Just woke up to find the email from Barack Obama in my inbox, and don’t I feel special: he’s chosen Joe Biden as his running mate.

I’d say ever since Joe gave the reporters staking out his house bagels and coffee, it was pretty obvious to me that Joe was the dude.  And he’s probably the best choice, too.  If ever there was a guy who would relish the prospect of being the attack dog, it’s Joe Biden, and he’ll be good at it, too.  Yes, there is the distinct possibility that he’ll go off half-cocked as he’s done in the past, but there has to be a bad cop to Obama’s cool surface in this election.

Because the more I think about it, the more I think one of the keys to this election is straight up: piss off John McCain.  Piss him right off, preferably in a way that makes him explode in a debate.

The walls of the media stronghold McCain has built up over all these years are cracking noticeably.  Joe Klien, a long time cheerleader, calls McCain’s “Obama would lose a war to win the presidency,” attack “scurrilous,” which is more than Obama said.  The “How Many Houses” gaff - which if the Dems play it right, will be the candidacy-killer quote - was started by by a reporter asking, “how many houses do you own?”  That’s not the kind of question you ask a Senator without already knowing the answer and without some indication that he doesn’t know.

So an explosion from John McCain could begin the flood of “McHothead” naratives that would doubtless carry though to the election.  This is exactly what Obama needs, because right now, his professorial coolness strikes many as a liability.  But when McHothead erupts and we combine it with the Georgia incident and his support for Iraq literally days after 911 and calling his wife a cunt and . . .  you get the picture.

So, here’s to hoping Biden can turn the screws without looking like a dick.

“I’m John Kerry and I’m. . . reporting for duty!”

Remember that line from the Democratic National Convention in 2004?  Remember how excited we all were to have a presidential candidate who’d served in a war and now objected to the Iraq War going up against the chicken-hawk loser administration who got us into this mess?  And remember slowly getting the feeling that his service thirty-plus years ago may well be all he had to offer for the election?

Don’t get me wrong: on substance, there was much I agreed with Senator Kerry about.  And when he spoke, he often pointed out a great many of the contradictions and lies the Bush Administration routinely trotted about.  But it wasn’t like he did it in any cogent, meaningful or effective way.  It wasn’t like he had any particularly bold suggestions of his own.  Any genuinely meaningful differences he had he never articulated in a way that could have resonated, and he didn’t have many in the first place.  Generally, he argued against the nuances of the Bush Adminstration’s policies, but stuck with their general themes and framing.

And now as the 2008 campaign wears on, it seems that John McCain is looking to revise and appropriate Senator Joe Biden’s assesment of Rudy Giuliani, speaking only sentences that contain a noun, a verb and a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp.  I’d meant to write up this little post yesterday, and now it looks like Howard Fineman pointed out the danger to McCain on Countdown last night.  He has no particular policy points on which he significantly differs from the President, except for those on which he agrees with Obama.  John Kerry had parasailing, John McCain has an unspecified number of homes he isn’t aware of.  John Kerry was for the war before he was against it, John McCain has. . .  oh, well shit.  Take your pick of lamentable quotes.

I’ve made the point several times in several different ways, here and on other blogs, but I’ll make it again.  Whatever you think of Turd Blossom’s supposed “genius,” or the efficacy of the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, elections are never close in this country unless the electorate is either A) bored, like 2000 or B) unimpressed, as in 2004.  Personality issues become important only when there’s either A) nothing else to talk about, as in 2000 or B) nothing being talked about honestly, as in 2004.

It remains to be seen if any substance comes of the 2008 campaign season.  But as sure as eggs is eggs (aching men’s feet), if there is to be genuine substance, it will need to be brought to the table by Barack Obama.  John McCain will not have it in him.  And if Obama choses his substance wisely, I think he can have as much as a six-point lead in the actual final tally, so sure am I that McCain’s support is soft as Velveta and planning on staying home come November.

How hard of a question is this for most people?  How many homes do you own?  For many Americans, it’s “none.”  Not “seven.”  And certainly not, “I think, uh, I’ll have my staff get to you, talk to you about that.”

And of course, the Jed Report has put together a little Google Earth tour for you, just in case you want to know more about John McCain’s life as the landed gentry than he does.

John McCain is an exceptional candidate.  He’s great in interviews, except when he’s not.  He’s a Conservative, except when he’s not.  He’s a maverick, except when he’s not. . . .

He’s for nuclear energy, except when he’s voting against parking the waste in his back yard.  He’s got the foreign policy experience to lead the nation, except when he can’t tell the difference between Sunni and Shia.  He’s knowledgable about affairs of state, except when he misses the fact that Czechoslovakia has not been a state in about twenty years.  He runs a clean campaign, except when he’s running nothing but negative ads for three weeks in a row.

