As for me, I’m going to continue to view with great suspicion anybody who expects God to talk to them.  Where I grew up they called people who heard voices telling them what to do schizophrenic.

Palin is attempting to use the residual glow that she still enjoys to improve her now-tarnished image by giving multiple interviews with reporters like Matt Lauer and Greta Van Susteren.  Alessandra Stanley of the International Tribune writes “But so far, viewers have mostly witnessed some of the very traits – disarming candor and staggering presumption – that drove some McCain campaign aides to leak damaging accusations about her.”   In those, Sarah opines that the loss of McCain-Palin was due to:

• Hispanics
• Obama’s money advantage
• The “R” next to their names (backlash against Republicans)

I guess she had nothing to do with the loss of the ticket.  I think the McCainiacs have gone overboard trying to blame poor Sarah for all of their woes, but to claim that her presence on the ticket or the extremely poorly executed campaign had nothing to do with their loss sounds like magical thinking.  But then again, Sarah is expecting God to tell her what to do next, and if that isn’t magical thinking, I don’t know what is.

Fred Davis of Strategic Perspectives

I was in equal parts mesmerized and horrified.  I found myself admiring his cunning and his thought processes, but then would take a step back and realize that the net effect of his work is truly corrosive to society and to the reasoned discourse necessary for a well functioning democracy.

You have to admit that Davis’ efforts have often been effective.  But they’ve been effective by appealing to the worst among and within us.  The Harold Ford Jr. Playboy Bunny ad?  That was his.  The Elizabeth Dole “Godless” ad?  His too.  So was the “Celebrity” ad against Obama this season.  When you review his work, as I did in the recent session, you see a not so subtle appeal to racism, class warfare, homophobia and misogyny.  Convicts dancing in tutus and a white playboy bunny talking about a black candidate.  Many of the most memorable extremes in negative ads have come from Davis’ work.  It is this kind of slimy campaigning that caused McCain’s longtime friend Chuck Hagel to not endorse McCain in the Presidential election.

Davis claimed to be mostly not interested in politics, and that might be true. But he only works for Republicans, and seems to have drunk more than his share of the conservative kool-aid.

Fred Davis is at once smart and charming but also reprehensible and largely responsible for so much of the partisan rancor and the disgust with which most citizens now view the political process. The win-at-all-costs approach makes advertising hitmen like Davis the practitioners of a dark art that has become indispensable to campaigns on all sides of the political spectrum. It was an interesting experience to say the least. Fred played a number of his TV ads from recent campaigns as well as earlier campaigns on figures like James Inhofe (his uncle) and Sunny Perdue (the “King Roy Rat” ads. He was responsible this election for the Dole “Godless” ads, as well as the “celebrity” ad attacking Obama that featured Paris Hilton. Davis believes that these ads were responsible for improved polling numbers for his candidates. He claims that Dole won 60% of the votes on election day after his “Godless” attack ads, but the enormous early voting that the Obama campaign turned out led to Hagan’s victory.

I will show some of the ads here, but with mainstream news commentary around some of them, because I really don’t want to just amplify something that is so vile at its root.

If you know what I mean when I say that you feel like you were nearly seduced by evil, you know what I was feeling.  Davis has so much charm that you feel yourself being attracted to what he’s saying, only to stop and realize that what the man is doing is manipulative and at is core evil and wrong.

