I’m going to do my “I was right” dance about Virginia.
As of this moment, with 30% of precincts reporting, McCain is up by 118,000 votes. Fairfax hasn’t reported in yet. That’s a big one, with about half a million votes. But so far, it’s McCain country here in Virginia.
Treacher was right. Via Marc Ambinder:
A New York City-based Obama home phonebanker who’s been making calls through the MyBO.com hub to PA and VA says he just received this e-mail:
Friends — Barack needs your help now — our data indicates that the results will be very close in many states. I can’t emphasize enough how urgent this message is. Please go to my.barackobama.com/call and start calling as soon as you can. We are not going to hit our goal of 500,000 calls for today by 3pm Central, unless we get at least 2,000 more people calling for the next hour. Can you call now and continue for as long as you can manage? Thank you. Judith
Obama’s worried.
McCain is hopeful.
Virginia is going to stay red. Will McCain get Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana as well?
Make calls for the McCain campaign. It’s not over yet. Click here.
Did you vote yet?
Less than two hours left in VA. Get yourselves to the polls, please.
How important is this statistic for a red victory?
Hampton Roads: The region’s hefty black vote is keeping Obama competitive there. So, too, is a narrow slice of the region’s military vote — for example, families angry over multiple deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan.
However, McCain is pressing his natural advantage as a war hero with the state’s 800,000-plus veterans and the more than 200,000 active-duty military and civilian defense workers.
I think it’s a key reason why Virginia remains red. Add that to the Republican makeup of the state—a Democratic candidate hasn’t won since Johnson—and that’s why I say the polls are wrong.
I say McCain takes Virginia.
So go do it.
And whatever you do, DO NOT PAY ATTENTION TO THE EXIT POLLS.
They were wrong in 2004. They won’t be any better now.
I voted at 11:30. I was voter number 1590 in a precinct with about 3,000 registered voters. In a heavily Republican county, that bodes ill for Obama.
Vote. Vote. VOTE.
Name a single major accomplishment of his that does not include running for office.
Just one.
What laws has he helped pass? Who has he helped? What, exactly, has he done?
While he was “writing a letter” about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s problems, John McCain was writing legislation—that was not supported by the Democrats.
Vote for John McCain, who has a lifetime of accomplishment. Or vote for the man who has been running for office nearly his entire legislative career.
Your choice.
This is why Hillbuzz is working for McCain:
We truly believe if all of us continue to work as hard as possible tonight and tomorrow in get-out-the-vote efforts, and if we control the Eeyores in our midst and prevent the Obamedia from depressing turnout in our ranks, that McCain/Palin will win tomorrow decidedly — 286 to 252 in the electoral college – and we PUMAs will stand proud with all Republicans and Independents who joined us in this fight, because that’s what it really boils down to for us. We’ve been trying to stop Obama and his socialist takeover of this country for almost two years now. Living in Chicago, we KNOW who this man REALLY IS, and know how bad he and his policies would be for this country. So, the way we see it, Republicans are OUR REINFORCEMENTS, not the other way around, because Hillary’s Army has been giving this effort our all this whole time — with the rest of you coming on board since the start of the general election.
So, our perpsective is well-informed, as our daily lives have been consumed with this campaign for much longer than yours. Some of us have given everything we have to this cause, and many of you out there have helped us in every way you can (and, frankly, there’s no way we could ever thank you enough for doing so).
Another good friend of mine moved from Chicago to the northeast. He said exactly the same thing to me—months ago, before Hillary lost the primary to Obama.
Vote McCain. Don’t bring Chicago politics to the White House.
From Hillbuzz again, the former Hillary voters who are now working their asses off for McCain, come these words of hope and cheer:
We don’t want to beat a dead horse here (or, donkey, as the case may be), but we need to remind you all, once more, not to be Eeyores today.
The Obamedia is going to do to you what they did to Hillary supporters during the primaries — they are going to lie, and float all sorts of incorrect exit polls, and start revving up to declare Obama the winner.
Drudge Report — mark our words — is going to run that flashing red/blue siren he loves to report McCain losing all sorts of traditional Republican states around midday. He’s going to get all of you Eeyores hyperventilating.
The goal of the Obamedia is to depress you so much you don’t turn out to vote. Our friend Astrid always falls for this garbage, and we know she is not all alone. She’ll be miserable all day because she’s never learned to turn out the media and just chill out.
This is going to go down just like Super Tuesday – where the media claimed Obama would win California, New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, and others…but Clinton won every state we predicted she’d win.
In fact, we were right about every state in the primaries except Missouri, which Clinton lost by less than 1%. Otherwise, we were spot-on.
Let’s get out and vote, and ignore the news reports. If my fellow McCain voters do their job, Obama is going to have a big-time sad face on about 11 o’clock tonight.
