Robert Draper will be blogging during the last week of the campaign for GQ.  This post contains some more behind-the-scenes on prepping Sarah Palin for her VP debate: 

I’m sympathetic to [Tucker] Eskew and [Nicolle] Wallace, and not just because they’re decent people. They’ve held their tongue from leaking what a couple of McCain higher-ups have told me—namely, that Palin simply knew nothing about national and international issues. Which meant, as one such adviser said to me: “Letting Sarah be Sarah may not be such a good thing.” It’s a grim binary choice, but apparently it came down to whether to make Palin look like a scripted robot or an unscripted ignoramus (emphasis added).  

Of course, this speaks just as badly of McCain as it does of Palin.  He's the one who wedged himself into a Palinesque dilemma.  UPDATE:  Given all the speculation about Palin in 2012, it should be noted that just because she was uninformed in September 2008 does not mean she'll stay that way.  I'll be interested to see what course she charts over the next few years.  ANOTHER UPDATE:  Conor Friedersdorf is immune to irrational arguments about Palin: 

In case you haven’t been paying attention, an enormous turnout at an Obama rally means that he is a celebrity cult leader who talks pretty to his mindless supporters but lacks substance, whereas smaller crowds turning out to see Palin prove that she is the best decision John McCain has ever made, and that she is obviously qualified to be vice-president.

Charles Barkley went on Campbell Brown's CNN show and said he was planning on running for governor of Alabama in the future.  I like his explanation for why: 

Brown: So are you going to run for governor? Barkley: I plan on it in 2014. Brown: You are serious. Barkley: I am, I can't screw up Alabama. Brown: There is no place to go but up in your view? Barkley: We are number 48 in everything and Arkansas and Mississippi aren't going anywhere.

Dammit, the man stole my campaign motto:  "Vote Drezner -- he can't screw it up any worse."

As a general rule of humor, I'd always thought that hand puppets are a guaranteed laugh. Jonathan Chait just falsified this hunch for me.  It might be the falsetto, but his spiel is pretty unoriginal too:

 

TNR.  Not Really That Funny. 

A few months ago I blogged the following: 

I think the notion that mere election of Obama would represent a “soft power surge” as it were, should be tempered.  It’s not that there would be no Obama effect.  It’s just that it would be concentrated in places where elites are enthusiastic about him and his policies.  This would mean Europe, Africa and Latin America, I suspect.  Other regions — the Middle East, Russia and Asia — might be less receptive. 

As the race draws to a close, I see prominent commentators are starting to speculate about whether electing Obama would bring a soft power surge.  Hey, now we have some real live data!  Foreign Policy and Gallup have run polls in 70 countries from May to September 2008.  The big findings: 

Gallup Polls conducted in 70 countries from May to September 2008 reveal widespread international support for Democratic Sen. Barack Obama over Republican Sen. John McCain in the U.S. presidential election. Among these nations, representing nearly half of the world's population, 30% of citizens say they would personally rather see Obama elected president of the United States, compared with just 8% who say the same about McCain. At the same time, 62% of world citizens surveyed did not have an opinion.

Looking at the interactive map, I see that my initial supposition was partly in error.  I was right about Europe and Africa leaning heavily towards Obama.  I was surprised to see, however, that Japan, South Korea, and Saudi Arabia all trended towards Obama as well.  On the other hand, large swathes of Latin America and South Asia are pretty indifferent to the whole election.  As for McCain, there was no country in which enthusiasm for him outpaced Don't Know/Refuse to Say.  He did the best in Georgia (23% to 18% over Obama, with 62% not knowing or saying).  One final thought -- it's too bad that other countries (Russia, China, Brazil, Ukraine, Iraq, Israel, Indonesia) were not polled.  UPDATE:  Two online and unscientific global responses:  one from the Economist and one at If the World Could Vote.  At The National Interest, Nikolas Gvosdev points out that the global affection for Obama could be fleeting:

It would be foolhardy for the Obama team to assume that these strong ratings can easily and swiftly be translated into renewed acceptance of U.S. policies. And publics in other countries that are expecting an Obama administration would reverse or alter every last policy of the Bush administration are going to be disappointed. 

