Idea IS the format

There used to be a time when Mrs Palin was pretty much a day-to-day fixture on Idea IS the format. Then she went away. And, when I saw her (ludicrous) resignation speech a few months back, I figured maybe she was going to return to the Alaskan wilderness from whence she came.

Apparently not. Her latest achievement in a glittering career has been to unite the British people behind none other than our National Health Service. Following some typically firebrand remarks regarding the implications of Obama’s healthcare plans, the Twitter-using UK populace have responded in force by rapidly propelling the hashtag #WeLoveTheNHS to the top of Twitter’s trending topics.

Mrs Palin’s comments have spearheaded a larger wave of conservative vitriol seeking to deliver an exacting blow to Obama’s administration, by derailing one of his first significant attempts to deliver on his electoral agenda.

As usual, the right-wing aren’t too bothered with the facts. The author of one article in Investors Business Daily wrote that “people such as scientist Stephen Hawking wouldn’t have a chance in the UK, where the National Health Service would say the life of this brilliant man, because of his physical handicaps, is essentially worthless.”

Mr Hawking – who was born in the UK, and has lived and worked here his entire life – was quick to respond that he “wouldn’t be here today if it were not for the NHS”.

Here’s hoping that the death throes of the Republican party continue to inspire these sorts of benevolent outpourings towards the various organs of our long-suffering welfare state. After all, it could be worse. It could be so much worse:

I’m doing a can of Red Stripe and working on my election eve post, and up pops this:

Shakespeare called it ‘vaulting ambition’.  Mix it with abject ignorance, and an aptitude for the kind of slash-and-burn rehetoric that gets the farm-hands feverishly sharpening their pitchforks, and you have an insidious little cocktail.

Here’s hoping after tomorrow we don’t see this kind of political poison masquerading as competitive electioneering for many years to come.

Right, well, first up a story you might have missed, given it that it jetted in and out of the headlines like US fighter planes encroaching into Syrian airspace:

I’m no detective, but the first thing I noticed was that the ‘B’ is the wrong way around.  Straight away I’m thinking that whoever scratched that into her face was looking into a mirror at the time.  Suspects-wise, I’m looking at a shortlist of one.

That might have been staring you, me and Ashley Todd in the face, but it wasn’t enough to stop the McCain camp aggressively pushing the story, which was subsequently picked up by Fox ‘News’ and the Drudge Report, the only two major media outlets still unblinkingly loyal to McCain’s car crash campaign.

Interesting to note that both the CNN anchor Rick Sanchez and Ashley Todd herself are users of Twitter, the micro-blogging tool identified this week in a draft Army intelligence paper as being of potential value to terrorists in co-ordinating their activities.

Given that Al Qaeda have already used Youtube to screen beheadings, Google Earth to plan attacks against the British Army in Basra and Skype to avoid eavesdropping by Western intelligence services, should we really be surprised that their visionary appreciation of Web 2.0 extends to the occasional tweet?

Terrorists must seem like a distant threat to John McCain, given that he now finds himself facing a more homegrown enemy in the form of what Politico’s Ben Smith has described as a ‘Palin Insurgency’.

It transpires that in recent days Palin has been increasingly disregarding the advice of the former Bush aides tasked with handling her, leading senior Republicans within the McCain camp to describe her as a ‘diva’ and a ‘whack job’ who has ‘gone rogue’.

With seven days to go, John McCain can ill-afford to waste precious valuable time trying to rein in what can only be described as the maverick’s maverick.

It looks like one of his supporters has found a makeshift solution though, and is doing her level best to ensure that McCain is still seen to be getting the full support of his runaway running-mate:

I love the way she graciously acknowledges the plaudits of the crowd.  If Palin is indeed a whack job, that’s one hell of a good impersonation.

She’s not the only fake Palin hogging the limelight on the web right now.

Yes, it’s Who’s Nailin’ Paylin? the porn flick Republicans are up in arms about as they condemn Flynt and Democrats in general for disseminating such left-wing filth all over the internet, rather than having the decency to wait until the election is over before buying the special edition DVD.

Given the very real possibility that this last clip will have been deleted by the time you come to look at it, and the fact that I know how to give the people what they want (except when ‘the people’ is my mother), here is a huge photograph of Sarah Palin lookalike and adult star Lisa Ann reminding us that you might not be able to burn the American flag, but you can sure as shit wrap yourself up in it and get your tits out.

That’s all well and good, but where on earth is the real Sarah Palin?

Well, wherever she is, you can bet your bottom dollar she’s saying something really fucking stupid.

