A "Pinch Me" Moment!

November 5, 2008
Nothing can express my feelings as beautifully as those by Alice Croll, one of the awesome My Barack Obama workers whose name has shown up in my email inbox for these past 21 months hundreds of times. I have never met her, but I feel like she is my good friend, my sister, and a part of the inspiration that helped to keep me going day after day. Thank you, Alice, and all of the rest of the people in the 100 groups I joined for this most incredible journey! It is my fervent wish that we can all somehow continue on in the work of President-Elect Barack Obama for our country.
Forever ObamaDonna in Lake Geneva, WI

The surreality of this foggy East Coast morning, watching dancing on the streets of Philadelphia,the swaying towards the sea in San Francisco, New York New York's Times Square with traffic of frantic folks, waves of women and men at the gates of the White House, remains a pinch myself moment.
Did we do it? We did.
Is he the one? He is.
Can we get there? We have.
Fired up? And here we go.
For almost two years of giving parts of our lives over to the belief in ourselves that had become a ghost of Americans past, many of us sit at our keyboards with Obama buttons stuck on our shirts, lists of e-mail addresses of people we may never meet strewn on our home office floors, laundry undone, friends who may have not seen us, or seen us sane for awhile, papers stuffed under the bed, here we are...dazed by what we have wrought.
Morning has already come to America, but the dawn will be as it never has broken the horizon. I wonder what will happen to our Obama groups, our daily dose of to-do lists, our blogging and slogging through the endless talking and turning points.
Like the national family, this superb support group, the We, the US that Barack Obama cited as the victors by his side, we will change too.
Maybe we won't have a website to keep us tight. Maybe we won't have the Breaking News to wake and snooze on. Maybe we won't even remember those who lifted us up or brought us down during our ongoing debates. What will become of the temporary asylum that was this grassrooting? It will be up to us.
Something extraordinary was born of this campaign, this cause, and yes this candidate. Something unknown and uncertain is what we all will become to each other as our mission
changes.
I owe so much of my ability to hang on here to those with whom I connect right now. We owe each other an embrace of the history we all made out of improbablity.
I think the best way to note this time is with an ending that is a beginning too.
To all the traveling companions of this jewel of a journey,

Aloha.
Alice Croll aka, Alice in NJ

New York Times on Palin Pick

Published: September 2, 2008
More often than not, the role of a vice president is a minor one, unless some tragedy occurs. But a presidential nominee’s choice of a running mate is vitally important. It is his first executive decision and offers an important insight into how that nominee would lead the nation.