Probably the best example is when Davis played the three minute Michael Monsoor video that was used during the Republican National Convention this year.  If you’re not familiar with the story, Michael was a young Navy Seal who fell under enemy attack while on patrol in Iraq.  After being struck by a live hand grenade, this courageous young man fell on the grenade, ensuring his own death but saving the lives of the other young men with him.  It’s a moving story of heroism and self-sacrifice to be sure, and even as Davis replayed it he choked up.  So why would I say that the use of this video was evil?  Simply because it follows in a long line of examples of Republicans taking remarkable stories and trying to use them for their own political benefit.  Monsoor was a hero.  Using his tragic story to try to get votes, in my opinion, is a tragic, cynical and evil use of his sacrifice.  Sacrifice and service are not partisan. Neither the Republicans or Democrats hold a monopoly on patriotism and honor. Even McCain, who personally sacrificed so much, does not hold a monopoly on service and honor. But then again the Republicans were willing to use Kerry’s remarkable service against him in the “Swiftboat” ads. That marked a disgraceful new low. While not his work, that ad is part and parcel of the work that Davis does. Yes, Monsoor was a hero, and we ought to honor his sacrifice. But we should never attempt to use his remarkable service as a way to get more votes for one candidate over another. That, my friends, is disgraceful. But you almost forget that when you get caught up in the remarkable and emotional story.  And such is the way of Davis’ most successful efforts.

Some of the most interesting comments were about the struggle between maintaining an overall strategy (which Obama did with “Change”) and the daily tactical approach that the McCain campaign used, and which resulted in the changing messages which left only the impression of a candidate who had lost his essential self, and ended up hawking an inauthentic brand.

Davis is also a Sarah Palin fan, and claims she is a smart lady, and a future leader of the Republican Governors Conference.  When Davis talked about his high regard for Palin, it was all I could do not to shout out: “If Palin is so smart, she’s done an amazing job of hiding it in her overcoat of ignorance.”

Davis was appalled that people within the McCain camp had turned on Palin and spread stories about her ignorance – not knowing that Africa was a continent instead of a country; not being able to name the three parties to NAFTA (The United States, Mexico and Canada).  He said that top leaders of the campaign including Schmidt would be on talk shows this Sunday to rebut those claims, and that Schmidt had put Nicole Wallace (widely suspected from within the campaign as being the source of those comments, as she did not get along with Palin but was charged with her handling) in charge of shutting down that story line.

I left the session feeling like I had met the devil.  I have it in my mind that the devil is clever and charming, but that behind the easy smile and the effusive charm lies an evil that slips into the room silently and poisons all who allow themselves to be lulled to sleep.

One thing is for certain, to borrow a phrase from traditional conservative Peggy Noonan, we are witnessing the vulgarization of politics in America.  And the responsibility falls squarely on Fred Davis and his ilk, on the candidates who are willing to utilize these hit men, and on all of us who let them get away with it.

There are many ways to measure that impact – Sarah Palin’s poor favorability ratings overall, especially her lack of popularity among the important moderate and independent voters (she continues to be treated like a Christian-Rock-Star by the Christian Right part of the Republican base).  Some polls had as many as 60% of the population holding negative opinions and believing that Palin was not qualified.

While it’s always difficult to poll people based on a hypothetical scenario, that doesn’t stop the pollsters from trying.  CNN attempted to conduct such a survey two weeks ago, and calculated that McCain’s support would have been 2 points higher without Palin than it was with her on the ticket.

We might think that is an unimportant difference.  But this 2-point difference would have decided a large number of recent contests, where the margin of victory has been very slim.

Palin promises to stay around, and is exploring the best ways to position herself for 2012.  I think this is a marvelous idea.  I’ve re-upped my domain registration, and can’t wait to see the Republican party engage in an all-out cultural civil war all its own.

The fissures in the party that were always there are coming to the surface and could well rip that tent apart, leaving Republicans in the cold driving rain.  Umbrella, anyone?

In his recent Washington Post article “Call Him John The Careless, ” venerable populist/intellectual of conservatives George Will calls out McCain for his reckless choice of Palin as Vice-Presidential candidate.

In his article Will chides McCain for his choice of Palin and her severe misunderstanding of the role of Vice President, and also for their ridiculous challenge to the huge groundswell of support for Obama-Biden.  This surge has been moral, financial and has brought new participants, both young and old into the political process.  Indeed, Obama is one of the first “movement” candidates we’ve had in the United States in a very, very, very long time.  McCain now claims that Obama donors, who have contributed on average between $80 and $90 each, are somehow skirting campaign finance laws and subverting democracy.  Are you McCain’ing kidding me?

