State of the Race: has Obama Peaked? Sarah Palin a Cancer for the GOP?

Here is a fivethirtyeight.com article about Obama’s current level of support: is this as large as it will get?

his post is going to seem slightly less relevant now that Gallup has come in showing an 11-point lead for Obama. But the other five daily tracking polls (yes, there are now that many trackers) all showed movement toward John McCain.

Between the Gallup result and Obama’s very strong state polling, I am inclined to think that this particular ebb in the tracking polls is mostly statistical noise. That notwithstanding, it’s worth considering Chris Bowers’ point at Open Left. What, realistically, is Obama’s ceiling in this election?

The better a candidate’s standing in the polls, the harder it ought to be pick up additional support. In part, this is simply because the more voters that you have in your column, the fewer there are available to convert. But this is still a highly partisan country, we tend to have close elections, and things certainly aren’t going to be any easier for a black candidate.

If Obama is ahead by something like 7-8 points ahead nationally, that means that he has persuaded just about all of the persuadables, and he’s left looking to covert people like those in Ben Smith’s anecdote. [...]

Follow the link to finish the article.

Remember McCain’s claim about the “overhead projector” that Obama wants money for? It was machinery for a planetarium.

I am an Associate Professor of Astronomy at the University of Chicago (the University that today has added yet another Nobel Prize winner in the sciences for the US). I would like to comment on Sen. McCain’s statement during the today’s debate that Sen. Obama has earmarked “$3 million for an overhead projector at a planetarium in Chicago, Ill. My friends, do we need to spend that kind of money?”

The way Sen. McCain has phrased it suggests that Sen. Obama approved spending $3 million on an old-fashioned piece of office equipment (overhead projector).
The 3 million is actually for an upgrade of the SkyTheater – a full dome projection system, which is probably the main attraction of the Adler Planetarium and is quite sophisticated and impressive piece of equipment.

I find it appalling that Sen. McCain would call a science education tool for public (largely children) for
a historic planetarium with millions of visitors a year a wasteful earmark. The planetarium’s focus, as stated on their website (http://adlerplanetarium.org) is “on inspiring young people, particularly women and minorities, to pursue careers in science.” Is an investment in such public facility at the time when US
competitiveness in math and sciences is a constant source of alarm a waste?

“American’s ability to compete in a 21st Century economy rests on our continued investments in math and science education,” said Rep. Brian Baird, Chairman of the Research and Science Education Subcommittee in Congress, after the passage of The 21st Century Competitiveness Act of 2007.

Considering such investments “wasteful earmarks” today, even in the face of the financial crisis, will severely cripple US economic competitiveness in the increasingly high-tech world down the road.

— Andrey Kravtsov, Chicago, IL

Follow the link for more. But then again, complaining about earmarks such as this one is fully in step with the current Republican agenda.

The Republicans are anti-intellectual. Other Republicans have noticed:

In an interview with The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg at New York’s Le Cirque restaurant to unveil that magazine’s redesign, Brooks decried Palin’s anti-intellectualism and compared her to President Bush in that regard:

[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn’t think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.

Brooks praised Palin’s natural political talent, but said she is “absolutely not” ready to be president or vice president. He explained, “The more I follow politicians, the more I think experience matters, the ability to have a template of things in your mind that you can refer to on the spot, because believe me, once in office there’s no time to think or make decisions.”

I should point out that McCain-Palin rallies have become hate fests.

(hat tip)

They throw lots of stuff out there, but McCain wouldn’t bring it up when he was face to face with Obama.

In short, if the Republicans lose the anti-intellectual and the xenophobic vote, they lose. They have wedded themselves to these sort of people; the party of Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, William Taft, and Dwight Eisenhower is dead.

That’s a shame too, because in its current form, I wouldn’t dream of voting Republican. That is too bad as this means that the Democrats all but have a monopoly on my vote, and that is never healthy.

I think that the United States benefits when voters have more than one legitimate choice at the ballot box.

Humor