Pew has a report out on the media coverage of the four presidential and vice-presidential candidates, and discovers that John McCain has received the most negative coverage of the lot.  Liberal media bias?  More like bandwagoning behavior, according to Pew: 

One question likely to be posed is whether these findings provide evidence that the news media are pro-Obama. Is there some element in these numbers that reflects a rooting by journalists for Obama and against McCain, unconscious or otherwise? The data do not provide conclusive answers. They do offer a strong suggestion that winning in politics begets winning coverage, thanks in part to the relentless tendency of the press to frame its coverage of national elections as running narratives about the relative position of the candidates in the polls and internal tactical maneuvering to alter those positions. Obama's coverage was negative in tone when he was dropping in the polls, and became positive when he began to rise, and it was just so for McCain as well. Nor are these numbers different than those we have seen before. Obama's numbers are similar to what we saw for John Kerry four years ago as he began rising in the polls, and McCain's numbers are almost identical to those recorded eight years ago for Democrat Al Gore.

What the findings also reveal is the reinforcing -- rather than press-generated -- effects of media. We see a repeating pattern here in which the press first offers a stenographic account of candidate rhetoric and behavior, while also on the watch for misstatements and gaffes. Then, in a secondary reaction, it measures the political impact of what it has reported. This is magnified in particular during presidential races by the prevalence of polling and especially daily tracking polls. While this echo effect exists in all press coverage, it is far more intense in presidential elections, with the explosion of daily tracking polls, state polls, poll aggregation websites and the 24-hour cable debate over their implications. Even coverage of the candidate's policy positions and rhetoric, our reading of these stories suggests, took on the cast of horse race coverage.

Michael Crowley has a great analysis of the current state of play on polls and polling in The New Republic:  The most interesting detail is how SurveyUSA's Jay Leve chooses who to record the firm's automated poll questions: 

While most pollsters employ real people--sitting in call centers, wearing headsets--to gather data for them, Leve relies on these machines. His innovation is to get news anchors from local television affiliates in the areas he's sampling to record scripts for him. A trusted anchor's voice conveys that the call is "legitimate, authentic, civic-minded, and not a scam," Leve says, and people are less likely to hang up on the call. (In return for their anchors' services, the affiliates get to make use of Leve's findings.) A SurveyUSA poll is like an airline's automated customer-assistance system--press one if you support John McCain, press two for Barack Obama--except that you receive the call instead of placing it. With the raw results in hand, Leve will make some technical adjustments and write an analysis, which he will send to one of the more than 50 media outlets that commission his work and feature it in their print and television news stories. This sort of computerized polling is controversial--but also increasingly popular, thanks to its lightning speed and low cost. "Gallup might charge $10,000 and take four to five days," Leve boasts. "We can do that in one night, for maybe a thousand dollars."

Meanwhile Nate Silver provides a fair and balanced analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of all of the national tracking polls floating around. 

UPDATE:  Kevin Drum provides the most accurate prediction about exit polls you will ever read. 

ANOTHER UPDATE:  Sam Wang has an interesting post on the incentives of pollsters and media outlets who use them -- but I think he's exaggerating the phenomenon he describes. 

I think Jane Mayer's New Yorker essay on Sarah Palin was intended to be the shiv that finally does her in, but it had the reverse effect on me -- and I'm no fan of the current Sarah Palin.  Compared to Noam Scheiber's TNR essay, which showed Palin as someone hostile to elites and elite-y things like policy expertise, Mayer's essay actually made me like Palin much more.  Mayer reveals that Palin courted DC concervatives by hiring DC lobbyists and talking to Weekly Standard and National Review types when they came on Alaska cruises.  So, in other words -- gasp! -- Palin was ambitious and good at power-schmoozing.  Meh. Ambitious politicians are not exactly unusual, and Palin's ambition has never been a concern.   Her utter conviction that she already knows enough to become the leader of the free world, however, scares the living bejeezus out of me.  Mayer's article is a damning indictment, but not of Sarah Palin.  It's the DC conservative cocktail circuit and John McCain who come off worse for wear.  Fred Barnes, William Kristol, Jay Nordlinger and Dick Morris come off as besotted teenagers suffering from Rich Lowry's Syndrome.  They're the ones who believed her to be ready to lead, and are now blaming McCain's handlers and a hostile media for her crash and burn on the national stage.* McCain, meanwhile, comes off as a follower and not a leader in his own campaign: 