Palin and her “circle” were busy today contemplating Sarah’s future if/when McCain/Palin loses.  As I’ve written here previously, apparently Sarah believes she is the future of the Republican party and has even talked publicly about a 2012 run, “if” they lose.  Oops, NOT a talking point!  Personally I happen to think that the establishment Republicans will wrest back control and send Palin a’packin’ – but I always try to remember that no one has ever gone broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.  Especially Republicans.

I kind of hope Sarah stays around.  It would make this URL domain (www.hatepalin.com) a whole lot more useful, and my life a lot more interesting.  It would also mean the dissipation of conservative power over the nation due to internecine warfare within the Republican party.  I think that would be a very good thing.

If it weren’t all so serious, it would be comical.

And now this.  The Alaska newspaper with the biggest circulation, the Anchorage Daily News, has looked past Palin’s ticket to endorse Obama-Biden.

Sarah’s popularity in her own state has been hurt by the negative style of campaigning of the McCain-Palin ticket, the concern that she looks foolish and unprepared in the harsh glare of the national spotlight, worry that she reflects badly on Alaska, and the revelations of petty vindictiveness from the Troopergate scandal.

Republican pundits like Ed Rollins believe that after a presumed McCain-Palin loss that Sarah Palin will work the national rubber chicken circuit to raise money for Republican candidates, and gain some seasoning that could position her for a run again in 2012 at the top of the ticket.

Personally I think there’s little chance of that.  I still think that the Republicans will bundle her off back to Alaska.  I’m sure she’d continue to play well to the Christian Right, but that the establishment wing of the party will see her only as a reminder of one of the main reasons that the party lost the White House.

But I’m willing to concede that I may have (in the words of George HW Bush) misunderestimated her.  For the sake of more material about which to write and continued interest in this site, I almost hope she sticks around for a while.

The Republican Party has done an amazing job holding together an uneasy coalition since the time of Reagan.  While the nuances are more complicated, it is not wrong to say that there have been two large clusters who often do not share a great deal within the coalition:  Traditional conservatives and the Religious Right.  Democrats are an even more fractured coalition of labor unions, African-American, Liberals, and teachers, and it is this diversity of interests that have made uniting those groups an even greater challenge than the Republicans have had.

Traditional conservatives include the more intellectual, moderate, fiscally conservative, “country-club” Republicans that formed the core of the Republican party until the late 1970′s.  Think top hats and martini sipping.

Shortly after the Democrats changed course, and went from a party that acted in obstruction of the civil rights movement and instead embraced civil rights, the Republicans started to flirt with the emerging evangelically-led religious right groups in order to obtain the possibility of a majority.  The Religious Right shifted from the traditional fundamentalist separation view which did not wish to be sullied by the worldly concerns represented by politics into the modern evangelical view of engagement that sought control of the political apparatus, using the Republican Party as its vessel.

Thousands of groups formed around specific objectives and interests, but the most visible, and arguably effective in the political sphere, was the now largely defunct Moral Majority.  Leaders in this movement included Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Bill Bright, James Dobson, and Don Wildmon – many of whom remain active to this day.  Most of these groups saw themselves as participating in the tradition of Christian “Great Awakenings” – movements of spiritual revival brought on as waves of new believers repented of their sins, found Jesus, and filled the churches, igniting a spreading wildfire of spiritual passion and renewal.  Concurrent with this socio-spiritual change was the growing movement of Christian Reconstructionism, first popularized by John Rushdoony in a publication in 1973.  The basic idea is that governments are subordinate to God, and that rather than pursuing secular government as had been the dominant paradigm, that it was the duty of Christians to control government, and legislate morality and to become a “Christian Nation.” I know a little of what I speak, having been involved in the movement from the early 1980′s through the mid1990′s first as a part of “Campus Crusade for Christ,” and later as a member of several activist evangelical churches across the country.