If John McCain wants voters to conclude, as he argues, that he has more independence and experience and better judgment than Barack Obama, he made a bad start by choosing Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska.
Mr. McCain’s supporters are valiantly trying to argue that the selection was a bold stroke that shows their candidate is a risk-taking maverick who — we can believe — will change Washington. (Mr. Obama’s call for change — now “the change we need” — has become all the rage in St. Paul.)
To us, it says the opposite. Mr. McCain’s snap choice of Ms. Palin reflects his impulsive streak: a wild play that he made after conservative activists warned him that he would face an all-out revolt in the party if he chose who he really wanted — Senator Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut.
Why Mr. McCain would want to pander to right-wing activists — who helped George W. Bush kill off his candidacy in the 2000 primaries in a particularly ugly way — is baffling. Frankly, they have no place to go. Mr. McCain would have a lot more success demonstrating his independence, and his courage, if he stood up to them the way he did in 2000.
As far as we can tell, Mr. McCain and his aides did almost no due diligence before choosing Ms. Palin, raising serious questions about his management skills. The fact that Ms. Palin’s 17-year-old daughter is pregnant is irrelevant to her candidacy. There are, however, very serious questions about her political past and her ideology.
If Mr. McCain wanted to break with his party’s past and choose the Republicans’ first female vice presidential candidate, there are a number of politicians out there with far greater experience and stature than Ms. Palin, who has been in Alaska’s Statehouse for less than two years.
Before she was elected governor, she was mayor of a tiny Anchorage suburb, where her greatest accomplishment was raising the sales tax to build a hockey rink. According to Time magazine, she also sought to have books banned from the local library and threatened to fire the librarian.
For Mr. McCain to go on claiming that Mr. Obama has too little experience to be president after almost three years in the United States Senate is laughable now that he has announced that someone with no national or foreign policy experience is qualified to replace him, if necessary.
Senator Lindsey Graham, the South Carolina Republican who has been one of Mr. McCain’s most loyal friends, said Tuesday that he was certain that Ms. Palin would take the right positions on issues like Iraq, Russia’s invasion of Georgia and Iran’s nuclear weapons ambitions. That seemed based largely on his repeated assertion that Ms. Palin would be tended by Mr. McCain’s foreign policy advisers. That was not much of an endorsement.
Some of the things Ms. Palin has had to say in the recent past about foreign policy are especially worrisome. In a speech last June to her former church in Wasilla, Ms. Palin said the war in Iraq was “a task that is from God.” Mr. Bush made similar claims as he rejected all sound mortal advice on how to conduct the war.
Mr. McCain, Mr. Graham and others also claim that Ms. Palin is a fearless reformer who is committed to fighting waste, fraud and earmarks. Ms. Palin did show courage taking on some of the Alaska Republican Party’s most sleazy politicians. But she also was an eager recipient of earmarked money as a mayor and governor.
Mayor Palin gathered up $27 million in subsidies from Washington, $15 million of it for a railroad from her town to the ski resort hometown of Senator Ted Stevens, now under indictment for failing to report gifts.
The Republicans are presenting Ms. Palin as a crusader against Mr. Stevens’s infamous “Bridge to Nowhere.” The record says otherwise; she initially supported Mr. Stevens’s boondoggle, diverting the money to other projects when the bridge became a political disaster. In her speech to the Wasilla Assembly of God in June, Ms. Palin said it was “God’s will” that the federal government contribute to a $30 billion gas pipeline she wants built in Alaska.
Mr. McCain will make his acceptance speech on Thursday, and Ms. Palin will speak on Wednesday. Those two appearances will go a long way to forming voters’ views of this Republican ticket.
As Senator Graham noted, Mr. McCain has to reach out beyond the party’s loyal base. “We’re going to have to win this thing,” he said. “This is not our race to lose.”
Mr. McCain’s hurdles are substantial. To start, he has to overcome Mr. Bush’s record of failures. (The president addressed the convention Tuesday night and now, McCain strategists fervently hope, will retire quietly to the Rose Garden.) That record includes the disastrous war in Iraq, a ballooning deficit, the mortgage crisis — and the list goes on.
To address those many problems, this country needs a leader with sound judgment and strong leadership skills. Choosing Ms. Palin raises serious questions about Mr. McCain’s qualifications.

Woo Hooooo!!!!! Its Obama-Biden!!!

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama (D-IL) (L), his wife Michelle and Senator Joe Biden (D-DE) (R) with his wife Jill greet people gathered on the lawn of the Old State Capital August 23, 2008 in Springfield, Illinois. The Obama campaign confirmed this morning Biden had been selected as Obama's running mate.
(Photo by Scott Olson/Getty Images North America)

Great choice! I love the pick! Here is a well-thought commentary on Joe Biden

From Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, and Domenico Montanaro of MSNBC:

