Final Obama Campaign Rally, Prince William Country Fairgrounds, Manassas, Virginia

i’m posting out of order, but the lady sparkler and i went out to Manassas last night for barack obama’s final campaign rally, at the Prince William County Fairgrounds. (see the pictures on facebook, or check out the panorama above.)

i’ll have more thoughts later (ie. tomorrow) but the rally was spectacular. they estimated the crowd at 90,000 and i’d absolutely believe it. he’s every bit as charismatic as clinton (mr, not mrs, who i met in early 1992) but hopefully without the, er, prominent character flaws. the lady sparkler and i went to the rally on a complete whim, but it felt great to be there for (hopefully) a little bit of history.

we didn’t get back until just about 2am, so i am way too tired for coherent thought, much less coherent election night coverage … but we’ll see what happens as we get through the night.

7:00 PM	i love numbers! just like crack, only they are a little more addictive ... and have a little less nutritional value.
7:03 PM	vermont is the first to go blue! as a former cog in the rep. bernie sanders (i-vt) machine, i am proud (i say) proud of this development ... and can feel the entire city of Rutland (viva, rut-vegas!) having a conniption fit.
7:18 PM	cnn is using faux-hologram technology to project a chicago-based reported into the atlanta situation room. help me obi wan, you are my only hope. @#$%ng ridiculous.
7:31 PM	cnn has mccain up 8 to 3 ... if that ratio holds, it's going to be a landslide.
7:40 PM	What we should be watching ... Early tells: Pennsylvania, Virginia, North Carolina. Must McWins: Florida, Georgia, Indiana, Ohio, Missouri. Late flags: Montana, Colorado.
8:02 PM	on a bus, away from CNN and it's killing me. I trust nothing important is happening?
8:11 PM	CNN mobile says electoral college is 77 to 34 in favor of Barack, but only KY and VT have been called. That's a Palin sized WTF?!?
8:27 PM	oh, the northeast happened. and Maryland. and Illinois.
8:34 PM	Obama won granite staters who "never attend church" and "make less than 25k" ... not sure that's a good thing.
9:02 PM	dole goes down... burn, dole, burn! you godless heeeethan.
9:10 PM	51 senators and Michigan. it's early. why do the people on fox look so sad?!?
9:13 PM	it's silly, but I was really hoping for Georgia. sad.
9:20 PM	fox calls Ohio for obama. stick a fork inmac, he's gone!
9:34 PM	I [heart] the CNN magic state/county map. it may be my new celebrity exception. mmmmmmmmm.
9:37 PM	malvo (CNN) went a little heavy on the orange bronzer.
10:13 PM	giddy. just giddy.
10:15 PM	breaking news! CNN announces that a source in the McCain count says that he may have lost!
10:20 PM	Jessica Simpson appears to be providing election coverage on fox news, and seems to have just high-fives Brett Hume.
10:28 PM	Steve Forbes is on comedy central, and BET seems to have a "magic map" made from refrigerator magnets.
10:35 PM	William bennett looks like he wants to blink out of existance.
10:42 PM	Jon King just touched Joe Lieberman's blue tile and it turned blue! Will someone please, please call something.
10:55 PM	wow, this has been a slow, slow 10-minutes...
10:59 PM	you heard it here first, BET just called virginia for Obama.
11:00 PM	that's it kids!
11:06 PM	wow, Jesus. wow.
11:09 PM	ten minutes ago, this had nothing to do with race. now, it's hard to see anything but ...
11:17 PM	is saying "our long national nightmare is over" too strong?
11:19 PM	no, boos, repubs. no boos.
11:24 PM	McCain: Dude, if you gave this tone of a speech six months ago, you would have won. Who wrote this? Why now? Legitimately beautiful.
11:27 PM	This is the pre-2000 McCain ... the one I could have been content as president way back when.
11:29 PM	well, lots of repub boos, but atleast no "drill, baby, drill!"
11:41 PM	Am I the only one who honestly doesn't believe that this has happened?
11:51 PM	Florida, Nevada? Montana would be the end zone spike.
11:56 PM	CNN: "people are celebrating in front of the white house." that's not celebrating, bob. that's taunting...
12:00 AM	Michelle Obama's dress made me think nice things about Cindy McCain. Damn her!
12:10 AM	God, he makes a lot of sense.
12:16 AM	how long has he been writing this in his head?
12:17 AM	this is really happening, huh?
12:25 AM	seeing Jesse Jackson cry makes me hate him just a little less...
12:45 AM	the steers are a wall of noise. horns honking everywhere. trucks, cars. it's beautiful.
12:49 AM	people are litterally shouting and clapping on each street corner. And I just face planted because i should have been walking instead of typing.
12:56 AM	if park road is half as noisy as Connecticut Ave, I won't be sleeping tonight.
1:05 AM	I've seen a hundred people since the returns, maybe two... but not one hasn't been happy, laughing, smiling, honking or shouting. even the one repub I've seen was happy.
1:33 AM	18th and Columbia is a parking lot of people high-fiveing, strangers making eye contact and grinning, people shouting "yes, we did." it's like DC melted away, and became Portland, Oregon for a couple hours.
1:34 AM	screw people who say that DC isn't a sports town. our sport is politics, it's just that we don't win often enough ...
2:20 AM	watched CNN's replay of obama's acceptance speech. it's even better the second time around.
2:20 AM	g'night.