In case you’d like a scorecard, William F. Buckley, John McCain, George Will, Christopher Buckley, Colin Powell, William Weld, Peggy Noonan and, yes, even Ronald Reagan are or were traditional conservative Republicans.  Sarah Palin, James Dobson, James Watt and John Ashcroft are part of the Religious Right.  Mitt Romney represents an interesting figure – he could be considered a traditional Republican, except for his Mormon faith.  Mormonism lies far outside the bounds of traditional Evangelical Christianity, which considers it to be a cult, despite the best attempt by the Mormon church to define itself as within the mainstream Christian tradition.  It is an interesting challenge to keep together many groups who define salvation as specific and exclusive.

It is for this very reason that McCain had to work so hard to go against his instincts and his identity as a traditional conservative Republican and embrace the Religious Right in this campaign.  Having called (correctly in my view) the Religious Right “agents of intolerance” after their work to defeat him in earlier primaries, he realized that he needed their support to win the Republican nomination, so he spent years reversing course and cozying up to them.  Unfortunately I don’t believe that we are yet at the place where adherence to the Religious Right’s ideals make one unelectable at the national level, but McCain’s reversal of position left unease on all sides, and made people feel like they didn’t know the “real” John McCain.  If they vote for him, will they get the John McCain of eight years ago (the “maverick” who fought parts of his own party), or the John McCain of the last 8 years (who wrapped himself in the folds of George Bush voting with him over 90% of the time, and embracing the religious movement that he once criticized)?  Many close to McCain have said that it is this fundamental inconsistency that has exacerbated his already cantankerous personality, and made his temperament a critical and possibly fatal consideration for the women and independents he needs to win.

In previous administrations the religious right was mollified by superficial professions of a belief system that was close enough to being “right” combined with policy planks that addressed their specific agenda: against abortion, against gay rights, relaxation of the hard line between church and state.  As a former evangelical, I understand the uneasiness most members of the Religious Right felt when they heard Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush and John McCain speak of their faith (which, by the way, is something they restricted to closed door meetings – not open to the media – held by religious interest groups rather than open forums).  After getting elected, the ruling administrations have largely abandoned those parts of the plank that were of most concern to the Religious Right, resulting in that movement feeling, appropriately, used by the party.  This year McCain had enough trouble with the traditional party establishment that the right felt empowered to demand its own Vice President candidate, and McCain was forced to find one that also offset his own weaknesses:  age, lack of charisma and exploit Obama’s perceived weakness with women following a long grueling primary fight with Hillary Clinton.  Thus did we arrive at a place where a relatively unknown and inexperienced Sarah Palin was placed on the ticket.  But rather than heal the rift, as Palin’s fortunes have sagged after an initial burst, Palin is now serving to expose and deepen the divide.

Traditional Republicans are abandoning the ticket in droves.  Uninspired by McCain and horrified by Palin, they are quietly or publicly supporting the Obama-Biden ticket.

This rift has now reached a critical moment and moved center stage.  To get back to the title of this article, Christopher Buckley is the most recent to suffer from the attempt for solidarity and purity.  No longer able to support a ticket that so thoroughly disdains the intellectual underpinnings of conservatism that his father had been so instrumental in creating, he came out in support of Barack Obama.  He wrote that his father William F. Buckley would have been “appalled” by Palin’s vapid folksy talking points and philosophical incoherence.

The resulting outcry came quickly and vehemently.  So much so that Christopher Buckley decided to offer up his resignation as a symbolic act of protest.  To Buckley’s surprise the editors accepted his resignation, believing that they needed to hew to party unity.  This insistence on falling in with the party line to foster unity and the attempt to paper over real differences will only weaken the Republican Party.

I will confess that I have always adored William F. Buckley’s writing, and it has influenced me greatly.  He had an ability to write thoughtfully about nuanced topics with great clarity, and with a love for and mastery of the English language that was rare.  While I have grown out of much of his system of beliefs, he was always someone whom I would have loved to have met, and to have engaged in lively discussion and debate.  But our political culture seems to have lost the idea that a robust debate about ideas is healthy and can be civil.

