Finally: Panic Washes Over GOP... But They Will Still Persist In Their Hateful And Unpopular Agenda

 

Republicans in Congress are preparing to triage Trump-- but not Amy Coney Island Baby. That's the hill they all seem happily willing to die on, a hill that symbolizes anti-Choice fanaticism, anti-healthcare mania, a pro-corporate and anti-regulatory extremism and, of course, the religious bigotry the GOP has wrapped itself in over the past two decades.

Republican Senators, Congress Members, state legislators, local officials, operatives and donors are all blaming Trump for their predicament. I hate Trump as much as anyone but if they want someone to blame for the tsunami headed their way, they should look in the mirror, not just to the White House. There was no time when they could not have said, "Wait, you are a fucking fascist and I am not and neither is my party." Too late for that now, though, because now their party is fascist and they have been enabling a fascist agenda-- eyes wide open.

The phrase on the lips of virtually all Beltway Republicans this month: "sinking ship," a way to describe the Trump reelection campaign, a battle being fought not in states Hillary won narrowly like New Hampshire, Virginia, Minnesota, Nevada and Maine but in states that were firmly in the Republican column way back then-- Arizona, Iowa, Georgia, Alaska, Ohio... even Texas.

And now, down-ballot Republicans are realizing-- too late-- they they are going down with that sinking ship. Some are even hoping to start showing their "independence" from Trump by breaking with his policies might help, after after their years of willing spineless subservience. Foolishly, they've chosen the wrong policy to break with. Trump, desperate to offer something to the voters, has ordered-- or re-ordered-- Mnuchin to work with Pelosi on a pandemic relief package that will include stimulus checks for struggling Americans (voters). For Mitch McConnell and his Senate colleagues that's a step too far. On Friday, Jonathan Swan and Alayna Treene reported for Axios that McConnell refuses to be tethered to Trump's growing desperation and that the president "has zero leverage to push them to support a bill crafted by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and congressional Republicans aren’t inclined to wrap themselves any tighter to a sinking ship." McConnell's camp says "You’re never going to get a deal out of Pelosi that Republicans can support. So do you really want to divide your party within days of an election? This entire exercise from Pelosi is basically trying to jam up the Senate in the midst of a Supreme Court confirmation. They know that from a procedural standpoint McConnell can drive this train to conclusion, so what they’re trying do is throw as many roadblocks in the way as possible-- and the best way to do that is get the president focused on some extraneous issue." Swan and Treene concluded that even if Pelosi and Mnuchin were to strike a deal, "there is little chance the Senate GOP would get on board with it... Senate Republicans remain far apart on what they want as a conference. They also view Trump and Mnuchin as far more willing to give more to Pelosi than what they're comfortable with-- both numbers-wise and on policy." And to make matters worse, "McConnell doesn’t want to do anything to interrupt the only visible Republican win before the election in his chamber-- the confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court."


Americans have been voting-- and in much biggest numbers than ever before this early. No one needs a debate. This is a referendum on Trump and his enablers. Biden is horrible. People don't care. The majority of the Democrats recruited by the DCCC are horrible-- as are all the Democrats recruited by Schumer. No one cares. (They will in 2022, but not now. Now they only care about Trump and those who allowed him to run amok.) In early voting reporting yesterday's NY Times, a trio of writers noted that early returns give Democrats a 10 point advantage among the 275,000 first-time voters nationwide who had already cast ballots and an 18-point lead among 1.1 million "sporadic voters" who had already voted.

As of Saturday, more than 8.8 million ballots had already been received by elections officials in the 30 states that have made data available. In five states-- including the battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Minnesota-- the number of ballots returned already is more than 20 percent of the entire 2016 turnout.

