The Boss

Springsteen sings "The Rising" at the rally in Cleveland.

Obama exuded confidence. "The last couple of days, I've been just feeling good," he told 80,000 gathered to hear him--and singer Bruce Springsteen --in Cleveland. "The crowds seem to grow and everybody's got a smile on their face. You start thinking that maybe we might be able to win an election on November 4th." Indeed, Election Day is becoming a misnomer. About 27 million absentee and early votes were cast in 30 states as of Saturday night, more than ever. Democrats outnumbered Republicans in pre-Election Day voting in key states.

The view from a Republican who got dragged along on the canvassing trail by his wife..."I had the chance to view that organization up close this month when I canvassed for him. I'm not sure I learned much about his chances, but I learned a lot about myself and about this election...I've learned that this election is about the heart of America. It's about the young people who are losing hope and the old people who have been forgotten. It's about those who have worked all their lives and never fully realized the promise of America, but see that promise for their grandchildren in Barack Obama. The poor see a chance, when they often have few. I saw hope in the eyes and faces in those doorways.My wife and I went out last weekend to knock on more doors. But this time, not because it was her idea. I don't know what it's going to do for the Obama campaign, but it's doing a lot for me."

The man in the plane: "The lines in Mr. Obama's face have grown a bit deeper since he started his campaign, with the notches of gray hair along his temples far more pronounced. He often carries the look of exhaustion, but flying the other night to Nevada, where he arrived after midnight, Mr. Obama passed on the chance to take much of a nap.Instead, he walked around the cabin of his airplane, which is about the size of a bedroom, and talked about a favorite diversion, the coming basketball season, as he took care not to step on a senior foreign policy adviser, Mark Lippert, who was asleep on the floor.

"His world is awash in powerful, conflicting emotions: the realization, presumably, that he may be about to become president; the huge optimism that he has unleashed, evident in the crowds he is drawing (and something he has told aides worries him a bit, given the expectations set for him); the weighty thinking he is gradually giving to how he would staff a government and deal with a transition in such a difficult time. All of this is taking place as a woman who played a large role in raising him, his grandmother, is approaching death. '"What if I disappoint people?"' Valerie Jarrett, a close friend and adviser, recalled Mr. Obama asking at several points throughout the campaign. 'That's what gives him the energy to keep getting up every day.'"

The Arizona Daily Star endorses Obama! "Like a race car driver going into a turn, a leader must see not only what confronts our nation today but envision where we come out on the other side. Obama sees how the United States is connected to other nations through our economic, immigration, national security and energy policies. No one can thrive alone. Obama sees a foreign policy where force is but one tool. He envisions countries collaborating to confront bad actors and shared challenges such as global warming, poverty, terrorism, disease and religious extremism."

One of the really heartening things has been to see how many people have invested into this presidential campaign. While he's been criticized for turning down public financing, in the end, Obama made a much more profound point by getting a "buy-in" from 3.2 million people (to raise $641 million) this campaign. And for those who wanted to do more, his campaign inspired a kind of do-it-yourself creativity and energy that frankly, I've never seen before. The NY Times on Sunday profiled Susan Skolfield, a Winter Park, FL resident who chafed that the Obama campaign wouldn't be opening an office in her mainly GOP-leaning town. "So Ms. Skolfield opened one herself. She dug into her own pocket for the initial $1,350 in rent, hooked up telephones and computers, hauled in furniture and printed up fliers for an early September opening party that drew nearly a thousand people."

Andrew Sullivan in the London Times: "We are indeed on the verge of something that seems even more incredible the closer it gets, something more than a mere election. This is America, after all. It is a place that has seen great cruelty and hardship in its time. But it is also a place that yearns to believe naively in mornings rather than evenings, that cherishes dawns over dusks, that is not embarrassed by its own sense of destiny. In this unlikely mixed-race figure of Barack Obama, we will for a brief moment perhaps see a nation reimagined and a world of possibilities open up. For a brief moment at least. As they have learnt to say in some of the most blighted parts of the world at some of the most desperate times: know hope."

Paul Krugman's column today muses upon what an Obama win would mean for the Republican party. Would it really force the party to ponder where it has been heading, and move the party fromt he far-right to a more central stance? Or will it become MORE extreme as socially moderate fiscal conservatives decide to leave?