This week I have again been challenged about the appropriateness of this site’s URL:  hatepalin.  I have been told that I am feeding the trend toward vulgarity and incivility with the use of the word “hate.”  The idea when I started this site was to:

1. Help vet Sarah Palin – to find and expose the truth, since so little was known about her
2. Expose the hate engendered in the exclusionary and divisive agenda of Sarah Palin and the Religious Right
3. Write about my disdain for the policies of Sarah Palin that I hate

I will repeat here and perhaps figure out a way to move to the front of the site the statements on the “About” Page:  I don’t hate Sarah Palin.  I do hate her policies and much of what she stands for.  If you want to know what this site is about and the word “hate” so disturbs you, ignore the URL, and focus on the title page.  Here’s what it looks like and says:

And I stand firmly by both of those premises.

Christopher Buckley, thank you for standing up for what you believe.  Thank you for staying true to what your father worked so hard to build.  You will not be the one left in the wilderness when the Republican rift has worked its course.  You will help rebuild a truly Grand Old Party into its historic best and not its present worst.

But read it for yourself from Christopher Buckley:

Buckley Bows Out of National Review

and

Sorry, Dad, I’m Voting for Obama

We’ve seen former Secretary of State Colin Powell and former Press Secretary Scott McClellan come out in support of Obama.  Peggy Noonan, while not actually voicing support, has been highly critical of Palin and of McCain for choosing her.

Here are two more Republicans for Obama:

• Former Governor William Weld of Massachusetts
• Former Governor Arne Carlson of Minnesota

Combine these defections with a shrinking electoral map, and McCain-Palin face daunting odds indeed.  There’s still a lot of time in the race, and anything is possible, but the signs can’t be encouraging for those within the McCain-Palin campaign.  Let’s take a quick look at some of the key states:

• McCain-Palin have essentially given up on these key “swing” states:  Michigan, Iowa, New Mexico
• McCain-Palin are near to conceding:  Ohio, Missouri
• Toss-up states that should be solidly Republican:  Indiana, North Carolina
• And one of the two kahunas?  Florida, where McCain-Palin went from a recent 5 point lead to a 1 point deficit as of today.

What does that leave?  The other big kahuna – Pennsylvania.  The electoral math says that Pennsylvania has become a must-win state for McCain-Palin.  And Tom Ridge, after being passed over for the VP slot, is still a McCain-Palin supporter, but he has been publicly speculating that the ticket would be much further ahead had McCain chosen him instead of Sarah Palin.

There’s even a site now for Republicans who are supporting Obama:  www.republicansforobama.com

As I’ve said before, the Palin decision worked great at firing up the hard right base, but not only has it alienated the independents necessary to win, by all indications it has also alienated enough moderate Republicans, including former holders of powerful positions like Governors of big states.  Not a good sign for McCain-Palin at all.

No friend of Obama or the Democrats, she has been scathing in her assessment of the candidacy of Sarah Palin.  Here are a few excerpts from her opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal on October 17, 2008:  “Palin’s Failin.”

But we have seen Mrs. Palin on the national stage for seven weeks now, and there is little sign that she has the tools, the equipment, the knowledge or the philosophical grounding one hopes for, and expects, in a holder of high office. She is a person of great ambition, but the question remains: What is the purpose of the ambition? She wants to rise, but what for?

No news conferences? Interviews now only with friendly journalists? You can’t be president or vice president and govern in that style, as a sequestered figure. This has been Mr. Bush’s style the past few years, and see where it got us. You must address America in its entirety, not as a sliver or a series of slivers but as a full and whole entity, a great nation trying to hold together. When you don’t, when you play only to your little piece, you contribute to its fracturing.

In the end the Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics. It’s no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain, against his judgment and idealism.

While I don’t agree with a great deal of what Peggy Noonan says and believes, I think that she is spot-on in her assessment of Palin.  And it is precisely this conclusion, that Palin is by no means qualified to be Vice President – or God forbid – President, and that her selection reflects so badly on John McCain that it could well cost him the White House.