The L.A. Times headline was hardly unique: As Trump’s fortunes sink, Republicans start to distance themselves in bid to save Senate. Evan Halper wrote that as "Trump skids deeper into political peril, anxious Republicans have started to try to distance themselves from his fate, appealing to voters to elect them as a check on a Joe Biden administration. As they make closing arguments in a desperate bid to keep control of the Senate, even Trump loyalists are chafing when asked how deep their support for the president runs. Senate campaigns, which long focused on electing candidates who would be loyal to Trump, now pitch a darker message to Republican voters-- one that assumes Trump won’t be there. 'If we lose the Senate, there will be no firewall to stop the Democrats from implementing their Armageddon plan to pack the courts with activist judges and to add four new Democrats to the Senate by giving statehood to DC and Puerto Rico,' said a fundraising appeal from the Senate Conservative Fund."

Halper noted that McConnell, who has been "one of Trump’s most loyal lieutenants, abruptly jumped off the Trump train this week to stake out a politically-- and medically-- safer position on the coronavirus crisis that is Trump’s biggest political liability. McConnell said at a news conference Thursday in Kentucky that he had not been at the White House for more than a month because he did not think its safety standards were stringent enough. 'My impression was that their approach to how to handle this is different from mine and what I suggested that we do in the Senate, which is to wear a mask and practice social distancing,' said McConnell, who is 78 and in an expensive fight for reelection this year. Veteran Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn, in his pitch for an endorsement from the Houston Chronicle, scolded Trump for downplaying the dangers of the coronavirus. The paper, which had endorsed Cornyn in the past, ultimately opted to support Democrat MJ Hegar."

“I think Trump might cause us a tidal wave,” said one top Republican strategist and Trump supporter, who asked not to be named discussing internal party matters. “He is ankle weights in a pool on Senate candidates.”

The move away from Trump resembles the strategy Republicans followed in 2016, when many party leaders assumed he would lose, and in 1996, when the party’s nominee, Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, badly trailed President Clinton.

In both cases, the approach was to avoid directly criticizing the nominee for fear of alienating his loyalists, while appealing to voters to keep a Republican Congress to deny Democrats a “blank check.”

...“A lot of Republicans are now having to walk this line where they don’t want be too critical of Trump and anger his base, but they need to reach out to moderates and independent,” said J. Miles Coleman, associate editor at the political forecasting journal Sabato’s Crystal Ball.

Yesterday, GOP lifer Ed Rollins, chair of Trump's Great America PAC, told CNN that the jig is up. "I'm afraid the race is over... What happened after the first presidential debate is every Senate race saw a 3- to 4-point drop for Republican candidates across the board. So campaigns are panicking and it’s the first time in a long while that they are being outraised. The potential is there to lose not only the presidency but the Senate as well… and to see the kind of wipeout we haven’t an experienced since the post-Watergate year of 1974." How could it can any worse for Trump. Well the Taliban could endorse him. Actually, they did.

NBC News reported that "some Republican operatives and donors" have given up on Trump's reelection and are "proposing that the party shift focus to protecting seats in Congress." Former NRCC staffer Ken Spain told NBC's Sahil Kapur that he sees "growing chances of a tsunami that drowns congressional Republican candidates," calling Trump's unpopularity "an anchor" for GOP candidates and worrying not about races in Colorado, Arizona and Maine-- that Republicans have given top on winning-- but in South Carolina, Georgia, Kansas and Alaska that they are in danger of losing.

Brendan Buck, a Republican consultant, who was a top adviser to former House Speaker Paul Ryan, said it would be a rational response to steer resources to saving endangered incumbents.

“We need to protect the Senate and limit the damage in the House,” he said. “They can’t say it out loud, but the president is likely toast, and a Republican Senate can serve as a check on a Biden administration and Democratic House. Republicans also need to keep the House in reach of flipping it back in 2022.”

If Republicans are struggling to protect an incumbent in the deep-red Palmetto State, it means the seat of Sen. John Cornyn in electoral vote-rich Texas may not necessarily be safe either, along with about a dozen others in a cycle in which Democrats need to pick up four seats to secure control, or three if they win the White House.

Biden’s campaign appears more bullish on Texas, purchasing $6.3 million in ads on TV and radio in the Lone Star State from Wednesday through Election Day, according to Advertising Analytics. His wife, Jill Biden, plans to travel to the state next week, the campaign announced Friday, with an itinerary a Biden campaign spokesperson said would include stops in Dallas, Houston and El Paso.

