The Impeachment Hearing Room

Ed’s Sunday Night Election 2008 Bill Board| Obama Plus

Reelect Kucinch : Wakeup America

Cindy Slices And Dices Pelosi On The Bailout!

Elect Charlotte Dennett - 60 second spot to run in VT

Web Ad: Chris Shays Just Doesn't Get It | Vote Jim Himes

Michele Bachmann's Million Dollar Mistake

Michelle Bachmann's Crazy Comment

Support Hagan Defeat Dole

 Today's Paper The New York Times (Plus) Obama For Every Reason

Barack Obama for President (Endorsement)

The Making (And Remaking) Of Mccain (Exposed) | By Robert Draper

In Defense of White Americans | By Frank Rich | The New York Times

IT seems like a century ago now, but it was only in 2005 that a National Journal poll of Beltway insiders predicted that George Allen, then a popular Virginia senator, would be the next G.O.P. nominee for president. George who? Allen is now remembered, if at all, as a punch line. But any post-mortem of the Great Republican Collapse of 2008 must circle back to the not-so-funny thing that happened on his way to the White House.

That would be in 2006, when he capsized his own shoo-in re-election race by calling a 20-year-old Indian-American “macaca” before a white audience (and a video camera). “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia,” Allen told the young Democratic campaign worker for good measure, in a precise preview of the playbook that has led John McCain and Sarah Palin to their tawdry nadir two years later.

It wasn’t just Allen’s lame racial joke or his cluelessness about 21st-century media like YouTube that made him a harbinger of the current G.O.P. fiasco. It was most of all the national vision he set forth: There are Real Americans, and there are the Others.

The Real are the small-town white folks Allen was addressing in southwestern Virginia. The Others — and their subversive fellow travelers, the Elites — are Americans like the young man who Allen maligned: a high-achievingson of immigrant parents who was born and raised in Washington’s Northern Virginia suburbs during its technology boom. (Allen, the self-appointed keeper of real Virginia, grew up in California.)

Cut to 2008. You’d think that this incident would be a cautionary tale, but the McCain campaign instead embraced Allen as a role model, with Palin’s odes to “real” and “pro-America” America leading the charge. The farcical apotheosis of this strategy arrived last weekend, again on camera and again in Virginia, when a McCain adviser, Nancy Pfotenhauer, revived Allen’s original script, literally, during an interview on MSNBC.

After dismissing the Northern Virginia suburbs, sheasserted that the “real Virginia” — the part of the state “more Southern in nature” — will prove “very responsive” to the McCain message. All Pfotenhauer left out was “macaca,” but with McCain calling Barack Obama’s tax plan “welfare” and campaign surrogates (including the robo-calling Rudy Giuliani) linking the Democrat to violent, Willie Horton-like criminality, that would have been redundant.

We don’t know yet if McCain will go the way of Allen in a state that hasn’t voted for a Democratic president since 1964, when L.B.J. vanquished another Arizona Republican in a landslide. But we do know that Obama swept like a conquering hero through Richmond, the former capital of the Confederacy, last week and that he every recent Virginia poll.

There are at least two larger national lessons to be learned from what is likely to be the last gasp of Allen-McCain-Palin politics in 2008. The first, and easy one, is that Republican leaders have no idea what “real America” is. In the eight years since the first Bush-Cheney convention pledged inclusiveness and showcased Colin Powell as its opening-night speaker, the G.O.P. has terminally alienated black Americans (Powell himself now included), immigrant Americans (including the Hispanics who once gave Bush-Cheney as much as 44 percent of their votes) and the extended families of gay Americans (Palin hasnow revived a constitutional crusade against same-sex marriage). Subtract all those players from the actual America, and you don’t have enough of a bench to field a junior varsity volleyball team, let alone a serious campaign for the Electoral College.

But the other, less noticed lesson of the year has to do with the white people the McCain campaign has been pandering to. As we saw first in the Democratic primary results and see now in the widespread revulsion at the McCain-Palin tactics, white Americans are not remotely the bigots the G.O.P. would have us believe. Just because a campaign trades in racism doesn’t mean that the country is racist. It’s past time to come to the unfairly maligned white America’s defense.

That includes acknowledging that the so-called liberal media, among their other failures this year, have helped ratchet up this election cycle’s prevailing antiwhite bias. Ever since Obama declared his candidacy, the press’s default setting has been to ominously intone that “in the privacy of the voting booth” ignorant, backward whites will never vote for a black man.

