The People’s Cube documents the reaction of Manhattan Upper West Siders to the passage of a McCain Campaign march through a local street fair.

The number of middle fingers in a “progressive” crowd is directly proportional to the number of PhD degrees in the ten block radius.

5:00 video

via Rusty Shackleford.

David Brooks takes a serious look at John McCain.

What disappoints me about the McCain campaign is it has no central argument. I had hoped that he would create a grand narrative explaining how the United States is fundamentally unprepared for the 21st century and how McCain’s worldview is different.

McCain has not made that sort of all-encompassing argument, so his proposals don’t add up to more than the sum of their parts. Without a groundbreaking argument about why he is different, he’s had to rely on tactical gimmicks to stay afloat. He has no frame to organize his response when financial and other crises pop up.

He has no overarching argument in part because of his Senate training and the tendency to take issues on one at a time — in part, because of the foolish decision to run a traditional right-left campaign against Obama and, in part, because McCain has never really resolved the contradiction between the Barry Goldwater and Teddy Roosevelt sides of his worldview. One day he’s a small-government Western conservative; the next he’s a Bull Moose progressive. The two don’t add up — as we’ve seen in his uneven reaction to the financial crisis.

Nonetheless, when people try to tell me that the McCain on the campaign trail is the real McCain and the one who came before was fake, I just say, baloney. I saw him. A half-century of evidence is there.

If McCain is elected, he will retain his instinct for the hard challenge. With that Greatest Generation style of his, he will run the least partisan administration in recent times. He is not a sophisticated conceptual thinker, but he is a good judge of character. He is not an organized administrator, but he has become a practiced legislative craftsman. He is, above all — and this is completely impossible to convey in the midst of a campaign — a serious man prone to serious things.

The Obama campaign’s attempt to respond to a National Rifle Association attack ad with dishonest quibbling combined with attempts at intimidation through use of government regulatory power provides an alarming sample of what a future Obama administration’s governing style might be like.

Allahpundit has the video and details.

It seems astonishing that democrat campaign professionals are so willing to believe that sportsmen and gun owners can be bamboozled by a few disingenuous protestations of support for a right to private gun ownership which has actually been a dead-letter in Obama’s home state of Illinois for years.

Obama has been consistently a supporter of the sort of gun ownership rights (from his point of view) currently regrettably still in legal existence, temporarily representing the residuum of private liberty awaiting elimination via future regulatory measures not yet presently politically achievable.

Ben Smith identifies a hundred eighty degree policy reversal made by Joe Biden in one 72-hour period.

Some great rope line video from Joe Biden’s recent Ohio swing, where he was asked by an anti-pollution campaigner about clean coal — a controversial approach in Democratic circles for which Obama has voiced support, particularly during the Kentucky primary.

Biden’s apparent answer: He supports clean coal for China, but not for the United States.

“No coal plants here in America,” he said. “Build them, if they’re going to build them, over there. Make them clean.”

“We’re not supporting clean coal,” he said of himself and Obama. They do, on paper, support clean coal.

The answer seems to play into John McCain’s case that Obama has been saying “no” to new sources of energy.

0:53 video

Today, Senator John McCain pounced on Biden’s remarks.

“I am going to put in place the priorities and policies that will create jobs in Ohio. One important way that we are going to create jobs here is with the development of additional nuclear plants and through investments in clean coal technology,” he said. “[Obama’s] running mate here in Ohio recently said that they weren’t supporting clean coal.”

Biden spokesman David Wade responded by calling McCain’s statement “yet another false attack from a dishonorable campaign.”

He continued: “Senator McCain knows that Senator Obama and Senator Biden support clean coal technology. Senator Biden’s point is that China is building coal plants with outdated technology every day, and the United States needs to lead by developing clean coal technologies.”

But the error here does seem to be Biden’s, and his remarks, and his apparent return to his primary position Tuesday, were striking because just three days ago, he praised the possibilities of coal to a crowd at the United Mine Workers of America annual fish fry in Castlewood, Va.

“You know we have enough coal in the United States of America to meet out needs domestically for the better part of the next hundred to 200 years,” Biden said before launching into a critique of McCain’s energy priorities, slamming his support for billions in tax breaks for oil companies as the industry rakes in record profits.

