I think ronbyers has it about right. The Republican party in Missouri is in deep yogurt after the incumbent governor, Blunt, rammed through some draconian cuts in things like Medicaid, mental health services, etc.. Having done that, he suddenly pulled out of the race for re-election, leaving a couple of unknowns to fight it out for the chance to challenge the well-known and very popular Jay Nixon. If all politics is really local, then Obama will win Missouri.

Yes, a lot of the state is basically Alabama under another name. And the northern farming areas are rock-ribbed Republican by inclination. But there are also some pretty pissed-off farmers up there at the moment, and Obama may be able to peel off a few.

Add to them the suburban liberals in St. Louis County and the African-Americans in St. Louis City and Kansas City, and I think Obama can pull it off. I do think it'll be close (a point or two) but he could do it. His on-the-ground operation here is *very* efficient.

Posted at June 25, 2008 5:12 PM in response to Poll: McCain Takes Seven-Point Lead In Missouri

>

I cook, and yes, my mother did create her meatloaf recipe. I watched it evolve over the years.

I've created a few original recipes myself, usually when I was wandering around the supermarket searching for something in the veg. section which looked appealing. Curried green beans, anyone?

Leave Cindy McCain alone. She's already got enough troubles. John, for one.

Posted at June 16, 2008 10:17 PM in response to McCain Camp Cribs Recipe For Cindy -- Again!

"I'm the One!"

Great slogan.

Quiz time: whose slogan in the presidential race years ago was: "______'s the One!"

Tell you anything?

Peace,
Paul

Posted at May 29, 2008 4:30 AM in response to Hillary's Letter To Super-Delegates: I'm The One

Yes, Kyl-Lieberman, and yes, AUMF. And a few other things too. But two other reasons strike me as more important:

1. Obama grasped the mood of the American people better, and figured out that this was an election about making real changes. Clinton did the same old same old DLC line, and sounded stale.

2. Obama's campaign whooped her ass in Iowa and other early-primary states (excepting New Hampshire) by out-organizing her on the ground. They had many more local organizing committees, many more on-the-ground volunteers, and just played better ball than Clinton's people. The fact is that Obama is a remarkable combination of new-politics ideals/rhetoric and old-fashioned precinct-level political skill. It's a potent combination, one we haven't seen in a Democrat since, dare I say it, RFK. (And if a lot of that precinct-level came from Axelrod, so be it. Knowing which adviser to trust is a big part of being a successful politician.)

Peace,
Paul

Posted at May 23, 2008 2:21 AM in response to New Republic: Did Taking Cues From Lobby Cost Clinton The Nomination?

"How many of our Presidents have been former soldiers or sailors?"

Well, if you want to be technical...

In my lifetime the following people who were elected president were former soldiers and sailors:

Harry S Truman (doughboy, WWI)
Dwight D. Eisenhower (duh)
John F. Kennedy (Navy, WWII)
Lyndon B. Johnson (I think Navy, WWII)
Richard M. Nixon (Navy, WWII)
Gerald R. Ford (Navy, WWII) [not elected]
Jimmy Carter (Navy, submarine, peacetime)
Ronald W. Reagan (Army, WWII)
George H. W. Bush (Army Air Corps, WWII)
Al Gore (I think Army, Viet Nam)

And a few others in the past...George Washington, Andrew Jackson, Zachary Taylor, Abraham Lincoln, U.S. Grant, Theodore Roosevelt...and a bunch whose service I don't know about, I suspect.

Just wanting to set the record straight.

Peace,
Paul

Posted at May 23, 2008 1:59 AM in response to McCain Questions Obama's Lack Of Military Service

Personally, I think tagging McCain with the moniker "Rufus T. Firefly" would be a good idea. With apologies to Groucho, of course.

Peace,
Paul

Posted at May 22, 2008 5:16 PM in response to McCain Finally Rejects Hagee's Support -- And Makes It All About Obama And Wright

I agree that whoever persuaded HRC to vote for the war bears a great deal of blame for her loss. But she also made the mistake of hiring idiots with a long track record of losing elections, and then listening to their advice. She, and her staff, assumed the campaign would be a coronation rather than a struggle, so she made no plans at all for contesting the primaries after Super-Duper Tuesday, and never caught up to Obama's lead in delegates. And she (and her campaign) resorted to a scorched-earth tactic on Obama, hoping to wound him enough to deny him the nomination; that may redound against the party in November.

Obama and his people, meanwhile, did their jobs, and for the most part did them well. In particular, they built local organizations in multiple locations in each state, with a strategy remarkably like that of the Republicans in general elections: win a lot of smaller states, and keep on stacking up the numbers.

In short, yes, the war was important, but in the end I think Clinton lost because Obama and his people did the nuts and bolts of retail-level politics very well, and Clinton and her people did them very badly.

Peace,
Paul

Posted at May 20, 2008 2:28 PM in response to Why Hillary Lost

FDR vs. Smith?

Unless in was in some obscure primary I don't know about, FDR never ran against anyone named Smith. In his presidential races, he defeated Herbert Hoover (1932), Alf Landon (1936), Wendell Willkie (1940)and Thomas Dewey (1944), who later defeated Harry Truman.

Peace,
Paul

Posted at May 19, 2008 3:10 PM in response to Obama Responds To McCain: "Strong" Presidents Aren't Afraid To Meet With Enemies

Folks, it ain't gonna get solved for a long time, maybe not in our lifetimes. There are two impossibilities which need to happen before there can be peace:

1. The Israelis have to give up the settlements -- ALL of them -- and withdraw within the 1967 borders.

2. The Palestinians have to give up the idea of returning to the Israel from which they were displaced in 1948.

Neither is going to happen.

#1 won't happen because the ultra-nationalist groups believe they were given the West Bank by God. And the Israeli system of proportional representation means that, when the nation is politically split, the nutters, although a smallish minority, hold the balance of power.

#2 won't happen because, if the Palestinians returned, they would constitute a voting majority, and Israel would cease to be a Jewish state. Some of us wouldn't mind seeing it become secular, but to my parents' generation, 1/3 of whom died in Hitler's camps while the world looked on and did nothing, the need for a 100% safe haven for the Jews means that Israel must remain Jewish.

If the Palestinians would agree to accept compensation rather than return (as one of the UN resolutions specifies), and if the Israelis would agree to pull out of the West Bank and Gaza completely, there'd be some chance at peace. But they won't, and they won't, so it's going to keep festering for another generation. And people will keep dying.

Peace,
Paul

Posted at May 17, 2008 1:54 AM in response to Presidential Candidates To Address AIPAC

I'm going out on a limb and predict that this won't influence this fall's election in any meaningful way.

First off, all three remaining major-party candidates take the same (nervous) view: no deal on gay marriage, but domestic partnership is okay. So they're out of the equation.

What about the backlash, dozens of anti-gay-marriage initiatives drawing conservatives to the polls to vote against the horribleness (and vote for McCain while they're at it)? It probably won't happen, except in a couple of states. Why? Because it's already happened, in 2002 and 2004. Most of the places which are likely to enact anti-gay-marriage referenda...have already done so. Yes, there'll be a push in California because of this ruling, but it won't be enough to push the state Republican.

Peace,
Paul

Posted at May 16, 2008 3:47 PM in response to We're Already Married