And best of all, whenever he slips up, the media is there to make an exception for him.

I am not a feminist, particularly.  I don’t mean to say that I don’t support women’s rights, but simply that in a long list of Progressive ideals and issues with which I sympathize, women’s issues don’t tend to get center stage.  And the word “misogynist” is a strong one that I don’t often use.

But I don’t think you need to be particularly sensitive to women’s issues to have begun to have some serious reservations about the tenor of John McCain’s apparent public relationship with women.  From his long-ago episode calling his wife a cunt in front of reporters to his remarkably unfunny rape joke to his current slip-up, offering his wife to compete in a biker stripper contest, a pattern of fairly aggressive attitude towards women seems inescapably present.

Yes, it is perfectly possible to explain away any one of these slip-ups, if you prefer to call them that.  Not everybody is the best joke teller, so perhaps McCain missed some crucial detail that would have made the rape joke, like, waaay funnier.  And everybody has a bad day or goes off half-cocked occasionally, so maybe calling his wife a cunt was one of those uncontained moments that we all regret, just a particularly bad one.  As Rachel Maddow and Keith Olbermann generously hypothesized on Countdown the other day, perhaps the fact that McCain clearly doesn’t read or practice his speeches before he goes on stage got the better of him at the rally.

There are a variety of ways to explain one off-the-cuff moment that will satisfy a majority of people.  Explaining all three in a way that makes sense and doesn’t involve a deep-seated resentment of women is a somewhat more difficult task.  Perhaps the problem is not so much disdain for women as it is disdain for Cindy McCain, but even if it is, spending so much of your life with someone you hate is weird in and of itself.  Also, each of these “bloopers” is in a different context, entirely: one is a joke told in private, one is an outburst of anger and the most recent, a campaign stop laugh line.  To me, that eliminates the “spoken in anger” and the “spoken in jest” arguments.  If you say it in anger and in jest, if you say it in private and in public, you’re not just speaking rhetorically or extemporaneously.  You are speaking truth as you see it.

As for the suggestion that his campaign advisers might have slipped this one in without him knowing, this argument - albeit rhetorical generosity - deserves special attention.  John McCain is a man who has spent his entire life, from birth, in the company of soldiers.  I don’t think I’m disparaging soldiers in any way they might find offensive if I say that such a man does not need to be instructed in the nuances of biker rallies.  I’d say it’s a fair bet that he understands what a “beauty contest” in Sturgis might entail.

As secondary evidence, imagine for a moment that John McCain really didn’t get what the Mrs. Buffalo Chip contest involved: where would the joke be?  It seems clear in the video that the line - whomever it was written by - was intended to be humorous.  The only way that works is if you are left with the image of the next First Lady dancing naked with a pickle down her throat.  Moreover, the joke wouldn’t work if Cindy McCain was actually up for such a thing, since being so inclined would automatically disqualify her as a First Lady in the minds of many people.  So, this isn’t so much an assertion of Cindy McCain’s readiness to flaunt her sexy as it is a public de-pantsing, right out of a high school locker room.

Finally, if McCain’s handlers actually did write the script for him, that’s probably worse than if he wrote it himself.  Because that means that not only is John McCain ready, willing and able to humiliate his wife in public, but that his willingness to do so is enough of a known quotient that other people are willing to jot such a joke down for their boss without fear of reprisal.

No, there simply is no other explanation but that John McCain himself or the McCain campaign intentionally used Cindy McCain as sexy red meat to ingratiate John Sydney with the Sturgis crowd.  I’m sure it’s not the kind of memory Cindy McCain wants to discuss with Prime Minister Merkel over truffle-stuffed scallops, duck confit and Rothschild Estate wine in the event that she becomes First Lady.

The politics of personality are not helpful at all to us as a nation.  When candidates for the presidency chose to delve into the gutter and discuss the personality traits of their opponents rather than dealing with issues, we lose out.  But when a mean streak towards woman this wide comes out in public, I think it rises above simply personality to a legitimate campaign issue.  If it’s fair to expect to know a candidate’s professed religion - if it’s fair that “Values Voters” can pick a president based on where he is on Sunday morning - it’s at least as fair to ask of a candidate who does not support a woman’s right to choose where he comes up with his ideas.

I’m not suggesting that all people who oppose abortion do so out of misogynic resentment of women.  What I am saying is that abortion is the current hot-button issue for which John McCain can check the box as being on the Conservative side of the issue his whole career.  Many people have legitimate moral problems with abortion that bring them to the anti-abortion side of the isle, and those people are to be respected even if I personally disagree with them.  But it’s worth asking if that’s really where John McCain is coming from and what, if he was elected president, his decisions concerning women’s issues would be based on.

