England for Obama

“Today we begin in earnest the work of making sure that the world we leave our children is just a little bit better than the one we inhabit today.” - President-Elect Barack Obama

David Axelgod - sorry, Axelrod - talks to Keith Olbermann about the final few days of campaigning, including the team’s strategy in Arizona and Pennsylvania:

I’ve written about the threat of Obama losing the election as a result of GOP voter suppression before, but the full extent of the Republican’s policy is only now coming to light. Rolling Stone magazine has the full story, but here’s a taster:

In the century following the Civil War, millions of black Americans in the Deep South lost their constitutional right to vote, thanks to literacy tests, poll taxes and other Jim Crow restrictions imposed by white officials. Add up all the modern-day barriers to voting erected since the 2004 election — the new registrations thrown out, the existing registrations scrubbed, the spoiled ballots, the provisional ballots that were never counted — and what you have is millions of voters, more than enough to swing the presidential election, quietly being detached from the electorate by subterfuge.

“Jim Crow was laid to rest, but his cousins were not,” says Donna Brazile. “We got rid of poll taxes and literacy tests but now have a second generation of schemes to deny our citizens their franchise.” Come November, the most crucial demographic may prove to be Americans who have been denied the right to vote. If Democrats are to win the 2008 election, they must not simply beat John McCain at the polls — they must beat him by a margin that exceeds the level of GOP vote tampering.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. also recently appeared on MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow Show to explain what it all means. If after you’ve watched it you’re not left with a profound mixture of anger and fear then you’re probably not backing Barack!

Find out more about these practices, and how to counter them, visit No Voter Left Behind and Steal Back Your Vote.

Barack Obama’s heading to Virginia, Missouri, North Carolina and Florida today. Well, presumably just one of them at a time. I know he’s the Messiah, but he hasn’t quite nailed omnipresence yet.

Keith Olbermann and Democratic strategist Chris Kofinis discuss what matters in the last 19 days of the campaign:

Alex Massie makes some excellent points here:

“Equally, ‘constructing’ a ‘narrative’ of Obama as a ‘lightweight celebrity’ was a strategy that depended upon Obama showing himself to be nothing more than a lightweight celebrity candidate. But what if he showed more than that? What would the McCain campaign do then? In other words, McCain’s strategy depended upon Obama failing, not McCain succeeding. As such it was vulnerable. Indeed, it was predicated upon an analysis that was not the GOP’s to control.”

Massie is spot on about the expectation of Obama to fail; and also about the idea that Obama proved himself not to be, essentially, what the GOP were painting him as.

In fact, I think this tactic by the McCain campaign has been the death-knell of it - and certainly the reason for McCain’s constant and steady drop in the polls.

Because time after time, he and Sarah Palin and their spokespeople have been on camera, or speaking to the crowds, or making TV ads, telling people: “Obama is X”, “Obama is Y”.

And yet their “X” and “Y” has simply not tallied with what the obvious reality is. And the American people have gradually come to realise that.

HuffPo has a very interesting (and looong!) article on ‘The New Organizers’ - the grassroots teams of volunteers who have been working for the Obama campaign around the country. What they’ve achieved is truly remarkable, and very, very inspiring. As Zack Exley says:

“The “New Organizers” have succeeded in building what many netroots-oriented campaigners have been dreaming about for a decade… [They] have undogmatically mixed timeless traditions and discipline of good organizing with new technologies of decentralization and self-organization.”

He compares and contrasts what’s going on now at grassroots level with what happened in 2004:

“The Ohio campaign is attempting to build teams in 1,231 campaign-defined “neighborhoods,” each covering eight to ten precincts. They are targeting virtually every inhabited square mile of the state. The campaign claimed to have teams in 65% of neighborhoods when I visited in early September. That’s risen to 85% coverage at press time—and they are shooting for 100%. In contrast, the Kerry campaign effectively wrote off rural counties, and completely abandoned them in the final few weeks of the campaign in a last minute all-in shift to the cities…

[An organizer says:] ‘Everyone who goes out canvassing comes back with at least one story of someone they impacted. The team leaders are trained to give people time to tell those stories, and so everyone gets a sense of progress and they learn from each other how to be more effective next time.’