i’m desperately trying to come up with something else to liveblog tonight, mainly because i am struggling to come up with anything original that i could possibly say during another ninety minutes of political discourse.

sure, mccain could come out with some kind of plan, and sure, obama could suddenly start spouting in arabic about the downfall of the great satan … but i am thinking the odds of this are a little low.

I will say that there has been a lot of ink floating around lately which seems to be setting up nicely for an Obama win. The most interesting are from (admittedly moderate) Conservatives such as David Brooks:

He’s phenomenally good at surrounding himself with a team,” Brooks said. “I disagree with them on most issues, but I am given a lot of comfort by the fact that the people he’s chosen are exactly the people I think most of us would want to choose if we were in his shoes.

… and Andrew Sullivan:

… McCain would have to concede that he didn’t vet her, made his decision impulsively based on no real knowledge of her, and that his first serious judgment as a presidential candidate was so monumentally irresponsible that it doesn’t just disqualify her for the vice-presidency. It disqualifies him for the presidency.

This story line is the most interesting to me, as someone who was on the hill during the later part of Gingrich’s Republican revolution. I can say, the prevailing wisdom was that we had seen the death-knell of modern American liberalism, and that people we’re hoping that the Conservative lock on the halls of power would only be a couple of decades long.

Sure, I’d take an Obama presidency in it’s own right, but just the possibility that we haven’t become a country of one permanent majority party is what’s making me feel warm and fuzzy right now.

final thoughts

the pundits are saying that mccain was great out of the gates (agree) that it was mccain’s best debate (agree) and it wasn’t obama’s best (agree) and that obama was on the defensive for the first third of the debate (agree).

but they are also saying that mccain let obama back in the debate by dwelling / looking emotionally disturbed by the ayers / john lewis thing (agree a hundred times over). mccain looked angry. obama looked like an academic. wonder how all this translated into the masses …

after the last debate, there was a lot of conversation about how mccain’s window was closing, and that this closing window means he would have to take larger risks (attacking obama) and those risks would have a greater chance of backfiring.

i certainly think that mccain has either slowed or stopped the hemorrhaging, but did he fundamentally change the course of the debate? dunno, but my guess is no. and i am certainly not going to loose any sleep about it.

speaking of which, good night. god bless. i’ll most likely kill you in the morning.

crap. there is a debate tonight, isn’t there. ugh.

final thoughts

The generational gap was more apparent tonight that it ever was before … and i’m guessing it was due to the absence of the podiums. McCain looked old, and the more he looks old, i think the more the rank and file Americans (who aren’t beguiled by Palin’s neocon-ly charms) bail on his campaign.

