I was getting very tired and somewhat disgusted dealing with stories and videos of white Republicans acting like 1960's-era segregationist assholes. I didn't like hearing all the anecdotes from white erstwhile-Democrats saying that they're not voting for the black guy. Shit like that makes me depressed, it hurts my feelings, and it makes me hurt for all the people that are the direct recipients of that hate and ignorance. So, I found tonight's Washington Post article about how old-time white Democratic organizers in West Virginia have been integrated with the new wave of racially diverse Obama volunteers to be quite a tonic.

The article focuses on Waneta Acker, an 88-year-old retired insurance saleswoman, who has run the one-room Democratic headquarters in Wheeling, West Virginia for the last twenty years running. In her two decades of experience, the small, local black community had not been involved in politics. That changed when Obama secured the nomination in June and some black people started showing up at headquarters to volunteer. But she got a preview in April:

Change suddenly arrived on April 12. That day, at the nearby Carpenters Union, supporters of Barack Obama staged a coup of sorts.

It was the Ohio County Democratic Party's monthly meeting. On the agenda: choosing delegates for the state Democratic Convention in Charleston, which in turn would elect delegates to the National Convention in Denver.

In place of the dozen or so participants Acker expected, at least 50 Barack Obama devotees showed up, clad in blue T-shirts, baseball caps, and buttons blaring: "PROGRESS."

"Who are these people?!" Acker demanded. She didn't know them, "And that's unusual because I know gillions of people."

Stranger still, they were "mostly dark, black, African American or what have you." That's through Acker's eyes. In fact, less than one in three of those Obama-backers were black, though that is still a relatively large ratio in this 93 percent white town. To Acker, anyway, it looked like a flood of strange newcomers.

Acker's first response was defensive. These people were encroaching on her turf, and she wasn't sure they were friendly.

Acker feared "retaliation" for ancestral sins. "Black people were treated horrible in the past and might start showing the white people what it's like," Acker mused. Maybe they'll "get cocky" if Obama wins.

Even if he didn't win, she feared that Obama's candidacy could hurt local Democratic candidates. If the headquarters is covered in Obama paraphernalia, Acker wondered, "How many white people will come in the office? That's what I'm looking forward to [seeing]."

In June, with the nomination sewn-up, Acker's fears got put to the test. The order came down from Chicago that the local Democratic office would be completely absorbed, or 'integrated', with the Obama campaign. Keep in mind that this story was repeated all over the country. The old guard was now on orders to be hospitable to the new guard. The 88 year-old Acker wasn't very comfortable with that idea.

If the Obama campaign and the Democratic headquarters merged, Acker worried, maybe Obama supporters wouldn't work hard for their local Democrats. Maybe they wouldn't pay their dues. Maybe they'd try to oust her.

She wagged a finger. "They're not going to rule me! If they think they are going to come in there and push me around, no way. No way!"

But Acker had nothing to worry about. The Obama volunteers were not looking to avenge historical wrongs, nor were they looking to push her out.

Acker dates the beginning of the two camps' integration to July 24, the opening of the Italian Festival on the waterfront. She was busy setting up the Democratic Party booth when some of the Obama newbies approached her and offered their help passing out local politicians' fliers and registering voters.

"I didn't know them from a load of coal," she remembers, "But they knew what they were doing" with their forms, their talk of health care and their relentlessness. "Just talking to them, I saw what nice people they were."

That must be a very West Virginia saying...'I didn't know them from a load of coal.' I like it. What Ms. Acker was learning is what is learned anytime blacks and whites work together without prejudice. Our differences are smaller than our common interests. And people are pretty much the same all over. Flash-forward to today, and Acker has been thoroughly de-programmed. Her fears have melted away.

And the same local white Democrats kept coming to the headquarters, despite the life-sized cutouts of Obama. "I was surprised so many of them [white Democrats] have changed," says Acker. "Where they didn't accept the fact that he was colored, now they've changed their attitude. Really."

"I also had some concern because he was colored that they [Obama volunteers] might turn the table on us here, but now when I see the way people have really worked together and banded together, I see a different way."

"It's a different era," she muses. "I accept it."

This is a beautiful story that is just a microcosm of what is going on all over this country. Ms. Acker still calls black people 'colored'. But, just as Sen. Robert Byrd came full circle from his KKK-past to endorse Obama in the primary, Ms. Acker, at eighty-eight, has accepted a new era. That's progress. That's a whole lot more healthy than a Sarah Palin rally.

I wonder what Donald Rumsfeld is doing these days.

Maybe after this election our national obsession with who is Godly enough to be President will finally meet a well deserved demise. I sure hope so, even as I doubt that in this "Christian Nation" of ours that will ever happen. So why am I wasting pixels on this? Because Sarah Palin believes that God cares enough about our elections to make sure the right people get elected:

The Alaska governor talked by phone with Dobson for about 20 minutes Monday while she was in Colorado campaigning. Dobson's Focus on the Family radio program aired the interview Wednesday.

