARY. If you haven't read Thurman Hart's diary on this topic, please do so now, and rec it up. Then we need to start doing everything we can to get the word out on this. Go below the fold for links to Digg that diary and several other related stories that have been posted to Digg. Write to the corporate media news people. E-mail your friends. Talk this up.
We need to take our country back!
The voters need to understand the shameful point at which we have arrived, as a logical extension of the Bush/Cheney Crime Family's contempt for our Constitution.
You remember that FABULOUS video of Barack's interview in Las Vegas, where he PWNED the living hell out of the Hannity/Tweety wannabe who was interviewing him? The video in my diary that was rec listed for a big chunk of the day yesterday?
Well, thanks to all of you, we got that video onto the front page of Digg.com -- where it still sits at this moment.
As of this writing, it has over 2500 Diggs and over 600 comments. Although there is the usual crop of inconceivably ignorant and racist comments, there are others written by people who felt they had really learned something about Obama by viewing the video, were feeling more comfortable about voting for him, were seeing that he isn't really a flip-flopper, etc.
That's great news, but it isn't the point of this diary. PLEASE, follow me below the fold. This is important.
You know, instead of having Obama surrogates appearing on all the talking head shows, I think we just need to find some way to create a few dozen Obama insta-clones and send them out instead.
Depending on how many Las Vegans [is that what they're called?] were watching today's episode of Face to Face on Channel 8, I think Obama may just have won himself the swing state of Nevada.
OK, maybe that's a slight exaggeration, but DAMN he was good. We've discussed many times here on DKos what a fast learner Obama is. I think he's getting more and more expert at this "attack McCain" thing as this week goes on.
Kossacks, we have an easily implemented but largely unused weapon available to fight against the curtain of darkness and obfuscation that has become the raison d'etre of the Traditional Media (TM).
Please join me after the jump, and also join me in the effort to make better use of the resources at hand.
69% of respondents have seen news coverage about the Paris/Britney ad. Of those respondents, only 22% believe the ad was racist. But more than half, 53% (it's not clear whether it's 53% of the 69%, or 53% of all individuals polled) believe Obama's comment about the dollar bill was racist.
He started with some prepared remarks on the economy (reiterating his "emergency relief plan") and the Gang of Ten energy bill (in a nutshell: we have to be more efficient in our energy usage; he won't vote for anything that suggests "drilling is the answer" to our energy problems, but in the interest of governing, which involves compromise, might consider a bill which includes drilling if the overall package meets his "clear goal" that we need to be moving toward).
Then came the questions. As you might imagine, most of them were about what's going on between the two campaigns right now. Details after the jump.
Despite his antipathy toward the Fairness Doctrine, McCain is apparently feeling neglected because of all the media attention Obama's been getting. So it would only be fair if they gave Magoo the same kind of coverage they're giving Barack. Here are a few suggestions for how the media can ensure that they are giving the candidates equal treatment.
I haven't seen or heard Obama's Berlin speech yet. For reasons I won't bore you with, I won't be able to see it until Sunday or Monday. But I did see clips of his interview with Brian Williams on Countdown and Hardball today.
From the diaries I've read here this evening, I gather that watching the video of the speech will probably make me feel pride in being an American -- both because of the quality of our next leader, and because of the way the folks in Berlin were showering the US with love.
But I doubt the emotions generated by the video will exceed the ones generated by hearing Obama speak the sentence I quoted in the title of this diary.