DENVER -- We confirmed the news after midnight, and then after trying to get a little sleep, this text message at about 3:00 am ET woke us up: “Barack has chosen Senator Joe Biden to be our VP nominee. Watch the first Obama-Biden rally live at 3pm ET on http://www.barackobama.com/. Spread the word!” A 3:00 am wake-up call, you just can’t make this stuff up. And there were two collective sounds you could hear over the beeping cellphones and the buzzing blackberries. On the Democratic side, it was a collective "phew." As the days got nearer for the pick, it was hard to find a Democrat -- even savvy Clintonites -- who weren't hoping it would be Biden. Only the most strident Hillary supporters appear to be upset this morning. On the GOP side, the sound you heard was disappointed silence. Of everyone on the short list, the candidate many Republicans least wanted to see Obama pick was Biden. Sure, they've already trotted out their talking points. And the McCain camp even produced a rapid-response TV ad highlighting some unkind words Biden said about Obama during the primaries. (We assume this now means McCain won’t be picking Romney, right? And doesn't the McCain ad actually send the message to swing voters that Obama's willing to surround himself with critics?) But there are too many intellectual conservatives (see David Brooks) who believe Biden's the most qualified guy Obama could have realistically picked.
*** Joe’s strengths…: As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he has plenty of foreign policy experience -- something viewed as a weakness for Obama. Also, Biden’s most recent presidential bid raised his national profile, making him a politico whom most Americans know, which could help reassure some voters who have doubts about Obama. In addition, whether it has been in recent speeches or on Meet the Press, Biden has showed that he’s up to this veep responsibility: whacking the opposition. What’s more, during his presidential bid in ’07-’08, Biden demonstrated that he’s a very good debater, a quality the Democrats might want to showcase during the vice presidential debate scheduled for October 2. And electorally, Biden could help lock down Pennsylvania, as well as connect better than Obama has in blue-collar Michigan and the "U" of Ohio (Toledo to Youngstown). A few more thoughts… Biden is someone that will play well with older white voters, a demographic group Obama's struggled with, and he’s very popular with labor and trial lawyers, which while helpful financially for Obama and in the Rust Belt, could fire up the business community even more for McCain.
*** … And his weaknesses: Obama has railed against Washington and Washington insiders during his campaign, but few people are more inside Washington than Biden, who has served in the Senate for 36 years (by comparison, McCain has been in the Senate for 22 years). Furthermore, Biden often has been a gaffe machine -- whether it was calling Obama "clean" and "articulate" (news that marred his presidential announcement in 2007) or stating in 2006, "You cannot go to a 7-11 or a Dunkin' Donuts unless you have a slight Indian accent.” And there was that plagiarism scandal that knocked him out of the 1988 presidential race. Perhaps the biggest question: Just how well will Obama and Biden mesh? Has Biden been anybody's No. 2, ever? He's run for president TWICE for a reason (the first time Biden ran, Obama was just starting law school, by the way). Biden has an actual "boss" for the first time in his political career. Is he ready to ride shotgun? And is it a problem that Obama-Biden is a mirror image of Bush-Cheney from 2000? A charismatic, inexperienced nominee taps a more experienced, dare we say, arrogant No.2? In fact, there are a lot of Republicans who believe they can sell Obama-Biden as "the Audacity of Arrogance times two."
*** Back to Springfield: When Obama and Biden appear together this afternoon at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, IL, it will come just more than 18 months after Obama officially launched his presidential bid from that historical venue. (It’s where Lincoln gave his famous 1858 “House Divided” speech, in which he railed against slavery and how it had torn the nation into two. “A house divided against itself cannot stand.”) While today’s event will be a bit warmer than it was on that February 2007 day -- it was close to 10 degrees! -- that announcement back then was the first sign that there was something to Obama’s candidacy. Despite the frigid weather, close to 20,000 showed up on that day, and the crowds at his rallies only grew. Now, with the polls tightening, Obama needs to draw on some of that Springfield magic. Can he deliver?
*** The big bounce? Now for some non-VP news… Yesterday, the McCain campaign released a memo saying that Obama should receive a 15-point (!!!) bounce from his convention. But here’s a big caveat: We haven’t had a back-to-back convention schedule in a very long time, so it may make historical comparisons moot. But let's crunch some numbers from the Gallup chart McCain's campaign sent around. The average Dem convention bounce since '64 is 6.2 points. The average GOP convention bounce since '64 is 5.3 points. The average FIRST convention bounce: 6.3 points. The average SECOND convention bounce is: 5.2 points. With just three instances since '64 of open-seat presidential elections, it's useless to attempt an average if you did this average based on Olympic score (tossing the high and the low), the average convention bounce would be 5.6 points, which feels about the right bar for expectations. The Clinton example the McCain folks are using -- 16 points after the '92 Dem convention! -- is really a reach considering that Ross Perot (who was the front-runner the week before the Dem convo) dropped out the week of the Dem convo. So toss the Clinton bounce out any analysis window.
*** Saying goodbye to those red states? In addition to that memo, the McCain campaign yesterday furiously pounced on a report that Team Obama was pulling its advertising in red states -- like Alaska, Indiana, Montana, North Carolina, and North Dakota -- suggesting that the Obama camp was abandoning its (almost) 50-state strategy. But as Lee Corso might say, “Not so fast, my friend.” A senior Obama campaign source told First Read that the campaign wasn’t planning to be on TV next week during their convention, but the McCain is up with negative spots in 11 states, and they wanted to match them in those 11 (which doesn't include any of those ruby-red states). Moreover, the source assures us that the campaign will resume its larger TV buy once the convention ends.
*** On the trail: McCain is down in Sedona, AZ. Obama holds his rally in Springfield at the Old State Capitol. Countdown to Dem convention: 2 daysCountdown to GOP convention: 9 daysCountdown to Election Day 2008: 73 days Countdown to Inauguration Day 2009: 150 days