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Endorsement roundup

I've always had a soft spot for Ron Reagan, Jr. ever since he danced with the Joffrey Ballet. Now he lends the Reagan name to his endorsement for Barack Obama.

On the other side, John McCain picked up the ALL important endorsement of Dick Cheney. Oh, thankyouthankyouthankyouthankyou THANK YOU..... At a rally in Pueblo, Obama said, "I'd like to congratulate Sen. McCain on this endorsement, because he really earned it. That endorsement didn't come easy," he said. "George Bush may be in an undisclosed location now, but Dick Cheney's out there on the campaign trail because he'd be delighted to pass the baton to John McCain." Obama's ad people are ASTONISHING. They had an ad out in hour.

McCain did his own version of the "infomercial" with Tina Fey on Saturday Night Live, making his pitch to America from the QVC channel. McCain starred in the opening segment (with a surprise cameo from Cindy) and also popped into the Weekend Update. Once again, if THIS had been the John McCain Obama was running against, we'd have a much tighter race. So sad.

Also, if you actually stayed up to watch the very not-funny rest of the show, you might have noticed that McCain was still there at the end of the show, hanging out with the cast. Dude. It's 54 hours until polls start opening. You got your media exposure. Hahahah, you were funny. Now, don't you have SOMETHING BETTER TO DO THAN HANG OUT AT SNL?
<== To the left, a photo of the McCain headquarters in Florida's Walton County -- precisely 72 hours before the poll close. To quote Jon Stewart, "You don't even want this, do you?"

By the way, in a brief historical note, Fontaine Maverick, the descendent of the REAL Maverick (for whom the term is named) has done this fab interview explaining why McCain is no maverick. And she wants her name back.

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Song and Dance Sampler

I think the reality is that our side is just more talented.

• Thanks to Sandy for the utterly hilarious Hockey Moms for Obama. ("Don't Speak for Me Sarah Palin," sung to the tune of "Don't Cry for M Argentina")
• Thanks, Milena, for the great Obama/McCain Dance Off. Because I am, you know, a dance writer. Hah.
• Oh, and in case you missed it, Barack dancing (for real) on Ellen Degeneres' show. And Michelle -- perhaps the better dancer?
  
• And thanks to Dana for this video of "Oy McCainia..."
• This guy was NPR on Saturday with renditions of hilarous old campaign songs.
• In a different vein, Jay-Z was in Richmond over the weekend, exhorting people to get out and vote. "Barack Obama's running so we all can fly."

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Obamapallooza continues

The Obamapallooza continues well into the week. All the buzz is about Obama, and McCain? Well, he might as well go back to chasing applesauce jars in a grocery store for all the interest there is in hearing him speak. Just as a little needle, Obama has actually bought ad time in Arizona. Hey, the race is close there... why not....?

Obama talks about the way to bi-partisanship with Rachel Maddows. "What I'm interested in, is how do we build a working majority for change? And if I start off with the premise that it's only self-identified Democrats who I'm speaking to, then I'm not going to get to where we need to go. If I can describe it as not a blanket indictment of the Republican Party, but instead describe it as the Republican Party having been kidnapped by a incompetent, highly ideological subset of the Republican Party, then that means I can still reach out to a whole bunch of Republican moderates who I think are hungry for change, as well." Could it really be that we'll have the first president who says he'll be bipartisan and then ACTUALLY DOES IT? Video of Obama on Rachel Maddows show.

33 million people watched Obama's infomercial on Thursday. Plus, Obama's appearance on the Daily Show on Thursday night gave Jon Stewart his highest ratings ever. "The 11 p.m. episode, which featured an appearance by presidential candidate Barack Obama, averaged 3.6 million total viewers, beating by 600,000 viewers the previous record set October 8 when his wife Michelle Obama appeared on the show." Call it the "Obama Bump."

And just this afternoon, Obama's interview with Wolf Blitzer aired on CNN. "Obama was asked to name his top priority from a list of issues, including taxes, health care, education, energy policy and immigration.