By the spring, the McCain campaign had reportedly sent scouts to Alaska to start vetting Palin as a possible running mate. A week or so before McCain named her, however, sources close to the campaign say, McCain was intent on naming his fellow-senator Joe Lieberman, an independent, who left the Democratic Party in 2006. David Keene, the chairman of the American Conservative Union, who is close to a number of McCain’s top aides, told me that “McCain and Lindsey Graham”—the South Carolina senator, who has been McCain’s closest campaign companion—“really wanted Joe.” But Keene believed that “McCain was scared off” in the final days, after warnings from his advisers that choosing Lieberman would ignite a contentious floor fight at the Convention, as social conservatives revolted against Lieberman for being, among other things, pro-choice. “They took it away from him,” a longtime friend of McCain—who asked not to be identified, since the campaign has declined to discuss its selection process—said of the advisers. “He was furious. He was pissed. It wasn’t what he wanted.” Another friend disputed this, characterizing McCain’s mood as one of “understanding resignation.” With just days to go before the Convention, the choices were slim. Karl Rove favored McCain’s former rival Mitt Romney, but enough animus lingered from the primaries that McCain rejected the pairing. “I told Romney not to wait by the phone, because ‘he doesn’t like you,’ ” Keene, who favored the choice, said. “With John McCain, all politics is personal.” Other possible choices—such as former Representative Rob Portman, of Ohio, or Governor Tim Pawlenty, of Minnesota—seemed too conventional. They did not transmit McCain’s core message that he was a “maverick.” Finally, McCain’s top aides, including Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis, converged on Palin. Ed Rogers, the chairman of B.G.R., a well-connected, largely Republican lobbying firm, said, “Her criteria kept popping out. She was a governor—that’s good. The shorter the Washington résumé the better. A female is better still. And then there was her story.” He admitted, “There was concern that she was a novice.” In addition to Schmidt and Davis, Charles R. Black, Jr., the lobbyist and political operative who is McCain’s chief campaign adviser, reportedly favored Palin. Keene said, “I’m told that Charlie Black told McCain, ‘If you pick anyone else, you’re going to lose. But if you pick Palin you may win.’ ” (Black did not return calls for comment.) Meanwhile, McCain’s longtime friend said, “Kristol was out there shaking the pom-poms.”

I actually think Black's assessment was correct, but surely someone as obsessed with honor as John McCain might have cared just a little bit about post-election governing, no?  *One meme that I've seen forming in the past month is that Palin has done fine except for the Katie Couric interview, and that was only because Couric asked follow-up questions.  With all due respect, that's a load of bull.  Her interviews with Gibson and Hannity were almost as bad as her Couric interactions.  Her debate performance wore thin after the first 15 minutes.  She's committed a variety of smaller gaffes at her campaign rallies.  Between her convention speech and her Saturday Night Live appearance, almost every Palin action that a camera has recorded has not treated her favorably.  She's been listed as a key reason for a string of conservative editorial board endorsements of Obama.  This cannot be chalked up to a few miscues.  Palin's campaign performance has been an abject disaster. 

There's been a raft of stories about how white racists are still planning on voting for Barack Obama.  From Sean Quinn:

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."

From Ben Smith:

New polling and a trickle of stories from the battleground states suggest that Sen. Barack Obama's coalition includes one unlikely group: white voters with negative views of African-Americans.... Anecdotes from across the battlegrounds suggest that there’s a significant minority of prejudiced white voters who will swallow hard and vote for the black man. “I wouldn’t want a mixed marriage for my daughter, but I’m voting for Obama,” the wife of a retired Virginia coal miner, Sharon Fleming, told the Los Angeles Times recently. One Obama volunteer told Politico after canvassing the working-class white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are … undecided. They would call him a [racial epithet] and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy.”

Just to be subversive here, these are the kinds of interactions that could lead to a greater Bradley effect than has been anticipated for this election cycle.  While people with these kind of attitudes might be telling canvassers, pollsters, and reporters that they're thinking of voting for Obama, I do wonder if that inclination will dissipate when they have to punch the ticket.  Developing.... UPDATE:  Folks in the comments section make an excellent counterargument -- the Bradley effect only exists if people are self-conscious enough about their racism to shield it from pollsters, and the people in these anecdotes do not appear to be doing that.  So who knows.  ANOTHER UPDATE:  One counterpoint to the counterargument.  To put it gently, the people quoted in the above excerpts don't sound like the most media-savvy individuals in the world.  So maybe they're trying to please reporters et al but are doing it in a very ham-handed way. 