In condemning the earmarks allocated to fruit fly research, Palin deftly brushes aside Nobel prize-winning studies into the way in which genes are passed on via chromosomes, from which we have gained a far better understanding of conditions such as autism.  All this in the context of a speech in which she is reasserting the commitment of the McCain ticket to children with special needs.

As ever, it’s not just the substance of what Palin is saying that invites ridicule, but the surety with which she says it, reinforcing what a dangerous flavour of politician she is. If you’re not prepared to take my word for it, how about those of erstwhile conservative commentator Christopher Hitchens, who concluded a recent article in the spectator with the following observations:

This is what the Republican Party has done to us this year: It has placed within reach of the Oval Office a woman who is a religious fanatic and a proud, boastful ignoramus. Those who despise science and learning are not anti-elitist. They are morally and intellectually slothful people who are secretly envious of the educated and the cultured. And those who prate of spiritual warfare and demons are not just “people of faith” but theocratic bullies. On Nov. 4, anyone who cares for the Constitution has a clear duty to repudiate this wickedness and stupidity.

(Oh, and ‘Wasilla’s all I saw’? It’s a Palin-drome. Gerrit?)

This is from a few nights ago. McCain and Obama both spoke for ten minutes at the Alfred E. Smith memorial dinner. McCain’s routine is pretty good value, but for my money Obama edges him on material and delivery.  You’ll need to have been keeping up with the campaign in order to enjoy it, but, if you have, it’s well worth the ten minutes.

Interesting to note that there’s not one mention of Sarah Palin by either candidate.  I get the impression the Obama camp have taken a conscious decision to leave her out of it, given that Obama avoided any direct references to Palin during each of his debates, and Biden was very careful in how was seen to handle her at the VP equivalent.

The effect of this has been to leave her looking as marginalised as the angry right-wingers her rally performances appeal to, undermining her ability to gain any real traction with the middle ground, where this election is being fought and the outcome will be decided.

This has worked particularly well because John McCain himself hasn’t made any effort to counteract it.  Watching him try to defend his choice of Palin on Letterman, I think he’s happier than anybody to keep her off the agenda, and to restrict her media presence to a fleeting cameo on Saturday Night Live.  That’s probably also worth a look, given that it’s apparently comedy hour on Idea IS the format:

I’m reading on TIMES ONLINE that McCain and Palin have ‘fallen out’ over the direction of their campaign. There’s not much in the article to substantiate this, beyond a quote from ‘a leading Republican consultant’ suggesting that she can see things getting away from them, and has one eye on topping the ticket in 2012.

I find the idea that Palin’s reputation and political future could outlive this election as terrifying as it is ridiculous. The McCain campaign has been awash with mistakes, a fact a growing number of staunch Republican consultants and commentators seem ready to admit, but surely the single greatest mistake was his choice of running mate.

To think of her being back here in four years time looking to oust an incumbent Obama seems just absurd. Surely the GOP will be able to muster somebody better than Palin, she being so inextricably linked to what’s shaping up as one of the most disastrous presidential campaigns in their history.

I’d have thought the big upside for them when they lose this election will be sending her straight back to the middle of nowhere, exiling the politics of hate-mongering and provincial ignorance in the process.

Or, as Time Blog’s Ana Marie Cox put it:

“The hardest thing about any political campaign is how to win without proving that you are unworthy of winning.” Adlai Stevenson

With so many different polls tracking the progress of the two election ‘08 campaigns, this is a great at-a-glance view of everything that’s happened since the start of the year.

I found it on my new favourite blog, Daily Kos, an great source of up-to-the-minute info, insight and analysis, coming from a solidly left-wing point-of-view.  Their analysis of the polling so far is well worth a read, but what really caught my eye is the way things have gone downhill for the GOP since the Republican convention.

Whatever advantage McCain gained from the unveiling of Sarah Palin as his running-mate, it turned out to be pure novelty value. It was only a matter of days before the lip-gloss started to come off for the thinking members of the American electorate, many of whom will have watched her famously assert in an interview with Charles Gibson that her governorship of a state within sight of Russia constituted valuable foreign policy experience.

Palin made matters worse by defending this claim in a subsequent interview with CBS’ Katie Couric.  Pretty soon it became obvious that Palin was just getting started, and that there was no question, however simple or straightforward, to which she could not provide a confused, convoluted and often meaningless answer.

The first crime in politics is to lack the knowledge to field a question (especially if that question relates to a basic detail of, say, the policy platform on which you’re standing).  The second, perhaps greater crime is to then lack the charm, articulacy and guile to be able to talk your way out of the corner you’re in without being exposed as the utter bullshitter you undoubtedly are.