That’s a totally different picture than what I saw in scores of Kerry offices in 2004: crowds of canvassers receiving minimal instruction before being sent to an unfamiliar neighborhood and rarely getting the chance to debrief with others as a group.”

It’s quite incredible how effective the Obama camp has been on this front. Coupled with the help of the blogosphere, they’ve truly managed to inspire and harness the power of both ‘real’ people on the ground, and the ‘virtual’ community in the new media (and I guess this site is testament to that!).

I was in Malaysia at the start of this year, and saw the ruling right-wing coalition there lose control of state after state in the general election. They’d been in power for 50 (count ‘em!) years, and the election result was an utter shock - to both the incumbents and the victorious young and/or left-of-centre politicians and supporters. I’ve been thinking about what happened there during various points of this American election, because one of the reasons why the Malaysian government lost so many seats was that they controlled the old media - TV, newspapers - but not the new. Turns out the opposition had been rallying support and getting out the vote (as well as getting people out for rallies) via text messages, blogs and websites. They had been doing the grassroots work - and took absolutely nothing for granted - and the result was an overwhelming rejection of the old regime by the young and the left, whose power (and feelings) had finally been harnessed by the use of new media. The excitement was incredible on the night of the election, as news started to spread (via that new media, of course!) of the sweeping changes happening across the country… and I’m imagining a similar thing could very well happen in America on the night of November 4th.

From Nate Silver at election poll specialists Fivethirtyeight.com:

Love it.

Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight seems to think not.

(Here’s the background in case you missed it.)

I do believe this is what’s called ‘bringing it home’.

The Obama camp is releasing a 13-minute video today about John McCain’s role in the Keating Five scandal (new/British readers start here).

Here’s the official email that was in my inbox from the Obama campaiagn this morning, entitled What they don’t want to talk about:

“Over the weekend, John McCain’s top adviser announced their plan to stop engaging in a debate over the economy and “turn the page” to more direct, personal attacks on Barack Obama.

In the middle of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, they want to change the subject from the central question of this election. Perhaps because the policies McCain supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend.

But it’s not just McCain’s role in the current crisis that they’re avoiding. The backward economic philosophy and culture of corruption that helped create the current crisis are looking more and more like the other major financial crisis of our time.

During the savings and loan crisis of the late ’80s and early ’90s, McCain’s political favors and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the center of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country. More than 23,000 investors lost their savings. Overall, the savings and loan crisis required the federal government to bail out the savings of hundreds of thousands of families and ultimately cost American taxpayers $124 billion.

Sound familiar?

In that crisis, John McCain and his political patron, Charles Keating, played central roles that ultimately landed Keating in jail for fraud and McCain in front of the Senate Ethics Committee. The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain’s Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts — and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain.

So at noon Eastern on Monday, October 6th, we’re releasing a 13-minute documentary about the scandal called “Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis” — it will be available at KeatingEconomics.com, along with background information that every voter should know.

Watch a preview right now and share it with your friends.

The point of the film and the web site is that John McCain still hasn’t learned his lesson.

And this time, McCain’s bankrupt economic philosophy has put our economy at the brink of collapse and put millions of Americans at risk of losing their homes.

Watch the video to see why John McCain’s failed philosophy and poor judgment is a recipe for deepening the crisis:

http://my.barackobama.com/keatingvideo

It’s no wonder John McCain would rather spend the last month of this election smearing Barack’s character instead of talking about the top priority issue for voters.

But if we work together, we can make sure the focus stays on the economy — and how to fix it.

Please forward this email to everyone you know.

Thanks,

David

David Plouffe
Campaign Manager
Obama for America

P.S. — The documentary will be live at noon Eastern at www.KeatingEconomics.com.”