A leading vehicle for this journalistic mind-set has been the unending obsession with “the Bradley effect” — as if nothing has changed in America since 1982, when some polls (possibly for reasons having nothing to do with race) predicted erroneously that a black candidate, Tom Bradley, would win the California governorship. In 2008, there is, if anything, more evidence of a reverse Bradley effect — Obama’s primary vote totals more often exceeded those in the final polls than not — but poor old Bradley keeps being flogged anyway.

So do all those deer hunters in western Pennsylvania. Once Hillary Clinton whipped Obama in the Rust Belt, it’s been a bloviation staple (echoing the Clinton camp’s line) that a black guy is doomed among Reagan Democrats, Joe Sixpacks, rednecks, Joe the Plumbers or whichever condescending term you want to choose. (Clinton at one low pointsettled on “hard-working Americans, white Americans.”) Michigan in particular was repeatedly said to be slipping out of the Democrats’ reach because of incorrigible racism — until McCain abandoned it as hopeless this month in the face of a double-digit Obama lead.

The constant tide of anthropological articles and television reports set in blue-collar diners, bars and bowling alleys have hyped this racial theory of the race. So did the rampant misreading of primary-season exit polls. On cable TV and the Sunday network shows, there was endless chewing over the internal numbers in the Clinton victories. It was doomsday news for Obama, for instance, that some 12 percent of white Democratic primary voters in Pennsylvania said race was a factor in their choice and three-quarters of them voted for Clinton. Ipso facto — and despite the absence of any credible empirical evidence — these Clinton voters would either stay home or flock to McCain in November.

The McCain campaign is so dumb that it bought into the press’s confirmation of its own prejudices. Even though registered Democrats outnumber Republicans by 1.2 million in Pennsylvania (more than double the 2004 gap), even though Obama leads by double digits in almost every recent Pennsylvania poll and even though no national Republican ticket has won there since 1988, McCain started pouring his dwindling resources into the state this month. When the Democratic Representative John Murtha described his ownwestern Pennsylvania district as a “racist area,” McCain feigned outrage and put down even more chips on the race card, calling the region the “most patriotic, most God-loving” part of America.

Well, there are racists in western Pennsylvania, as there are in most pockets of our country. But despite the months-long drumbeat of punditry to the contrary, there are not and have never been enough racists in 2008 to flip this election. In the latest New York Times/CBS News and Pew national polls, Obama is now pulling even with McCain among white men, a feat accomplished by no Democratic presidential candidate in three decades, Bill Clinton included. The latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey finds age doing more damage to McCain than race to Obama.

Nor is America’s remaining racism all that it once was, or that the McCain camp has been hoping for it to be. There are even “racists for Obama,” as Politico labels the phenomenon: White Americans whose distrust of black people in general crumbles when they actually get to know specific black people, including a presidential candidate who extends a genuine helping hand in a time of national crisis.

The original “racist for Obama,” after all, was none other than Obama’s own white, Kansas-raised grandmother, the gravely ill Madelyn Dunham, whom he visited in Hawaiion Friday. In “Dreams From My Father,” Obama wrote of how shaken he was when he learned of her overwhelming fear of black men on the street. But he weighed that reality against his unshakeable love for her and hers for him, and he got past it.

When Obama cited her in his speech on race last spring, the right immediately accused him of “throwing his grandmother under the bus.” But Obama’s critics were merely projecting their own racial hang-ups. He still loves his grandmother. He was merely speaking candidly and generously — like an adult — about the strange, complex and ever-changing racial dynamics of America. He hit a chord because many of us have had white relatives of our own like his, and we, too, see them in full and often love them anyway.

Such human nuances are lost on conservative warriors of the Allen-McCain-Palin ilk. They see all Americans as only white or black, as either us or them. The dirty little secret of such divisive politicians has always been that their rage toward the Others is exceeded only by their cynical conviction that Real Americans are a benighted bunch of easily manipulated bigots. This seems to be the election year when voters in most of our myriad Americas are figuring that out.

The Party of Yesterday

Two years ago, a list of the nation’s brainiest cities was put together from Census Bureau reports — that is, cities with the highest percentage of college graduates, which is not the same as smart, of course.

These are vibrant, prosperous places where a knowledge economy and cool things to do after hours attract people from all over the country. Among the top 10, only two of those metro areas — Raleigh, N.C., and Lexington, Ky. — voted Republican in the 2004 presidential election.

This year, all 10 are likely to go Democratic. What’s more, with Colorado, New Hampshire and Virginia now trending blue, Republicans stand to lose the nation’s 10 best-educated states as well.

It would be easy to say these places are not the real America, in the peculiar us-and-them parlance of Sarah Palin. It’s easy to say because Republicans have been insinuating for years now that some of the brightest, most productive communities in the United States are fake American — a tactic that dates to Newt Gingrich’s reign in the capitol.

