(1) Campaign aides announcing the negative campaign as a way of diverting attention from the economic news. I mean, of course that’s true, but not the kind of thing a campaign should admit.

(2) Usually this kind of stuff is best coming from surrogates or maybe the VP candidate, not from the candidate. But McCain was … I was going to say out of control, I actually think that he was, but whether or not that’s true, he was … over the top vicious today. I can’t imagine this helping with anyone other than the base. Not at this point, when the public has had a chance to get to know Obama, and when McCain’s credibility has been eroded.

(3) It’s just so scatter shot. Like the campaign as a whole. No theme to it, no rhyme or reason.

I do get the impression that McCain is really upset at some of Obama’s recent negative ads (ironically, Obama has gone negative almost as much as McCain lately; he’s just been a LOT smarter about it). I think there is at least a 50% chance that he loses his temper at the next debate. And then maybe my prediction that his floor is 40% will be tested.

And more bad polling news for McCain today – though it is still probably too early to link it to the latest attacks.

Now I’m going back to my study scores for the Third and Fourth String Quartets…

Even my 70+ year old Mom has given up on the GOP. She gave up before me, actually.

I think the Republicans are going to be staying home in droves this year.

Here, let me give ya a hand: http://www.dispatx.com/show/item.php?item=1039

Modern nation-states not yet ready for a war that they see looming, as a means of taking revenge for past defeats, seizing ascendancy within disputed power structures, annexing territory, annihilating traditional rivals, or ‘struggling for a new justice against corrupt oppressors’, commence to manoeuvre for advantage in matters of treaty and international support, and at the same time gear up their economy for re-armament and internal self-sufficiency. The promotion of a consciousness within the social order that will gradually align itself with these processes is set up by and through language more than any other medium. Yet if the as yet unfocussed idealism and variety of motivation within a populace is to be concentrated upon purposes that will inflict sacrifice and killing upon very many ordinary people, some high principles must be found that can bind the waverers into a unified purpose, to ‘totalise’ the cultural apparatus. Who can deny that, supplanting even religion in this respect, a national language in its loftiest and most inspiring forms does not mediate these purposes and provide totems for aspiration, the noblest expressions of national consciousness and history carried through into hearts and minds by the work of a nation’s writers and poets.

It may be resisted that true poets are patriots only to an ideal kingdom, of pure language and equally pure humanity; but enquiry shews this contention to be mostly false, because such purity is itself chimerical, often substituted for less admissible alternatives. The bread and butter that a man or woman eats (or even a poet) does not materialise like manna out of thin air. The emergence of nineteenth-century European nationalism, in the period of state-formation that composed the map for the start of the twentieth, was propelled by the intense development of national schools of culture and literature, by the locking up of international possibilities into the closed citadels of a national language, and by the poets who endorsed its ultimate separateness from the other languages all around its frontiers. No other art will do this so well, because music and painting are able to be more transparent to trans-national modalities; but writers proclaim the essence of their patriotic kingdom, and their work is most frequently enrolled into ideas of national identity by which one kingdom rallies its purposes against another. (As an aside, does this not re-emphasise the astonishing and exceptional defiance of Heine towards poetic, religious and national-political conscription; as a further aside, recall Bartok’s courageous note on folk-music transmigration, ‘Race Purity in Music’ [1942], in Béla Bartok, Essays, ed. Suchoff.)

Consider a few examples of historic complicity in diplomatic terms. After the first Austrian Republic had been proclaimed in 1918 the Treaties of Versailles and St Germain foresaw the danger of a new German ascendency in central Europe and in 1919 included an interdict against any future merger of Austria into a greater Germany. Yet after the preceding intense manoeuvres Hitler’s troops entered Vienna and in March 1938 the Anschluss was proclaimed, welcomed by the majority of the Austrian populace. When after the second war the allied powers recognised the second Austrian Republic in 1946, the interdict of 1919 was restated, as again in 1955. The languages of military aggression and diplomatic manoeuvre blend into seamless overlaps of blindness and complicity, as demonstrated by even more recent developments in Austria and foolish European responses to them. The Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939 and the Tripartite Pact (Germany, Italy and Japan) of 1940 are other examples of preparations for war in which the mediations of language rehearse the channels of ascendancy.

These pacts were secret but were developed in parallel with sustained propaganda manoeuvrings of national will all over the European map, and like any modality through which bids for power might flow the languages of national identity were relentlessly manipulated. One might compare the Dayton Peace Accords of 1995, to be enforced by NATO formations, by which Bosnia was to remain a single state with unchanged external borders but internally divided into a western Bosnian-Croat Federation and a north-eastern Bosnian-Serb Republic; Handke’s own lin-guistic history as an Austrian might have prepared him to see that the attempt to impose ethnically homogeneous partner-states in a region of antagonistic racial intermixture could only result in fierce violence and inhumanity, just as the British insistence on calling the civil war in Northern Ireland ‘sectarian violence’ was an insult to both sides that could only prolong the bitterness which sustained it.

