Any reading on how that Schlaflyesque fruitcake from Minnesota, Bachmann, is doing?

Lot of anti-Americans up there, they may want to stop her before she starts her investigatin'.

Blow off Ohio? I guess I don't understand the headline here. Did Nate put in the wrong state, or is he just being too subtle for me.

Jeff, I was thinking the same thing myself looking at the poll numbers.  However, near the bottom Nate makes the point that McCain can't win unless he gets his national popular vote numbers up.  If McCain's national numbers go up, then his numbers would likely proportionally go up in Ohio too, which may swing the state to his favor then.

Too subtle, Jeff.  Nate is saying that all winning scenarios for McCain are predicated upon a nationwide move in his direction, a shift in voter opinion/intention that would inevitably pull Ohio into the McCain column.  In other words, while McCain remains within reach in Ohio, money spent there to secure a state-level W will have been wasted if he simultaneously loses FL or CO + IA + VA or one of several other swing-state combos.  Nate's saying that McCain's efforts for the next two weeks should/must be directed at a national audience.

Of course, with equal logic, you could argue that McCain should just fold up his tent now, concede the election and hand whatever cash he has left over to the RNC to distribute to Congressional candidates in close elections.  I don't, however, see that happening.  What's more, it seems to me that in terms of advertising and organization--a campaign's two major expenses--it's ALL done at a state/local level.  So it does beg the question, if McCain is not to spend money in Ohio, where does Nate propose that he *should* spend it?

OK, too subtle for me. Even if he campaigns for a national audience he still has to do it from somewhere. I can see that perhaps he should go with national media buys rather than local, but to keep in the news day in and day out he needs to be holding events somewhere, and those events might as well be in swing states like Ohio.

The Tampa Bay Rays just defeated the Boston Red Sox in the American League Championship Series. For the

I want to thank everyone who has posted this week, because I believe we have gone seven days in a row without suggesting that McCain needs to throw a certain Catholic prayer - (this posting would have been particularly tempting).

It's not that "...this is one of those areas where McCain's attacks on Obama are having resonance."

West Virginia, and  quite possibly Ohio and other places, are areas where Obama's attacks on Obama are having resonance. Joe the Plumber appears hugely significant because he's become code for invoking Obama's own disastrous remark about "spreading the wealth around".

The Vanguard of the Proletariat is heavily over-represented at tnr, and in the media in general. There are a large number of voters who shudder at the thought of more of the sort of political economics that produced the fiasco at Fannie and Freddie, and historically such wonders at the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine, and the Great Leap Forward in China.

It's bad enough that we have to face the inevitibility of a health-care system being run like the Motor Vehicles Dept. without the prospect of a guy with socialist leanings taking over shortly after the banking system has been nationalized by "the conservatives".

Robrt Powell, it's bad enough that capitalist robber barons have destroyed the US economy. Have you been under a rock lately?

It's not socialists who destroyed US economy and put into recession - it's plutocrats aided by their kleptocrat Republican government. They've done it before. Have you ever heard of the Great Depression? How come you forgot that?

Clearly, if it's Richard Fuld and Ken Lay or other typical capitalist kleptocrats, you can only love them. If they call themselves capitalists, all is fine with you - they can walk away with the houses and retirements savings of Americans. Long live robber-baron capitalism!

" It's bad enough that we have to face the inevitibility of a health-care system being run like the Motor Vehicles Dept. without the prospect of a guy with socialist leanings taking over shortly after the banking s

system has been nationalized by "the conservatives"."

That's another gem from Robert Powell, the man in flight from reality. Most Western European countries have government-run healthcare. Guess what? Western European live LONGER and are HEALTHIER  by any measure than Americans. But of course, being an American conservative as Mr. Powell means you would rather die faster -literally- rather than have the government step in.

It makes sense. The government might actually stop the thievery perpetrated by Wall Street bastards in collusion with Republican politicians. Obviously, rich Republicans don't care about healthcare - as long as the Repubs are running the show, they can safely plunder people's retirement savings and houses. That gives them plenty of money for their personal healthcare. The people's health? Eh, the hoi polloi is good steal from and send to wars.  

"There are a large number of voters who shudder at the thought of more of the sort of political economics that produced the fiasco at Fannie and Freddie, and historically such wonders at the collectivization of agriculture in Ukraine, and the Great Leap Forward in China."

