one more miracle

I feel in my bones that the game has changed dramatically this year, but I've had a hard time articulating why. I don't really have the authority or experience to sufficiently support what I know in my gut. Instead, this article does it for me: For GOP, Reliable Wedge Issues Suddenly Fall Flat

We are looking at a paradigm shift on a massive scale. I know it's hard to believe in until the numbers come in, but I don't think that polls lie. Not to the extent that some think they may be. Once bitten, twice shy, okay, I get it. But if either Gore or Kerry were going to win, they would have done it by the skin of their TEETH. They never expanded into Republican territory - in fact, they didn't try. They aimed for the core 19 states (or so?) that would put them just over 270. And that's all they COULD do. But Obama started out with a philosophy that it's not how many states go blue, but how many people do that matters. This ideology is emphasized by the sheer extent of his ground effort. I read a statistic today that 35,000 new Democrats were registered in Texas. Texas! Which could never go blue in anyone's wildest imaginations. Yet there are still 35,000 new people in that state who are engaged and paying attention to Obama's message, plus goodness knows how many other swingy voters that have seen the light.

My point is that Obama has broken out of the restrictive "liberal" electoral box. By all measures and polls, he has completely locked in states that were battlegrounds only a month ago: Michigan, Oregon, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Mexico. He has made massive inroads in Virginia, Colorado, and New Mexico, while Ohio and Florida are both looking very good. Meanwhile, West Virginia is officially a toss up, and Indiana is a pale pale pink. Fivethirtyeight.com has a great post up today about what its model considers battlegrounds now, and what the battlegrounds of a month ago look like now. The numbers are pretty staggering.

But taking a step away from the polls and electoral college for a minute. The article I linked above goes into an eloquent analysis about how the Republicans have tightly controlled the dialogue for four decades now. In the 60s there was a huge shift in what "liberal" meant - Republicans grabbed onto that shift and successfully defined liberalism in terms of forcing people to sacrifice in order to help the "under class". The inherent selfishness of human nature rebelled against that; furthermore, liberalism was associated with radicalism and race riots. So many people stopped self-identifying as liberal, and became "conservatives". Yet a truth is coming to the fore - these people are actually policy liberals, at least when it comes to things that affect them personally: healthcare, education, and social security. Democratic policies on these items appeal to a great amount of the electorate, which feels by an overwhelming majority that the government is not currently spending enough money on these issues (see the article for numbers). Obama is the perfect messenger to frame the Democratic economic ideals in this way, and he is aided by the dire straits we find ourselves in. Add on 8 years of misery under a despised president, widespread doubt in an extended war, and Obama's looking pretty great.

Ahem. *gets off soap box*

(I would like to emphasize that I am not encouraging complacency. I personally will be volunteering my time to phone bank in the next weeks, and particularly on election day. We have to get people to vote, yes. But I think that optimism is not uncalled for, and in fact is better. People are excited about this election - the support for Obama is of an unprecedented tenor. They will get their asses to the polls, I promise you, and whoever doesn't will get poked into action by the massive GOTV efforts. This IS going to work.)

So if you peek around at my journal you might see some changes! Fittingly enough, I changed my journal to reflect my passionate and starry-eyed love and hope for Barack Obama. Header, default icon, userinfo, titles and subtitles.

That we are one people
that we are one nation
and together we will begin the next great chapter
in the American story
with three words that will ring
from coast to coast
from sea to shining sea

yes we can
~Barack Obama

Can't wait to watch our boy in the debate tonight! ♥

I know that I may seem to be overly optimistic, even naive. This is probably true. I have never before followed an election closely, and therefore have never been burned when my emotional investment was great. When Kerry lost, I was 16/17 and apathetic. Disappointed, but not overly invested. This time... this time it's personal. The higher my hopes, the greater their fall, I know that.

But I don't think I am wrong. I think that McCain and his (remaining!) cronies will make these last three weeks as ugly as they can. They will try to undermine the mandate that Obama will have entering office (which is just petty and stupid - they claim to put country first! Ha I say. HA.) because that is the last thing they can do. Unfortunately, I don't think McCain is one who can possibly admit defeat. There is NOTHING he can pull from his hat to save his ass at this point. NOTHING. Seven national tracking polls show Obama with a double digit lead. Seven! Including Gallup and Research 2000! And at the same time, I think that polls are drastically underestimating Obama's support and turnout, for reasons I have mentioned before. I think that on election night, I am going to be weeping with sheer overwhelming joy as state after state turns a bright, cheerful blue. Do you know what would be wonderful? If Indiana went blue. It's the first state to report on election night, and it has gone red for decades. That first drop of blue would essentially clinch it, I think, and the rest would just be a progressively more and more drunken joyous celebration.