Brainy cities have low divorce rates, low crime, high job creation, ethnic diversity and creative capitalism. They’re places like Pittsburgh, with its top-notch universities; Albuquerque, with its surging Latino middle class; and Denver, with its outdoor-loving young people. They grow good people in the smart cities.

But in the politically suicidal greenhouse that Republicans have constructed for themselves, these cities are not welcome. They are disparaged as nests of latte-sipping weenies, alt-lifestyle types and “other” Americans, somehow inauthentic.

If that’s what Republicans want, they are doomed to be the party of yesterday.

Not only are we becoming more urban as a nation, but we’re headed for an ethnic muddle that could further shrink the party of small-mindedness. By 2023, more than half of all American children will be minority, the Census Bureau projects.

Ronald Reagan was lashed by liberals for running a “Morning in America” campaign, but he knew this country, at heart, was always tomorrow-looking — and he fared very well in educated cities as well as small towns. “Whatever else history may say about me when I’m gone,” said Reagan, “I hope it will record that I appealed to your best hopes, not your worst fears.” Barack Obama, who brings that music to the stage, leads by 30 points on the “hope and optimism” question in polls.

Spurning the Reagan lesson, John McCain made a fatal error in turning his campaign over to the audience of Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. In so doing, he chose the unbearable lightness of being Sarah Palin, trotted out Paris Hilton and labeled Obama a socialist who associates with terrorists.

At a recent Palin rally, the crowd started chanting, “We want Fox!” McCain has given them just that. But how isolated and out-of-touch is this audience? At the end of each debate, a sure-fire way to decide who won was to look at the Fox viewers poll — typically showing a landslide for McCain. Within a day, scientific surveys found big wins for Obama.

Whether Americans are real or fake, they can see through Palin, a woman who couldn’t correctly answer a third grader a few days ago when asked to explain the duties of vice president. Somewhere, between the shuffling to costume and accessorize Palin with a $150,000 wardrobe, her handlers never handed her a copy of the Constitution.

Republicans blow off the smart cities with the counterargument that they win the exurbs — the frontier of new homes, young families and the fresh middle class. And it’s true, in 2004, George Bush won 97 of the 100 fastest-growing counties in America.

That will not happen this year. Polls show McCain is losing 20 percent of self-described moderate Republicans. And new registration figures and other polls indicate that Obama will likely win such iconic exurban centers as Washoe County, Nev., Loudoun County, Va., and Wake County, N.C.

But in the kind of pattern that has held true since McCain went over to the stupid side, his brother recently referred to suburban northern Virginia as “communist country” and a top adviser, Nancy Pfotenhauer, said it was not “real Virginia.”

Here in Seattle, it’s become a one-party city, with a congressman for life and nodding-head liberals who seldom challenge a tax-loving city government. It would be nice, just to keep the philosophical debate sharp, if there were a few thoughtful Republicans around.

That won’t happen so long as Republicans continue to be the party of yesterday. They’ve written the cities off. Fake Americans don’t count, but this Election Day, for once, they will not feel left out.

John McCain, (In-)Flexible Aggression

But when he confronts an adversary, a starkly different John McCain can emerge, fired up with certainty for an all-or-nothing battle. “I am going to win this thing and you are going to have to run me over to defeat me,” said former Senator Bob Kerrey, a Democrat close to Mr. McCain, explaining his friend’s attitude. “It is a face that makes his opponent think, ‘I don’t know if I want to get my nose bloodied by this guy.’ ”

The conflicting impulses toward deliberation and aggression have been the alternating currents of his singular career and, if Mr. McCain wins the White House, could shape his presidency. As a Navy pilot, Mr. McCain has written, he let his “cockiness” deafen him to the risk of a buzzer warning of enemy fire. But as a returning prisoner of war he drew nuanced conclusions about political leadership and public opinion that have left him at some times a dove (Lebanon, Somalia ) and others a hawk (the Balkans, Iraq).

Today’s Choice

Rebranding the U.S. With Obama

We’re beginning to get a sense of how Barack Obama’s political success could change global perceptions of the United States, redefining the American “brand” to be less about Guantánamo and more about equality. This change in perceptions would help rebuild American political capital in the way that the Marshall Plan did in the 1950s or that John Kennedy’s presidency did in the early 1960s.

In his endorsement of Mr. Obama, Colin Powell noted that “the new president is going to have to fix the reputation that we’ve left with the rest of the world.” That’s not because we crave admiration, but because cooperation is essential to address 21st-century challenges; you can’t fire cruise missiles at the global financial crisis.