On the strength of the Couric interviews you could send Palin down for life. Her shortcomings were so manifest that McCain made an eleventh hour decision to join her for one of the follow-up interviews.  This enabled him to define the direction of their response to Couric’s questions, before deferring to Palin on the benevolent if somewhat belated assertion that she was more than capable of speaking for herself.

If the shine was starting to come off the hockey mom with the electorate, in the hands of Saturday Night Live’s Tina Fey she was an instant hit.  Fey’s impersonation was uncannily familiar, not least because for much of the time she was simply repeating Palin word for word.  As a politician, it’s not a good sign if all somebody has to do is change the context of the things you’re saying in order to create ready-made, weapons-grade satire.

By the time the VP debate came around, anybody who’d been paying any attention at all would have found their mind boggling at the idea of Palin going toe-to-toe for ninety minutes with someone as knowledgeable and experienced as Joe Biden.  History may record that she coped well, but that will only be to say that, so far out of her depth, she managed to tread water.  History ought to record that it was Joe Biden who delivered a truly classy performance, letting his superior knowledge and experience speak for itself without ever appearing unduly superior or condescending towards his opponent.

At this stage McCain and his campaign strategists must have been realising that what they had in Palin was a blunt instrument, and that she should be used as such.  They would also have been realising that, however ardently they might claim to have won the various debates, the polls demonstrated otherwise.  Hence their decision to try and ‘turn the page on the economy’, focusing instead on raising questions about the character and background of their opponent. Palin spearheaded this attack, suggesting in an interview that the electorate ought to be giving more of their attention to Obama’s relationship with reformed domestic terrorist Bob Ayers.

It’s reassuring in this day and age to witness how disastrous the decision to ‘go negative’ proved to be for McCain.

Disastrous, because since then the economy has kept itself very much on the agenda, by continuing to deteriorate in a way that nobody, least of all a prospective president of the USA, could possibly afford to ignore.

Disastrous, because Obama saw it coming, and lay in wait, releasing a series of advertisements exposing the cynicism of his opponent’s approach, and drawing attention to McCain’s own dubious association with the Keating 5 (not to mention Sarah Palin’s links to a secessionist Alaskan independence organisation).

Disastrous, because it introduced the word ‘terrorist’ into the lexicon of the Republican campaign, leaving McCain open to accusations of radicalizing his supporters, reinforced by the sudden appearance of words like ‘treason’, ‘traitor’ and ‘terrorist’ coming from the audiences at his increasing hateful and vitriolic rallies.

And, more than anything, disastrous because, for a reason that I will probably never understand, the McCain camp decided to announce exactly what they were doing, and why they were doing it.  To quote the ‘top McCain strategist’ in question, “if we keep talking about the economic crisis, we’re going to lose.”  Unsurprisingly, Obama has had no difficulty turning these words against them.

Meanwhile, rather than courting the middle ground, McCain has continued to move steadily  further and further away from it.  That is until yesterday, when he finally initiated another change of tack.  He took the microphone from a woman at a rally who had claimed that Obama was an ‘Arab terrorist’, correcting her to the effect he was no such thing, but merely ‘a decent man with whom I have disagreements’, to the audible displeasure of his audience.

Whether McCain did this because he realised that he was in danger of becoming a spokesperson for America’s far right or because he’d seen the polls and knew that he wasn’t going to win an election that way is still up for discussion.  Either way, the danger now is that he finds himself on no man’s land, having to constantly chastise the lunatic fringe his campaign has created a platform for.

It’s hard to see how the Republicans can claw their way back into this race, especially hampered by a such a manifestly inadequate and increasingly unpopular running-mate.  Palin has only looked anything like comfortable since she’s been inciting hatred among the terrifying throngs of white, middle-class pitchfork-wavers she best claims to represent.

As of the last twenty-four hours and McCain’s attack of conscience she’ll probably need to tone that down.  She may find that more of her time is spent explain the findings of the Troopergate investigation, who reported back yesterday that she had abused her power in trying to get her former brother-in-law fired.

For my part, I hope they’re both finished, and I’m calling it that way.

I see Obama going 300+ electoral college votes, maybe even a landslide 350+ if the McCain camp go on running their campaign as badly as they have done until now (and the electorate are good to their word when they find themselves alone in the polling stations).

And God knows it needs to be that kind of margin, it really does, because Rove and his cronies have shown how ready, willing and able they are to steal a close one.

This time though, there’s a difference.  This time the electorate seem to be against them. Because for any thoughtful, compassionate, intelligent human being, it’s surely black and white.