I can't wait.

The only question right now is how dirty McCain is willing to get. He's proven so far that that's pretty dirty. There could be some surprise lurking around the corner, but - wasn't the economy CRUMBLING INTO PIECES something of a surprise? Hmmm? And Obama dealt with that with poise and grace, and subsequently has had an unprecedented and mindboggling run of momentum. At this point, the only thing that could turn this around thoroughly enough to give McCain a win would be for some terrible, damning secret to be revealed about Obama without any question about its validity. But the chances of this happening are slim to absolutely zero, for two reasons: 1) Obama has been so thoroughly and evisceratingly vetted by both Clinton and McCain that it's extremely doubtful McCain's got something sitting under his hat, and 2) Obama. Is. A. Good. Person. Period dot. I just can't see there being anything horrible enough to turn around more than eight percent of the American public.

McCain is losing supporters left and right. Every day at Huffington Post there's a new post about some prominent Republican criticizing McCain and his campaign. Just yesterday, McCain's own brother scathingly condemned the campaign for how it has handled things. Which is entirely fair, given that I think a lot of the chaos and instability has been a result of bad miscommunication between McCain himself and his people. (At this point I can't help but picture the West Wing portrayal of a presidential campaign - a group of dedicated, brilliant people passionately supportive of their candidate and his message. I feel this strongly reflects Obama's campaign, while it's worlds away from the manipulative and counter-productive environment McCain's got going on. In FACT, I think the campaign people (cough Steve Schmidt cough) are having a hard time controlling McCain, because hey, he does have a brain and willpower, unlike one G W Bush. That's resulting in a lot of the confusion going on.) Wow that was a long parenthetical. ANYWAY. McCain is spiraling into disaster, and I see negative chance of his being able to rally in any significant way in these last days.

Obamaaaa! \o/

I have never cared about politics before. The mere term "politics" was a dirty word to me, implying a group of greedy jerks who do a bunch of nasty things for their own benefit without any consideration for the people they supposedly represent.

I'm not ashamed of that mindset, nor surprised by it, because I came of age in the Bush era.

But it feels so much nicer to care.

These days, when I procrastinate on schoolwork, as often as not I'm refreshing FiveThirtyEight.com (I'm addicted) or Huffington Post, to see whether the new polls have come in, or whether Palin's shot herself in the foot again, or what new inspirational or beautiful thing Obama or his supporters have done. I'm paying attention to every aspect of the race, watching debates, reading the NYTimes columns, Newsweek, and CNN Politics. Right now, in fact, I'm supposed to be studying for a chemistry test tomorrow but instead was reading a new blog post on 538 and actually started crying.

The post is about the grassroots efforts in Indiana (stacks of hundreds of canvassing clipboards, a phone bank that's often so full that volunteers have no choice but to go canvas instead, separate and equally vigorous field offices run by the public and the students at Purdue University) and the support of a retired Senator, Birch Bayh (whose resume is damn impressive, including historic championing of the Civil Rights Acts, two Amendments, and Title IX). The post says:

"[Bayh] talked about his own grassroots campaign that first elected him to the US Senate in 1962. What he's seen with Barack Obama's operation in the state of Indiana this time around reminds him of that grassroots surge that won him the Senate seat in this traditionally red state. After speaking about the value of an engaged citizenry, and the consequences of detaching from the public policy arena (the previous eight years being his primary example), Bayh made a prediction.

On the night of November 4, at that early six o' clock hour that is almost always an immediate blot of red in a largely empty map (Indiana reports early), America is going to see something different this time.

A dot of blue." -Sean Quinn, FiveThirtyEight.com

And that's when I started crying.