“Imagine … what Barack and I can do taking that $4 billion … and investing it in coal gasification, finding out what we can do with carbon sequestration, finding out how we can burn the coal that you dig that can free us from being dependent on foreign oil countries and at the same time not ruin the environment. That’s within our capacity to do it, if you give me $4 billion I promise you, I promise you we will find the answer,” Biden said.

He linked the ticket’s support for coal with their call to have U.S. automakers produce plug-in electric cars. “Where’s that [electricity] come from? That comes from a utility. What do utilities burn? They burn coal mostly.”

Southwest Virginia UMWA members are just too dumb to notice what he says in a different state, Biden obviously surmises.

D.J. Drummond, at Wizbang, explains Obama’s miraculous recovery in Gallup’s Polls.

Obama’s support goes up and down, but the Liberal and Moderate Democrat support for Obama has been steady all of September. Odd, isn’t it? And support for Obama among Conservative Democrats went down four points in the last week, even though his overall support is supposed to have gone up four points. How to figure that?

Perhaps it’s in the Independents. …

Hmmm, again. Obama gained support among Independents in the last month, but he actually lost two points among Independents in the last week. So that 4 point gain overall is still a mystery.

Nothing to do, then, but look at the Republicans. It would really be something if he’s improving support from GOP voters:

Ouch. Obama lost six points among Liberal and Moderate Republicans in the past week.

Conservative Republican support for Obama …

No change there in the past week.

Taken altogether, there is no group of political identification where Obama’s support has increased in the past week. Mathematically, therefore, there is only one way in which Gallup could show an increase in Obama’s overall support, when none of the party identification groups showed improvement for him.

Before I explain that possibility, I want to look at John McCain’s support by specific party identification groups. The man, according to Gallup, lost four points of overall support in the past week,

Conservative Republican support for McCain…

Interesting. McCain’s support among Conservative Republicans went up a point in the last week.

Wow, McCain’s support from Liberal and Moderate Republicans climbed by seven points in the past week, and yet we are told his overall support fell by four points? That is very odd, wouldn’t you say? It must have been the Independents, perhaps?

Independent support for McCain …

Stranger and stranger, McCain’s support among Independents went up by four points in the past week, just as his support from Republicans increased, yet we are told his overall support went down by four. Very hard to explain that using the math most of us learned in school, isn’t it? Well, there’s just one place left to look. Maybe somehow McCain used to have significant support among Democrats, but lost it? Let’s find out:

Conservative Democrat support for McCain …

Hmpf. Once again, a group where support for McCain went up (3%), but the overall says he went down.

Moderate Democrat support for McCain …

Steady there, so that one does not explain it.

Liberal Democrat support for McCain…

It’s only a point, but again we see McCain’s numbers in this group went up.

So, put it all together, and in the past week Obama has stayed steady or lost support in every party identification group, yet Gallup says his overall support went up four points. And McCain stayed steady or went up in every party identification group, yet we are supposed to accept the claim that his overall support went down by four points? Anyone have an answer for how that is even possible?

Well, actually I do. There is one, and only one, possible way that such a thing can happen mathematically. And that way, is that Gallup made major changes to the political affiliation weighting from the last week to now. Gallup has significantly increased the proportional weight of Democrat response and reduced the weight of Republican response.

Read the whole thing.

Rex Murphy, writing in the Canadian Globe And Mail, observes that the effulgent energy of the Obama candidacy came from sources external to itself, and seems to have entered an irreversible decline.

Most of the story of the campaign isn’t so much coming from the candidate himself as it is created by all those who, most in worshipful terms, have talked, written and reported on or about him. The Obama campaign is one great text generator, the grand fable of his fans.

In one sense, this is not surprising. He has a quicksilver quality. Even after two autobiographies, Mr. Obama remains something of a floating, uncrowded presence. His story (and he is so impressively self-aware as to have made the most acute comment on it) is temptingly open-ended, very much a page to be written on. He himself has written, most memorably: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

That is as bold a statement as it is an insightful one. Bold, because it is a remarkable confession from a presidential hopeful. Insightful, because it matches the facts. There are not many personalities so fluid or vague on which an attempt to “project” a storyline would take hold. Imagine, for example, projecting a “rewrite” of Donald Rumsfeld. There’s too much of Mr. Rumsfeld already there to offer hospitality to new material.