“Trump is definitely helping us,” Beto O’Rourke, a former Texas congressman and presidential candidate, told NBC News. “They have been neck and neck for weeks now, and Biden’s chances are only improving after his and Kamala (Harris)’s strong debate performances.”

O’Rourke, who came within 3 points of winning a Texas Senate race in 2018, insists the state and its 38 electoral votes are in play, and has been pleading with the Democrats to invest more there.

Democrats running for Republican-held congressional and state legislative seats are on the attack in Texas and closing in on Republican incumbents. Yesterday, Julie Oliver, progressive Democratic candidate running against crooked conservative Roger Williams in an R+ 11 district that the DCCC has completely ignored, told me that "We're in the middle of a pandemic that has killed hundreds of thousands of people. Many of our kids' schools are still closed. Women are having to leave their jobs. We've lost millions of jobs. And meanwhile, both Donald Trump and Roger Williams have consistently put themselves and their financial interests before the people in Texas. This presidency has been an unmitigated failure-- and Roger Williams has enabled him, every step of the way." Polling has turned so positive towards Oliver that last week the DCCC felt compelled to add her to their Red-to-Blue program. Same just happened in the district next door, TX-10, where Mike Siegel has battle the wealthiest man in the House, Trump lieutenant Michael McCaul to a dead heat. (You can contribute to both Siegel and Oliver here.)

Although Democrats stand to pick up a half dozen Texas congressional seats-- and win back the state House to boot-- Texas isn't the only "red" state preparing the shed more seats to the Democrats. Kapur's report noted Beltway imbeciles-- he was more polite-- who long believed the GOP would gain seats are now confronting the prospect that their minority might shrink. "Cook Political Report’s forecast gives Democrats a better than even chance of expanding their House majority." That can be interpreted as "even the conservative fools at Cook fear Democrats are on the verge of winning dozens of seats we scoffed at the idea of flipping just a few weeks ago."

Beltway insiders like Cook and the DCCC have never taken Audrey Denney's race against Trump appendage Doug LaMalfa seriously. After all, CA-01, in the northeast corner of rural California where it borders on Republican parts of Oregon and Nevada, has a daunting PVI of R+11. It was one of only 2 districts in California where Hillary took less than 37% of the vote and in the midst of 2018's "Blue Wave," neither Gavin Newsom nor Dianne Feinstein won a single one of CA-01's eleven counties. But look a little closer at the 2018 results and you'll notice that in both the biggest and third biggest counties in the district-- Butte and Nevada-- Denney beat LaMalfa with substantial majorities. This cycle, she's been expanding her base into Shasta, Placer, Siskiyou and Placer counties and is poised to make up the 9 point vote deficit from 2018. Her latest tracking poll by Lake Research, one of the most consistently accurate polling firms in the country, shows her and LaMalfa in a dead heat. Please consider contributing to Denney's campaign here and take a look at this analysis from Lake, an analysis that shows exactly how a deep red district flips progressive blue:

Letter From The DSCC Asking For Help Defeating Those Who Oppose Sonia Sotomayor-- Let's Start With Ben Nelson & Blanche Lincoln

GOP can't do squat without the help of these 2 ugly galoots

It's easy enough to dismiss par-for-the-course, totally predictable racism from sordid, partisan characters like Limbaugh, Inhofe, Tancredo and Gingrich. I'm sure President Obama warned Sonia Sotomayor exactly the kind of vicious buzzsaw she'd be walking into if she accepted his nomination.

Yesterday, I got a fundraising beg from Senator Bob Menendez, chair of the NRSC. Pretty boilerplate and the emphasis is his.

Dear Howard,

Tuesday was a historic day: President Obama nominated Judge Sonia Sotomayor for the United States Supreme Court. I am thrilled the president has chosen such a qualified nominee and, at the same time, moved toward a Supreme Court that looks more like America. Judge Sotomayor would be the first Latina, and only the third woman, to serve on the nation's highest court.

