Take some time to make some sense of what you want to say / and cast your words on the waves

Oh shit...

At the time of writing McCain is sitting 10 points ahead of Obama in one national poll in the US (he’s also ahead in couple of others including Zogby, who are notoriously, and dismissably unreliable but Gallup are the first serious pollster to give McCain this sort of lead).

It’s a hell of a ‘convention’ bounce and it’s easy for the Democrats to write it off, but they should be very, very worried. Right now you can almost feel the shockwaves.

Clearly the messages and images from the RNC worked extraordinarily well, and the Democrats played perfectly into their Rovian hands by swooping on to the VP choice and missing the targets that might really matter (that is, after all, what she’s there for..to divert the gaze from the issues that might really matter or hurt McCain). After all, corrupt or not, experienced or not, pregnant or not, she's hot!

And clearly America loves big parts of Sarah Palin. Forget the fact that she’s a born again wacko who may or may not have breached a few ethics rules as mayor of where-ever, Alaska, and filled her speech full of half truths, and blatant lies. Forget all that...they love her.

Like John McCain, her speech (sermon?) was little more than a series of simplistic rabble rousing slogans and right wing platitudes that stand up to little scrutiny. And the flag waving: Ewessay! Ewessay! Ewessay chanters bought it, as does the mass out there watching, it seems.

But the key thing to remember about Sarah is none of that…it’s the fact that her speech was written by one of President Bush’s speechwriters, Matthew Scully. And not only that it was written, mostly, prior to her anointment as the new Mother Teresa of the right. That’s right, she’s a calculated allegedly pretty vacuum there to repeat the simple memes for the troops.

And deflect the arrows from the boss.

However, the 10% lead is not without it's heel. That poll I started this post with above indicates that:

The Republican's ties to President Bush remains a huge vulnerability. In the poll, 63% say they are concerned he would pursue policies too similar to those of the current president. Bush's approval rating is 33%.

But instead of attacking that very obvious, potentially election winning, vulnerability over and over again, Dem Central goes into a muliti-day overdrive about Sarah’s church and her banning of books and a thousand other irrelevancies that just turn people towards her.

And some positively gruesome stuff from Kos.

Rove knows that just about nobody cares about those things…or at least if they do they are already confirmed Obama voters. For the rest, the message is Ewessay! Ewessay! Ewessay! And she's hot. Which is all that matters.

This is the nation that thinks it invented democracy and can’t in gods name see why anyone else in the world doesn’t want to be just like it.

Ewessay! Ewessay! Ewessay! McCain takin' it to the ruskies, the krauts and whoever else tries it on, with a babe at his side!

If you want that any clearer, wander through the positively stone-age comments on that USA Today story. This is, BTW, the biggest selling newspaper in America.

The Republicans know: dumb, simple, dumb, simple, dumb, repeat.....

Oh, but look, now Obama is hitting back:

And after days of tiptoeing around Palin, Obama even took his first direct swipe at the Alaska governor: “I know the governor of Alaska has been, you know, saying she is change,” Obama said at a town hall here. “But when you [have] been taking all these earmarks when it is convenient and then suddenly you are the champion anti-earmark person. That is not change, come on. I mean, words mean something. You can’t just make stuff up.”

And that’s it…how nice..how polite..the toughest things said about the woman came from these guys! And right now nobody is mentioning McBush.

Aside from Lou Dobbs:

Joe Biden

"In the Senate, John[McCain] has voted with President Bush 95 percent. And that is very hard to believe."

The Democratic vice-presidential candidate is exaggerating McCain's support for the policies of President Bush. According to the Congressional Quarterly, which keeps score, McCain supported the Bush administration on 95 per cent of the votes in 2007. But his loyalty score for the first seven and a half years of the Bush presidency is significantly lower--90 per cent.

Glenn Greenwald gets it right again:

But the idea that Americans instinctively recoil from negativity or that there will be some sort of backlash against Republicans generally and Palin specifically because of how "negative" their convention speeches were is pure fantasy. Cultural tribalism and personality attacks of those sort work, especially when they're not aggressively engaged.

Every four years, the GOP unleashes unrestrained personality attacks on Democrats and exploits cultural resentments. Every four years, Democrats tell themselves that such attacks don't work and are counter-productive. And every four years, that belief is disproven. These "character" issues end up mattering largely because Democrats, in election after election, allow wars over "character" to be waged in a largely one-sided fashion.

Will they learn? I doubt it. Bloody stuck up liberals....

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