• 10:58 p.m. ET

Points Scoring: The Scorer's Table unenthusiastically reports this bout as going to Senator John Kerry by 12 rounds to 4, with 5 rounds even. On individual points, Senator Kerry is awarded a net total of 19 points, and President Bush a net of 2, having undermined his own effort with no less than eight points subtracted, three of them in a disastrous 12th Round in which the President had to be told time was up, answered a question with, in essence, 'all of the above,' and stumbled by inadvertently criticizing himself by claiming the borders of Texas were tighter than they'd been when he was Governor there. He also lost points for having twice invoked the 2000 election, and for once having given back at least a minute of time when the question hadn't really been answered.

Back in May, I argued that with the American electorate's across-the-board preference for Democratic policies and a historically unpopular Republican president, John McCain's campaign would turn the November election into a "character war." In September, campaign chairman Rick Davis confirmed the GOP would follow its tried and true strategy from 2000 and 2004 when he announced "this election is not about issues" but instead about "a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." On Tuesday night, Americans will learn not only whether Barack Obama won the election, but whether voters literally thought he was a better man.

Heading into Election Day, Senator Obama looks like to outperform his recent Democratic predecessors across a range of policy and demographic measures. An October Rasmussen survey showed that Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans across each of the 10 issues tracked. The party of Obama enjoys double-digit leads on the economy (by 13%), Social Security (12%), health care (20%)and education (by 19 points).

That issue advantage, compounded by John McCain's feeble response to the economic crisis and the GOP's increasingly xenophobic line towards immigrants, is helping fuel Obama's strong performance among critical voting blocks. As I detailed last week, media myths notwithstanding, Barack Obama will approach traditional levels of Democratic support among Jewish voters and outpoll Al Gore and John Kerry among Hispanics. And with his backing among white voters reaching 44% in the final CBS News/New York Times survey, the African-American Obama may surpass the levels achieved by Gore (42%), Kerry (41%) and even Bill Clinton (43%). Four years ago, John Kerry lost among white men by a 25 point margin (62% to 37%); according to a Fox News poll, Obama now trails John McCain by only 5 points among the same group.

But from the moment John McCain secured the Republican nomination, his fall strategy rested on creating a "character gap" between himself and Obama. As in 2000 and 2004, I argued, the Republicans would try to turn the race into a presidential personality contest:

And to win it, they need to manufacture a "character gap" between John McCain and Barack Obama...The data is clear. If the election is about the economy, health care and Iraq, John McCain cannot become the 44th president. Only if the GOP succeeds once again in transforming the race into a media medley about lapel pins, angry ministers and Muslim-sounding middle names can the Republicans hope to maintain their hold on the White House.

Sadly, we've been here before. The 2000 and 2004 exit polls clearly show the Republican Party succeeded both in portraying the presidential contest as being about character and in defining the accepted media narrative for candidates Bush, Gore and Kerry.

Continue reading »

The Pew Research Center’s latest report notes, “Trends in the opinions of America’s youngest voters are often a barometer of shifting political winds.” If so, the winds are at Democrats’ backs, and will be for a quite a while. While young people shifted to the Democratic Party a bit in the 1990s, the bottom fell out for the GOP and younger voters during Bush’s presidency.

In 1992, Republicans enjoyed a slight edge in party identification among 18-29 year olds, 47% to 46%. Four years later, Democrats claimed a six-point edge, 50% to 44%. By the time of the 2000 election, Democrats’ lead had expanded slightly to eight points, 49% to 41%.

And voters under the age of 30 have been making a beeline from the Republican Party ever since. In 2004, Democrats’ lead among young voters’ party ID expanded to 11 points, 51% to 40%. And in 2008, the margin became a landslide — Democrats 58%, Republicans 33%.

What’s striking is not just the one-sided nature of young voters’ preferences, but the speed with which the change occurred. As recently as the 2002 midterms, voters aged 18 to 29 split evenly between Democrats and Republicans. In the 2006 midterms, they backed Democrats, 63% to 33%. Between 2004 and 2008, the party ID shift has more than doubled in Dems’ direction.

The change is also broadly based. From the Pew report:

In fact, the Democrats’ advantage among the young is now so broad-based that younger men as well as younger women favor the Democrats over the GOP — making their age category the only one in the electorate in which men are significantly more inclined to self-identify as Democrats rather than as Republicans.

While more women voters in every age group affiliate with the Democratic Party rather than the GOP, the gap is particularly striking among young women voters; more than twice as many women voters under age 30 identify with or lean toward the Democratic Party as favor the Republican Party (63% vs. 28%).

Talk about your emerging Democratic majority.

I suspect most Dems have a caricature in their mind of devious Republican smear artists, who help GOP candidates pander to the public’s worst instincts. These operatives specialize in opposition research — or, “oppo” — which, as the caricature tells us, involves political hitmen digging through dirt and peddling in innuendo, all in the interests of conning voters.

In reality, the caricature is probably a bit of an exaggeration. These smear artists don’t literally dig through Democrats’ garbage; they usually pay someone else to do that. But if we wanted to match this image with a real-life example, we’d have to point to Stephen Marks, who recently published, “Confessions of a Political Hitman,” and who chatted with the NYT’s Deborah Solomon about his career.

What led you to write your new book, “Confessions of a Political Hitman,” which chronicles your rather unsavory career as a Republican Party operative who was hired in hundreds of political campaigns to dig for dirt on Democratic candidates? I wouldn’t use the word unsavory. The voter has the right to know the history of any candidate in order to make the most educated vote.

Why do you make yourself sound as benevolent as a reference librarian? Because opposition researchers perform a needed public service.