Still, McClellan’s formal announcement earlier today on the new “T.L. Hughley Breaks The News” comedy show on CNN, is still striking in that moderate Republicans seem to be breaking more strongly away from McCain-Palin.

I have to believe that it’s for many of the same reasons that Colin Powell endorsed Obama:

• Obama is a transformative historic figure
• McCain’s campaign has been unsteady
• McCain has cozied up to the right wing of the Republican party
• Palin highlights the extent to which McCain has bought into the “win-at-all-costs” mentality
• Palin’s selection demonstrates how much beholden the Republican party is to the religious right.

View the interview here:

The campaign follows in a long line of disenfranchisement efforts that stretch back to Jim Crow laws, and includes the well-documented shenanigans that made the 2000 and 2004 US elections on par with third world rigged elections, and about which America should be ashamed.

The ultimate debacle of course happened in Florida – led by the embarrassing Katherine Harris (see my post on the parallels between Palin and Harris here).  There the Republican Secretary of State Harris, working in conjunction with George W. Bush lawyers and George’s brother Jeb, the Republican Governor of Florida, decided the outcome of the Presidential election by refusing to count votes made in support of the Democrat Al Gore, in addition to other procedural decisions that effectively disenfranchised the votes of those who did not support Bush.

McCain-Palin know that there has been a huge surge of new voter registrations, mostly by young and minority voters.  This surge helped Obama defeat the political machine of Hillary Clinton in the primaries.  These new voters remain energized and likely to vote in the upcoming election.  The problem is that Obama-Biden leads McCain-Palin by enormous margins.  So what’s a campaign to do?

The answer is simple:

1. Keep voter turnout low.
2. Don’t count votes for the opponent.

The Republicans have a long tradition of trying to scare voters they think will vote against them.  They’ve used “push polling” to give out bad advice to likely Democratic voters:  the wrong voting location, the wrong election day.  (They’ve also used “push polling” to spread lies like phantom illegitimate mixed race babies, like Bush did against McCain in the primaries, but I digress).  They’ve spread false information about the voting process or voting requirements intended to scare voters away from participation.  Yes, they’ve even starved areas of necessary resources in order to ensure long lines and more inconvenience in order to discourage voting.  Shameful, really.

Ohio matters:  perhaps you’ve read recently about the Supreme Court ruling against the Republicans.  The Supreme Court just ruled on Friday, October 17th, 2008, overturning a decision of a Federal Appeals Court.  The Republicans were trying to compel the Secretary of State of Ohio (a Democrat) to turn over to the Republicans a list of new voters for whom there were some database mismatches against other governmental lists, like the DMV record.  The Republicans were going to use this list to give to partisan poll workers who would then challenge voters individually when they came in to vote.  They would seek to either not allow the people to vote, or to have their ballots made “provisional” – meaning they’d be kept separate, not counted with the general votes, and only counted after long protracted legal wrangling if that might help the Republicans.  Think about it – the Republicans have a strategy of keeping voter turnout low and trying to prevent having people’s votes from counting.  Even if the information is faulty, or the mismatches something as simple as a change of address, or a misspelled name as the result of an error by a government worker (Sara instead of Sarah?  Palin instead of Palen?).  Most experts estimate that in excess of 80% of the mismatches are just these kinds of simple errors.  For a detailed report on the Ohio decision, read this New York Times article:  Justices Block Effort to Challenge Ohio Voters.

Who amongst you has never had a simple government data entry error with their name or address?