"[The] top priority may not be any of those five. It may be continuing to stabilize the financial system. We don't know yet what's going to happen in January," he said. "None of this can be accomplished if we continue to see a potential meltdown in the banking system and financial system. So that's priority No. 1: making sure the plumbing works."

Obama said priority No. 2 is energy independence: "We have to seize this moment, because it's not just an energy independence issue; it's also a national security issue, and it's a jobs issue. We can create 5 million new green energy jobs."

Priority No. 3: Health care reform.

Priority No. 4: "Making sure we have tax cuts for the middle class as part of a broader tax reform effort."

Priority No. 5: Reforming the education system.

Apparently Obama has picked up more Reagan support, as Ken Duberstein, Reagan's former Chief of Staff announced today on Fareed Zakaria's show, that he'll be pulling the lever for Obama this year. "Well let's put it this way - I think Colin Powell's decision is in fact the good housekeeping seal of approval on Barack Obama."

And in an NPR interview, former Sec. of State Lawrence Eagleburger, whom McCain has touted for his endorsement of the Republican, admitted that Palin is not ready for the presidency: "Asked by the host whether Palin could step in during a time of crisis, Eagleburger reverted to sarcasm before leveling the harsh blow. 'It is a very good question,' he said, pausing a few seconds, then adding with a chuckle: 'I'm being facetious here. Look, of course not...Give her some time in the office and I think the answer would be, she will be [pause] adequate. I can't say that she would be a genius in the job. But I think she would be enough to get us through a four year... well I hope not... get us through whatever period of time was necessary. And I devoutly hope that it would never be tested.'" Let me help you out, Larry, I can say, SHE WOULDN'T BE A GENIUS AT ANYTHING. Of course, as soon as the words were out of his mouth he thought...ooops. And in an interview on Fox today, he tried to backtrack. "'I made a serious mistake yesterday. I was quoted correctly,' Eagleburger said. 'I wasn't thinking when i said it -- in fact, I was discussing foreign policy, and this was in that context, and I was just plain stupid, and if I had given the flim-flam artist Barack Obama some success with this I am deeply apologetic.'" Yeah, that's what we call a "Freudian slip."

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Bill's Lines of Reasoning

After the Informercial and the Daily Show, there was one more part to the Obamathon, maybe my favorite part of the night-- his appearance at a rally in Florida with Bill Clinton. In that way that only Bill can serve it up, he gave his four reasons to support Mr. Obama on Election Day next week: his philosophy, his policies, his ability to make a decision and his ability to bring change to people's lives. Watch the old master at work again:

There are four reasons that I can tell you in a way no one else can, because I've been there. And I want you to tell this to everybody. And they don't just have to be your neighbors. You can e-mail people all over America. There are all these exchanges going on where people who are still undecided are fessing-up, at least on the Internet.

And I want you to get on there and tell them there are four reasons they ought to be for Barack Obama. The four things that really matter in a president are: number one, the philosophy; number two, the policies; number three, the ability to make a decision; and number four, the ability to execute that decision and make changes in people's lives.

So I've been noticing this philosophical argument on television. You all been seeing that in this election? And Senator Obama asked me to say a word about it on the way up here. He's got the right philosophy which is America works from the ground up, not from the top down.

They talk about redistributing the wealth. They just presided over the biggest redistribution of wealth upward since the 1920s and we all know how that ended. In the last eight years 90 percent of the gains went to 10 percent of the people over 40 percent to one percent. Can you run a great democracy that way? I don't think so. So don't tell me about redistribution. When I served you, you had more than five times as many jobs as you are going to get out of this crowd. You had medium family income across all racial lines going up and now it's down. We paid down the debt. They've doubled the national debt. So don't tell me about redistribution.

What Senator Obama has is a plan that works from the bottom up. If there's a strong middle class and if poor folk can work their way into it and stay in it, there'll be lots of millionaires and billionaires. I know we made more millionaires and billionaires than they did and you just didn't know it because middle class incomes were rising and everybody had a good job and that's what Barack Obama will do again.

So he's got the right philosophy.