One of my friends lives in Pennsylvania and is working for McCain there. Yesterday, she told me that McCain voters from New Jersey came to the Philadelphia area to help get out the vote for McCain/Palin, as New Jersey is in the bag for Obama.
This is happening all over the country.
And via Hillbuzz, a hopeful note on Pennsylvania.
I believe that John McCain is going to win the 21 electoral votes in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania on Tuesday. In 2004 Bush lost the state by 144,248 votes (see the above map of the 2004 result). The cities of Philadelphia, Allentown, Pittsburgh, Wilkes-Barre, Scranton, and Erie went to Kerry, while the entire rest of the state voted for the Shrub. Pampers will no doubt take Philadelphia. But McCain doesn’t need Philadelphia to win. He needs, and he’s going to get, Allegheny County.
In 2004 Kerry won Allegheny, and outlying counties, by slim margins:
Allegheny: 96,987
Beaver: 2,230
Washington: 552
Fayette: 4,075
That’s 103,844 votes. Leaving a margin of 40,044 votes in the 2004 totals.There is one reason and one reason only that Kerry took these counties: Tereza Heinz-Kerry. Knowing this, Obama tried to trot her out in the run-up to the Pennsylvania primary. Her lack of enthusiasm for the candidate was pretty obvious. Obama has no such connection. In fact, the one thing he had going for him in the area, John Murtha, decided to pick the scab off the bitter/cling incident by calling his constituents racists, and then rednecks. Personally I think Murtha fell on a grenade, potentially ending his political career to prevent Obama from getting into the White House. Between that, Joe the Plumber, Bittergate, the Hillary/PUMA effect and Obama’s ever shrinking tax break income threshold (it used to be $250,000…now his ads say $200,000….his VP says $150,000….Bill Richardson says $120,000….we know it’s really around $42-50,000…middle class, get ready for the mugging) chances are McCain is going to win all four of those counties.
Another Kerry stronghold was Lackawanna and Luzerne Counties. Margins were not that wide there either.
Lackawanna County (Scranton is County Seat): 14,807
Luzerne County: 4,620I believe that it is the PUMA effect that will have the greatest impact in drawing Democrats away from Obama. Forget Biden’s connection to Scranton. He hasn’t had any there in decades. No one is seeing his appearance there as a homecoming. It’s a hey I used to be from here vote for me kind of feeling. When Democrats for McCain and Harriet Christian are leading PUMAs on major canvassing safaris, reminding everyone what Obama and the DNC did to Hillary, the candidate they still love, what Obama said about them, etc. I see both counties in play big time. Thank you all for your hard work and dedication up there!
Joe the Plumber will also pull in votes in Allentown, and Erie. We hear time and time again that working class voters are “values voters,†meaning that they vote with the candidate whom they feel represents their beliefs, even if they are voting against their economic interests. In 2008 the McCain/Palin ticket not only speaks to them more, especially with a woman who comes directly from the working class, but will better serve their economic interests by not taxing them into the poor house, or taxing their employers into laying them off (and with those ever lowering tax thresholds that is exactly what is going to happen).
Here’s an up-to-the-minute election blog from the Richmond Times Dispatch. Way to go, Richmond!
7:50 a.m. — Voters report that Precinct 308 in Richmond, at a Richmond library, opened late because a poll worker overslept.
Way to go, electronic voting machines and the Godwin district!
7:29 a.m. — Henrico voter Audrey Belford, who experienced the machine problems at Godwin, reports: “I arrived at 5:15 and was about 10th in line. When the polls opened at 6:00 I would estimate about 3-400 people were there. Of the 7 voting machines, only one was working. Apparently they are wireless and only one “found†the signal. I was able to vote within about 15 minutes and the poll officials were considering offering paper ballots as I left. If the machine malfunction were not worked out, I can only imagine what a mess it is by now.”
8:54 a.m. — The voting machine problems at Godwin were due to a problem in the machines’ wireless communication systems, registrar Mark Coakley said.
He attributed the problem to human error.
I’m going to vote in a little while. I’ll be back with a report.
Tzippi Livni mocks the return of “Benny” Begin to the Likud.
“We are actually in a situation in which the Right wants to put a stop to everything and the Left may want to give up everything,” she said. “However, our way is to continue the peace process in an intelligent and responsible manner that preserves Israel’s interests.”
Speaking during a Kadima faction meeting, Livni said that Likud had turned into a party that “says no to everything.”
I’m not certain how the leadership of Kadima now differs from the Left, but here’s what Begin wrote back in 1996 about Oslo. (Oslo and Mideast Logic, Jan 17, 1996, The Jerusalem Post)
This is the logical chain of the Oslo agreement: 1. The government has signed an agreement with Arafat. 2. For the agreement to be implemented, Arafat must survive. 3. To survive, Arafat must violate the agreement.
The current calls strengthening Abbas absent the demonstration of any will or capability on his part to foster coexistence with Israel shows that Begin’s words that those words of caution are no less appropriate nearly thirteen years later.