You're comparing a remark about making the US tax code more equitable to forced labor in China and Eastern Europe? Even by the standards of someone who compared the Democratic Party to the Whig Party of the 21st century - two days before that party took control of both chambers of Congress - this is remarkable.

If we just keep those poor folks from hiring lobbyist to keep that easy access to Freddie open wouldn't be in this mess:

WASHINGTON — Freddie Mac secretly paid a Republican consulting firm $2 million to kill legislation that would have regulated and trimmed the mortgage finance giant and its sister company, Fannie Mae, three years before the government took control to prevent their collapse.

In the cross hairs of the campaign carried out by DCI of Washington were Republican senators and a regulatory overhaul bill sponsored by Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb. DCI's chief executive is Doug Goodyear, whom John McCain's campaign later hired to manage the GOP convention in September.

Freddie Mac's payments to DCI began shortly after the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee sent Hagel's bill to the then GOP-run Senate on July 28, 2005. All GOP members of the committee supported it; all Democrats opposed it.

In the midst of DCI's yearlong effort, Hagel and 25 other Republican senators pleaded unsuccessfully with Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., to allow a vote.

"If effective regulatory reform legislation ... is not enacted this year, American taxpayers will continue to be exposed to the enormous risk that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac pose to the housing market, the overall financial system and the economy as a whole," the senators wrote in a letter that proved prescient.

Unknown to the senators, DCI was undermining support for the bill in a campaign targeting 17 Republican senators in 13 states, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press. The states and the senators targeted changed over time, but always stayed on the Republican side.

Pull out of Ohio? The last predidential candidate who did that was Al Gore in 2000, when he had no campaign effort here at all. He lost to Bush by only 4%, without having spent a dime. Had he made the effort to win in Ohio he might have won the state and spared us all from 8 years of Geroge Bush!

MONDAY'S CAMPAIGN ROUND-UP....Today's installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn't generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers. * Obama expects the presidential race to get tighter in the remaining 15 days.

With all due respect to those who prefer their economic history as a cartoon of Tom Joad vs The Monopoly Guy:

--there's a lot of blame to go around on this one. Significant Dems not only refused to provide proper oversight for Fannie and Freddie, but worked hard to prevent anyone else from doing so. They stoked the housing bubble enthusiastically.

--Wall Street fat-cats are easy targets, but right now they have lost their asses. Top executives at Enron went to jail. Ken Lay effectively got the death penalty. Better scapegoats, please.

--French health care is great, but then we basically underwrote their national defense for half a century so they could pay for it, and there are lots of cultural differences that won't transfer. Lots of Euros get scandalous health care, including many Brits. We have "shorter" lives primarily because of infant mortality among recent immigrants, and poor people who already have government health care. The whole system needs to be changed, from insurance companies and medical schools on down. Try getting US docs and hospitals to work for European wages. You can't just transplant the French system by changing the payment scheme and raising taxes.

--Not that anyone likely gives a shit, but when talking about the Dems' resemblance to the Whigs I was specifically referring to the Lamonster phenomenon in CT, where wild-eyed lefties attempted to torch the heretic Lieberman for representing what most voters wanted then and now, a reasonable conclusion to the war in Iraq rather than an evacuation under fire. The Democratic gains were as predictable as Lamont's defeat, but a lot of the new Senators are more conservative than the Republicans they replaced.

--The catastrophes of the Ukrainian Terror Famine and the Chinese Great Leap Forward had little to do with forced labor, and a lot to do with centralized economies replacing the contemporary equivalent of small business. Granted, I don't expect similar events here, but when Obama talks about  "spreading the wealth around" it leads to extreme reactions in many circles. The fact is that something like 54% of the small businesses in the country report more than $250,000, and in most cases this is reported as the owners' income. Most of that money usually gets re-invested in the business, creating jobs. Sending it to Washington doesn't strike me as a particularly useful exercise in a recession/credit crunch. Millions of voters know this instinctively, and most of them don't read tnr.

I'd like to see Obama win, but this is the kind of thing that can fuel a McCain comeback in crucial states.

This thread's dead but I have to respond to one point.

"We have "shorter" lives primarily because of infant mortality among recent immigrants, and poor people who already have government health care."

Not true.  Most common measures of life expectancy exclude deaths in the first year of life.  And most poor people who are dying young of things like HIV and uncontrolled diabetes do not already have government health care.  Medicaid generally is only available to women/children on welfare and people receiving Social Security Disability Insurance.  Medicare is available only to those over 65 and generally does not cover out-of-hospital care.