The second thing I want to tell you is he's got the right policies. And I've read them all. And I've read his opponent's. People used to make fun of me for being a policy wonk but I take it after the last eight years, we all know it really matters what people advocate. And let me tell you folks, is again something I can say because I'm not running for anything, the historical record shows that virtually every person ever elected president does his best to actually do what they say they're going to do in the campaign and Barack Obama's do-list is the better do-list.

The economic plan is better. The education plan is better. Young people, you read his plan. If you are willing to do community service it doesn't matter how rich or poor you are, you're going to be able to go to college, universal, everybody is included, no ifs, ands or buts.

And his health care plan is light-years better. And I can tell you there are people in this crowd, I know there, are who have lost their health insurance. There are people in this crowd who have children with autistic conditions or other disabilities that need help and nobody is helping them. And we're living in the government, last week one in eight Americans are not going to be able to afford their cancer drugs this year. America drops to 29th in infant mortality and we're spending more than anybody else in the world? They want to defend that.

Barack Obama wants to change that and he has a good plan to do it and we should vote for on Election Day.

And finally let me say his energy plan is better. And don't you be fooled by these oil prices going down because as soon as they can sucker us in to forgetting about being energy independent they'll go right back up again. And he's got the best plan to liberate Americans and create millions and millions and millions of jobs. So he's got the best policy.

Now the third thing he is, is the better decision maker. You know our current President said something that's really true. The President is the decider-in-chief. And in this election you've got a very unusual thing I've never seen happen before. You got to watch the candidates make, not one, but two presidential decisions. You always get one; who they pick as Vice President. He hit that one out of the park, folks, that was a good decision.

OK, then you got to see the reaction to the financial crisis in America nearly coming off the wheels. Having the wheels nearly run off. I saw this up close. You know what he did? First he took a little heat for not saying much. I knew what he was doing. He talked to his advisers, he talked to my economic advisers. He called Hillary. He called me. He called Warren Buffett and he called Paul Volcker. He called all those people and you know why, because he knew it was complicated and before he said anything he wanted to understand.

Folks, if we have not learned anything, we have learned that we need a president who wants to understand and who can understand. Who can understand; yes, he can.

The second thing and this meant more to me than anything else and I haven't cleared this with him. And he may even be mad at me for saying this so close to the election but I know what else he said to his economic advisers. He said tell me what the right thing to do is. What's the right thing for America, and don't tell me what's popular. You tell me what's right and I'll figure out how to sell it. That's what a president does in a crisis, what is right for America. And you know after this election there are going to be a lot of rough times ahead and you know it as well as I do. You have got to have a president who can understand and then has the fortitude to stand up and tell you, you hired me to win for America. I've got to make this decision now. This is the very best I can do. And I'm prepared to be held accountable.

I'm going to tell you something the way he handled this crisis and the way you saw him talk about it in the second and third debate showed that he will be a very, very fine decision maker working for the American people.

The last thing I want to say is this. Here's the last thing I want to say. All over the world I see this where I work now. The world is full of good, honest, smart, hard-working people with the best of intentions that cannot figure out how to turn their good ideas into real changes in other people's lives. If you have any doubt about Senator Obama's ability to be the chief executive, that's what the Constitution calls the president, just think about all of you. Look at this. Has there ever been a campaign that involved so many people, had made so much use of the Internet, that thought about how to solve problems, that gave people so much opportunity to give money, to give their time, to express their opinions, to do things.

He has executed this campaign in a way that is different from modern and forward thinking, something no one else ever could have done. He can be the Chief Executor of good intentions as president.

So I want you to get on the phone, and I want you to stalk your neighbors on the street, and I want you to get on the Internet and say if haven't made up your might you ought to vote for Barack Obama. He's got the best philosophies. He's got the best positions. He definitely has the decision making ability. And he is a great executor.

Folks, we can't fool with this. Our country is hanging in the balance and we have so much promise and so much peril. This man should be our president.

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More Cognitive Dissonance

In the Wonderfully Bizarre World: "Barack Obama, the first black major-party nominee, is positioned to win the largest share of white voters of any Democrat in more than three decades, according to an exclusive Politico analysis of recent Gallup and Pew Research Center polling....No Democrat has won a majority of white voters since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. John McCain has shuffled between 48 percent and 50 percent support in recent weeks — which would be the lowest share for a Republican candidate in a two-man race since Barry Goldwater's run."