The languages of international diplomatic manoeuvre remain as complicit as ever with the terrors they envisage: Additional Protocol I of 1977 to the Geneva Convention of 1949 interdicts concentration or carpet bombing (mass-bombing attacks on whole cities or territories), but as supra-national entities neither NATO nor SHAPE nor IFOR (the U.S.-led Implementation Force set up to enforce the Dayton Accords) were parties to the Geneva Convention or Protocol I thereto; according to Max Johnson, legal adviser to the supreme allied commander in Europe writing in March 1996, IFOR, as a multinational force under the operational command and control of NATO, ‘should not be equated to a State in terms of international obligations’ and that as IFOR was ‘not an army of occupation’ it was ‘free to do anything it pleases’ (Roy Gutman and David Rieff, eds, Crimes of War; What the Public Should Know [New York, 1999], p. 259). Even the PLO has ratified the full Geneva Convention, although cynics might argue that, by this aspiration to be behaving like a state, it has rather little to lose if (even after the Camp David breakdown) rather little hope of advantage: the PLO and the Arab refugee communities in Lebanon are probably closer to the ultimate definition of no-hope than almost anyone except perhaps the tribes of Mali who are so far out of civilised awareness that their wretchedness can’t even be imagined.

Whatever the actions of human social aggregations, whether internal or external, divergent or monolithic, the implied social contract has been validated by and through values perceived to be upheld within language itself. Human language is the tribal continuity of expressive human behaviour, and is marked in its very core by whatever depravity or nobility an exercise of linguistic analysis may discover within the human record. If writers and poets think that language can somehow resist this involvement with the worst, while claiming natural affinity with the best, then they are guilty of a naive idealism that ought least of all to attract those who know how language works and what it can do. Treaties and diplomatic instruments are not drafted by poets; but poets live within the illusion of peaceful free choice that such protocols broker into the historical process. Language in its more elevated functions trades forward upon a future, upon readers yet to come, ‘just as’ the other social modalities of money and war also trade forward in order to buy out the future by competitive power-investment against the status quo.

The last two elections have basically been photo finishes. Kerry was strong, Gore was strong. Obama being strong is not a predictor of the finish – he really needs a mandate or else Diebold may give the election away.

You must think the echo chamber is small. EVERYONE I know who identifies as conservative or republican is voting for McCain without hesitation. They believe EVERY word from the right about Obama. Not one person has said anything positive about McCain accept for the mavericky talking points, it’s anit-Obama all day all night. The RNC is using these tricks because there are people who are looking for this ‘information’ so they can feel good about the decision they were making anyway. They want a reason to run from Obama and the reason doesn’t have to be deep, just truthy.

Actually, the fact that it isn’t speaks far more to Obama’s weaknesses than McCain’s strengths. The GOP never liked McCain very much. Obama was welcomed as a savior.

I’m voting third party this year because I don’t see much difference between them. Neither of them has a plan that will work for the economy.

Carter ushered in Reagan. Hopefully Obama will usher in a Buchananite.

I think all of that may well be true. I would add (recognizing that this intersects with some of your suggestions as well) that the dilemma here is this: while a good emotional argument can be made on PBA and “born alive” (again, IMO unfairly, but not easily answered by a sound bite), raising the issue at all risks reminding people that the “official” Republican position on abortion (i.e., the party platform position) is toxic for swing voters – most of whom reside in that “mushy middle.”

If the Republican party took a mildly restrictionist position on abortion, I do think that (unfortunately from my point of view) abortion could turn into a good “swing” issue for them. But they can’t make that transformation, for obvious reasons.

Obama is leading or threatening in Indiana, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida; deep red states. I’m not sure what “runaway” means but we’re getting pretty close to my defenition of runaway.

Well, it’s much too soon to say for sure, but there is SOME polling evidence that it isn’t working this time, as Obama today has again increased his lead in the polls. Particularly significant: very reliable Rasmussen at +8 for the first time, and long time McCain outlier GW/Battleground Tracking at +7 Obama.

Maybe not quite as significant, but astonishing in its own way, SUSA has Obama +10 in Virginia.

I’m also somewhat surprised that the both PBA and Obama’s “born alive” votes aren’t getting more play. The latter is certainly brought up a lot in the socon blogosphere, but the campaign as such doesn’t seem to be making any real attempt to raise the profile of abortion-related issues (other than to some degree by emphasizing SCOTUS appointments).

The only explanations I can think of are:

1) (most likely in my humble and ignorant opinion, though still not that easy to believe) The campaign’s polling tells them that the swing voters they’re trying to target are sufficiently “mushy middle” on abortion that raising the salience of abortion is a losing issue (remember that for many in the mushy middle, the topic of abortion is very conflicted, so psychologically those voters will respond negatively to messaging which forces them to look at their own inconsistencies).

2) For those voters for whom abortion is a primary issue but who are still voting for Obama (or third party), e.g. Bacevich and several frequent contributors to CrunchyCons, raising the issue risks reminding those voters just how damnably little the Republican party and its apparatus have actually done to reduce abortion rates.

3) The campaign is concerned that raising the issue too intensely might scare off some of the remaining “libertarian” GOP voters.

Thoughts?