This not according to me but moderate-liberal editorialist for the WaPo David Broder.

LINK

Seth

My son, Brig, who has Down Syndrome turned 18 at the end of October. He has been so excited about voting, but we have had to work hard to explain to him that he can’t vote for both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin, who famously has a son with Down Syndrome and whose names rhymes with his. We talked to him about the advantages of each candidate and how the election process works, emphasizing the whole time the importance of voting and how it really is HIS DECISION. We have said to him that its totally OK if he votes differently from his parents.

So we arrive at the polls this morning right when they opened at 7:00 AM, waited about 35 minutes in line, (I had never before waited longer than about 2 minutes), and handed the pollworker our IDs. I explained the need to provide assistance and so I had to sign at a couple of other places on the register indicating I would be assisting the voter and then we both took our ballots into the same booth. Brig made his decisions and in several instances, such as for a judge or an amendment, he voted differently from me. Before he ticked the presidential vote, I said to him one last time, “Remember, you can vote however you want”. He never hesitated, his decision was already made. Here he is with his completed ballot.

My take in a nutshell:

• Registration fraud is way easy and when you pay people to register voters its likely to happen. Not for insidious election-stealing reasons but for economic ones.
• Voter fraud is way hard and not likely to effect the outcome of the election. Things such as voting twice or more, dead people voting, or ineligible people voting would be very hard to do in sufficient numbers to effect the outcome. Lets say you wanted to do this. If the election is not close, it wouldn’t matter. In a very close election, you would either 1) have to know in exactly which precinct in the nation the election would be coming down to or 2) fraudulently vote in very large numbers (tens of thousands), all over the country. The chances of being caught would be very high. Mathematically I think this is a non-starter.
• Disenfranchisement and voter Suppression, on the other hand is pretty easy to do. Some examples would be, 1) striking thousands from the voter rolls, 2) putting up signs in key neighborhoods that say, “If you have an unpaid parking or traffic ticket you cannot vote”, or 3) requiring that the voter’s ID match the information in the voter database EXACTLY, down to every last jot and tittle or 4) removing people from the rolls because their home was foreclosed on. All of these examples have happened this election cycle. If, in one fell swoop, you can prevent thousands or tens of thousands from voting, you can steal an election.
• I agree with Hilzoy that voter registration and polling could be done in such a way as to make everyone happy, eliminating voter registration fraud, vote fraud and voter suppression.

Scott

Nate Says:

Barack Obama’s position has become somewhat stronger since our update this afternoon. We now have him with a 5.8 point lead in the national popular vote, and winning the election 96.3 percent of the time. Earlier today, those figures were 5.4 and 93.7, respectively.

I continue to find a hair’s worth of tightening on balance in the state-by-state polls — even as Obama’s position in the national trackers seems to be roughly as strong as it has ever been. This, ironically, is the exact reverse of the position we saw earlier in the week, when the national polls seemed to be tightening even as the state polls weren’t.

However, Obama’s win percentage has ticked upward again for a couple of reasons. Firstly, he’s gotten some relatively good numbers out of Pennsylvania since our last update, with PPP and Zogby giving him leads of 8 and 14 points, respectively, and Rasmussen showing his lead expanding to 6 points after having been at 4 before. (The Zogby poll is probably an outlier, but may serve to balance out outliers like Strategic Vision on the other side).

Secondly, McCain’s clock has simply run out. While there is arguable evidence of a small tightening, there is no evidence of a dramatic tightening of the sort he would need to make Tuesday night interesting.

If McCain wins Nate Silver will have to go into hiding.

ELECTORAL COLLEGE

OTHER CHARTS

POLLING DATA

VIA FiveThirtyEight

Scott

Publius over at Obsidian Wings has written a very thoughtful and reflective post on Race and the significance of a potential Obama presidency.

That’s because if race has contradicted American ideals at times, it’s also exemplified them. Race has brought out the worst, but also the best. It’s interesting – if you ask people to explain what exactly about America makes them most proud, I bet most would offer something relating to the fight for racial equality. The end of slavery. The Civil Rights Movement. All of these loom large in our national self-consciousness. Yet all were the collective efforts of people who tried to hold America to the standards of “America” the idea – often at great cost.