Dream no longer, you Progressive Pervs!  John McCain serves up his wife to a festival full of sweaty, leather-bound and alcohol-fueled bikers in the latest round of Porn Pandering.  via TPM.  Nothing says “First Whore” like a stained and sweaty Miss Buffalo Chip tee and smeared lip-stick.

Johnny boy, you’re all class.

Late update: just wanted to add that my vote is we just go ahead and drop the pretense that this man is anything other than a misogynist.

You’ve heard Barack Obama say that John McCain is trying to scare voters because Obama doesn’t look like the other presidents on the dollar bill.  You may also have heard that John McCain said it was not him but Obama that was playing the race card.  If not, you doubtless will have after clicking the above link.

Well, what you probably haven’t seen - and neither has anyone else except those one or two people who ended up on the JohnMcCainforPresident.com website because they Googled “erectile dysfunction” - is the McCain campaign ad that does exactly what Barack Obama says it does: puts his face on the dollar bill, Mount Rushmore and the Statue of Liberty, asking, “what will he want to change next?”  Check it out, via Crooks and Liars:

Poor li'l Emo. . .

Much has been made of John McCain’s new ad campaign, which describes Barack Obama as a “Celebrity” and compares him to Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears.  Barack himself chose to address this campaign, albeit tangentially, in MO today.  Josh Marshall and a host of Liberal bloggers have picked up on this new gambit as a means to a white girls/black guys scare tactic ala the attacks on Harold Ford.  And since the media is showing McCain’s ads more than McCain is, I guess there’s no harm in linking to it here:

So, perhaps I lack nuance.  But really, even if what they intended to do was paint Obama as a nigga with a taste for white ass, is that what they’ve accomplished?  I never thought about this ad like that even once.  My impression was: “are we voting for President of the United States or of the Death Cab for Cutie Fan Club?”

Because this ad is the pissing-est, moaning-est, most emasculated pile of crap I’ve ever seen in a presidential election cycle.  It’s not “withering” as someone recently described the ad, if by withering you mean damaging to Obama; it is as though they video taped John McCain’s balls shrinking into infinity.  If the best defense you can come up with against a popular figure is, “oh, he’s sooooo popular!  Why don’t you just marry him?”  you should probably pack your Depends and call it a day.

And to follow this gelding display with a lame “tax and spend liberal” line, as though you didn’t notice the entire tenor of this campaign is better than that, just makes things worse.

Don’t get me wrong: there is a specific and significant strain of anti-elite, anti-celebrity sentiment that, when properly tapped into, can be the death-knell of any successful campaign.  There is a way to cut into a candidate by making him look like the “popular” kid everybody hated in school.  Or the rich kid.  John Kerry and para-sailing come to mind.

But this ain’t it.  This is just pathetic.

If Barack Obama’s trip to the Mid East - and the sudden injection of Iraq’s Prime Minister Maliki’s plans into the U.S. political mix - have done anything, they’ve definitely flipped the entire conversation in unexpected ways.  But while many are viewing this as a positive for Barack Obama, there is one highly important question on which the media has jumped the shark entirely, even those dying to be supportive of the presumptive Democratic nominee: we’re now operating under the assumption that The Surge Is Working.

How did we arrive at that?  Is that even true?

What’s even more frustrating is the fact that media icons of the Left are struggling to find ways to continue arguing against a McCain presidency, insisting for example that the “Sunni Awakening” happened before The Surge, tacitly admitting that not only do they believe The Surge is working, but that they refuse to admit this “fact.”  It’s even getting “Digged” as I type.

And I can’t help but notice a critical element missing in all this. . . the facts.  The Surge isn’t failing, exactly, but it’s not working either.  Maliki is playing for his constituency, which is fine and I applaud him doing so, but that doesn’t mean anything else has changed.  What’s happened is that Barack Obama said he would stick to the 16-month timeline, then Maliki agreed to the timeline, then McCain said “but, but, but, . . he couldn’t agree to that if The Surge wasn’t working!”

… And then the media bought it, hook like and sinker without so much as a moment’s cricital inspection.  Now we’re off to the races with another line of BS that ultimately helps John McCain.

This is interesting.  Via TPM’s Election Roundup of this morning, The Page is reporting that James Dobson is now signalling that he might be persuaded to vote for John McCain.  I speculated way back when he first announced his plan *not* to vote for the Republican Nom that such a plan might be playing chicken with reality.  After all, if a Cedar of Lebanon falls in the wood and no one gives a shit, does it make a difference?

Well, now it begins to look like Dobson’s gambit for a third party candidate may be coming to a close.