Judge Sotomayor's vast knowledge of the law, excellent temperament and lifetime of experiences make her a great choice. She's authored about 400 legal opinions, and she understands how laws affect people, businesses and government. Judge Sotomayor has more federal judicial experience than any Supreme Court nominee in the past century and has garnered bipartisan support: She was appointed to the District Court for the Southern District of New York by President George H.W. Bush and the Second Circuit by President Bill Clinton.

Despite all of her qualifications, Republicans stand ready to obstruct. On Tuesday, de facto party spokesman Rush Limbaugh went so far as to accuse President Obama, and Judge Sotomayor, of racism. "Obama is the greatest living example of a reverse racist and now he's appointed one ... Sonia Sotomayor to the U.S. Supreme Court," he said.

With statements like that from Limbaugh, we can expect to have a fight on our hands. You can be assured, however, that the DSCC, the branch of the Democratic Party solely dedicated to electing more Democrats to the Senate, is working hard every day to elect senators who will give President Obama's nominees a fair hearing. It's what America expects of us.
 
Sincerely,

Robert Menendez

Menendez is correct, Limbaugh will rile up a whole pack of craven reactionaries in the Senate, from Richard Burr (R-NC), Jim Bunning (R-KY), Jim DeMint (R-SC), Tom Coburn (R-OK), Johnny Isakson (R-GA), Robert Bennett (R-UT), Sam Brownback (R-KS) to David Diapers Vitter (R-LA), Chuck Grassley (R-IA), Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) and Ben Nelson (D-NE). Blanche Lincoln? Ben Nelson? Sure. There are a handful of Democratic senators (and candidates) who have to face the voters in 2010 and whose every move is predicated not on principle but on electoral calculus. There's no Democrat worse in that regard than WalMart's representative in the U.S. Senate Blanche Lincoln.

Lincoln and Nelson sound about as supportive of the president's nomination as do half the Republicans! "Concerning Judge Sotomayor’s nomination, I look forward to examining her entire record and commitment to upholding the law and Constitution of the United States in the coming weeks." That could be John Cornyn or Lamar Alexander. But it's ole Ben Nelson.

There's really no clear definition as to what exactly is an activist judge according to Nelson, but apparently none of President George W. Bush's nominees were. Nelson was the only Democrat to vote for Janice Rogers Brown, one of Bush's most conservative and controversial judicial picks, and was one of only a couple of Democrats who supported Samuel Alito and John Roberts for the Supreme Court and John Bolton for UN ambassador. Nelson also backed both John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales for Attorney General.

Nelson explained in an op-ed for the Omaha World Herald that his only criteria for a "good judge" is one that is not an activist. How did he know Alito was not an "activist judge?" Well, because Alito told him so, of course.

In my meeting with Judge Alito on Nov. 2, he assured me that he was carrying no political agenda to the bench. I asked him if he envisioned himself carrying a hammer and chisel and looking to forge new law. He assured me that he would consider each case on its merits and would bring no agenda to the bench.

The open secret about the politicization of the judiciary in this country is that right-wing judges are just as "activist"-- if not more so-- than left-wingers. The myth about the Supreme Court being a group of impartial umpires is especially strong, but categorically false. Supreme Court Scholar Jeffrey Toobin recently called out Chief Justice Roberts for faithfully serving the interests and values of the GOP. Jeffrey Rosen, the writer who began the whisper campaign against Sotomayor before she was nominated, called Alito a "conservative activist... [willing to] overstep judicial boundaries to further right-wing ideology," and threw Justices Clarence Thomas and Antonin Scalia in that category as well.

Lincoln, as usual, sounds just like your garden variety Republican shill. “I believe the people of Arkansas and our nation deserve a Supreme Court Justice who is able to interpret and apply the law fairly without political favor or bias. Ensuring that a nominee meets this standard is an obligation I have sworn to uphold as a United States Senator, and moreover, is the standard that Americans expect for a lifetime appointment to our nation’s highest court."