And if Obama is fortunate enough to win on Tuesday, his victory will be a victory for all those people too. Don’t get me wrong – ending slavery and ensuring the vote ain’t small potatoes. It’s not like their historical actions would otherwise have been in vain. But Obama – as talented as he is – comes on the shoulders of these past giants. His presidency is possible because people for the past 200 years believed in holding America to its standards. And in pursuit of that goal, they were willing to fight, and get beaten, and get lynched for the sake of basic equality – an equality we today have the luxury of taking for granted.

And that’s what’s so exciting about a potential Obama inauguration speech. You can literally imagine the area being filled not just with overflowing crowds, but with teary-eyed ghosts too. Generations of them, from Frederick Douglass to Thurgood Marshall to nameless farmers to voting rights activists.

It’s a powerful moment – particularly considering the magnitude of the historical obstacles it faced. Not in vain, those dead.

Read it.

Scott

Before you read this post, I would like you to read the Intro.

You’ve probably never heard of Dilawar. He was a taxi driver in Afghanistan who disappeared. He then died a few days later at Bagram Air Base, having been chained to the ceiling in a standing position and beaten to a pulp. By American soliders. It turns out there was a tribal leader in Afghanistan who was routinely attacking an American outpost with rockets and then he went around gathering innocent people and turning them in to the Americans as the guilty party in an attempt to ingratiate himself to U.S. forces.

Did you know that 125 detainees have been killed while in American custody? 38 of those deaths have been ruled as homicides. Did you know that the authorization to torture prisoners was approved at the highest levels of the government, certainly Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, but probably president Bush himself? Yesterday, as inpiration for this essay, I watched the documentary Taxi to the Dark Side. I wept. I was filled with the sense that under President Bush, our nation lost its collective soul. I know that our enemies are evil and that the war we have to fight against terror is not easy. But if we win some of the battles by compromising our principles of goodness, justice and human rights and thereby lose our respect and standing in the world, then we’ve lost the war and the terrorists have won.

And its not just torture, as horrible as that alone is. There are many, many things this administration has done that are unconscionable and inexcusable. Just off the top of my head, here’s a short list of what this administration has done.

• torture
• murder
• extraordinary rendition (kidnapping)
• Patriot Act
• VP as unrestrained co-president
• unconstitutional expansion of the Executive
• unitary executive
• The Bush Doctrine
• politicization of the DOJ
• secret prisons
• Bush doctrine
• illegal eavesdropping
• due-process-less detentions
• the suspension of habeas corpus
• extreme and unprecedented secrecy
• general executive lawlessness
• complete disregard for the Rule of Law
• pre-emptive pardoning
• Our standing in the world.

(I’LL BE ADDING LINKS TO THESE ITEMS LATER)

This list doesn’t even mention economic and domestic policy. We all know how well that’s gone. Just look at your 401(k)

When I first started writing this , I titled it, We The Sheeple. That snark is infecting my soul right now because I am so angry at the complete and total lack of outrage at these atrocities. Especially among Christians. Implicit in all this is that these are muslim ragheads so they must be terrorists and don’t deserve things like good treatment or a fair trial or the right to challenge their detention in court. They’re muslims so let them rot in jail forever. I think most Christians actually think that way and that is so wrong. There are RIGHT NOW at Gitmo prisoners who have had all charges against them dropped but the Bush Administration still won’t release them. This isn’t three years ago this is RIGHT NOW.

And not everything on that list has to do with foreign terrorists. Some of it has to do with yours and my Constitutional Rights. They’ve been attacked. If you are an American, the government has vigorously asserted its right to deny you liberties and to spy on you, all in the name of the war on terror. I’m just glad I’m white and not a recent descendant of an immigrant. I’ll probably be OK. But if your father immigrated here and is named Abraham and your name is Hussein. I’d be worried. You’re probably being “watched” right now. You may be on a list somewhere.

And here’s the problem, the genie is out of the bottle. From a policy standpoint everything that has happened is now a precedent. If we want to restore our reputation and good standing in the world, the next president has got to work vigorously to undo what has been done. We have to hold people accountable, some people should probably go to court and some people need to go to jail. One of the big questions I have is this: Who is going to fix whats broken?

MY next post answers the question WHY NOT McCain / Palin. I can’t answer that question without you understanding this context.