In his endorsement, Mr. Powell added that an Obama election “will also not only electrify our country, I think it’ll electrify the world.” You can already see that. A 22-nation survey by the BBC found that voters abroad preferred Mr. Obama to Mr. McCain in every single country — by four to one over all. Nearly half of those in the BBC poll said that the election of Mr. Obama, an African-American, would “fundamentally change” their perceptions of the United States.

Europe is particularly intoxicated by the possibility of restoring amity with America in an Obama presidency. As The Economist put it: “Across the Continent, Bush hatred has been replaced by Obama-mania.”

Poll: Obama's race not the only factor for Ky. Voters, Oh Really ...
By Ed. Dickau(Ed. Dickau) 
Poll: Obama's race not the only factor for Ky. Voters, Oh Really! And There You Have It From A Hot Bed Of Racism USA! By Ryan Alessi | ralessi@herald-leader.com. Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill. climbs the ...
The Impeachment Hearing Room - http://theimpeachmenthearingroom.blogspot.com/

CC Goldwater Why McCain Has Lost Our Vote

Being Barry Goldwater's granddaughter and living in Arizona, one would assume that...

Michele Bachmann: "Not All Cultures Are Equal" (Exclusive Video)

http://www.theuptake.org/

There Is Much More Work To Be Done!

Polls give Obama a clear lead  Now Let’s See To It That This Election Is Not Stolen!

David Plouffe

https://donate.barackobama.com/page/contribute/septembernumbers?source=20081019_DP_ND

David Plouffe's Strategy Update: October 14, 2008

McCain's Robocalls: An All Out Assault

Voters Want Robo-Calls Terminated

Polls Give Obama A Clear Lead

By Daniel Dombey and Harvey Morris in Washington

Published: October 17 2008 03:00 | Last updated: October 17 2008 03:00

Polls and pollsters pointed towards a near-unassailable lead for Barack Obama yesterday, just 19 days ahead of Election Day on November 4.

Snap surveys taken after the last of three televised debates with John McCain on Wednesday night gave the Democrat the edge in the encounter by margins of up to 30 percentage points.

"McCain was behind going in and he is behind coming out," said John McIntyre, co-founder of RealClearPolitics.com, an election website.

Pollsters and analysts say Mr. Obama is now so well ahead of his Republican rival that it would take an exceptional event for him to lose. In the battleground states that will decide the race for the White House, he has a lead even greater than in the national polls.

Mr. Obama, however, sounded a note of caution. "I've been in these positions before when we were favored and the press starts getting carried away and we end up getting spanked," he told a fundraising breakfast in New York.

Pollsters echo some of that caution, noting it is a peculiarly difficult election to forecast, precisely because of one of the chief weapons in Mr. Obama's armory: nobody knows how many of the young people, African-Americans and first-time voters enlisted by his campaign will actually vote.

Frank Newport, editor-in-chief of the Gallup Poll, one of the most venerable and widely followed of US surveys, said a lead of the size Mr Obama enjoys - an average of between 3 and 8 points, according to his own poll - is rarely overturned this late in a race.

"Clearly the probabilities are that Obama wins, based on where he is now, but it would not be out of the question that there would be an unusual circumstance in which McCain charges from behind," Mr Newport said.

So uncertain is Gallup about who will vote amid the Obama campaign's drive to recruit new voters that it provides two estimates of the intentions of "likely" voters, in addition to its survey of registered voters.

Mr Obama's position in the swing states is stronger than in the nation as a whole. According to Pollster. com, he has compiled a formidable lead in the electoral college of 333-155 electoral votes. To win, a candidate needs 270 electoral votes.

Mr McIntyre said the one possible light at the end of the tunnel for Mr McCain post-debate was the "Joe the Plumber" factor. "But we will have to see if that materializes in the polling taken after the debate, which we really won't see in full until Sunday, Monday," he said.

Joe Wurzelbacher, an Ohio small businessman, was elevated to star status by Mr McCain in Wednesday's debate after challenging Mr Obama's tax policies during a campaign stop this week. He disappointed interviewers yesterday by declining to say for whom he would vote.

Editorial Comment, Page 10 Philip Stephens, Page 11

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008

Joe the Plumber's attack on Obama goes down plughole

... even though the man who confronted his opponent, Barack Obama, in the key state of Ohio has turned out to be neither a qualified plumber nor even to  have Joe as his first name....

John McCain is still hoping that "Joe the Plumber" can rescue the ailing Republican campaign for the White House, even though the man who confronted his opponent, Barack Obama, in the key state of Ohio has turned out to be neither a qualified plumber nor even to have Joe as his first name.

