Interesting:

Akhil Reed Amar, a professor of law and political science at Yale... raised the possibility that the 2008 election could be remembered as the fifth "pivot point" election in the presidency's 219-year history.

In Amar's reading, history was changed and the United States was headed in new directions by the elections of 1800, 1860, 1932 and either 1968 or 1980, depending on whether you believe the conservative ascendancy we are living through right now began with Richard Nixon in 1968 or with Ronald Reagan in 1980...

Amar then expanded the idea by arguing that the "pivot point" elections were quite similar to each other -- and to the election of 2008. Each of them, he says, was marked by the same conditions: economic decline, over-reactive wars or war talk that led to repression of civil liberties at home.

In 1800, John Adams ended Federalist rule by over-reacting to war fever and pushing through the Alien and Sedition Acts, which were the repressive Homeland Security laws of their day. The Jefferson-Jackson era lasted until the 1850s, when the country moved toward civil war because Democrats, many of them Southerners, proved incapable of finding a national policy to deal with the issues of slavery. Lincoln's party reigned until economic collapse led to the Great Depression and the election of Franklin Roosevelt. Failed wars in Southeast Asia and the Iranian hostage crisis led to the elections of Nixon and Reagan. The Democrats managed to elect two presidents in the Nixon-Reagan years, but neither of them, Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton, ever won 50 percent of the vote...

And now 2008. The country is engaged in two unpopular and probably unwinnable wars, the economy is in dangerous decline, and civil liberties have been aggressively repressed by the Bush administration in the name of the war on terror.

Therein, historically, lies the strength of the candidacy of Barack Obama. Despite his obvious political talents, it is hard to imagine a young, black two-year senator rising toward the presidency if his Republican opponent could have preached the winning doctrine of peace, prosperity and low taxation.

But there is no peace. There is no prosperity. And, whether through taxes or borrowing, the voters are going to foot the bill for the misjudgments and mistakes of the last eight years. The next question, in Amar's terms, is how solid a coalition and how many Democratic terms might follow an Obama victory -- or, to be consistent, a Bush-Reagan defeat.

Who'da thunk it?

59 percent of voters surveyed said Ms. Palin was not prepared for the job, up nine percentage points since the beginning of the month. Nearly a third of voters polled said the vice-presidential selection would be a major factor influencing their vote for president, and those voters broadly favor Senator Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee.

And in a possible indication that the choice of Ms. Palin has hurt Mr. McCain’s image, voters said they had much more confidence in Mr. Obama to pick qualified people for his administration than they did in Mr. McCain.

Earlier this week, Eric Boelhert at Media Matters examined the declining influence of Matt Drudge:

[T]here's no question that Drudge's Web traffic remains strong and continues to grow, thanks to a burgeoning international audience. But in terms of setting the ground rules -- in terms of setting the campaign agenda -- Drudge has been AWOL since mid-September when the credit crisis erupted....

Four years ago, Drudge and the right-wing bloggers were at the peak of their political power. Today, they're pretty much watching the election pass them by, reduced to the role of frustrated sideline hecklers.

Boelhert argues that it's the economic meltdown that has primarily contributed to Drudge's reduced ability to control the narrative:

[I]t's obvious that since Wall Street's meltdown commenced five weeks ago, and since America's economic crisis became a tsunami of a news story that's not only dominated the media landscape, but also irrevocably altered the course of the campaign, the Drudge Report has become largely irrelevant in terms of the setting the news agenda for the White House run.

Boelhert makes some good points about how Drudge's laundering of conservative talking points has failed to move the Washington press corps this cycle, as it has in the past.

In part, this is because the talking points themselves are vacuous and desperate at this point. Consider, for example, the headline Drudge has been blaring all day today:

JOE THE PLUMBER 'SCARED FOR AMERICA' IF OBAMA PREZ

What sort of reaction does Drudge expect this to elicit other than: so fucking what?

Nobody cares what Joe the Plumber thinks -- except for Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and the junkies who shoot up in the conservative media echo chamber.

If Drudge has lost his influence, it is in no small part because he hasn't realized that the noise in the conservative echo chamber is making him tone deaf to the actual zeitgeist.

But it's not just his laundering of GOP talking points that is causing Drudge to lose influence, in my opinion.

While he's always been a partisan hack, he's always been a partisan hack with some pretty good news instincts, and who utilized those instincts to consistently beat others to the story.

And despite what some would say, that story wasn't always colored by his politics.

From 1996 to about 2006, he had a knack for being a good twenty minutes ahead of cable TV and other sources, even when the story was as non-political as an earthquake.

But those news instincts seem to be failing him lately, and he has become laconically slow at a time when the monopoly he once held on breaking news has been, erm, broken by the growth of the blogosphere and other internet news sources.

Nowadays, everyone knows the value of speed -- yet Drudge himself is getting consistently beaten to the break with even the most obvious of stories.

For example: when Paul Newman passed away a few weeks ago, the story first appeared early in the morning on the blogs, where it lingered for several hours before it was confirmed by reporters.

But not only did the blogs beat Drudge to posting the story: so too did CBSNews.com, the BBC, MSNBC, Huffington Post, and Yahoo! News.

Even when the headline was blaring across the net, it took another full hour for it to appear on Drudge.

Such slowness is unforgivable for a site that wants to set the news agenda.