BTW. Taxi to the Dark Side can be watched Instantly if you are a Netflix subscriber. Please watch it. Maybe you’ll start to feel some of my outrage. Also download and read the material you find HERE, by the Physicians for Human Rights.

My next essay is Why not McCAin / Palin?

Scott

********** UPDATE***********
Andrew Sullivan makes my point much better than I ever could. Please consider THIS to be part of your homework.

Intro - I have promised to write my final argument to explain and defend why I am casting my vote for Barack Obama this Tuesday. We all mustn’t forget how blessed we are to live in a country where we are free to exercise our consciences and cast ballots to select those men and women to represent us in our government. The founders instituted a grand experiment where the belief would be tested that the people could govern themselves. The constitution, which I love, guarantees that I and every American, having met a very minimal base set of requirements, can exercise that right without interefence from anyone, be it church, family, employer or government.

It has not always been this way. It used to be that the base set of requirements to vote in our republic were narrow and restrictive. You could cast your vote if you were a member of the landed gentry. If you were a non-white, a woman, a non-protestant or poor, then you were left completely out of the political process. Indeed, If you read through the amendments to the constitution, you are often reading through a history of death and struggle where slowly, ploddingly, our nation grew to understand that government by the governed must include all of us and not just a select few. It signifies a trail of blood and heartbreak where the disenfranchised, the owned, the invisible, the outsiders gave up their fortunes and their very lives so that they could be truly free to control their own destiny.

So I know that my vote on Tuesday is part of a sacred trust given to me by the Founding Fathers and their descendants whose vision was that we the people truly could govern ourselves. It is a privilege that I shall not take lightly.

One of my goals as I make my final argument is for you to understand how I’ve come to this place. The first presidential election in which I voted was for Ronald Reagan in 1984. I have never since voted for a democrat. Much to my chagrin, I even voted for George W. Bush twice. It’s not so much that I have always voted for the Republican as I was voting for the pro-life candidate, who always happened to be a Republican. I have always been cognizant of the fact that the unborn cannot vote and that their lives cry out for justice in light of one of the most despicable and un-democratic decisions ever made by a court. A decision that cast aside laws in every state and put us on a path of strife and division from which we have never recovered. Many of us have sought and fought, vainly it seems, over the years to overcome that heinous ruling. Seemingly, our hands are tied and there is nothing we can do to reverse it. You may wonder at this point what has entered into my moral calculus that would allow me to reverse my lifelong habit. I’ll do my best to explain in my final post.

How someone gets from here to there is a pretty complicated and difficult to understand process. I have a whole post in my head where I think over the difficulty to persuade and move a heart or mind intellectually. My movement away from the traditional evangelical and conservative way of thinking has taken many years. If I could point to any one thing that precipitated that movement it was an event several years ago where my I was filled with doubt about many of my core beliefs. A lot of this had come about as a result of my own error, my own sin and desire to rebel against the status quo. During that time, there is s real sense in that my eyes were opened to see beyond the small world of reformed evangelical Christianity. I was at a place where I really didn’t care what other people believed or thought about me or my religion. I really saw that this world and this country is FILLED with people who are very very different from me, who have unbelief or different belief from my own. Whose paths had taken them to places I couldn’t even imagine. And during this time of rebellion, that was something I grew to love about my country. You see, it is a very remarkable thing to be able to see the world from a different point of view. To be able to know people who are totally and completely OTHER than yourself and find yourself loving them and appreciating their point of view.

By God’s good mercy, this rebellion ended by my coming back to Him. My brother gave me a book called “Not the Way It’s Supposed to Be: A Breviary of Sin.” The book agreed with me that indeed the world is not the way its supposed to be, but it also reminded me that that’s ok, because He also has promised to fix it.

But I learned some valuable lessons while I was away. In addition to the obvious ones of faithfulness to God and family, I also have never forgotten just how wide the world is outside of myself. God had given me empathy and taken away self-righteousness and had shown me minds very different from my own. He caused me to once again love the Truth but he also gave me the humility to not cling to it so tightly that I am unable to accept the possibility that I am wrong.