Mr. Obama, however, has a kind of welcoming emptiness. Eager acolyte or stern observer, both find it difficult not to add, or project, the most flattering, even jubilant, fill-ins. The Obama candidacy, in its rocket-blast phase when he outsoared Hillary Clinton, drained the dictionaries of every superlative. The great “O” had them swooning in the stands. Why?

True, Oprah had passed her potent wand over him, but even the afternoon regent of a thousand therapies has stays on her sorcery. Mainly, his was very much a candidacy constructed by those who were drawn to him. If there was any meaning to that fortune-cookie poeticism that “we are the ones we have been waiting for,” it was that his campaign was a feedback loop. People saw what they came to see. Mr. Obama was the slate; the crowds brought their own chalk.

This is the nature of Mr. Obama’s particular kind of charisma. People project their best wishes on him, they fill in the blank of a very attractive and plausible outline. His is not, emphatically, a charisma of deeds. For what has he done, save run for president? He is an accommodating vessel – cool, smart, biracial and “unfinished.” This is the Gatsby quality of him that others have noted. Like Gatsby, he is a receptacle of others’ glamorous invention.

People see in him, or wish to see, the last great ideal of the American polity fulfilled, a final and full racial accommodation. That should he be elected president, America will have achieved, by his singular persona, the perfect emblematic demonstration of having exorcised at last the great stain of its racially riven origins.

Mr. Obama’s charisma is, in this sense, external, something extended to the candidate. And it follows that that which is given may equally be taken away. The sparkle has, in fact, dimmed. He travels now in a lower orbit, closer to Earth – which is to say, he grows more mundane. The great word “hope” sounds less frequently now. He picks a running mate thick with the dust and rancour of many long years in Washington.

His acceptance speech in the Olympic-style stadium could not gather the inspirational energy of his earlier arias. Of late, the flash supernova of U.S. politics is seen “competing” with a second-on-the-ticket female governor of a remote state. There’s more than a gap between the “audacity of hope” and “lipstick on a pig.” The mouth that spoke the first phrase should not be capable of the second.

He has shrunk into a combative partisan. He crowds his own screen, leaves less space for projection. Others are not writing his narrative now – he’s inscribing his own.

A candidacy that leached so much of its energy and drive from the imagination of others, Gatsby-like, is shedding its gift. The narrative stage is over. It’s all tactics from here on in.

Campaigning in Virginia coal country, Joe Biden actually described himself as “a coal miner” from the Northeastern Pennsylvania anthracite region.

In his first visit to Southwest Virginia, Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, speaking at the United Mine Workers’ annual fish fry here on Saturday, was quick to tout his ties to coal.

“I hope you won’t hold it against me, but I am a hard-coal miner, anthracite coal, Scranton, Pa.,” Biden said. “It’s nice to be back in coal country. … It’s a different accent [in Southwest Virginia] … but it’s the same deal. We were taught that our faith and our family was the only really important thing, and our faith and our family informed everything we did.”

Biden, a U.S. senator from Delaware, told the story of his great-grandfather, a mining engineer who was elected to the state Senate in 1904 and was rumored to be a Molly Maguire, a member of a secret organization tied to union activism and crime in the Pennsylvania coalfields in the 19th century.

“He went out of his way to prove that he wasn’t, and we were all praying that he was,” he said.

The mines closed when Joe Biden and I were kids. Biden obviously was never a coal miner personally. Still, those of us from miner’s families do identify with a certain kind of culture and tradition, and consider ourselves connected to our father’s and grandfathers’ lives of hardship, danger, and hard labor.

Joe Biden moved from Scranton to the Delaware suburbs at the age of ten. Biden campaigns on his purported coal mining, Roman Catholic roots, but his politics have always been upper middle class suburban liberal.

I haven’t read Biden’s autobiography, but Ann Coulter has, and she reports that Biden tells a very different story there.

According to Vice Plagiarist Biden’s own autobiography, his father was to the manor born. Biden’s grandfather was an executive with the American Oil Co., and his father had all the advantages in life. “My dad,” Biden writes in “Promises to Keep,” “grew up well polished by gentlemanly pursuits. He would ride to the hounds, drive fast, fly airplanes. He knew good clothes, fine horses, the newest dance steps.”