Dobson asked whether Palin was discouraged by polls showing the GOP ticket behind.

"To me, it motivates us, makes us work that much harder," Palin said. "And it also strengthens my faith, because I'm going to know, at the end of the day, putting this in God's hands, that the right thing for America will be done at the end of the day on Nov. 4. So I'm not discouraged at all."

And what if Barack Obama wins the election Governor Palin? Will you still feel God's will was done? I somehow doubt it. And I doubt all the folks on the religious right who you've been stirring up with your smears of Barack Obama's "palling around with terrorists" will accept that result as the will of God either. I'm certain, in fact, that they and you will find some excuse not to accept Obama's election to the presidency as legitimate, much less God approved. A far more likely reaction to a President Obama from your supporters will go something like this:

Minutes ago I spoke with friend Dr. Norman G. Marvin, M.D. and he is so concerned at what he has learned about Barack Obama's family in Kenya that he is calling a special prayer meeting in his home to pray against the witchcraft curses attempted by them against John McCain and Sarah Palin.

Dr. Marvin sent me the below e-mail from Flo Ellers. Flo is credentialed with the International Fellowship of Ministries which is based in Washington State. She is also a member of EndTime Handmaidens and Servants of Jasper, Arkansas.

IF YOU KNOW HOW TO DO SPIRITUAL WARFARE, PLEASE PRAY TODAY AND CONTINUALLY THAT ALL SUCH CURSES BE BROKEN AND SATAN'S PLAN FOR AMERICA BE DEFEATED, IN JESUS' NAME. PRAY AND COVER MCCAIN AND PALIN WITH THE BLOOD OF CHRIST. IF YOU DO NOT KNOW HOW TO DO SPIRITUAL WARFARE, IT IS TIME YOU LEARN!!!

In other words, you and your "Spiritual Warriors" are more likely to view President Obama's electoral victory as the work of Satan rather than the will of The Lord. Which is why I expect a huge outcry among "the faithful" on election night if you and your sidekick, Senator McCain, don't pull off a miraculous comeback. I don't expect them to meekly accept Obama victory as "God's will," like they proudly proclaimed the elections of George W. Bush to be.

So spare me the toxic insertion of your heretical version of Christianity into our political discourse. You know as well as I do that the Christian Right will never accept any President who isn't one of them. Hell, the only reason they are on board with a potential McCain Presidency is because he decided to let people like James Dobson and John Hagee vet his vice presidential running mate for him. They, no doubt, sincerely pray each night, not only for a McCain/Palin victory, but for President McCain to shuffle off this mortal coil as soon as possible after his Inauguration Day, so that you can assume the reins of power. I bet, in your heart of hearts your're praying for that too.

Which is one reason why you must never be allowed to get within walking distance of the Oval Office. We've already had one President who believed he was on a mission from God, and looked what happened to our nation. We sure don't need another unqualified, ruthless, power hungry religious nutcase who believes that they were divinely appointed by God to rule America like some Medieval Monarch.

God save us from another catastrophic success like that one.

There's an interesting, and long, profile of John McCain's campaign in this week's New York Times Magazine. One part of it describes how Steve Schmidt convinced John McCain to talk about his time as a POW. I think it probably helped McCain a great deal in the Republican primaries. But the cost was that, by the summer, people had heard him talk about his time as a prisoner of war so much that they just began to roll their eyes whenever he brought it up. I'm not sure when the McCain camp realized this, but after their convention they pretty much dropped the POW talk from his campaign rhetoric. Whenever he does still mention it, as in one of the debates, the audience is unimpressed.

I don't find McCain's use of his time as a POW to be as cheap, tawdry, and exploitative as Rudy Guiliani's use of 9/11, but the effect over time is the same. People stop listening and the candidate becomes a parody of himself.

If I can think of one thing that I would have done differently as a McCain strategist, it's that I would have tacked all the way to the center-left after wrapping up the nomination, and run extremely hard against the Bush administration and the fire-breathers in the Republican Party. It would have really caused a blood-bath among the GOP delegates but, if McCain was right about one thing in this campaign, it was the need to throw a successful Hail Mary pass.

McCain and Lieberman were the preferred running-mates of the last two Democratic nominees. They had bipartisan, moderate, bona fides, and they should have exploited them and run as a centrist alternative to the nutso DeLay-Rove-Santorum wing of the party. Running to the right allowed Obama to easily capture the center. And, by not running aggressively away from a party and a president that is in total disrepute, McCain tied himself to a sinking ship.