Campaigning to hold on to once solidly Republican North Carolina yesterday, Mr McCain declared: "The real winner this week was Joe the Plumber. Joe won, because he's the only person to get a real answer out of Senator Obama about his plans for our country. Congratulations, Joe. That is an impressive achievement."

Samuel J Wurzelbacher, a burly and balding everyman from Toledo, was seized upon by the Republican campaign after cameras captured him questioning Mr Obama about his tax policies. Introducing himself as a plumber named Joe, he complained that he would be paying more tax if the Democrat won the White House, damaging his ability to live the American dream and buy his own business.

With just over two weeks to go, and the Republican campaign losing altitude rapidly, Mr McCain apparently believes that Mr Obama's reply to "Joe the Plumber" – that he wanted to "spread the wealth around" by raising taxes on those earning more than $250,000 (£144,000) – is his best chance of convincing voters that the Democrat is a tax-raiser, practically a socialist, and definitely out of touch with regular Americans.

Even though it emerged that "Joe" does not have a licence to operate as a plumber, is behind on his taxes, and would actually enjoy a tax cut of about $500 under the Democrat's plans, because his real income is much lower than he claimed, Mr Wurzelbacher is still being courted by the Republicans.

According to Newsweek magazine, he was invited to a McCain rally today, but declined – because he is being flown to New York for an interview on the Fox TV network.

Whether that will be more or less damaging than an appearance by Mr McCain's running mate, Sarah Palin, on the Saturday Night Live comedy show remains to be seen. But as one commentator cruelly wrote of the Republican campaign after the final presidential debate last week: "Sometimes the leak is so bad that even a plumber can't fix it."

http://www.blackboxvoting.org/

Video the Count: What to do on Election Night

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/10172008/watch3.html

http://www.canivote.org/

http://www.866ourvote.org/

http://www.pbs.org/vote2008/youtube/

Fight Back And Clean Up This Election | Every Vote Is Going To Count And Be Counted!

Are Voters Telling The Truth About Race?

And Other More Up Scale Commentary

If Barack Obama is the consensus leader in the public opinion polls heading into Election Day, can we be sure that voters are really telling the truth and will actually vote for the first major-party African-American presidential candidate?

At Zogby International, our polling suggests that the so-called Wilder or Bradley effect is not likely to be a factor in the presidential race this year. These "effects" are named for two African-American politicians--former Virginia Gov. Douglas Wilder and California's Tom Bradley. Wilder, who in 1989 was running for governor of Virginia and led polls in that race by 15 points as close as two weeks prior to the general election, won by only 6,700 votes. Bradley, in 1982, led in the polls for governor of California, but lost the election.

The assumption has been that some American voters may be reluctant to reveal a racial bias they harbor to someone asking them poll questions. To avoid admitting bias, the assumption held, some would tell the pollsters they would vote for the black candidate, but would do the opposite in the polling booth. They might also say they are undecided when they have already made up their minds to vote against the black candidate. If the Bradley/Wilder effect were taking place in this presidential election, one would expect a disproportionate number of undecided voters to act in that way.

However, in all but a few 2008 Democratic primaries, there was no significant difference between our final polling results and the actual results.

Contrary to what the Bradley/Wilder effect would predict, last-minute voters were fairly evenly split between Hillary Clinton and Obama supporters in many key states. For example, our Zogby poll showed that 47% of the likely voters in Texas would vote for Clinton compared to 44% for Obama. About 9% of the sample claimed to be undecided at the time of the poll. The actual election results showed Clinton received 51% of the final vote and Obama 48%. Each picked up about 4% of the voters who identified themselves as "undecided" until Primary Day.

Similarly, in Pennsylvania, our Zogby poll indicated that 51% of the likely voters would vote for Clinton and 41% for Obama. About 8% of the sample was undecided. In the election, both Clinton's and Obama's support went up by 4%. Again, each of the candidates picked up about half of the undecided voters. The actual result for the election was 55% for Clinton and 45% for Obama.

The New Hampshire primary is cited by some as proof that poll respondents did mask racial feelings that came out in Clinton's unexpected win there. But the actual result and pre-election polling were within the margin of error. The polling average predicted Obama would receive 38.3%, and he actually got 36.4%.

Clinton's total was 9 points higher than the poll average, but not due to the Bradley factor. Strong evidence suggests that Obama lost some support from independents who sensed a solid Obama victory and felt comfortable voting in the Republican primary, and due to a big turnout from women over 45 who feared an end to Clinton's campaign. In either case, race did not play a factor.