Not that I'm saying it's going to be easy. Nate Silver reports the following bizarre story on FiveThirtyEight.com:

Last week, Julie Hensley made one of her thousands of phone calls on behalf of Barack Obama. A woman answered. As Hensley ran through her short script, the husband impatiently broke in.

"Ma'am, we're voting for the n***er." And hung up.

Hensley wasn't having it. "I went and made a couple other calls but chafed over this absurdity," she told us, "so I called them back, as I still had a couple questions for the wife." This time the man answered, asked pointedly who she was, and when she replied he hung up again.

Um, yeah. Y'know, here's what I say, Alright, FINE--as long as you're voting for Obama. I don't even care right now. We'll sort it out later when he's got his hand on the Bible.

In a slightly different take, but with marked similarities, Frank Rich points out in his Sunday NY Times column: "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."

Endorsements

Okay, I've gotta just get past all that for now, because we got a wide variety of more positive things ahead.

Oh, SNAP! Sarah Palin's hometown paper, the Anchorage Daily News has endorsed Obama.

The Financial Times also endorsed Obama (jeez, who's next? The Wall Street Journal???): "A campaign is a test of leadership. Mr Obama ran his superbly; Mr McCain's has often looked a shambles. After eight years of George W. Bush, the steady competence of the Obama operation commands respect. Nor should one disdain Mr Obama's way with a crowd. Good presidents engage the country's attention; great ones inspire. Mr McCain, on form, is an adequate speaker but no more. Mr Obama, on form, is as fine a political orator as the country has heard in decades. Put to the right purposes, this is no mere decoration but a priceless asset...Mr Obama's purposes do seem mostly right, though in saying this we give him the benefit of the doubt. Above all, he prizes consensus and genuinely seeks to unite the country, something it wants. His call for change struck a mighty chord in a tired and demoralised nation – and who could promise real change more credibly than Mr Obama, a black man, whose very nomination was a historic advance in US politics?"

Even Hitler is against Sarah Palin. (From the Hitler "Downfall" meme flooding YouTube, basically you take this scene from the movie Downfall and you apply subtitles railing against the topic of your choice. Eric likes this one railing against jazz music.)

By the way, on the subject of newspaper endoprsements, Editor & Publisher, continues to list all the papers around the country that have endorsed either candidate and Obama leads by an astonishing 194 to 82. 38 papers have switched from Bush to Obama this year and in major swing states and red states, Obama has endorsements from (among many others) the Miami Herald, The Sarasota Herald-Tribune, St. Petersburg Times, Anchorage Daily News,The Denver Post, The Toledo Blade, Akron Beacon-Journal, Cleveland Plain Dealer, Des Moines Register, The Minneapolis Star-Tribune, The Philly Inquirer, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the NC News & Observer, Charleston (WV) Gazette, The Asheville Citizen, Houston Chronicle, Fort Worth Star-Telegram, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and the Times-Picayune of New Orleans.

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Latest endorsements

In another one of those gosh-durned funny twists of fate, Scott McClellan, former Mouth of Sauron-- I mean Bush press secretary--endorsed Obama at a taping of D.L. Hughley's new show for CNN. Ooooh, Scott, there's something growing out of your neck... oh wait. I think it's a backbone.

And holy moley, Ron Howard has gotten the Opie wig back on and had a reunion with Andy Griffith and Henry Winkler in this latest ad from Funny or Die.

Obama also picked up the NY Times endorsement, unsurprising because of course that Liberal-bias rag has been in the tank for Obama since the start. Hah.

It will be an enormous challenge just to get the nation back to where it was before Mr. Bush, to begin to mend its image in the world and to restore its self-confidence and its self-respect. Doing all of that, and leading America forward, will require strength of will, character and intellect, sober judgment and a cool, steady hand. Mr. Obama has those qualities in abundance.

Watching him being tested in the campaign has long since erased the reservations that led us to endorse Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Democratic primaries. He has drawn in legions of new voters with powerful messages of hope and possibility and calls for shared sacrifice and social responsibility.