I posted the original version of this a few months back, but I couldn’t resist doctoring it to depict a popular scene from Alaskan schoolbooks.

I’ve downloaded a demo version of Photoshop that gives me thirty days of trial usage.  Should be enough to get me through to the election, and a couple of days beyond.

I’ve also been taking lessons from Annie Ok on the art of Flickr, and have started to develop my own ninja style.  If you’re a Flickr user and you haven’t already, friend me up.

So it’s welcome, one and all, as we go head-to-head here tonight, with Senate heavyweight and Democrat candidate for the Vice-Presidency Joe Biden taking on self-styled ‘Joe Six-pack American’ and Republican VPILF Sarah Palin.

We’ve already witnessed a thrilling first bout in the 2008 series. Somewhere between the irritable accusations of John ‘McSame’ McCain and the conciliatory counterpunches of Barack ‘Osama’ Obama each camp claimed a victory.

In the eyes of this pundit at least it was McSame who came off worst. Looking more war-horse than war hero, he was ultimately driven to behave like a low-ranking monkey. Never a good look, for a man who would be king.

And now comes the turn of our candidates for the Vice-Presidency, in what is surely the most tantalising and eagerly anticipated encounter of the series so far.

In the blue corner, born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1942, we have a man who became the fifth youngest senator in US history when he was elected to represent the state of Delaware in 1973. A long-time member and current chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee and a former chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, with 25 years of service to the US Senate under his belt, it’s Joseph “Joe” Biden!

And in the red corner, born in Sandpoint, Idaho in 1964, we find a woman whose rise through the ranks of Alaskan local government has earned her a reputation for strong-arm tactics and intimidation not just of her political opponents, but also the diminishing population of polar bears. Yup, it’s the hard-working ‘hockey mom’ from Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah “Caribou Barbie” Palin!

And it’s Palin everybody’s talking about in the build up to fight night, as she continues her seemingly implausible progress through the ranks of American party politics. Were she to make it within a 72-year-old’s heartbeat of the country’s highest office, surely this would be the greatest story ever told, and the ultimate triumph of the American Dream over the tedious trappings of reality, pragmatism and plain old common sense.

She’s certainly come out fighting. It was Palin who used a public appearance to stir up a war of words with Biden, seeming to suggest that the 65-year-old’s age might be an issue for his candidacy. “I’m the new energy”, she declared, drawing attention to the fact that while her opponent was passing throw-away legislation across the floor of the Senate, she was debating the ethics of moose-hunting at Wasilla High.

Small matter, it seems, that Palin’s own running mate is seven years Biden’s senior. Small matter, indeed, that the GOP ticket represents the most convincing evidence ‘palintologists’ have yet discovered that humans and dinosaurs ever peacefully co-existed on God’s earth. Meanwhile Palin herself pushes on, sensationally claiming that one of her best friends is gay, and that Vladimir Putin’s head can occasionally be seen from the shorelines of Alaska.

With Biden keeping his own counsel in the build up to fight night, all this talk from the Palin camp has left pundits (some of them staunch Republicans) openly questioning whether these two fighters even belong in the same ring.

Certainly, it’s hard to see how a political featherweight like Palin could ever get the better of a seasoned pro like Joe Biden. In this pundit’s opinion, however, Biden needs to be careful.

Palin’s might have her detractors among the educated liberal classes, but she’s been ‘awful busy’ winning over hearts and minds throughout the mindless heartlands of middle America, and is not without her sympathisers among the mainstream US electorate. Biden has to find some way to land enough telling blows, without ever being seen to strike the lady.

Palin, on the other hand, has nothing to lose. Expectations are so low, all she has to do last a few rounds, go the distance even, and she gives herself a fighting chance of claiming victory.

Fight fans, whatever happens, just remember this. It isn’t down to Fox News to tell you who won. We’re the judges here, not just some unwitting audience, herded towards somebody else’s conclusion.

Maybe, if we judge for ourselves, we’ll see that Palin’s candidacy is just a cynical sleight of hand, seeking the right person for the ticket, at the expense of getting the right person for the job.

Right now, that’s a billion dollar maybe.

Quick word of thanks to KidRobot23 and Annie Ok for some eleventh hour help with this one.

I’m in the office late working on a major pitch, in that kind of precarious tired strung-out work situation where you can lose perspective. Then I watch this, and it’s puts everything back in perspective, and I realise that I’m not alone, and that I’m right to be scared.

I tweeted this, I’m blogging it, I want to spread it as far and wide as possible. Because the next eight weeks are eight of the most important weeks in my life, and probably yours too.