Finally, a new study by Daniel J. Hopkins, a post-doctoral fellow in Harvard's Department of Government, looked at data from 133 gubernatorial and senatorial elections from 1989 to 2006. Hopkins writes that his study "demonstrates a significant Wilder effect only through the early 1990s, when Wilder himself was governor of Virginia."

Hopkins also quite accurately points out that polls tend to overstate the support of any front-runner, no matter his or her race or gender. As for why the Wilder/Bradley effect may have been real in the 1980s, but not so now, Hopkins hypothesizes that "the prominence of racialized issues such as crime and welfare declined markedly at the national level in the late 1990s and early 2000s."

Analysis of Zogby polling has showed that younger voters, whom I identify in The Way We'll Be as "First Globals," are much more racially tolerant than their parents, and especially their grandparents. The trend toward each new generation being more open to diversity is peaking with these First Globals. Any remnants of submerged racial bias surfacing on Election Day are eroding, and I doubt we will see it Nov. 4.

John Zogby is president and CEO of Zogby International and author of The Way We'll Be: The Zogby Report on the Transformation of the

30-Second Sarah: A Quickie With Sister Sarah

It was a day in February and the sun was little more than a gaudy accessory. The man stood on a bridge along Eleventh Street in Milwaukee. He was holding a sign. His breath rose in clouds. There was ice on his eyebrows. Beneath him, along Interstate 43, the traffic ran north and south in a great rattle. The cold made everything seem fragile, as though the cars would shatter if they collided. It was ten o'clock in the morning and it was 8 degrees, and the man held his sign while the ice formed on the edges of his face, trying to get the cars below him to honk their horns in support of Barack Obama.

He had been a classmate, long ago, before he'd gone into the Navy the way his family had wanted him to, a fellow student at a high school in Hawaii, where they had no mornings like this one. He had traveled the world and he had come to this bridge with the ice on his face because he was looking for something and he thought he'd found it. Hardly anyone looked up. Hardly anyone saw his sign. Hardly anyone honked their horn. But he stood there, holding his sign and waving at the drivers below as the sun rose vainly higher in the sky and nobody looked up toward it to see the sign and honk their horns.

"I'm working for him," the man said, "because a lot of what I believed, I don't believe anymore, and I want to again. Not in him, necessarily, but in those things."

Barack Obama had a moment, as fragile as thin ice, in which he could have defined "change," which he never truly has defined except as all those things encompassed by the phrase "Elect me." He could have defined change as a rejection of preemptive war, of torture, of black prisons, of warrantless surveillance, as a renewed embrace of our founding documents. He could have defined change as a condemnation of crony government, of incompetent government, of drowned cities, of conscious, greed-driven neglect that has turned the idea of "the general welfare" into a spiritless punch line.

He could have defined change with the laws already on the books. He could have defined change simply as "change back," to an America in which so much of what the current administration has done was not merely un-American, it was unimaginable. He could have celebrated the people who never changed at all -- the heroic military lawyers of the JAG Corps, to name one conspicuous example -- and welcomed us all back to the better country they'd never left.

But no.

In August, for whatever reason, he went to the Reverend Rick Warren's Saddleback Church for a "forum" in front of people who have no more intention of voting for him than they do of erecting a statue to Baal. It is instructive to remember that forty years ago, when George Romney ran for president, hardly anyone mentioned the fact that he was a Mormon. This year, his son, the former governor of Massachusetts, ran for president and couldn't go ten minutes without being asked about the "issue" of his religion. The very notion that an affluent celebrity God-botherer like Warren should be allowed to vet presidential candidates is in itself a measure of how badly things have turned. At one point, Warren asked Obama: "At what point does a baby get human rights?"

The only proper answer to this question for anyone running for president is "How the hell do I know? If that's what you want from a president, vote for Thomas Aquinas." Instead, Obama summoned up some pale, faith-based flummery that convinced nobody and made him look like they had to tie him to the floor to keep him from floating to the ceiling. Warren responded by giving an interview after the forum in which he compared an evangelical voting for a pro-choice candidate to a Jewish voter supporting a Holocaust denier. And on we go.

"Change" is now whatever Barack Obama needs it to be at the moment. He is the change. We are the change. And there it ends. He thought it meant an end to "partisanship" without appreciating that democracies are supposed to be partisan, never more so than when a "bipartisan" consensus fits American military justice with a kangaroo suit. He thought it meant an end to "divisiveness" without appreciating the fact that there is much about this country now that ought to divide us, that it is time for a loud, impolite fight about what it means to be an American.