In the 2000 election, you produced an infamous anti-Gore commercial, juxtaposing footage of Gore saying Al Sharpton couldn’t be altogether discounted with unrelated footage of Sharpton giving an inflammatory speech. I happened to have gotten some footage from some anti-Sharpton groups where he urged college students to kill cops: to off the “pigs,” as he put it.

How can you justify misrepresenting Gore like that? I’ll admit that the ad was nasty and negative, but it was accurate, just like the Willie Horton ad that finished off Dukakis.

Who paid you to make the commercial? Some folks in Tennessee who didn’t like Al Gore.

How do you sleep at night? Very well, thank you.

Asked specifically if he has any “moral qualms” about his professional efforts, Marks said, “No.”

Marks seems to understand perfectly well that he’s sleazy, and has smeared honorable candidates with garbage, but at the same time, he’s also quite pleased with himself.

That's right...the rightful President was invited to go to the office stolen from him. Boy, this had to be awkward. Bush has such a chip on his shoulder, I can't imagine him being a big enough man to keep from making some snarky or insulting remark.

Download | play Download | play (h/t BillW)

The Swamp:

Al Gore slipped out the side door of the West Wing.

In his private Oval Office meeting with President Bush, the former vice president insisted that they had spoken about global warming "the whole time.'' It wasn't clear if the winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, who shared the honor for his work on climtate change, was serious.[..]

But Gore, calling the meeting with Bush "very cordial'' and "substantive,'' declined to elaborate on their meeting. "I'm not going to do an interview here,'' Gore said in his walk down the streets outside the White House. "I don't want to comment more.''[..]

Gore also has been outspoken in his criticism for other administration policies, most notably the war in Iraq.

The White House insists the president holds no ill will toward Gore, who carried his challenge of the outcome of the 2000 election to the Supreme Court.

"I don't believe so,'' Bush Press Secretary Dana Perino said of any "bad blood'' between the two. "I know this president does not harbor any resentments. He never has.''

Uh huh. Sure.

I think what bothers the Joe Klein's of the world about bloggers is that they won't have an unfettered hand in shaping the narratives that are applied to politics and then transmitted back to the public anymore. We're around to beat back some of their idiotic observations  that even right wingers object to and it appears they can't seem to handle the critiques---so they say write pieces like this.

The Daily Howler does a wonderful job of deconstructing their screeds and has the archives to pin them down from their past indiscretions. Bob Somerby continually points out how Al Gore was savaged by the media which probably cost him the 2000 election. Here's a piece about Paul Krugman's column on the Republican debate on CNN. 

Krugman begins with Tuesday night’s Republican debate—more specifically, with the work of our floundering press corps:

KRUGMAN (6/8/07): In Tuesday's Republican presidential debate, Mitt Romney completely misrepresented how we ended up in Iraq. Later, Mike Huckabee mistakenly claimed that it was Ronald Reagan's birthday.

Guess which remark The Washington Post identified as the ''gaffe of the night''?

Folks, this is serious. If early campaign reporting is any guide, the bad media habits that helped install the worst president ever in the White House haven't changed a bit...read on

Katherine Harris was on MSNBC trying to spin everything about her campaign. First she starts off by referring to the National Journal as "the liberal media". After that she tries to explain all her staffing turnovers. She is saying that they had to let people go. Funny since all the news about those changes had the staff quitting.

Download | play - WMV Download | play - QT

After Harris tries to spin the 2000 election debacle, Andrea Mitchell says that Bush will be in Florida campaigning for Harris today, however the Republican gubernatorial candidate will not appear with Bush (which has the White House rather upset). Mitchell's reason for that? "He is busy cleaning out his sock drawer". Perhaps she should have just said that he didn't want to appear with Bush, like many other Republican candidates around the country.

WaPo:

Two weeks before the midterm elections, at least 10 states, including Maryland, remain ripe for voting problems, according to a study released yesterday by a nonpartisan clearinghouse that tracks electoral reforms across the United States.

The report by Electionline.org says those states, and possibly others, could encounter trouble on Election Day because they have a combustible mix of fledgling voting-machine technology, confusion over voting procedures or recent litigation over election rules -- and close races.

The report cautions that the Nov. 7 elections, which will determine which political party controls the House and Senate, promise "to bring more of what voters have come to expect since the 2000 elections -- a divided body politic, an election system in flux and the possibility -- if not certainty -- of problems at polls nationwide." Read on...

I've been hesitant to publish too much about potential voter problems, not because I don't believe there's a problem, but because I feel strongly that we should not discourage voting and there's only so much news you can read like this without getting hopeless.

But in order to regain some semblance of balance in this country--to get the desperately needed oversight that this administration has not had in the last six years--it is critical that each and every one of us exercises our right to vote.

"Already trying to avoid the media, Longboat Key Republican Katherine Harris is now canceling campaign stops in Southwest Florida as questions swirl about her ties to a Washington, D.C., defense contractor at the center of an ongoing national bribery scandal....read on
In honor of her hiding-I'm re-posting her spot on H&C-from August 9th, 2005

A blast from the past:

Katherine Harris Shakes her Booty

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT

Newshounds provides the play by play as she talks about her five day "listening" tour:

"It was a Hannity & Colmes segment (8/9/05) ostensibly about her just-announced candidacy for the US Senate but Katherine Harris (the Cruella De Vil of the 2000 election) kept shaking her over-sized chest so often throughout the interview that I couldn't help but conclude that what she really wanted the audience to check out was something other than her politics...read on"

"Rumsfeld's deputy, Gordon England, is the inside contender to replace him, but there's also speculation that Sen. Joe Lieberman - a Democrat who ran against Bush-Cheney in the 2000 election - might become top guy at the Pentagon. That's not as farfetched as it might first appear. The Daily News has learned that the White House considered Lieberman for the UN ambassador's job last year before giving the post to John Bolton, a Bush adviser said....read on "