Let's stipulate that I'm sympathetic to a lot of the economic arguments that James Pethokoukis makes on his Capitol Gains blog.  This post, however, makes me question his political judgment: 

Did Barack "Spread the Wealth" Obama Just Blow the Election?  No. Really. You're kidding me. Barack Obama actually told that Joe the Plumber guy that he wants to "spread the wealth around." What, did Obama just get done reading the Wikipedia entry on Huey "Share the Wealth" Long or something? Was he somehow channeling that left-wing populist from the Depression? Talk about playing into the most extreme stereotype of your party, that it is infested with socialists.

Let's review -- in the past two months, the Bush administration, with the bipartisan support of Congress, has essentially nationalized Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and AIG.  The Federal Reserve has promised to back the commercial paper market.  The Treasury Department has purchased equity stakes in nine major banks.  Loan guarantees have been thrown at the automobile sector.  After all this, I'm supposed to believe that an increase in the highest marginal tax rate from 35% to 39% is the ne plus ultra of socialism?   I want to see a flat tax as much as the next libertarian, but given the events of the past two months, I just don't think "spread the wealth" is the tipping point after which the Reds took over America.  Dear readers, am I overreacting or underreacting here?

POST-MORTEM:  The big winner was Joe the Plumber -- the rest of us are screwed.  And, if you played the drinking game below, you are also pretty hammered.  More substantively:  McCain was better on economic issues than in the first two debates.  On trade in particular, McCain wiped the floor with Obama.  Obama was wrong on the Colombia FTA (the trendline of protection of labor leaders is improving, not worsening) and I was glad to hear McCain bring up Brazilian ethanol (that makes one of us).  Obama does well what he always does well -- try to explain his positions as clearly as possible.  Less substantively:  The split screen is going to kill John McCain -- and the way he handled the Ayers/ACORN/Lewis portion of the debate is going to kill him yet again.  Contra the post-debate commentary, I thought Obama seemed more peeved at points during this debate... but he got better as the debate went along.  Feel free to comment here on tonight's Hofstra debate about the economy.  In the interest of sanity, I will not be live-blogging it (check out Alex Massie for that), but will provide a post-mortem.  In the meantime, I offer the following Protectionist Drinking Game to make the debate go more quickly:  TAKE A SIP WHEN:

• Obama references jobs going overseas to China
• McCain references $700 billion going to countries that don't like us very much
• Pledges of energy independence are made by both candidates within a five-minute span
• Either candidate talks about the "rigorous enforcement of trade rules"
• McCain says something good about international trade.

DO A SHOT WHEN:

• Obama articulates a race-to-the-bottom theory of labor or environmental standards
• McCain articulates a race-to-the-bottom theory of corporate taxation
• Either candidate promises to bring manufacturing jobs back to this country (BONUS:  finish entire drink if McCain pledges to do this and says, "it's simple" at any point during his explanation).   
• Obama says something good about international trade that ends with the word "but..."
• Sovereign wealth funds are mentioned.

FINISH YOUR DRINK WHEN: 

• Obama says something good about international trade that does not end with the word "but..."
• Either candidate says the phrase "Financial Stability Forum"
• The Doha round is mentioned
• Either candidate actually names an economist during the course of an answer (Ben Bernanke doesn't count). 

Enjoy... or suffer, depending on your expectations. 

I expect conservative readers of danieldrezner.com to say that I'm voting for Obama because I want to play nice with my friends and get on TV more.  The truth is just a bit different.  Ross Douthat has a point about what it's like to hang around with lots of colleagues of a different ideological ilk -- but the fact is I'm in a position to suffer no ill effects in my day job from supporting whoever I damn well want to support.  In fact, in making this decision I lost a tempting TV gig for election night on a Network That Shall Not Be Named.  In terms of punditry opportunities, I'd be much better off if I offered my full-throated support for McCain (not that I'm all that good at it anyway).  As Julian Sanchez points out, there's not a lot of pundit love for moderate Republicans: 