I’m glad the onslaught of personal attacks didn’t come … i think slinging mud would hurt both sides more than they’d help, because it causes the middle to stay home. We’ve had enough elections in recent memory that were about mobilizing the base, and that doesn’t help the national discourse by any means.

Yet again, I don’t there was anything here to change the conversation, and status quo favors the guy in the lead. My main concern is as it was after the very first one … Obama needs to start building up a lead, because once the white people are in the voting booth alone, all polls and predictions become bogus.

update: i just heard cnn’s republican and democratic analysts hand the election to obama (pending major implosion, etc). basically, the argument was that the things that mccain would need to do to take the lead are either too late (policy shift, separation from bush) or have too high a potential to backfire (personal attacks).

other interesting tidbit … in the initial poll, 50%+ thought that obama won (not news) but mccain’s unfavorable ratings are at 46%, while barack’s fell to 34% after the debate. if mccain is really 12% behind in unfavorables, there is no way he wins … you just can’t overcome a gap like that.

I’ve been looking to avoid this evening since I heard the veep nominations…

The expectations for Palin are so low, that if she strings two coherent sentences together she wins. If Biden crushes her, she wins. If the moderator asks her hard questions, she wins. If she shows up with a star-spangled swimsuit and poses with a gun, she wins.

To quote the pimply faced boy from the Simpsons: this is only going to end in tears.

a couple more thoughts after the debate … it’s fascinating the sea change we have seen in regards to women and their roll in society. i’m sincerely happy that a woman can go into a veep debate with a folksy, soccer mom schtick and hold her own against opposition in a power suit.

let’s be honest, if geraldine ferraro went for this approach 24 years ago, she would have been run off the ticket on a rail.

to me, this election was all fun and games until tonight. honestly, i suspect i could live under a McCain administration … even if i would prefer pre-2001 as opposed to this particular incarnation. but, imho, the country just can’t survive even two years of a Palin administration.

the way she looks down on intellect, forces herself to be colloquial, follows her politico-driven script, her obviously ultra-conservative credentials … that’s just a continuation of the bush approach which has proven bankrupt.

that’s it for me. i’m (right now) going to go donate a lot of money to the Obama campaign, and go to bed to get the nightmares over with.

Guess who live blogged the debate tonight? Tonight’s coverage came from waaaay out in suburban Maryland — home of the very mighty baby boig. Also, in case you missed it, I live blogged that joint appearance by Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton on Saturday night two weeks back.

thoughts from the debate

a couple thoughts from the drive home

first, i liked how approachable obama seemed … he had a “kitchen table” schtick about him, and it think that will serve him well. it’s not him at his most eloquent, but i think everybody is expecting a good state of the union already. it’s still a question of if you want to drink beer with him, and the debate was a personal win for him here.

second, that stupid audience reaction graph seemed to map indies and dems very closely together, with repubs more often swinging the opposite way. if that graph has value, which is a bold assumption, then this correlation is a very, very good sign for Obama. actually, anecdotally, i’d say that the three lines were more “together” when barack was speaking, and a little more separated when mccain was speaking. that could be good, too.

finally, a Conservative commentator (not sure who) mentioned that foreign policy and national security are the bread and butter issues for McCain, and that if he doesn’t score in this debate, he probably isn’t going to score at any debate. Now, call the debate how you will, but i don’t think anyone is saying that McCain did any better than “holding his own” … so, that could be good, too.

well, good night! god bless you … and god bless the united states of america.

p.s. i want you to know i did this whole thing from a couch using my iPhone. come on in, my friends … drink the kool-aid. the water is *mighty* fine.

In a suprising turn of events, I’m hearing rumors (from Washington insiders) that Sarah Palin and Hillary Clinton will be making a joint appearance tonight! Because I live blogged both conventions (and hope to do at least some of the debates!) i figured I should do this special event, too …

Saturday Night