But not only is he slow at picking up on news nowadays -- he's agonizingly slow at letting it go.

I've checked Drudge perhaps six times today, as I do most days. And the problem is not that his Joe the Plumber headline is laughably transparent and meaningless, though it is.

The problem is that, in six hours, he has neither added to the story (not that there is anything to add) nor replaced it. It just sits there, seeping in its own irrelevance.

So too have the links about the Jennifer Hudson tragedy remained equally static.

I've never cared for Drudge's politics, but anyone interested in how news travels across the Internet -- and, from there, onto TV screens and into newspapers -- has to recognize the contribution he made to Internet news and to the accelerated news cycle.

That Drudge now seems to be falling behind in the very media landscape that he helped to create -- that, to me, is the story.

A nice image captured downtown this evening....

Naomi Klein:

The best summary of how the right plans to use the economic crisis to push through their policy wish list comes from Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich. On Sunday, Gingrich laid out 18 policy prescriptions for Congress to take in order to "return to a Reagan-Thatcher policy of economic growth through fundamental reforms." In the midst of this economic crisis, he is actually demanding the repeal of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which would lead to further deregulation of the financial industry. Gingrich is also calling for reforming the education system to allow "competition" (a.k.a. vouchers), strengthening border enforcement, cutting corporate taxes and his signature move: allowing offshore drilling.

It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the right's ability to use this crisis -- created by deregulation and privatization -- to demand more of the same. Don't forget that Newt Gingrich's 527 organization, American Solutions for Winning the Future, is still riding the wave of success from its offshore drilling campaign, "Drill Here, Drill Now!" Just four months ago, offshore drilling was not even on the political radar and now the U.S. House of Representatives has passed supportive legislation. Gingrich is holding an event this Saturday, September 27 that will be broadcast on satellite television to shore up public support for these controversial policies.

What Gingrich's wish list tells us is that the dumping of private debt into the public coffers is only stage one of the current shock. The second comes when the debt crisis currently being created by this bailout becomes the excuse to privatize social security, lower corporate taxes and cut spending on the poor. A President McCain would embrace these policies willingly. A President Obama would come under huge pressure from the think tanks and the corporate media to abandon his campaign promises and embrace austerity and "free-market stimulus."

Great new ad from the Obama camp:

The hard right may be in love with her, but Independents and women are not impressed by Sarah Palin:

Another week, another Frank Luntz/AARP focus group of undecided voters--this one in Minneapolis and with some bad news for John McCain: they don't like the choice of Sarah Palin for vice president. Only one person said Palin made him more likely to vote for McCain; about half the 25-member group raised their hands when asked if Palin made them less likely to vote for McCain. They had a negative impression of Palin by a 2-1 margin...a fact that was reinforced when they were given hand-dials and asked to react to Palin's speech at her first appearance with McCain on Friday---the dials remained totally neutral as Palin went through her heart-warming(?) biography, and only blipped upwards when she said she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere.

That's not good, especially considering it has since become clear that Palin was flat out lying when she claimed she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere. Indeed, between Trooper-Gate and reports that she fired the police chief of her tiny town because he didn't support her bid for Mayor, it's becoming clear that her so-called "reformist" credentials are but a euphemism for a petty and vindictive tendency to abuse the powers of every executive office she's ever held:

Then there was this, from a woman named Teresa, who went to the Democratic Convention as a Hillary delegate and is leaning toward voting for McCain--obviously the target audience for the Palin pick: "His age didn't really bother me until he picked Palin. What if he dies in office and leaves us with her as President? Also she leans toward the rigid right, and I always thought he was a moderate...You know, I change my mind almost every day, but right now I"m wondering where the John McCain I really liked in 2000 went, what happened to the moderate?"

Of course, John McCain was never a moderate. As Digby has pointed out, "John McCain is the man George W. Bush was pretending to be, right down to the flight suit." The McCain-Palin ticket is the most radical far-right ticket ever to rise to the national stage in this country, making Bush-Cheney look like moderates in comparison:

They really saw this pick as a gimmick--and one that reflected badly on John McCain's judgment.

Who would have thought that putting on the ticket a radical fundamentalist who believes Alaska should secede from the Union, that creationism should be taught in schools, a woman who is anti-women and who is under investigation by her own state's attorney general and the Republican legislature for abuse of executive power would cause such an uproar?

Not John McCain, that's for sure. No wonder voters are questioning his judgment.

Update: Add book-burner to Palin's list of radical anti-American values:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

Technorati Tags: politics, McCain, Obama, palin, presidency, elections.

Technorati Tags: politics, McCain, Obama, palin, presidency, elections.

Well, that seemed rather clear from about a mile off -- not Palin in particular, but a woman generally.

McCain's only hope of winning this election was to try to make voting for him as historic as voting for Obama. It was clear that if Obama chose a man as running mate, it would leave a strategic opportunity for McCain if he were to choose a female VP.

All that courting of disaffected female Clinton supporters didn't exist in a vacuum, after all, which is why I was rooting for Sebelius as Obama's running mate. The McCain campaign was literally broadcasting their intentions.

That said, Palin is an anti-choice ideologue, and it's questionable whether voters will view her selection as historic or just plain crass.

Will it make a difference in McCain's chances? Someone might do well to ask Walter Mondale.

Technorati Tags: politics, McCain, Obama.