I always thought his best choice for running mate would have been Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison would have been a decent choice, as well. Or, even Joe Lieberman. If Arlen Specter didn't have health issues, he would have been a fine choice. Or Tom Ridge, Christie Whitman, or George Pataki. McCain needed someone that could sell him as a different kind of Republican. But he chose to go for a base election in a Democratic year. It was a terrible choice. Choosing Palin wasn't the half of it. Any conservative would have helped drive him under.

Normally I post these without much comment. But I this time I couldn’t help it.

One of the first things Sarah Palin did after she was selected as John McCain's running-mate was to go to a Minneapolis Neiman Marcus and drop $75,062.63 on clothes and accessories. All told, she's spent over $150,000 on her appearance, using RNC money that was raised from committed Republican activists. I don't know how the real-Americans in Western Pennsylvania, Southern Virginia, and Western North Carolina are going to be able to relate to that. It's hard to picture how you could spend $75,000 in a department store. Did they have an 18-wheeler to haul away her loot?

The McCain's response is defensive, and they're trying to blame the media. But, unsurprisingly, a lot of Republicans are furious, and not just because of bad optics. It's a huge waste of their money.

The campaign says that it was always their intention to donate the clothes and diamonds and gold to a worthy charity when the campaign is over. I don't really believe that, and I'm sure Palin is crushed to hear that she can't keep her bling. I think it should all be donated to the Smithsonian, where future generations can view it like the Queen of England's Family Jewels.

DemFromCT points something interesting out. The ABC/WaPo tracking poll shows Obama outperforming Kerry with every group except liberals.

Having lived among liberals for this entire campaign season, it's easy to see why. We're thinking too hard. If you are a liberal, and you are not giddy with excitement at this moment, you need find a bottle of alcohol and loosen up. Let me explain something to my liberal worry-warts.

If Al Gore had taken office in 2001, and he had won re-election, we would right now be organizing to get Joe Lieberman elected because at least he isn't as bad as the Republican. Okay?

But not only that, in 2004, John Kerry begged and pleaded with John McCain to be his running mate. If McCain had accepted his offer and they had won the presidency, we'd all be working to reelect John McCain right now, not defeat him.

There are few things I don't like about Obama and a few more things I don't like about Joe Biden. Fortunately, they kind of cancel each other out. Biden has been wrong on bankruptcy law and the AUMF-Iraq. Obama was right. Obama was wrong on FISA. Biden was right. But, any way you slice it, we haven't had a ticket this liberal since, what, 1984? And we didn't do so well in that election. So, any of you disaffected liberals out there...get over yourselves. Join the party, and join the fun.

A TV station in Hawaii is reporting that Barack Obama's grandmother Madelyn Dunham may be suffering a recurrence of cancer, in addition to her broken hip:

HONOLULU -- Sen. Barack Obama's grandmother, Honolulu resident Madelyn Dunham, has had a recurrence of cancer besides suffering from a broken hip, a source said. [...]

Obama will be in Honolulu alone, and for less than 24 hours.

He is expected to spend all of that time with his grandmother and sister, Maya Soetoro-Ng, who has been caring for Dunham.

Dunham also suffers from osteoporosis and has had a corneal transplant.

I'm sure all our thoughts and well wishes are with the Obama family right now.

Update [2008-10-22 10:32:31 by Steven D]: Scumbag Wingnut takes credit for Obama going to see his ill grandmother. There should be a special place reserved in hell for this man.

Sarah Palin "palling around" with Neiman Marcus, Macy's and Saks Fifth Avenue to the tune of $150,000? What did you expect? She's a Republican. It's what they do.

At least she didn't have a $400 haircut.

It's still too early to tell, but I think my piece on February 7th, What's a Realignment Look Like?, might turn out to be my best and most prescient piece of the year. Here's a teaser:

The interesting thing is what happened in 1932, by which time it had become apparent that Hoover's Republicans had no answer to the hardships of the Depression. Franklin Delano Roosevelt took back the White House for the Democrats after twelve years on the outside, and the Democrats had huge wins in both the House (101 seats) and the Senate (an astounding 12 seats). The gains in the Senate flipped control of the chamber and gave the Democrats a 59 vote caucus. The House margin was 318-117. This is the kind of election the Democrats could be looking at in 2008, if all our ducks line up in a row. Well, that's a bit of an exaggeration...we have no way of winning anywhere near 101 seats in the House...but twelve seats in the Senate is not out of reach, we'll almost certainly take back the White House, and another 30-50 seats in the House are not out of the question.

And then there's this piece that responds to analysis from David Frum. It's looks an awful lot like the analysis I did earlier today, Culture in a Realignment.

Of course, Frum has just described the experience of every progressive/Democrat over the last 38 years (just coincidentally, this exactly corresponds to my entire life). Whether we have been in power or out of power, we have not had the initiative on policy since Lyndon Johnson's presidency succumbed to the violence in Vietnam.