In truth, though, Senator Obama is the only one of the two candidates who seems to believe in the idea of a political commonwealth, that there are those things -- be they the guarantees in the Bill of Rights or mountains in Alaska -- that we own together. Barack Obama stands, however inchoately and however diffidently, for the notion that a common purpose is necessary for common problems, that "government," as it is designed in our founding documents, is our collective responsibility.

It is this collective responsibility that built America into a great power without peer in the history of the world. And it is this collective responsibility that has succumbed to nearly thirty years of phony rightist populism, corporate brigandage, and the wildly cheered abandonment of a common American civic purpose. It is shocking that in America an argument for salvaging the common good is regarded as a radical notion by anyone, but that is where we are.

And that is what Barack Obama seems to stand for. After all, as a young man with his potential, he could have headed straight to midtown Manhattan and made a fortune. Instead, he took a church job working for poor people in Chicago, and for his troubles, he and those poor people have been viciously jeered by the likes of Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin. Such is their regard for the common good. And such is Obama's promise. And in that, however inchoately and however diffidently, Obama stands not only against Bushism, but against Reaganism, which gave it birth. And that is more than enough.

This year it's more than enough because we are not all in that enterprise together anymore, and we have not been for some time. For seven years, for the purposes of deceitful war-making and constitutional vandalism, the president chose to preside over "the base," and the devil take the common good. For several years, before the war soured, and New Orleans drowned, and he meddled grotesquely with how a woman's family in Florida chose to allow her to die, and mocked the very institutions he was to protect, this was praised as the height of political acumen.

The incompetent president and his wolfish advisors were encouraged and enabled in their various schemes and praised for their cleverness into the bargain. Anyone who questioned what was going on -- any member of what was once memorably described to writer Ron Suskind as the "reality-based community" -- was of no consequence, their voices ignored, their concerns as foreign as those of a tribesman in New Guinea.

And now, with it all in ruins, it's time to move ahead, without recriminations or even without maintaining the simple clarity of the historical record? That is not change we can believe in. And that is precisely where Barack Obama is frozen. But make no mistake, in our view the senator from Illinois is the only possible choice to lead the country.

Obscured by Obama's dithering is the fact that his Republican counterpart is one of the first presidential candidates in history to run as a parody of himself. John McCain has decided on a cheap and dishonorable campaign. He has embraced the tactics with which he was slandered in 2000, and he has hired the people responsible for them.

In so doing, he has become something of a mockery of everything he once purported to be. He has stated that he wouldn't now vote for his own immigration bill. He has operated in violation of the very campaign-finance law that bears his name. And even though his own body bears the scars of torture, he has silenced himself on the issue of the torture sanctioned and designed by the government he seeks to lead, so as not to alienate "the base." The most underutilized trope of the campaign is the notion that John McCain is running against John McCain.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the senator was leading a movement that had been exiled for decades and was now storming back to Washington to save the country from its oppressors. Of course, the truth is that it is the excesses of McCain's own party from which the country needs to be saved. That McCain is now attempting to seize the mantle of "change" for himself is profoundly absurd. And that he expects the American people to swallow it is profoundly insulting. History demands that this election be a referendum on the Bush years, and John McCain has tried desperately to change the subject.

There was a moment, in 2000, when he might have gone a different way. He gave a brave speech in Virginia, and he seemed genuinely interested in prying his party from the clutches of corporate avarice and theocratic lunacy.

If he had held to the substance of that speech, instead of merely to its form, he might have been as transformational a figure on his side of the aisle as Obama has been on his.

However, McCain has spent the past few years dancing like a monkey on a string, making brave noises in public that he later abandoned in private. And now he genuflects to Pastor Warren and a hundred other preachers who are a hundred times worse, people whom he called "agents of intolerance" eight years ago, when John McCain still had the soul he's sold off piecemeal to pay the salaries of the men he's hired out of Karl Rove's shop.

Then, of course, he picked an agent of intolerance to join him on his ticket.

But it is not Governor Palin's religious beliefs that are of concern to us. More to the point, there is no serious debate to be had over Sarah Palin's preparedness to be president of the United States.

Because in fact, she is stunningly unqualified, having never taken a position of consequence on an issue of consequence before she was selected in the last days of August. But she has now been put in a serious position to assume the presidency, and her selection is the clearest indication yet of the contempt that Senator McCain -- transformed into nominee McCain -- now feels for the process of governance.

More important still, however, is that nothing John McCain has done or said in this campaign would lead you to believe that anything the incumbent administration has done is simply wrong -- just badly executed -- and he's saying that now only because public opinion has turned so radically against Bushism and all its works. And the ultimate price of his capitulation is to continue Bushism, in all of its manifestations. Not even the presidency should be worth that.

