I read with great interest that the Guardian thinks that Barack Obama “Risks sounding cocky” by outlining his plans for Presidency. This despite it being a tradition for plausible participants in a presidential election declaring “When I am president…”

Now the only difference is that McCain is not within that category.

Endeavour, comrades, to find some pity for that most wretched of creatures: the intellectual conservative.

The excellent Glenn Greenwald notes the GOP suddenly watering down their former favourite line. The loss of old standards can cast a political party adrift at the best of times {just witness the woe that has befallen the Conservative Party now their “small state” rhetoric is the exact opposite of what the public desires} but when it is one as widely despised and intellectually vapid as the Republican Party it is hard to imagine any way back out of the wilderness. To propose another Buckley as required would be an understatement and clearly insuffecient. They seem more in need of a Bernstein.

McCain supporters take on…Some McCain supporters.

Glad to see that the more rational side of McCain’s campaign are purging the nut-jobs. I wonder, though, what it is that attracted them there.

Oh yeah, and the long pause when they were asked to support their accusations amused me.

As you can probably tell, I’m not getting a lot of spare time here. Certainly not enough to write much worth reading, but neither enough to follow politics as closely as I once used to. One of the rare sites still worth delaying essays for is fivethirtyeight, which I really can not commend highly enough. They are a mixture of hard stat crunching and annecdotal excellence, of the sort you can only get from a website that has taken to both carefully analysing and amalgamating figures and sending a team all around every swing state in the country.

The results are passages like this:

So a canvasser goes to a woman’s door in Washington, Pennsylvania. Knocks. Woman answers. Knocker asks who she’s planning to vote for. She isn’t sure, has to ask her husband who she’s voting for. Husband is off in another room watching some game. Canvasser hears him yell back, “We’re votin’ for the n***er!”

Woman turns back to canvasser, and says brightly and matter of factly: “We’re voting for the n***er.”

Accompanied with the best consideration of the latest polling you’ll find anywhere on the internet.

I imagine that I’ll give up on them for at least two years after November but for the time being they’ve got a machine nobody else can match.

First a word from Penny Red:

I rarely talk about American politics on this blog, and even less so since the hype has ramped up over the November election. Part of this has been because I believe that voyeuristic obsession over a political event with which British voters are relatively uninvolved exacerbates British political apathy.

Eloquently put, as ever. But also a policy which (as is most likely clear to our regular readers) which this blog has never followed. The reason is that although the democratic structures in place remain rigidly national, the economic and diplomatic ones are far less adherent to such localistic restrictions. Hence we became fantastically wealthy off of the internet bubble (with the internationalist elements blatantly obvious here: observe companies such as Amazon simply colonising with a .co.uk url) and then slumped once it burst, we became bloated courtesy of property markets and then were dashed against the rocks of Sub Prime (I was one of the few British victims, primarily the practice of mortgage selling is an American one).

Jonathan Freedland outlines this argument after joining Anatole Kaletsky in being an American writer who has become targeted by American right-wingers after writing an article that attracted their ire. The results were tiresomely predictable to any accustomed to their ilk:

I love it! A pansy-ass limey Brit begs the US to do his bidding while his own country slips further towards total Islamic rule.

As ever the American Right’s line on Europe can be summed up in a word: “Muslims”. As far as they are concerned Europe is socialist, thus needs a young workforce and as the only workforce available is the dreaded Muslims they are doomed to be taken over completely. So far as can be determined this is all the view they have of the Europeans, since their eschatological view of the outcome of immigration allows all other facts to slide into insignificance.

Unfortunately there seem to be an awfully large number of these cretins, with most of them being vocal to a disturbing degree. For the most part they congregate on The Times’ website (which seems to host an extraordinary amount of Americans) but that they found their way onto the Guardian’s comment section and into Freedland’s inbox fails to surprise me.

His response to the shout-down is also entirely correct: you can not establish yourself as a world power and expect none to be concerned about your leadership. If you begin intervening with the affairs of other nations they have a considerable stake in your government, as it is exerting an influence upon them regardless of whether or not they have an opportunity to hold it accountable.

But this also leads to a rather grim consideration: in many ways the American election matters significantly more to Britain than does the British one. Consider: the next prime minister will either be atlanticist interventionist Gordon Brown, atlanticist interventionist David Cameron or perhaps avowed atlanticist interventionist David Miliband. Now does it truly matter more which shade of poodle will trot along obediently with the American line, or is the dichotomy between McCain or Obama more important?

With regards to Iran, the difference between the potential Prime Ministers is minimal. Americans get a real choice and the American President is who matters when it comes to British foreign policy. Just one reason amongst many that the run-up to the presidential election is worth watching.

Fox News tries to count:

Sarah Palin tries to play the flute:

I’m not a rich man.

John McCain, oh he of the 13 cars and 7 houses (was that how many there were? He certainly can’t remember…)

From the McCain camp:

Could there be a more disingenuous ad? McCain’s team take footage of Obama at the debate, doctors it (poorly) to cut him off mid-sentence, and pushes it out. It simply misrepresents Obama; and we can see that, because they didn’t even bother to remove the “but” from the end of one of his sentences. And so negate the ad’s entire message, as it becomes clear that, actually, Obama doesn’t think McCain is right after all.

Even the visuals push credibility. Perhaps the juxtaposition of Obama’s head with graphics so tacky they look to be from a Vegas-style arcade game was meant to trivialise him, or evoke an air of cheap faux-celebrity. But, in reality, they simply look amateur - as does McCain’s campaign, increasingly.

Contrast that with Obama’s latest offering:

It’s brilliant. Obama offers coherent content, delivered clearly, and looks convincing. The delivery evokes the tone of Roosevelt’s fireside chats; Obama talks directly and reassuringly to the people about the economy. And he offers them a solution - far more than McCain’s ads on the economy manage.

Every election campaign where one side balances optimism with reasons not to vote for the opposition, while that opposition simply pushes out ferocious attack ads, has had the same result; the optimists won. Constant offence might put voters off one candidate, but it gives them no reason to vote for the attacker. So they simply stay at home, instead; or judge that any candidate who makes such a fuss but proposes no alternative is just full of hot air. And that’s certainly the impression McCain must give at the moment.

(Hat-tips: BenSix and Miller respectively.)

(Hat-tip: The Daily (Maybe))