Well, I Was Wrong

It's Biden and Palin, meaning I airballed on my VP predictions. Palin is certainly an interesting choice for McCain. Her big (huge) downside is that is that she will make it more difficult for McCain to credibly attack Obama for his lack of experience. Palin has only held significant office since 2006 and like Obama has no military expertise. McCain now has to be careful about attacking Obama's lack of experience to make sure the attacks don't apply as well or better to Palin (that is, of course, if he had any shame or if the mainstream media would ever do its job of pointing out McCain's hypocrisy).

Another benefit for the Democrats is that every time the above argument gets trotted out, the next sentence (either implied or spoken aloud) is that Palin's inexperience is all the more relevant because McCain is old and he might die in office. And it's always a good thing when something that can put attention on McCain's age without an Obama surragate saying "Hello?!! He'd be 76 when he left office. If he doesn't have the beginning stages of Alzheimer's now, he sure might in four years."

I'm happy with the pick. If I were McCain I would be happy with how the campaign was going and I'd pick Mr. Boring, Pawlenty. Palin has the potential to push the race in McCain's direction, but the past month or so has been excellent for him, so I don't mind at all him doing something bold to shake things up.

And if I can think outside of partisan politics for a minute (yeah, right), let me be one of many to say: we'll either have a female vice president or a black president. That's cool.

Why Is Youtube Better Than the Dems at Making Ads?

I thought this was very well done. I like the music a lot. (btw, it's done by ProgressiveAccountability.org, which is a fairly serious organization) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SkUj9EIINIs&NR=1

Here's a similar, but worse ad from the Democratic National Committee that was just released: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtXOBH6U89Y

Obama's Love of Saying "50 States"

The Obama campaign is pouring tons of resources into registering new voters, and the Republicans, because they are Republicans, are sending out party operatives to block those registrations. According to the WSJ, The Obama campaign, in return, is putting teams of trained lawyers on the ground in all 50 states to protect their supporters' right to vote.

This all sounds very sensible from the Obama side - but why all 50 states?

I know it sounds nice in your press releases to say "all 50 states," but Obama is up 21 points in New York, and down 26 in Utah. Given our ridiculous winner-take-all electoral college system (don't get me started), it makes more sense to ignore those states completely and send all the lawyers to states that actually could be affected. Maybe the Obama camp is actually just announcing the "50 states" strategy now to sound good and will actually only send people to a dozen or so states. I hope so.

Great Youtube Clip: McCain Heart Bush

I don't even have to add anything to this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3U5KZzgaB2k&feature=related

It's only about 25 seconds. Hopefully you'll be seeing it in an ad soon.

Timing of the VP Picks

This is a response I wrote to a post on TPM (you don't really need to read the post to understand what I'm saying):

There have been murmurs about Obama using his (relatively) long campaign stop on Wednesday in Indiana to select Evan Bayh. I think it'd be a great time to announce, going along with what the OP said.

It hasn't been a good week or two for Obama with McCain finally finding a way to negatively define Obama (celebrity, arrogant, etc). The polls have slipped a little, and if you believe intrade, Obama has lost ~4 percentage points.

Announcing now would do a couple of things. It would take the focus off of McCain's recent negative ads. A surprising number of people in the traditional media have bashed them as dishonest, but they seem to be working anyway. (It would be nice if a newspaper would use the headline "McCain's New Ad Is a Lie" instead of burying a mention that it may be dishonest in the 12th paragraph of a story on A14, but I'll take what I can get). Also, from what I know about Bayh, he's not the kind of guy you could stick the "celebrity" label on - you could with Kaine much more easily. So that might disrupt the narrative.

Also, announcing on Wednesday the 6th would be good timing with the Olympics, which run August 8th to 24th. Announcing on the 6th gives the Dems a couple days of press attention from the media before the Olympics, and the alternative is to announce during the Olympics (the convention is August 25th - 28th).

I highly doubt that McCain would want to announce between the 6th and the 8th, so that would leave McCain with the unfortunate choice of waiting through the entire Olympics and the Democratic Convention (the Republican Convention is September 1st - 4th) and then announcing right before their own convention or else announcing during the Olympics. That risks splitting media time especially if something amazing happens at the Olympics. And if it were Obama, it would open him up to criticism of being unpatriotic and thinking you were better than the Olympics, but of course if you're McCain then any criticism is off limits.

Long story short: Bayh on 8/6.

edit to add: this is a good piece on the VP choices: http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2008/08/obamas_choices_for_veep_are_fa.html