Original NY Post story.

Washington Prowler:

The Obama campaign spent more than five hours on Monday attempting to figure out the best refutation of the explosive New York Post report that quoted Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari as saying that Barack Obama during his July visit to Baghdad demanded that Iraq not negotiate with the Bush Administration on the withdrawal of American troops. Instead, he asked that they delay such negotiations until after the presidential handover at the end of January.

The three problems, according to campaign sources: The report was true, there were at least three other people in the room with Obama and Zebari to confirm the conversation, and there was concern that there were enough aggressive reporters based in Baghdad with the sources to confirm the conversation that to deny the comments would create a bigger problem.

Instead, Obama’s national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi told reporters that Obama told the Iraqis that they should not rush through what she termed a “Strategic Framework Agreement” governing the future of U.S. forces until after President Bush left office. In other words, the Iraqis should not negotiate an American troop withdrawal.

According to a Senate staffer working for Sen. Joseph Biden, Biden himself got involved in the shaping of the statement. “The whole reason he’s on the ticket is the foreign policy insight,” explained the staffer.

Russ Smith feels the time has come to start discussing the unthinkable.

It’s three a.m. on Oct. 31 and a frantic broker awakens you. He’s advising making substantial investments that day in the stocks of Lilly, Pfizer and other manufacturers of anti-depressants, as well as high-end booze, say Grey Goose vodka and Hillary Clinton’s whiskey of choice, Chivas Regal. The calculations buzzing through your head are not insignificant. Barack Obama holds a two-point lead over John McCain in the Gallup poll for the Nov. 4 presidential election, and that slender margin suggests—given the undeniable factor of racism when Americans retreat to the privacy of the ballot booth—that for the third straight time a Democratic candidate will be defeated. Your own preference in the contest is irrelevant: there’s money lying on the table and only a fool would ignore the market’s indications.

A month ago, as any honest Democrat will tell you, this scenario was nearly inconceivable. The Republicans had nominated an elderly and inarticulate candidate in McCain, who was marred not only by his association with George Bush, but distrusted by the critical conservative base as well. ..

In mid-September the GOP resurrection is a simple reality, and though I dislike the cliché “a month in politics is a lifetime,” no one has any idea of how Americans will vote on Election Day. But the fear expressed by a “major Democratic fundraiser” in Politico last week—“I’m so depressed. It’s happening again. It’s a nightmare.”—isn’t isolated and won’t subside unless Obama, to quote a Matt Drudge headline, “gets his groove back.”

I have no clue if or when that could happen, but I do have an opinion of what will follow in this country if McCain pulls off what so recently seemed the miraculous feat of becoming the country’s 44th president. Voter fraud, conspiracy, “sleazevertisements” (the preferred term of many left-wing bloggers), disenfranchised voters, the return of redneck chic; those will be the immediate cries of Democrats who thought the election was in the bag. Once again, scores of celebrities will claim they’re moving abroad (and inevitably won’t). And then the depression will kick in hard.

New York magazine columnist Kurt Andersen, one of the few Beltway-Boston pundits who bashed Hillary Clinton a year ago, when her nomination appeared inevitable, was unstinting in his speculation of the fallout should Obama lose. He emailed me: “Even without post-November 4th rumors of rigged voting machines and the like, an Obama loss will be a deeply, traumatically depressing event for Democrats and other Obama enthusiasts. (Whereas if McCain loses, who will be seriously bummed outside of the McCain household?) There will be so many facets of potential unhappiness. That an eloquent, inspiring, intelligent, subtle black candidate lost—and if it’s close, it’ll be true that racism beat him… That the rest of the world will be reaffirmed in their belief that America is the land of nincompoops (or worse). That a war with Iran looks a lot likelier… That Sarah Palin won it for the Republicans, and gives a bad name to feminism and (terrifyingly) has a one-in-six (Russian roulette!) chance of becoming president before 2013.”

Tom Bevan, co-founder of Real Clear Politics, was succinct: “Two words: Hari Kari. The base of the [Democratic] party is so vested in its nominee…that to lose in November would be one of the most demoralizingin the modern era.”

Read the whole thing.

Rasmussen reports that 52% of voters polled think Sarah Palin is not ready to president.

But while 63% say John McCain is ready to be president, only 44% think Obama has the necessary experience. Do the math.