I tell you that story because it explains how I grew to love something that, in my opinion, must be protected and cherished for the proper functioning of our Republic. PLURALISM. In the circles I run in, that’s a dirty word. It is so often associated with all kinds of bad philosophies like relativism or post-modernism. But I must confess I can hardly understand why so many hate it. Protecting that principle is the foundation of mine and every citizen’s liberty to live our lives and practice our religion. Sure, in church we have to settle on our beliefs and doctrines and believe them wholeheartedly and defend them vigorously, lest truth become totally irrelevant and God be forgotten. But I am not just a Christian, I am a citizen of the United States, which holds out promises for everyone who is willing to participate. Our founders understood that and that is why they made a point to not establish any official religion. I am convinced that their desire was to allow all people to freely practice their religion or worldview without the meddling influence of government. Conversely, I believe that they wanted to make sure that no particular worldview, religion or sect would hold sway over any other. What that means practically is that my responsibility as a citizen is to pursue my own happiness, live my life freely and responsibly and to defend to the death your right to do the same. The amazing thing is that when we do this, everyone flourishes. American civil society stands out like a lighthouse of hope on the shores of the earth. I have marvelled how good we are at embracing immigrants of every color and religion and providing for them the ability to merge into our culture and succeed. We do this better than anyone else.

But I am afraid we’ve started to stray really far off that path and to be perfectly frank, I think the Republican Party, swayed by their “base” of pro-lifers, Dobsonian evangelicals, homophobes, and anti-immigrant bigots are leading the way. When your party’s base thinks that corporate hegemony, injustice, torture, kidnapping and the rejection of constitutional and human rights are perfectly within the bounds of good governance due to our difficult circumstances, then I think something is profoundly broken with your party. And I want to have nothing to do with them. They anger me. Combine that with the fact that I don’t give a damn what they think of me and we are in for some strong chemistry.

Before I end, I want to say a few thing about my “Philosophy” or approach to my vote. First, in regards to my faith, I don’t think our nation is a Christian nation nor do I believe that it was founded as such nor do I think I should vote to make it such. My Christian faith provides me with some very basic core principles that inform my vote: Protection of life and property, compassion for the poor, freedom of conscience. That last one is not in itself a biblical ideal but it is necessary for the flourishing of the gospel in a free society.

Second, in regards to country, at a bare minimum our government must protect life and liberty and seek to structure society to provide the most opportunity for as many people, for happiness, success and flourishing as is humanly possible. I think we need to strive vigorously to avoid wars and only enter into a war through a broad consensus and only after ever other avenue has been tried. I think exporting democracy will often be a failed venture. We need to restore our standing in the world. We need tax and economic policies that are wise and fiscally sound that will create real wealth, jobs and economic growth. We need to restore justice and eliminate torture and kidnapping and other damnable U.S. policies on the war on terror.

Third, I want to see the end of the culture wars. Our nations is SO DIVIDED that I am not sure we can stand for it much longer. It may not be possible, but I eagerly desire to see basic respect between the warring factions. It may not be possible, but its a hope.

This post is already WAY longer than I had originally intended. But before I end I think its only fair for you to know my influences. Here’s the list of blogs I read. Here’s my Amazon wishlist in no particular order. Many of the books I have read or am reading.

I will be writing four more essays between now and Tuesday. If you’re mostly interested in the Abortion argument, to be fair to me you need to hear me out on everything else, because its all figured into my calculus.

1. Why we need Change.
Why not McCain / Palin?

2. What I love about Obama
His Intelligence
His Rhetoric
His Thoughfulness
His Pragmatism
His Leadership
His Campaign

3. Whats wrong with Obama - (Abortion)

4. Closing Statement

GEORGE WILL

From the invasion of Iraq to the selection of Sarah Palin, carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism. Tuesday’s probable repudiation of the Republican Party will punish characteristics displayed in the campaign’s closing days.

DAVID FRUM

Now it is Obama’s turn. He can try (as Shrum recommends) to overthrow the Reagan legacy, to establish himself as a new historical bookend, hurling himself into the kind of great campaign for economic redistribution hinted at by his own early rhetoric. If he does, his career will likely be tumultuous and ultimately doomed. This remains a basically conservative country.

Or Obama can fit himself into the American story, seeking continuity with all that came before, accepting institutional limits on his actions, innovating by inches. That may disappoint his most ardent followers, who long for a second coming of FDR. But it will emulate his wisest predecessors.