Oh, wait! I hope I didn't insult Maine Senator Olympia Snowe (R) by inadvertantly comparing Blanche Lincoln to Republicans. Snowe was far less afraidf to show her enthusiasm for Obama's choice than the craven, hackish and cowardly Lincoln. Snowe: "Indisputably, this is an historic selection, as Sonia Sotomayor is just the third woman to be nominated to The Court and the first Hispanic American. I commend President Obama for nominating a well-qualified woman, as I urged him to do during a one-on-one meeting on a variety of issues in the Oval Office earlier this month.

So the DSCC is worried about "a fight on our hands?" It isn't the rump of a Republican Party that is watering down all of President Obama's bills and killing chances for real change. The Republicans alone don't have the power to do all the damage the Senate has been doing. They can only do it with the help of treacherous bought-off handmaidens of the corporate elites that normally lavish all their bribes on Republicans but who have found a handful of conservative Democrats to champion their causes. The DSCC wants help keeping Blanche Lincoln in her seat? That's where a portion of every single cent you donate to them goes-- to the woman who single-handedly is killing Employee Free Choice at the behest of the Walton family (WalMart). Support Lincoln? How about working to defeat her instead? I'm hearing that the unions are going to try-- even if it means electing a Republican.


UPDATE: Another Kind Of Letter-- This One From Ed Rollins

Ed Rollins has been a GOP operative for a long time. He's probably best known because he directed Reagan's 1984 presidential campaign but he has always been a target of great enmity from George H.W. Bush and his last big brush with fame was in 2007 when, as campaign manager for Mike Huckabee, he was overheard saying that he wanted to "knock out" Mitt Romney's teeth. He and Huckabee certainly aren't on the same page regarding the Sotomayor nomination.

Almost everybody cheers for the underdog-- maybe not those born to upper-class standing with great advantages, but those of us who weren't always want the little guy to be victorious.

We want hard work and extra effort to be rewarded. Standing at the front of the East Room of the White House Tuesday morning were two Americans who clearly had started life as underdogs.

One is now our president, son of a Kenyan. The other is the daughter of Puerto Rican parents who is about to sit on the highest court in the land. Both were born without privilege. Both were raised in households with little cash, but much love. Both were raised by strong, devoted mothers who worked hard to support them.

Both were encouraged that through hard work and education they could go beyond the boundaries of their environment and their class. Somehow the flame of ambition was lit and both became outstanding students who didn't need affirmative action programs to get to the top of their class.

Both are extraordinary role models for the next generation of Americans and both will be historic figures. And the important thing is that both President Obama and Judge Sonia Sotomayor never forgot where they came from or the people who helped them move forward to such heights.

It was a day to make all Americans proud.

Now we begin a process that might not make Americans proud. The Senate confirmation hearings for Sotomayor will begin in the coming weeks and already the long knives are out. The historic role of the Senate to advise and consent to a president's judicial nominations has become in the last few years a process of "attack and condemn."

Unfortunately, the battle for the heart and soul of the Republican Party that has raged for the last several weeks is now spilling over into the debate over Sotomayor's ideology and judicial temperament. The challenge has been laid down by conservative commentators that "if not now, when!" The terms " radical liberal" and "reverse racist" are being bantered about, with more to come.

Those who have not been able to lay a glove on President Obama, with his 60 percent-plus approval ratings, now think they can define him by smearing Sotomayor.

For a political party that lost an election just six months ago by 9? million votes, the second largest vote margin of defeat ever for a Republican presidential candidate, you would think we would shut our mouths and figure out how to get more votes in the future.

But instead we have gotten into a raging debate over the purity of the party and who's a better Republican. Dick Cheney, Colin Powell, Tom Ridge, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh and even Meghan McCain have had their say along with the new party chairman, Michael Steele.

But a political party is not a religion. We don't get up every weekend and go to our church or synagogue or mosque or wherever else we might practice our beliefs and pay homage to the great tenets of the Republican Party, or the Democratic Party for that matter.

Of all the things that are important to me, I don't get up every morning and say first and foremost I've got to go out and be a good Republican today and spread the gospel and beat up on President Obama and the wretched Democrats.