Here’s the really odd thing about this. The number of “David Brooks” slots out there—opportunities for a token moderate conservative or libertarian at an otherwise liberal-leaning mainstream publication—are vanishingly tiny.  I’m actually hard pressed to think of an obvious example other than Brooks and maybe Ross Douthat, but at any rate, I’m pretty sure they can be counted on the fingers of one hand. If you’re in the very small pool of realistic contenders for that slot, I guess it might be a rational career strategy. If you’re not, it might still be good for a one-shot “even the conservative…” op-ed or TV spot. But on the whole, it’s not gonna do you that much good. You’re still going to be the freak. If you’re willing to toe a straight party line, on the other hand, let’s face it, you can be pretty damn mediocre and still carve out a nice little niche for yourself at any one of a welter of generously funded ideological publications and think tanks. Sure, it’s a smaller pond, but you get to be a relatively big fish. 

Of course, in his list of moderate Republicans, Sanchez omits the almighty David Gergen, and in doing so misses one whopping incentive to go moderate -- it sets Jessi Klein's heart a-flutter: 

The moment I realized my feelings were more serious was in late September, right after the first presidential debate. Gergen was on for hours, and I found myself on the couch, riveted, a glass of Cabernet by my feet, hands wrapped around my knees as I leaned forward to capture every word, every thought, every—oh, be still my fluttering heart, was that a little chuckle? And then all of a sudden my face felt hot. I was blushing. I was loving David Gergen. How do I love David Gergen? Let me count the ways.... I love that his name is Gergen. Gerrrrr-gen. I don’t know the real origin of the name, but it’s a quirky, comforting sound with an onomatopoeic quality to it. Like the little pleasure noise you make under your breath when you’re home in your pajamas and you hear someone on the TV making consistent, rational sense.

There's more adoration on Klein's blog.  

Ther general consensus is that the presidential debates have sucked eggs.  Of course, this leads to an interesting question:  what would a good debate look like?  Ladies and gentleman, I give you Eric Alterman and Christopher Hitchens debating Iraq on bloggingheads.tv.  Bear in mind, these two are actually going to vote for the same guy in November -- but it doesn't affect their clash on Iraq: 

 

Do out the whole diavlog. 

You can check them out at The National Interest.  To sum up: 

In the end, both candidates put forward mainstream internationalist positions on most issues related to national security, stressing the prudent use of military force, working in concert with allies and insisting that America could still be an active force for good in the world. What was odd was that this hopeful vision of America’s role in the world clashed badly with their rhetoric on the global economy. When talk turned to economics, the rest of the world was viewed as a scary, scary place.

Back in the summer I blogged about how the fundamentals in this election were stacked in Barack Obama's favor.  After a Palinesque convention bounce, it appears that the financial crisis has brought those fundamentamentals back to the fore.  Pollster.com's Steve Lombardo puts it this way: 

The past 14 days have transformed this election. The financial crisis has catapulted Obama into the lead both nationally and in key states. We have been saying for six months that the political environment has favored the Democrats significantly, but it took a near global financial meltdown for things to finally reach the tipping point. The economic situation has virtually ended John McCain's presidential aspirations and no amount of tactical maneuvering in the final 29 days is likely to change that equation.

Intrade now gives Obama a 68% chance of winning.  Nate Silver now gives Obama an 88% chance of winning.  Conservative columnists like Charles Krauthammer and David Brooks are now conceding that Obama will win.  So, my questions to readers:

1. Short of a complete fiasco of a performance by Obama, will the debates make any difference from here on in? 
2. Short of a 9/11-style attack, will any external news-making event affect the fundamentals?
3. Will the character mudslinging that framed yesterday's news cycle turn off voters for both men?  Who will deal better with the inevitable "Ponytail Guy question" in tonight's town hall? 
4. The question that really interests me -- how is McCain going to go out?  This is normally his favorite political terrain -- a complete and total underdog.  He's not going to get much sympathy, however, by using the Ayres/Wright/Rezko -- no one cares about that stuff when the credit markets are shutting down.  Will McCain decide to go out as the valiant but honorable loser?  Let me second Ross Douthat here:  "McCain is almost certainly going to lose this election. He can go down trying to talk about the issues that voters actually care about, and trying to make some headway in the debates that are going to dominate our politics for the next few years, or he can go down trying to change the subject. I really don't see any percentage in the latter."  Indeed.