In addition to Ohio, McCain-Palin have made ACORN central rallying cry for their campaign recently (we can only hope this central message lasts as long as the previous 20).  ACORN is an organization that seeks to bring low income people into the political process, and to advocate for low income housing and the preservation of jobs for the low and unskilled.  As part of an effort to increase the appallingly low voter registration rates in this group, they paid canvassers to go out into these low income neighborhoods and get people to register.  Some of these 1,600 paid canvassers apparently made up names on their list.  But ACORN had a solution for this:  they themselves would segregate the names into three categories:  those that seemed to be OK, those that were probably not OK, and those that might not be OK – and they identified the names with these categories when they submitted them.  In fact, it would be illegal for the organization to “throw out” names they thought were bad.  Imagine, should an organization be able to decide what they submit and what they don’t when someone thinks they’ve signed up to vote?  I think not.  Should they be able to ask how the person will vote and then only register Democrats, or only register Republicans?  Of course not.  But the Republicans know that the efforts of ACORN are probably bringing more Democrats than Republicans to registration, so they are attempting to discredit the entire effort.  By the way, does “ACORN” sound scary to you?  If it does, it’s just an indication of how effective the right-wing scare machine is.  It stands for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN).  Liberal?  Yes.  A threat to the very existence of democracy?  Hardly.  And we saw at the Republican convention how icky and scary this batch of Republicans like Giuliani and Palin think “community organizing” is.  More cynical politics and more class warfare, courtesy of McCain-Palin.  It would be laughable if it didn’t have such serious consequences.

The Republicans want to win at all costs.

It galls me that Republicans would seek less participation in the electoral process.  But that’s exactly what’s happening.

That’s disenfranchisement.  And that’s just palin wrong.

We need look no further than Katherine Harris of Florida for how the Republican party will treat Palin in the future when her usefulness is done.  She will go from being the toast of the party to being an embarrassing relative pushed to the background, and erased from memory.

Katherine Harris, of course, is the former Republican Secretary of State of Florida whose actions had an enormous impact on the outcome of the 2000 election.  Harris entered politics with her election to the Florida Senate in 1994.  As early as 1996 she was caught up in a scandal when a company called Riscorp made $400,000 in illegal political pay-to-play donations, including over $20,000 to Harris.  The CEO of Riscorp did prison time after confessing guilt; Harris was never charged.  In 1998 she won the race for Secretary of State of Florida, which would give her a pivotal role in the 2000 Presidential election.

Harris leveraged her new found recognition to a seat in the US Congress in 2002.  She then ran for the US Senate in 2006.  Unfortunately for Harris she had more political funding trouble, as she was involved in the MZM defense contractor scandal that had led to the conviction and resignation of California Congressman Randy “Duke” Cunningham.  The Republican establishment which had come to power because of Harris now turned against her.  Jeb Bush publicly speculated that she couldn’t win and encouraged others to run against her.  Karl Rove soon followed suit.  The entire Republican establishment rushed to find a replacement candidate, and even recruited conservative commentator Joe Scarborough to step in.  The flow of Republican money soon dried up, and when her father left his sizable estate entirely to her mother, she was left without the money needed to compete.

In another eerie parallel to Sarah Palin, Harris was another evangelical Christian who apparently believed in Christian Reconstruction – the belief that Christians have a duty to God to make America a theocracy.  That’s right, they have the same approach to government as fundamentalist Muslims – just a different theology.

Here’s what Harris said to the Florida Baptist Witness on August 24, 2006.

“We have to have the faithful in government and over time, that lie we have been told, the separation of church and state, people have internalized, thinking that they needed to avoid politics and that is so wrong because God is the one who chooses our rulers. And if we are the ones not actively involved in electing those godly men and women and if people aren’t involved in helping godly men in getting elected then we’re going to have a nation of secular laws. That’s not what our founding fathers intended and that’s certainly isn’t what God intended. … we need to take back this country. … And if we don’t get involved as Christians then how could we possibly take this back? …If you are not electing Christians, tried and true, under public scrutiny and pressure, if you’re not electing Christians then in essence you are going to legislate sin. They can legislate sin. They can say that abortion is alright. They can vote to sustain gay marriage. And that will take western civilization, indeed other nations because people look to our country as one nation as under God and whenever we legislate sin and we say abortion is permissible and we say gay unions are permissible, then average citizens who are not Christians, because they don’t know better, we are leading them astray and it’s wrong.”

If the positions seem eerily familiar, it’s because Palin shares them lock, stock, barrel and “Jesus loves the NRA” bumper sticker.