Like most Americans, I wake up every day and think about my wife, my daughter, my friends, my neighbors, my job and go to work. I worry about my favorite sports teams and whether they won or lost. I do think of myself as an American and thank the almighty that I have that privilege. And as an American, I do worry about the direction of my country and the decisions made by our elected leaders. That is where political parties matter.

Political parties are vehicles to help elect people to office. Elected officials are the name of the game. And what people do when they are elected is what matters to most Americans.

Here is where the conduct of the Republican Senators will have a big impact on the future of this party in this crucial rebuilding period.

Sotomayor will have a lifetime appointment on the Supreme Court. Senators, both Democrats and Republicans, have a right and an obligation to question her and get to know her views. But they must treat her with the respect she deserves and has earned.

Let me state that I am sure Sotomayor and I don't agree on very much. And I am sure some of her liberal rulings will drive me nuts. But President Obama won, is a liberal and gets to put liberals on the court. That's the way it works. Ideology aside, is she qualified?

There can be no debate over her qualifications. Her lifetime achievements in the academic world, in the legal world and the judicial world are unchallengeable. If that was the only measure, she would be confirmed unanimously.

That isn't going to happen! We are into full-bore political battle within the Republican Party, with conservatives and pragmatists arguing over what are the best tactics to stop the direction that this young president and his congressional allies are taking us.

But I just offer a word of caution. The confirmation of Sonia Sotomayor is not the battle to be waged and it won't be won. No one should be brutalized like Judge Robert Bork was in the 1980s. And no one should be rubber-stamped either.

Sotomayor is not deserving to be on the Supreme Court because she is Puerto Rican or a woman. She has been appointed by the president because she is extremely well-qualified. Judge those qualifications fairly and without malice. To do less will antagonize Hispanic and female voters, two voter groups Republicans must do better with to have any chance of electoral success.

In 1981 when Sandra Day O'Connor was nominated by President Reagan to be the first woman on the court, she was confirmed unanimously. When Antonin Scalia was nominated, also by President Reagan, he was confirmed 98-0. He was the first American of Italian descent appointed to the court.

Sotomayor, if confirmed, will be the 111th judge to sit on the court. One-hundred-six white men, two African-American men and two white women have gone before her. The appointment of a Hispanic-American is long overdue. Appointing another woman is critical also. But she's there because of her own accomplishments, not her gender or her heritage.

Republicans are in a position where we are the underdogs. Unfortunately, no one is cheering for us to win. These nationally televised hearings may be an opportunity for Republican senators to take a step in the right direction. Don't treat her like a lady. Treat her like an extremely qualified American who the president chose to elevate to the nation's highest court.

He should be allowed to knock Romney's teeth down his throat, especially now that the two-faced Mormon bigot has decided to play a little demagoguery game with the nomination.

I didn't see the debate, but I'll bet Young Johnny McCranky lied his fool head off. Lee Atwater would have understood, and applauded

Outside the Hofstra University student center students championed their favorites Wednesday. Tonight's debate is said to have cost the school in the neighborhood of $3.5 million.

by Ken

I'm not going to kid you. I didn't watch the debate. (It is over, isn't it?) I may watch Keith Olbermann's post-debate wrap-up on MSNBC, or then again, I may not. The problem is, it's going to be all about, you know, the debate

As I've said a number of times, basically I don't watch debates. You know as well as I do that you hardly ever learn anything about what the candidates would actually do if they're elected. What you learn is mostly how well coached they were, and perhaps how coachable. What's more, ind in the end it never matters what I think. It only matters what some mass of people out there -- usually known as the "middle" or the "undecideds" -- take away, and that may or may not have much to do with what really happened.

And of course I will inescapably see, many times over, the "highlights" of the debate, the things I'm supposed to need to have seen.

It makes me if anything less interested in this debate, coming as it does mere days after I followed through on my announced intent and saw the documentary Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story.