According to a former co-worker, in his Autobiography, Barack Obama seriously inflated the status of the company he worked for many years ago, and the scope of his responsibilities.

It’s a fairly trivial issue, of course. Most people remember this sort of life episode in a manner advantageous to their own egos. But it does remind us all of the necessity of taking Barack Obama’s testimony about his life and accomplishments with a grain of salt.

Steve Gilbert found all this published way back in 2005.

Like I said, I’m a fan. His famous keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention moved me to tears. The Democrats – not to mention America – need a mixed-race spokesperson who can connect to both urban blacks and rural whites, who has the credibility to challenge the status quo on issues ranging from misogynistic rap to unfair school funding.

And yet I’m disappointed. Barack’s story may be true, but many of the facts are not. His larger narrative purpose requires him to embellish his role. I don’t buy it. Just as I can’t be inspired by Steve Jobs now that I know how dishonest he is, I can’t listen uncritically to Barack Obama now that I know he’s willing to bend the facts to his purpose.

Once, when I applied for a marketing job at a big accounting firm, my then-supervisor called HR to say that I had exaggerated something on my resume. I didn’t agree, but I also didn’t get the job. But when Barack Obama invents facts in a book ranked No. 8 on the NY Times nonfiction list, it not only fails to be noticed but it helps elevate him into the national political pantheon.

Donald Luskin, in yesterday’s Washington Post, points out that politicians and reporters have a personal interest in exaggerating the scope and dimensions of current economic woes.

Do a Google News search for “since the Great Depression,” and you come up with more than 4,500 examples of the phrase’s use in just the past month.

But that doesn’t make any of it true. Things today just aren’t that bad. Sure, there are trouble spots in the economy, as the government takeover of mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and jitters about Wall Street firm Lehman Brothers, amply demonstrate. And unemployment figures are up a bit, too. None of this, however, is cause for depression — or exaggerated Depression comparisons.

Overall, the pessimists are up against an insurmountable reality: In the last reported quarter, the U.S. economy grew at an annual rate of 3.3 percent, adjusted for inflation. That’s virtually the same as the 3.4 percent average growth rate since — yes — the Great Depression.

Why, then, does the public appear to agree with the media? A recent Zogby poll shows that 66 percent of likely voters believe that “the entire world is either now locked in a global economic recession or soon will be.” Actually, that’s a major clue to what started this thought-contagion about everything being the worst it has been “since the Great Depression”: Politics.

Patient zero in this epidemic is the Democratic candidate for president. As it would be for any challenger, it’s in his interest to portray the incumbent party’s economic performance in the grimmest possible terms. Barack Obama has frequently used the Depression exaggeration, including during a campaign speech in June, when he said that the “percentage of homes in foreclosure and late mortgage payments is the highest since the Great Depression.” At best, this statement is a good guess. To be really true, it would have to be heavily qualified with words such as “maybe” or “probably.” According to economist David C. Wheelock of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, who has studied the history of mortgage markets for the Fed, “there are no consistent data on foreclosure or delinquency going all the way back to the Depression.”

The Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) database, which allows rigorous apples-to-apples comparisons, only goes back to 1979. It shows that today’s delinquency rate is only a little higher than the level seen in 1985. As to the foreclosure rate, it was setting records for the day — the highest since the Great Depression, one supposes — in 1999, at the peak of the Clinton-era prosperity that Obama celebrated in his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention late last month. I don’t recall hearing any Democratic politicians complaining back then.

Even if Obama is right that the foreclosure rate is the worst since the Great Depression, it’s spurious to evoke memories of that great national calamity when talking about today — it’s akin to equating a sore throat with stomach cancer. According to the MBA, 6.4 percent of mortgages are delinquent to some extent, and 2.75 percent are in foreclosure. During the Great Depression, according to Wheelock’s research, more than 50 percent of home loans were in default.

Moreover, MBA data show that today’s foreclosures are concentrated in that small fraction of U.S. homes financed by subprime mortgages. Such homes make up only 12 percent of all mortgages, yet account for 52 percent of foreclosures. This suggests that today’s mortgage difficulties are probably a side effect of the otherwise happy fact that, over the past several years, millions of Americans of modest means have come to own their own homes for the first time.

Read the whole thing.