In the Florida Senate race in 2006, the Republicans got their replacement candidate, Vern Buchanan, who eked out a victory by only a few hundred votes.

Sarah, I feel for you.  Right now you’re the toast of the Jesus and Guns circuit.  You’re being told that you not only have to try to help McCain overcome difficult odds to win the election, but you also have to think about your own future should the ticket lose.  You’re even thinking that you could become President one day.  I’d suggest you give Katherine a call, and see how solid and lasting that Republican embrace is.  If there’s one thing that Republicans hate more than a Democrat, it’s a loser.

I hope that we can all agree that intelligence matters.  We’ve suffered through 8 years of a guy who isn’t that bright (just ask his Harvard Business School classmates, as I have, off the record), but who some of us apparently wanted to have a beer with.  Funny, I think he’s a teetotaler now, having drunk and snorted his way to near oblivionn, but I digress.

OK, intelligence matters.

While not perfect, the IQ test has a lot going for it.  It’s been around a long time.  It’s rather the de facto standard.  It doesn’t put too much weight on accumulated knowledge, but rather attempts to get to some core traits that define intelligence.

Now the top of the ticket is definitely more important than the second slot.  So here’s what we do.  We pick a day, make all four candidates show up.  We have a stern looking teacher-type there to administer the test.  Then we calculate the IQ’s of the candidates.  The candidate for President’s score is at face value (remember 100 is average, 85 is the highest end of retarded).  The Vice Presidential candidate’s score is 50% of face value.

Whichever ticket has the highest calculated score wins.  We call it a day.

So what do you think?  McCain?  Palin?  Obama?

… John McCain is the pig.

When the “controversy” first broke over Obama’s use of the old “lipstick on a pig – same old pig” statement, with the right wing blustering in fake outrage about the sexism of the statement, I didn’t think too much about it.  It seemed like more of the same ridiculousness at high volume you’d expect from the McCain campaign and O’Reilly, Hannity, Beck et al.

But at the gym this morning, it occurred to me why it’s stayed with me.  It’s true.  They just got the roles wrong.  You see they were trying to say that Obama called Palin a pig.

Obama should have said

“No, I wasn’t calling Sarah Palin a pig.  I was calling John McCain a pig.  You see, the saying refers to taking something that’s ugly (Bush’s failed policies) and dressing them up in different makeup and trying to sell them as something pretty.  And that’s what McCain is trying to do.  Remember when he was the ‘Experience candidate’?  Now it’s supposedly all about change.  Sorry, but McCain and his proposals are still pigs.”

But that would be too confrontational for the gentlemanly, cool, professorial Obama.

Now I suppose instead of saying that McCain is the pig, we could say that Bush’s policies are the pig, and McCain’s policies are the same pig with the lipstick of a McCain-Palin ticket, but that would lack the punch.  There’s something viscerally satisfying about saying that McCain is the pig, delicately sweetened with just the hint of guilty pleasure.  And anyway, if people couldn’t see the context of the Obama comment for what it was – a knock on the failed Bush policies, they’d miss the subtlety of the more refined argument anyway.

So Palin is the lipstick, McCain is the pig.  And you can put lipstick on the pig, but it’s still a pig.

So there.  I’ve said it.

The original Maverick?  Huh?!  An outsider?  Huh?!  The McCain-Palin campaign is being run by insider lobbyists, trying desperately to wrap themselves in a shawl of change, because they’ve figured out that’s what America is demanding.

Does McCain-Palin really believe that the public won’t see through their cynicism?  The candidate of change – after his party has controlled the presidency for the last eight years, after he was the most ardent of deregulation supporters (including oversight of Freddie Mac).

McCain admits he doesn’t know as much about the economy as he should.  Palin knows even less.  I wonder if she’s even had just one college-level class in economics given her school-jumping.  Now, apparently, McCain either didn’t know as much about his campaign manager as he should, or else he DID know, but was trying to keep that information out of the public’s view.

Check out the story in the Washington Post:  McCain Aide’s Firm Was Paid Recently.