Not even the presidency is worth what it's made John McCain do to himself.

John Paul Stevens was born on April 20, 1920, into a family of hotel magnates in the city of Chicago who, when Stevens was still young, lost everything in the Great Depression. In 1936, when John Paul Stevens was a student at the University of Chicago Laboratory School and preparing to enter the University of Chicago proper, Barack Hussein Obama Sr. was born on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kenya. In 1941, when John Paul Stevens was graduating Phi Beta Kappa and preparing to go and break Japanese naval codes and help shoot down Admiral Yamamoto in the South Pacific, Ann Dunham was born in Fort Leavenworth in Kansas.

In 1961, when John Paul Stevens was practicing law, Barack Obama and Ann Dunham married and had a son, whom they also named Barack Hussein Obama. In 1975, when President Gerald Ford named John Paul Stevens to replace William O. Douglas on the United States Supreme Court, the elder Obama was long gone and the younger Obama was a freshman at the Punahou School in Honolulu.

In January of 2009, if and when Barack Obama is inaugurated as the forty-fourth president of the United States, Associate Justice John Paul Stevens will be closing in on his thirty-fourth year on the Court and his eighty-ninth year on earth. And there, really, you have it. The best argument for the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States is written quite clearly in the peaks and squiggles of John Paul Stevens's EKG.

More than any other recent election, we are voting this year not merely for a president but to overthrow two governments. The one we can see is the one in which constitutional order has been defaced, the national spirit degraded, and the country unrecognizable because so much of the best of itself has been sold off or frittered away.

The other one is the far more insidious one, a doppelgänger nation of black prisons, shredded memos, and secret justifications for even more secret crimes. Moreover, the current administration has worked hard not only to immunize itself from the political and legal consequences of the government we can see, but it has also worked within the one we cannot see in order to perpetuate itself.

For the past several months, it has worked to make extricating ourselves from the catastrophe it has wrought in Iraq as hard as possible. It has sought to make permanent the culture of corporate brigandage and predatory incompetence that it has made a hallmark of its stewardship of the country and its government. Salted throughout the vast bureaucracy are dozens of little homeschooled land mines, the products of a dozen cheapjack diploma mills selling patent-medicine history to the spiritually gullible.

The fantastical hiring practices that only recently have come to light in the Department of Justice are only the most visible example of this, but the poisonous philosophy that has guided this administration is in all the institutions of the government Barack Obama hopes to lead. It is not dormant. It is there, replicating itself like a virus does in the cells of the body, waiting until it can erupt and debilitate him and his administration.

And nowhere is it more clearly visible than in the federal courts. It is in the courts where the depredations of the past seven years can become permanent. It is in the courts where the un-American legacy of George W. Bush can live forever -- or, at least, as long as most of the rest of us do. The Supreme Court already is dangerously close to an extremist conservative majority, and Chief Justice John Roberts and Associate Justice Samuel Alito were both born after John Paul Stevens already had passed the bar, and it was Stevens who, as recently as last June's Boumediene decision, helped create a thin 5 -- 4 majority in favor of reestablishing the right of habeas corpus for those people being detained by the administration in places like Guantánamo Bay.

The decision threw out a key provision of the 2006 Military Commissions Act, a bipartisan piece of legislative cowardice that sank the Great Writ into a deep mire of euphemism and deceit. One vote, to uphold the right that En-glish nobles wrung out of King John in 1215. One vote, on the Supreme Court of the United States of America. One vote, from an eighty-eight-year-old man who'd already founded his own law firm when the chief justice under whom he serves, and who predictably voted in agreement with the president who'd appointed him, was born. One vote, on one of 107 federal courts.

There is no evidence at all that anything will change under a President John McCain, who has already identified Roberts and Alito as his beau ideals of Supreme Court justices.

He has made brave noises about torture and the extraconstitutional prerogatives of the executive, but President Bush and his men went on and did what they wanted anyway, and McCain walked away, begging for votes from fundamentalists who hate him, meeping his displeasure in ways that were barely audible.

The virus will gestate and spread on his watch, all throughout the federal government. Bushism must be ripped out, root and branch, everywhere it has been established, or else the presidential election of 2008 is a worthless exercise in futility. Barack Obama may not be the man to do it, but John McCain, for all his laudable qualities, clearly is neither willing nor able to do so.

To continue to govern ourselves this way is unthinkable. It is unsustainable as a democracy to continue to mock so egregiously in secret what we continue to profess in public. That is the task for the next president. That is the main reason to vote for Barack Obama of Illinois. We strongly encourage you to do so.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/video/nakedcampaign/meltdown/?xrail