Notes From Outside The Loop

Massachusetts is no left-wing "People’s Republic." (It’s been a long time since Nixon/McGovern.) In the Commonwealth's radio landscape, you can’t swing a dead cat without hitting Rush Limbaugh or some homegrown, faux-populist, Republican tool. Right-wing broadcasters are still a force to be reckoned with, particularly with Sarah Palin now on the scene to push their manly buttons. Expect the wingnuts to turn up the volume on the Attack Machine to "11" as the campaign gets hotter.


Barack Obama had a good convention (from the little I saw of it), but he remains very beatable. He needs to make this election entirely about John McCain’s unacceptability. When the afterglow of "Thursday Night in Denver" has faded, the transcendent awesomeness of Obama-as-Savior will only be observed from within the friendly confines of Keith Olbermann’s skull. It's going to be trench warfare in the real world.


Is Hillary Clinton off the media’s shit list? Though many who watched her amazing speech ended up feeling depressed that the best woman had lost–and lost unfairly!–the pundits were beside themselves with joy as they witnessed the spectacle of their favorite female punching bag shoveling dirt (at least temporarily) on her own uppity aspirations. If Obama goes down to McCain, it’s hard to imagine Chris Mathews and Company having the stomach to blame Hillary for it. (Bill, on the other hand . . . He’s still white trash, and he makes no secret of his contempt for his beltway betters.)


By traditional standards of what constitutes "experience," we now have two tiers of candidates: Biden/McCain and Obama/Palin. Democrats would be well advised to just leave Sarah alone. Let her make her own mistakes. And does Obama really want to see Joe Biden, of all people, have to help deconstruct her resume? Is there any chance that the venerable Gaffe Master can avoid wading hip-deep into the rancid stream of sexism that runs through the Democratic Establishment? (Obama's Blogger Boys are already there.)


John McCain was actually quite effective with Chris Wallace on Sunday. He’s using Sarah Palin to take the tarnish off his old maverick image--they'll run as the dynamic duo of change--and he might get away with it. On Friday, I was sure he'd trot out Romney so he could tap into the Mittster’s proven ability to sell Republican economic snake oil, but now I suspect that McCain might, at long last, have become disgusted by his own craven flip-flopping on Bush’s disastrous tax cuts. With Wallace, he kept mumbling his way through his "keep taxes low" pledge as if he knew he'd have to raise them. McCain is going to serve only one term. Perhaps, as part of his legacy, he wouldn’t mind restoring some fiscal sanity to the Republican Party. In any case, Democrats need to keep pounding him on economic fairness. He doesn’t want to talk about it.


Finally–is this guy a piece of work? He was ubiquitous during the Obama selection process touting the wisdom of the party elders. Now he just needs to get lost.