Sean Quinn is an incredible writer, and I absolutely love reading his posts. Nate is great too. They both have a clear, eloquent way of writing that makes things I once would have brushed off crystal clear to me. Because of them, when my dad mentioned looking at the new electoral map posted by NYTimes, I launched into a mini rant about their lack of a transparent methodology, their questionable labeling of Colorado as a tossup and Washington and Oregon as only leaning Dem (Colorado is very strongly in the Dem column at this point, while WA and OR have been staunchly blue from the start with no sign of wavering) and how they don't even acknowledge that Indiana and Missouri and North Carolina are listing notably blue and should at the very least be labeled battleground states. I love FiveThirtyEight because it takes such a mathematical approach. I think the media refuses to acknowledge that traditionally staunchly red states are indeed wavering. Obama is aiming for an extremely ambitious chomp out of Bush 2004 territory, and he's bloody well succeeding. He's practically yanked Virginia all the way into his column (Virginia!!) and it's looking good for him essentially everywhere else. He's even competitive in one of the congressional districts of Nebraska! (Which allows its electoral votes to be split up.)

I am very optimistic at this point. I know that's possibly naive, possibly jinxing the whole thing, but I can't bring myself to care. I feel a change in the air, as cheesy as that may sound. The whole rhetoric is changing. McCain is trying to drag the tone back down under an ugly anchor (accusing Obama of "palling around with terrorists"? A claim fully debunked back in primary season? Really??) but he's not chaining down that hope burgeoning in my chest. There are so many things going for Obama at this point, and so few against. One of my favorite factors is that it's likely that polls are underrepresenting Obama's lead. Polls have a very hard time factoring in the young generation, due to the "cell phone problem" and our tendency to strictly filter who has access to us (not answering unknown calls, filtering email, etc). And more than ever, the young demographic is very strongly skewed towards Obama, as well as more inclined to actually vote. Futhermore, Obama's supporters include many demographics that do not traditionally turn out strongly - inner city minority populations, for example, which are likely very underrepresented by polling. The black population in general is going to, I hope, turn out more strongly than it ever has before, and polling models are not adjusting to take account for this trend.

This is only good news for Obama. His national lead is at a mindboggling 7 or 8 points, well outside of the margin of error, and I think that number is SMALLER than reality.

There's change in the air. The era of hijacking government in favor of the ludicrous freedom of the few, at the price of millions upon millions left to fend for themselves in a system that continually cares less about them, is coming to a close. We are saying Enough Is Enough. It is time that the people of this country get factored in to how it is run. The government of a republic should not be a hateful monster, yet that is what it has become. There is a desperate need for a mutual rebuilding of trust, empathy and understanding.

The process of healing can begin now. It can begin with Barack Obama.

Probably as a consequence of the massive fire alarm debacle of FAIL yesterday, the security alarm in the hall outside our apartment has been going off since yesterday afternoon, a constant high pitched beeping noise. It's obnoxious as fuck, and we called the landlords about it twice. (For the record, it's still going - that's almost 24 hours. FUCKHEADS.) Last night, we couldn't hear it anymore and we thought it had stopped. Then Rob went to leave the building, and he comes back in laughing his head off. He pulls me out in the hallway and I see:



GENIUS.

In another form of genius, AARON SORKIN WROTE A CONVERSATION BETWEEN JED BARTLET AND OBAMA FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES. This pretty much made my life. As did waking up to FiveThirtyEight.com showing Obama winning in 73.9% of statistical projections for November!

You guys, this might actually work out! :O

Obama was AWESOME! \o/ I mean, hearing him speak was great but not that different from watching the DNC speech. However, being a part of that massive crowd that was so in tune with what he was saying? That was really something special. SO MANY PEOPLE SHOWED UP! The line started very early and grew to what I have to guess was between a mile and two long. Thousands of people, curving around and through the park and along our campus, waiting to see this man speak. Probably half of them actually got in, but the speakers were loud enough that I think everyone heard. I did get in because I had friends who had arrived pretty early (I had to do work in the lab, blah etc) so we stood on a hill and watching him speak and gesture and smile. He's such a passionate man! I NEED him to be our president. I definitely had tears in my eyes, because this is a PERSON. A person who loves and feels and cares and dreams. Not a politician in it for himself. Obama is going to help US. And every time I type that sentiment, I think how appropriate it is that US is also the initials of our country. Now if only we could live up to our name. I think he can help us do it.

OBAMA BIDEN 08!!!!

(In much less awesome news, this semester is going to kill me. SEND HALP.)
(Oh and PS. PANIC BABIES ARE ADORABLE the end.)
(PPS. GEEWAY IS A STRAWBERRY SHORTCAKE. I KNEW ONE DAY HE WOULD SHOW HIS TRUE COLORS. THE BLACK IS JUST A FACADE. ILHIMMMM.)
(PPPS. Where was Jon?)
(PPPPS. HALP.)