FOUAD AJAMI

A younger man, “cool” and collected, carrying within his own biography the strands of the world beyond America’s shores, was put forth as a herald of the change upon us. The crowd would risk the experiment. There was grudge and a desire for retribution in the crowd to begin with. Akin to the passions that have shaped and driven highly polarized societies, this election has at its core a desire to settle the unfinished account of the presidential election eight years ago. George W. Bush’s presidency remained, for his countless critics and detractors, a tale of usurpation. He had gotten what was not his due; more galling still, he had been bold and unabashed, and taken his time at the helm as an opportunity to assert an ambitious doctrine of American power abroad. He had waged a war of choice in Iraq.

He says:

McCain, just like Obama, believes that taxes should be levied for the purpose of funding social programs that redistribute income downwards. (We’ll leave aside, for the moment, the fact that both of them also believe that taxes should be levied for the purpose of funding a bloated military-industrial complex and other things that redistribute at least some of the income upward.) McCain and Obama may envision different forms and scopes for those programs, and those differences may or may not have profound consequences in practice. However, the McCain rhetoric is being employed to argue that just about any downward redistribution is a type of socialism. If it is (at least in McCain’s usage of the term) then McCain is a socialist. Maybe not as much of a socialist as Obama (we’ll leave aside welfare for the rich, for the moment) but a socialist nonetheless.

If the pinko pot wants to call the kettle red, well, have fun. One can argue that McCain is a lesser evil according to the manner in which he has framed the issue (leave aside welfare for defense contractors, because military spending isn’t actually spending, in the bipartisan consensus) but that’s about it. The party that expanded government spending for 8 years (even leaving aside military spending) and brought us the Medicare prescription drug benefit simply has no credibility on whining about redistribution. Of course, one could acknowledge this and still argue that at least McCain will spend less money on social programs (not so sure that’s true, and of course we’re leaving aside a whole pack of pachyderms in the room, but whatever). Still, the rhetoric as currently framed defies credibility. As McCain and Palin are currently framing the argument, any sort of redistributive social program is welfare and hence socialism (according to their usages, mind you–Gov. Palin, what do you think about Alaska’s oil fund?).

The post is HERE and the commentary over there is intelligent as usual. You should join in.

Scott

LINK

Pretty Effective I think.

Scott

As Seth has stated, he thinks Obama is just a liar and once he’s in office he will take off his nice-guy mask and show his inner-demon underneath. There are myriad reasons why I don’t think thats what will happen, including the fact that he is so well respected by pretty much everyone who has ever worked with him, including people with whom he disagrees.

But here is an example, his tenure as the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. In THIS ARTICLE, Frontline interviews his fellow HLR staffers. Here’s what one of the conservatives said about Obama.

Absolutely right, absolutely right. I think Barack took 10 times as much grief from those on the left on the Review as from those of us on the right. And the reason was, I think there was an expectation among those editors on the left that he would affirmatively use the modest powers of his position to advance the cause, whatever that was. They thought, you know, finally there’s an African American president of the Harvard Law Review; it’s our turn, and he should aggressively use this position, and his authority and his bully pulpit to advance the political or philosophical causes that we all believe in.

And Barack was reluctant to do that. It’s not that he was out of sympathy with their views, but his first and foremost goal, it always seemed to me, was to put out a first-rate publication. And he was not going to let politics or ideology get in the way of doing that. …

He had some discretion as president to exercise an element of choice for certain of the positions on the masthead; it wasn’t wide discretion, but he had some. And I think a lot of the minority editors on the Review expected him to use that discretion to the maximum extent possible to empower them. To put them in leadership positions, to burnish their resumes, and to give them a chance to help him and help guide the Review. He didn’t do that. He declined to exercise that discretion to disrupt the results of votes or of tests that were taken by various people to assess their fitness for leadership positions.

He was unwilling to undermine, based on the way I viewed it, meritocratic outcomes or democratic outcomes in order to advance a racial agenda. That earned him a lot of recrimination and criticism from some on the left, particularly some of the minority editors of the Review. …

It confirmed the hope that I and others had had at the time of the election that he would basically be an honest broker, that he would not let ideology or politics blind him to the enduring institutional interests of the Review. It told me that he valued the success of his own presidency of the Review above scoring political points of currying favor with his political supporters.

Scott

This is rich. In an interview from earlier this year, she said:

A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

LINK

Scott