Mr. McCain, whom we chose as the best Republican nominee in the primaries, has spent the last coins of his reputation for principle and sound judgment to placate the limitless demands and narrow vision of the far-right wing. His righteous fury at being driven out of the 2000 primaries on a racist tide aimed at his adopted daughter has been replaced by a zealous embrace of those same win-at-all-costs tactics and tacticians. He surrendered his standing as an independent thinker in his rush to embrace Mr. Bush's misbegotten tax policies and to abandon his leadership position on climate change and immigration reform.

Gallup has gone the extra mile and gotten polling from the rest of the world as to who they would vote for. Not that you couldn't guess, but it's interesting to see what a vote of confidence McCain doesn't get. Of the top ten countries that are most pro-McCain, four of them are not for McCain--but nevertheless, they still qualify as the most "pro" that he's got. Obama, unsurprisingly finds his biggest supporters among African and European countries. It's the companion piece to the similar poll from earlier in the year. Interesting how BLUE everything looks.

Painful. Really painful... Nancy Pfotenhauer, new Mouth of Sauron, is back, this time trying valiantly to defend...er... justify...er... cover up... Sarah Palin's (mis)understanding of the constitutional role of the Vice President, to wit, that "A Vice President has a great job because not only are they there to support the President's agenda, they are like the team member, the teammate to that President. They are in charge of the senate. if they want to, they can really get in there with the senators and make a lot of good policy changes that will make life better." Yeah, get in there and be all senator-ey and as to agenda-advancing and good. With smile firmly affixed to her teeth, Nancy has a go, and Chris Matthews, to his credit does NOT let it go.

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Ground Control to Major Tom Edition

I took a weekend off before we get into the final two week frenzy, but of course, the campaign cycle is inexorable--YIKES there was STILL lots of news, so let's get down to it!

Colin Powell
In case you missed this over the weekend, General Colin Powell gave his endorsement to Obama on Meet the Press on Sunday. Along the way, Powell makes some excellent and very pointed comments about the way the discourse has devolved during this election cycle.

I'm also troubled by, not what Senator McCain says, but what members of the party say. And it is permitted to be said such things as, "Well, you know that Mr. Obama is a Muslim." Well, the correct answer is, he is not a Muslim, he's a Christian. He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, what if he is? Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country? The answer's no, that's not America. Is there something wrong with some seven-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president? Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, "He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists." This is not the way we should be doing it in America.

I feel strongly about this particular point because of a picture I saw in a magazine. It was a photo essay about troops who are serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. And one picture at the tail end of this photo essay was of a mother in Arlington Cemetery, and she had her head on the headstone of her son's grave. And as the picture focused in, you could see the writing on the headstone. And it gave his awards--Purple Heart, Bronze Star--showed that he died in Iraq, gave his date of birth, date of death. He was 20 years old. And then, at the very top of the headstone, it didn't have a Christian cross, it didn't have the Star of David, it had crescent and a star of the Islamic faith. And his name was Kareem Rashad Sultan Khan, and he was an American. He was born in New Jersey. He was 14 years old at the time of 9/11, and he waited until he can go serve his country, and he gave his life. Now, we have got to stop polarizing ourselves in this way. And John McCain is as nondiscriminatory as anyone I know. But I'm troubled about the fact that, within the party, we have these kinds of expressions.

Let's hope cooler heads can prevail. There was an bizarre incident at a McCain rally in Virginia where a McCain supporter tried to push the idea that Obama is a Muslim again and ran into trouble with McCain staff who are actually Muslim. There are Islamic McCain supporters??

After Meet the Press, Powell had more to say. And of course, there was a lot of buzz for the rest of the weekend. Huff Po gathers reaction from across the political spectrum, with Newt Gingrich on This Week making the point that it eliminates the "experience" argument. And more reaction to this endorsement from all over, on Politico.com.

Oh, and Colin Powell also said we might think about talking with our enemies..."I think the president has to reach out to the world and show that there is a new president, a new administration that is looking forward to working with our friends and allies. And in my judgment, also willing to talk to people who we have not been willing to talk to before. Because this is a time for outreach."