I don't want to write about the film in detail without the benefit of a transcript or a DVD or a second viewing. But a couple of things popped out at me. First was the reminder of how young the "boogie man" was. His ambition was limitless, as was his willingness to do absolutely anything to win an election.

We are reminded of this forcefully by Ed Rollins, who managed Ronald Reagan's presidential reelection campaign in 1984 and afterward took the audacious step of hiring Atwater, with his bare minimum of experience, as his deputy. Rollins tells us that people warned him seriously not to hire Atwater, that he couldn't be trusted, and sure enough, Atwater almost immediately repaid the man who gave him this extraordinary opportunity by attempting to ruin him. Rollins provides a vivid description of their ensuing conversation, in which he informed the young man that if he ever did anything like that again, he would kill him. There is a strong suggestion that Rollins wasn't speaking metaphorically.

(Footnote: During the second Reagan term, Rollins says, Atwater used his office to ingratiate himself with Vice President Bush and his people and to bad-mouth Rollins, thus ensuring that Bush wouldn't turn to Rollins to manage his presidential run, turning instead to -- imagine that! -- Lee Atwater.)

I've also had to replace my image of Atwater as a master strategist with one as a master innovator. Give him a set of circumstances, and he could come up with a stratagem that probably nobody else would have thought of -- or would have had the gall to actually do. Polls, apparently, were an Atwater specialty. Somebody in the film points out that if Lee needed a poll, he would just go in the next room, and half an hour later he had the poll he needed.

Related to this is the point I wanted to get to: the casual acceptance of lying in campaigns. As several commenters in the film point out, there is really only one standard in campaigns: winning. And the stakes don't get any higher than the presidential level, where Atwater found himself competing at such a remarkable age. But when it looked like he had blown the 1988 Bush campaign, he was on his way to becoming a pariah. We're told that GHWB was perilously close to firing him.

It's not surprising to learn that the patrician Bushes didn't take to a loudmouth cracker like Atwater. But they were happy to let him do their dirty work, as along as it showed signs of winning for them.

GHWB himself certainly understood the etiquette of public lying. We see longtime White House correspondent Sam Donaldson watching videotape of Bush browbeating Dan Rather, who's attempting to get actual answers to interview questions and is punked by Bush. Donaldson laughingly makes clear that Bush was just plain lying his head off. But, he says, you just can't say that when it comes to presidential politics.

My first reaction was, why not? But I think I'm beginning to understand. Once you point out that so-and-so is lying, so-and-so is forced to come back at you with a bigger and better arsenal of destructive weapons.

Now it wasn't news to me that politicians lie. What was news is that everybody involved on the inside of the electoral game understands that people lie all the time. It's so normal that it's taken for granted. Only we poor schlubs on the receiving end of the TV feed aren't in on the game, and are left parsing each statement, as if the candidate meant it to be taken seriously rather than to create some sort of emotional effect.

Very likely the ease of lying has been undermined somewhat by the present-day existence of such extensive and readily searchable political archives -- in a matter of seconds any nerd sitting in his living room or den can call up not just accounts but actual video of candidate X -- let's call him Young Johnny McCranky -- contradicting everything he just said. In fact, as Rachel Maddow among others has pointed out, this is an odd and hard-to-explain feature of the McCranky campaign. Maybe it's because of his famous unfamiliarity with modern technology like "the Google," but he still doesn't seem to understand how accessible the historical record is now.

Now I don't believe that all political candidates lie, or that even the ones who do all lie to the same degree. On the one hand, while I'm sure there have been misstatements of fact out of the Obama campaign, I do believe that the campaign managers and strategists have accepted an obligation to truth as the standard against which their claims are to be measured.

Whereas, as I've noted more than once, I've not only never seen but never imagined a spectacle like the McCranky campaign, in which every word, inflection, and indeed blink of the eye has to be assumed to be wholly unrelated to truth.

I guess now I understand better. There is an assumption inside campaigns that voters are morons, and clearly Senator McCranky thinks the people who might vote for him are barely even that. Is it possible that McCranky-Palin sympathizers don't realize that their guy thinks they're dumber than doody?
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