Quotes From Around Yon Blogosphere

Obama understands that to succeed, he must make peace with John McCain just as he has done with Hillary Clinton. When this historic election concludes, I expect the two to sit down, without precondition, and negotiate an agenda of reform.

-- BOB KERREY

Obama's task is the great unwinding of the Bush debacle, which Bush himself started these past two years, but which is likely to go four more. If Obama spends his first term unwinding both the financial crisis and the two wars well, then he wins a second term and there stands his real chance to imprint a different world moving forward.

-- THOMAS P. M. BARNETT

I have had conversations about this election in the bathroom at Target, in the checkout line at Food Lion, at work, at home and just about everywhere else in between. The highs are when you see 11,000 people standing outside a stadium to listen to speeches on loudspeakers because they didn't get there early enough to beat the 12,000 who fit in the stadium. The lows come when you watch the dirty ads and hear people on the street repeating them.

-- WNG

Forget all the rhetoric about four more years of Bush, Old Politics vs. New Politics and all that jazz. Absent any plausible reason for a late McCain surge and victory, the inescapable fact about an Obama loss would be an ugly truth to haunt American life for years to come.

-- ROBERT STEIN

Everyone who is voting Obama to punish the GOP thinks that there is some small chance that the GOP might change its ways. The diversity of views among Obamacons reflects how many different future directions are expected, guaranteeing that many will be disappointed, but it also reflects how badly the GOP has failed on multiple fronts that it is simultaneously losing so many prominent and obscure Catholic pro-lifers, libertarians, foreign policy realists, moderates and small-government conservatives, among others, to a Democratic nominee who genuinely is the most liberal of any they have had since 1972.

-- DANIEL LARISON

The election will be decided by Middle America. And I can’t think of any group to which I would prefer entrusting our country’s future.

-- RICK MORAN

The Iowa class battleships (Wisconsin, New Jersey, Iowa, and Missouri) have a chance to go as a bloc this year. This has happened more often than you'd expect; all four went for Clinton in 1992 and 1996, for Reagan in 1980 and 1984, for Nixon in 1968 and 1972, for LBJ in 1964, and for Ike in 1952. In comparison, the South Dakota class (South Dakota, Indiana, Alabama, and Massachusetts) have only voted as a bloc twice; 1980 and 1984.

-- ROBERT FARLEY

On some level, I sort of regret seeing people like this hop onto the Obama bandwagon. Realistically, at some point the Republicans are going to come back into power and I’d prefer that to be a less-crazy version of the GOP. That’s going to require less-crazy people, people like Duberstein, to exert some influence and have some credibility.

-- MATTHEW YGLESIAS

You know what most Americans I think realized is that you don’t offer a job, let alone the vice presidency, to a person after one job interview. Even at McDonald's, you’re interviewed three times before you get a job.

-- KENNETH DUBERSTEIN

Now folks of all the things that have scared me this year in politics, one of the worst was learning that Sarah Palin declared the war in Iraq to be a task from God. Just do a little research on the history of religious wars and see how you feel about that. They tend to be long, bloody, and in every case, the biggest loser is God.

-- HELEN PHILPOT

McCain's fortunate that Dick Cheney hasn't been much of a topic in this campaign. That's why it's a little stupefying that Cheney would come out and make a public endorsement of McCain/Palin on the last weekend before the election. How does that help? It just opened the door for an Obama smackdown.

-- BOOMAN

To think that a thin-resume liberal could win in a landslide in a post 9-11 world is mind-numbing, bordering on incomprehensible.

-- NICK RAGONE

White people are faced with either a negro or a total nutter who happens to have a pale face. Personally I'd prefer the negro. National Socialists are not mindless haters. Here, I see a white man, who is almost dead, who declares he wants to fight endless wars around the globe to make the world safe for Judeo-capitalist exploitation, who supports the invasion of America by illegals--basically a continuation of the last eight years of Emperor Bush.

-- ROCKY SUHAYDA