More Endorsements:

As of this morning, Obama has picked up 112 newspaper endorsements, compared to McCain's 39. The list for Obama--which includes papers in key swing states like Detroit Free Press, Buffalo News, Cleveland's Plain Dealer, Palm Beach (FL) Post, New York's Daily News, Miami Herald, Philadelphia Inquirer, The Oregonian, Denver Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Salt Lake Tribune, Kansas City Star, and Chicago Sun-Times.

In a real shocker, two solid Bush papers in 2004, the Houston Chronicle and Austin American-Statesman, also came out for Obama on Sunday.

LA Times: "Our nation has never before had a candidate like Obama, a man born in the 1960s, of black African and white heritage, raised and educated abroad as well as in the United States, and bringing with him a personal narrative that encompasses much of the American story but that, until now, has been reflected in little of its elected leadership. The excitement of Obama's early campaign was amplified by that newness. But as the presidential race draws to its conclusion, it is Obama's character and temperament that come to the fore. It is his steadiness. His maturity. These are qualities American leadership has sorely lacked for close to a decade...We may one day look back on this presidential campaign in wonder. We may marvel that Obama's critics called him an elitist, as if an Ivy League education were a source of embarrassment, and belittled his eloquence, as if a gift with words were suddenly a defect. In fact, Obama is educated and eloquent, sober and exciting, steady and mature. He represents the nation as it is, and as it aspires to be."

Chicago Tribune, in the paper's first ever endorsement of a Demoncratic Party nominee for president: "On Dec. 6, 2006, this page encouraged Obama to join the presidential campaign. We wrote that he would celebrate our common values instead of exaggerate our differences. We said he would raise the tone of the campaign. We said his intellectual depth would sharpen the policy debate. In the ensuing 22 months he has done just that. Many Americans say they're uneasy about Obama. He's pretty new to them. We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party's nominee for president. We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready."

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Obama Strategy

For perennial worriers like me, this Sunday's NY Times magazine will have a big article on Obama, which they've already posted online. It offers lots of interesting and encouraging insights into how he views this campaign and how it's been organized.

"Obama, though, has talked from the beginning about running a "50-state" campaign, and he has spent considerable time and money in more culturally conservative parts of the country where Democrats rarely, if ever, venture, from Elko and Appalachia to Billings, Mont., and Las Cruces, N.M.... He told me, when we talked, that Washington's us-versus-them divisions had made it impossible for any president to find solutions to a series of generational challenges, from Iraq to global climate change. 'If voters are similarly polarized and if they're seeing two different realities, a Sean Hannity reality and a Keith Olbermann reality, then we're not going to be able to get done the work we need to get done,' Obama said."

Perhaps Obama has discovered more fertile ground than we might imagine. NY Times columnist Roger Cohen discovers he can find common ground with folks in Branson, Missouri: I came to Branson and its mayor with my liberal prejudices and was disarmed. Presley reminded me of my ex-mother-in-law, another brisk, pragmatic, funny, no-nonsense Republican Midwesterner with little tolerance for debt, delinquency, dumbness or dereliction of duty. She also reminded me of a great American virtue: getting on with it. And it dawned on me that Palin, with her vile near-accusations of treason against Barack Obama, her cloying doggone hymns to small-town U.S.A., her with-us-or-against-us refrain, is really an impostor.

The Washington Post endorses Barack Obama for President: "Mr. Obama is a man of supple intelligence, with a nuanced grasp of complex issues and evident skill at conciliation and consensus-building. At home, we believe, he would respond to the economic crisis with a healthy respect for markets tempered by justified dismay over rising inequality and an understanding of the need for focused regulation. Abroad, the best evidence suggests that he would seek to maintain U.S. leadership and engagement, continue the fight against terrorists, and wage vigorous diplomacy on behalf of U.S. values and interests. Mr. Obama has the potential to become a great president. Given the enormous problems he would confront from his first day in office, and the damage wrought over the past eight years, we would settle for very good.

"Mr. Obama's temperament is unlike anything we've seen on the national stage in many years. He is deliberate but not indecisive; eloquent but a master of substance and detail; preternaturally confident but eager to hear opposing points of view. He has inspired millions of voters of diverse ages and races, no small thing in our often divided and cynical country. We think he is the right man for a perilous moment."

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