(Saying A Lot)
Palin: Dems think “terrorists” are the “good guys.” She phrases it as a question. But pretty much straight out.
We just got finished shooting a couple of interviews at Obama’s national campaign headquarters. We’ll have the video of those for you shortly.
A national campaign office is a strange place the day before an election. It looks a bit like a frat house the morning after a kegger, but without the smell. Empty pizza boxes. Leftover food. Posters touting the home team (Obama) and each desk festooned with its own mementos of the campaign and signs of little inside jokes developed over the course of months of an intense shared experience.
A good chunk of the national staff and volunteers have been dispatched to the states for the final few days of the campaign. So some sections of the office, which is spread across the 11th floor of a Michigan Avenue office tower, are empty. A lone member of the policy staff sat in her cubicle amongst scattered empty chairs and abandoned desks.
Most of those who are left are seriously sleep-deprived. You can tell from the thousand-yard stare, and they move very deliberately, as if hungover.
I expected a louder environment, a final frenzy. But whatever yelling and screaming the final hours are provoking are directed into emails and text messages. A busy office is dozens of 20-somethings focused and hunched over laptops.
For many, their work here is done. The press office’s rapid response operation is winding down. As Bill Burton, the campaign press secretary told me, the McCain-Palin rhetoric is now fixed in the public mind, to whatever degree it was successful. There’s not much left to rebut or counter. It’s now up to the voters.
TPM’s David Kurtz talks to Obama spokesman Bill Burton early this afternoon for the campaign’s final read on the state of the race …
We got a chance to go over the map, figuratively, with Jon Carson, the national field director for the Obama campaign. The focus? Pennsylvania.
I know there’s a lot of talk in Republican circles that Sarah Palin is going to be the star, the new face of the GOP in the post-Bush, post-McCain era. And this speculation has been goosed by Palin’s own hints that it’s full speed ahead with Palinism on the national stage if she and McCain fall short on Tuesday. But for me the whole idea has never really added up. I’m certainly not the target audience. But my own sense is that Palin’s appeal is uniquely and paradoxically tied to the dynamics of this particular election — an election in which Republicans are expecting, rightly or wrongly, to be beaten decisively and the most aggrieved are uniquely drawn to Palin’s bright eyed and unapologetic appeal to resentment and victimology.
As I think Noam Scheiber said a week or two ago, Palin is the first Republican presidential or vice-presidential since Richard Nixon to so genuinely appeal to the politics of resentment. Sure, the Bushes and McCain have played to it. But either economically or socially or both, these men were all to-the-manor-born — elites who’ve lived their whole lives on greased rails.
To use a different analogy I think Palin (and perhaps Joe the Plumber too) appeal to the brainstem of conservatism, where the most primitive and persistent impulses are registered, even as the areas of higher reasoning and cognition (frontal lobes and all that) are flat-lining or tracking into oblivion.
Even a week or so back a poll of Republicans found that Palin came in third behind Romney and Huckabee in their choice for a 2012 nominee.
The conventional wisdom seems to be that only the conservative ‘intellectuals’ have a beef with Palin. But I’m pretty sure the post-election view is going to seem very different. The chatter out of the McCain campaign only confirms what her two months on the public stage has made painfully clear. Palin wasn’t simply unprepared for intense scrutiny of a national campaign. The woman is an ignoramus of almost unprecedented magnitude in the annals of national politics. It’s not just that virtually every-non-Republican has a negative view of her. I just don’t see a national party getting behind someone like that. And before you snark, “What about George Bush?” Sorry but there’s no comparison. Whatever else I think of him, he’s not a moron. And while he appears to be astoundingly incurious, there’s simply no comparison to Palin.
I guess I could imagine a rump Republican party nominating Palin. It could be Palin with perhaps Mark Levin as veep to nail down the all important angry, middle-aged DC Jewish male, right-wing ravanchist vote and Joe the Plumber to run her Phalangist paramilitary. But my strong hunch is that if McCain loses tomorrow that will be the end of Sarah Palin’s national political career even if there are some persistent twitches and jerks over the coming months.
As I mentioned earlier, we have our TPMtv crew (Managing Editor David Kurtz and Video Editor Ben Craw) on location in Chicago today and tomorrow. And they’ll be bringing you regular video updates and interviews through Wednesday morning. This afternoon, David interviewed Obama spokesman Bill Burton, who you’ll likely recognize from numerous TV appearances and press statements and another guy you might not recognize, Jon Carson, the Obama campaign’s National Field Director. We’ve all heard about the big ground gain Obama’s got in store. Well, the Field Director is the person in charge of all that.
You can see both interviews in this post at the TPMtv website.
The campaigning is now for all practical purposes done. The only thing left to do is complete the final stage of each campaign’s get out the vote operations. So this afternoon we stopped by the central phone bank that the Obama campaign in Illinois (not the national campaign) is running here in Chicago, using volunteers to reach out to voters in swing states.
The place was a bit of a zoo, with lots of volunteers showing up to help, but it was a controlled chaos. It took me a minute to realize why all these people were sitting on the floor in the building’s lobby, but it turned out to be overflow from the phone bank operation in the basement. Not enough tables and chairs, so volunteers would just plop down on the floor with a cell phone and a call list and start dialing.
Here’s our report: