Former Clinton Chief Strategist Mark Penn discusses the sharp decline Obama's campaign is experiencing, and the swing voters willing to vote Republican because " They don't care what the New York Times had to say. They don't care what Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd have to say." He also says the media is "on very dangerous ground.
"I think the people themselves saw unfair media coverage of Senator Clinton. I think if you go back, the polls reflected very clearly what "Saturday Night Live" crystallized in one of their mock debates about what was happening with the press.
I think here the media is on very dangerous ground. I think that when you see them going through every single expense report that Governor Palin ever filed, if they don't do that for all four of the candidates, they're on very dangerous ground. I think the media so far has been the biggest loser in this race. And they continue to have growing credibility problems.
I think that the media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they're not doing on the other candidates. And that's going to subject them to people concluding that they're giving her a tougher time.
This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves. The media has lost credibility with them."
The Sunday Telegraph in London reports that internal Democrat polling has Barack Obama 6 points lower than published polls. Despite his rapidly declining candidacy, Obama and his top strategists refuse to take the advice of other Democrats. As one senior Democrat strategist says:
"These guys are on the verge of blowing the greatest gimme in the history of American politics. They're the most arrogant bunch Ive ever seen. They won't accept that they are losing and they won't listen."
Is the Barack Obama campaign imploding?
Mark Cunningham of the New York Post summed up the private views of many: "If it suddenly seems like the Obama campaign doesn't have any idea what it's doing, maybe that's because it doesn't."
A senior aide to one of the most powerful Democrats in the House of Representatives voiced the fears of many: "Palin doesn't just play to the Republican base. She has much broader appeal."
Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan speechwriter, blamed the defection of women voters from Mr Obama on the atom bomb of ritual abuse by left-wing bloggers and Democratic officials, painting Mrs Palin as a bad mother and religious weirdo.
Ms Noonan wrote: "The snobbery of it, the meanness of it, reminded the entire country, for the first time in a decade, what it is they don't like about the Left."
The Democrat National Convention tried to invoke the legacy of President John F. Kennedy, but here's the real question, "Is today's Democrat Party really the party of JFK?" Larry Elder doesn't think so, and neither do I:
In his 1961 inaugural speech, Kennedy said, "Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty."
Kennedy, in a 1962 speech before the Economic Club of New York said, "It is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low, and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now. The experience of a number of European countries and Japan have borne this out. This country's own experience with tax reduction in 1954 has borne this out. And the reason is that only full employment can balance the budget, and tax reduction can pave the way to that employment. The purpose of cutting taxes now is not to incur a budget deficit, but to achieve the more prosperous, expanding economy, which can bring a budget surplus."
In a televised national address just two months before his assassination, Kennedy broke it down: "A tax cut means higher family income and higher business profits and a balanced federal budget. Every taxpayer and his family will have more money left over after taxes for a new car, a new home, new conveniences, education and investment. Every businessman can keep a higher percentage of his profits in his cash register or put it to work expanding or improving his business, and as the national income grows, the federal government will ultimately end up with more revenues."
So when the haze disappears, what remains? A man of limited government, low taxes and strong national defense who rejected a government-led redistribution of wealth.
Punk rocker Johnny Ramone: A rebel indeed! The famous and influential punk-rocker, Johnny Ramone is a fiercely Republican-voting, NRA-supporting musician in a world known for its embrace of all things left.
"I'm just honored that people still like us and people are still nice to me," he says, 55 years old and very retired in Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Linda, and their three cats.
Johnny was driven right by a youthful revulsion against, um, face-ism. "It was in 1960, the Nixon-Kennedy election," he says, recalling his first inclination toward the right. He was an only child of Irish heritage in a working-class neighborhood. Families on his block voted left, pro-union. "People around me were saying, 'Oh, Kennedy's so handsome,' and I thought, 'Well, if these people are going to vote for someone based on how he looks, I don't want to be party to that.'"
He relishes agitating his left-wing peers -- and has since the band started in 1974.
"Oh yeah, they really get upset," Johnny says. "I remember in 1979 doing an interview for Creem magazine with [famed rock and roll scribe, now deceased] Lester Bangs and telling him that Ronald Reagan will be the next president. He was really mad that I liked Reagan, who was the greatest president of my lifetime. So I turned it around on him and asked to see his commie card. In fact, ever after that, I would ask him for his card. I think he had one, really."
Not that Mr. Ramone's friends must pass an ideological litmus test. He still holds ideological hopes for the relentlessly liberal Mr. Vedder. When the Pearl Jam singer impaled a mask of Mr. Bush and slammed it to the stage at a Denver concert on the heels of the Iraq invasion last April, Johnny Ramone let him know that he thought it was a stupid move.
"I got serious with him and told him that he was alienating people," Johnny says. "And I got him to see the point." When Johnny Ramone tells you something is uncool, well, it is.
Harnessing chaos, humor and danger, the Ramones created the template of the rock 'n' roll revolution that was punk rock.
Gerard Baker of the TimesOnline, finds "a yawning gulf between what the Democratic candidate says and how he has acted." He believes this election to be a struggle between two very different visions for the future of the United States.
This election is a struggle between the followers of American exceptionalism and the supporters of global universalism. Democrats are more eager than ever to align the US with the rest of the Western world, especially Europe. This is true not just in terms of a commitment to multilateral diplomacy that would restore the United Nations to its rightful place as arbiter of international justice. It is also reflected in the type of place they'd like America to be - a country with higher taxes, more business regulation, a much larger welfare safety net and universal health insurance. The Republicans, who still believe America should follow the beat of its own drum, are pretty much against all of that.
The essential problem coming to light is a profound disconnect between the Barack Obama of the candidate's speeches, and the Barack Obama who has actually been in politics for the past decade or so.
Politician Obama rose through a Chicago machine that is notoriously the most corrupt in the country. As David Freddoso writes in a brilliantly cogent and measured book, The Case Against Barack Obama, the angel of deliverance from the old politics functioned like an old-time Democratic pol in Illinois. He refused repeatedly to side with those lonely voices that sought to challenge the old corrupt ways of the ruling party.
Politician Obama has toed his party's line more reliably than almost any other Democrat in US politics. He has a near-perfect record of voting with his side. He has the most solidly left-wing voting history in the Senate.
Politician Obama's support for abortion rights is the most extreme of any Democratic senator. In the Illinois legislature he refused to join Democrats and Republicans in supporting a Bill that would require doctors to provide medical care for babies who survived abortions. No one in the Senate - not the arch feminist Hillary Clinton nor the superliberal Edward Kennedy - opposed this same humane measure.
The fact is that a vote for Mr Obama demands uncritical subservience to the irrational, anti-empirical proposition that the past holds no clues about the future, that promise is wholly detached from experience. The second-greatest story ever told, perhaps.
