For an instant next Thursday, in a glimpse of what have been, the election-year tide of acrimony and attack ads will be rolled back as Barack Obama and John McCain come together at Ground Zero to mark the seventh anniversary of the terrorist attacks of 2001.
The idea of a joint appearance was broached by Obama in a congratulatory phone call to McCain after his convention speech, and the two will be appear afterward in a forum at Columbia University.
It may not be a healing moment for the candidates, but for the rest of us, their actions on Thursday will be a reminder of the true patriotism and civility that Americans are hungering for in public life.-- ROBERT STEIN
[A]long comes the Palin thing, and now we seem to be arguing about fundamentally irrelevant things – like about whether the mayor of Wassilla, AK did or did not ask the school librarian to ban books (and which books they might be), about how many colleges the Governor of Alaska has attended (and the relative value of a University of Idaho vs. a Harvard Law education), about the virtues of small-town life, about hunting, and snowmobile racing, and whether the Governor of Alaska did or did not improperly interfere with the state police to remove a trooper she didn’t like, and about a thousand other things like that. If you had asked me early last week, those all would have struck me as pretty insignificant, in the greater scheme of things, and entirely irrelevant to the 2008 election. But now they are relevant, alas – McCain has made them so.
-- DAVID POST
We still don’t know a lot about Palin except that she’s better at delivering a speech than McCain and that she defends her own pregnant daughter’s right to privacy even as she would have the government intrude to police the reproductive choices of all other women. Most of the rest of the biography supplied by her and the McCain camp is fiction.
. . . How long before we learn she never shot a moose?-- FRANK RICH
Would you give power of attorney over your entire life to someone you had only met once, or possibly twice?
I think that Palin is to the Republicans what Obama is to us. I know that there are many differences and we can spend hours on that. But, if you stop and reflect what is being said you can see where I am going. Palin is a blank slate. Almost immediately from her introduction she began to reflect everything that the Republican party wishes it could stand for (family values, a good mother, a tough person, a simple person, an average person, her own independent person . . . one of us). As we have come to see, there is almost nothing that can be said which distracts from the message. The pregnancy, the lack of knowledge, the dangerous simplicity…no matter it just shows that she is one of us. She is a bonafide rock star for this party. As it is for Obama, from the narrative of her life, she has pivoted herself into a whole new future. If you think about it, the same means to take her down is the same one used against Obama: you must destroy the narrative. Is two months enough time for that? That is why the Obama camp desperately wants to move the discussion away from her and have people get bored with McCain. They undstand that this electorate is looking for something new and is willing to take a risk (in Palin’s case . . . a freaking big one). McCain, on the other hand, wants to use her as a prop but cannot have her overshadow him.-- MOSES
With just over eight weeks left until Election Day, the two sides are settling into an unusually broad set of state-by-state face-off.
Republicans' Senate campaign arm called off television ads Tuesday that were to air in New Mexico in the run-up to Election Day, an indication that it's leaving the GOP candidate there to fend for himself as the party braces for losses.The National Republican Senatorial Committee's decision to cancel the New Mexico spots reflects its priorities during a tough year for the GOP, with the party lagging badly in fundraising and resigned to losing seats in the Senate.
Maybe I'm getting old, maybe it's that I've seen this act so often before, maybe it's that the people I talk to when I go out on the road really are having a harder time paying for things like health care, gasoline and college tuition, but I'm finding the Republican attempts to derail the conversation from the actual state of the country really depressing and disgraceful this year. They practice Orwellian politics of the crudest sort. They are trying to sell a big lie -- that the election is about the social issues of the 1960s, or Barack Obama's patriotism or his eloquence, or the "angry left," when it's really about turning toward a more moderate path after the ideological radicalism and malfeasance of the past eight years.
-- JOE KLEIN
Cartoon by Pat Oliphant/Universal Press Syndicate
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