But we're on the cusp of a new progressive era.

And, as I stated back in February, without Obama, this might not have been possible at all.

When you are considering which candidate has the better health care plan, or housing plan, or whatever, please remember that a realigning election changes everything. Imagine what FDR could have accomplished with a 1928 Congress. Almost nothing. But with a 1932 Congress he gave us the New Deal. It matters a lot more whether our nominees can bring in a tsunami of new congresspeople than whether they have a slightly better policy paper on education reform. We should dare to think big. And, because almost all of us have no memory of living in a country with a progressive ruling majority, we simply cannot dream big enough. In my opinion, Clintonism, the Democratic Leadership Council, triangulation, or whatever you want to call it, is a philosophy for an era of conservative dominance, and it is wholly inappropriate for the times we are about to enter into. In fact, it may be the only thing that can prevent a new progressive era from arriving at all.

I revisited this topic on July 12th, with my Realignment History piece. One takeaway from that:

It wasn't until the economic and foreign policy disasters of the Carter administration that the New Deal coalition was truly challengable as the ruling party of the country. And we are all more or less familiar with post-1980 politics. But because post-1980 politics represents the majority of most of our lives, we have a hard time envisioning a period of sustained liberal dominance. But there are two reasons why we are about to see a second round of it. George W. Bush's second-term has been at least as disastrous as Harry Truman's second-term, and its been more disastrous than Jimmy Carter's single-term. There's no question that we are about to see the second shock election in a row. We might worry that the Republicans will quickly recover, as the Democrats did after the shock elections of 1946 and 1952. But what's really happening is an ideological collapse of the Republican's rationale for being.

And:

In a country with a popular welfare state (however underdeveloped) the Republicans are more or less a permanent minority party. By 1980, the Welfare State had developed enough to allow for some downsizing and this provided a window for Republican dominance. But that window really closed during the Clinton administration and the first Bush/Cheney term, when unpopular programs were shrunk, reformed, or eliminated. When Bush moved to privatize Social Security the Republicans had reached the end of their viability. They had nothing politically sustainable left to do, and they started challenging the very structure of the Welfare State as we have known it since FDR.

In many ways, the same thing can be said about the Bush administration's radical moves on the Unitary Executive and the powers of Congress. The American people will accept reforms and occasional downsizing of the Welfare State, but they do not support fundamental changes that betray over a half-century, if not more, of settled ways of doing things. The Democrats will restore the state to the way it was before Bush came to power. The bigger question is whether they will do more. And a lot of that depends on the size and culture of the Class of '08, and on Barack Obama.

After the realigning elections of 1930-1932, 1958-1960, and 1964, the assumptions about what was possible changed. In every case, there was major progressive legislation that proved to be popular. Will 2006-2008 do the same thing?

As for the Republicans, they may occasionally occupy the White House, but they won't control Congress again until they find a new reason for being that doesn't include rolling back the Welfare State.

Read the full articles for the full flavor. But I'm quite pleased with the quality of my meta-analysis of this historical moment we're living through. Whenever someone suggests that Obama only won because of x,y, or z, you can point them to these pieces to show that the events we're witnessing were discernible to the careful student of history. Little bits of strategy and flubs and gaffes played incidental parts in a larger historical cycle.

Did John McCain just say that he couldn't agree more that Western Pennsylvania is filled with racists?

McCain needs a nap.

Hey Larry Johnson!!

There also is the fact that the Obama campaign at one point circulated the lame story that Michelle was not using “whitey” as an epithet. Nope. She was saying, “Why’d he.” You don’t put out a story line like that if such a recording does not exist. At this point I don’t think it is going to be used.

The Obama campaign didn't tell me to do it. I picked it up in a joke comment at MyDD and wrote it up as if it were real. I punk'd you, you fool. I explained how I ratfucked you and your credibility here. You, sir, should get a life.

Honestly, wouldn't voting go a helluva lot quicker and smoother if we all just reverted to paper ballots? There no way using paper to cast your vote could be worse than what happened today in Florida:

After an hour and a half, Zarella reported he was "almost inside the door." However, according to those coming out at that time, "it was a big mess" with "machines breaking."

It ultimately took Zarrella 3 hours and 15 minutes to get to the head of the line. "There are two machines that actually print out the ballots," Zarrella explained, "and both of the machines went down for a period of about 45 minutes."

Technical problems were also noted elsewhere in Florida on Monday. In Jacksonville, some of the vote scanning machines malfunctioned, and seven out of the fifteen had to be replaced because they were rejecting ballots. At Miami Beach City Hall, it was reported that "some of the computers used to check in voters weren't working, though there were no problems with the optical scan machines used to count ballots."

I bet paper ballots are cheaper, too.