Israel Matzav isn’t deterred by Livni.
Ehud Barak also sounded off:
Also Monday, Labor leader and Defense Minister Ehud Barak slammed former IDF spokeswomen Miri Regev and former science minister Benny Begin for joining Likud. Referring to the Middle East peace processes, Barak said their decision made the Likud’s stance clear and demonstrated that “the Likud way is likely to bring us again to a dead end.”
When Barak took office after he defeated Netanyahu, he inherited a situation where terror was down.He left office a year and a half later at the start of the “Aqsa intifada.” Whose approach then led to a dead end?
PS. Begin’s return to politics is very strange. Israeli politics has moved quite a bit to the left since he resigned a decade ago. He also left with seemingly hard feelings towards Netanyahu. It’s hard to see that he will fit in better now than in 1998.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
In a too generous retrospective of Yossi Beilin’s career, Ethan Bronner writes:
For the last two decades, the easiest way to invoke dovishness in Israel has been to utter the words “Yossi Beilin.†The politician who navigated mutual recognition between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization in the early 1990s and has never stopped believing, Mr. Beilin has a unique place in the Israeli political galaxy, admired and reviled for his relentlessness.
He was not reviled for his relentlessness. He was reviled for his failure to play by the rules.
Still, Mr. Beilin’s decision to leave public life and set up a private company offers a lens through which to view Israeli politics. The arc of his career describes the fortunes of peacemaking. He said last week that he was leaving in triumph, since his support for an end to occupation of Palestinian territories and the creation of a Palestinian state, once radical positions, are today mainstream. There is no denying that shift in public opinion and official policy. But it is impossible not to see the move also as a defeat — of Mr. Beilin’s understated style in an overheated environment, and of his goals, with no Palestinian state on the horizon.
The first part of this is correct. Israel has changed quite a bit in the past twenty years and Beilin’s extreme views are now pretty much mainstream. But the defeat wasn’t one of Beilin’s “understated” style. it was one of his misreading the Palestinians. If there was a movement towards Beilin’s positions in Israel, there has been no reciprocal moderation on the Palestinian side. Maybe some of the rhetoric is milder than it was 1992, but even Abbas still denies the right of there to be a Jewish state.
The next three paragraphs are bewildering. I’ve highlighted the essentials.
Most successful Israeli politicians resemble Ariel Sharon — open-shirted men with strong military backgrounds, thick fingers and quick tempers. But the soft-voiced Mr. Beilin, with his Cross gold pens and carefully knotted ties, was a different species, one that left Israelis bemused. At his political height, that mattered little since he was less a leader of the people than a leader of the leaders, a behind-the-scenes actor who persuaded Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1993 that Yasir Arafat wanted peace. That feat was all the more remarkable because, as Mr. Beilin noted in a two-hour conversation in his office last week, he and Mr. Rabin never liked each other.
It is a tribute to Mr. Beilin — to his powerful intellect and keen interpersonal skills — that despite his demure style and lack of good-old-boy credentials, his political fortunes rose remarkably in the 1990s as the Oslo peace process that he set in motion took over Israeli politics. In the Labor primaries at one point, he won the No. 2 spot. Twice he was appointed a minister. For a while, if you wanted to know what was next on Israel’s geopolitical agenda, you consulted Mr. Beilin.
But when peacemaking reached a dead end and the second intifada broke out in late 2000, sending Israel into a fury of suicide bombings and fierce military counterattacks that killed thousands, Mr. Beilin lost his sheen. He was accused of being a snake-oil salesman, responsible for luring Israelis into the false belief that they had a peace partner. The exotic fellow with the Ph.D. and attaché case was anathema.
First Bronner credits Beilin with convincing Rabin to trust Araft, but then, two paragraphs later, shocker: Mr. Beilin lost his sheen. Here’s a guy who got the leader of his country to trust an unrepentant terrorist who proceeded to launch a terror war against his country.
“He was accused of being a snake-oil salesman, responsible for luring Israelis into the false belief that they had a peace partner.” He wasn’t accused of being a “snake oil salesman” that’s what he was shown to be. Trusting Arafat was a huge mistake. I can’t feel the sympathy for Beilin that Bronner seems to want me to feel. Worse, Beilin’s never admitted his fundamental mistake. The failure to achieve peace he blames on others, not on his own faulty judgment.
He sees two clocks ticking. One is demographic, with the Jewish-Palestinian ratio in Israel and the Palestinian areas nearing 50-50. The other is geopolitical, what he calls the growing threats and hatred toward Israel in the region. “Our behavior,†he said, “ is costing us a huge price because we are giving the fanatics the best pretext.†Mr. Beilin, now 60, is starting an Israeli version of Kissinger Associates and says he plans to stay involved as a private citizen in peace efforts, even as he promotes businesses across the Israeli-Arab divide.
The demographic “clock” has stopped ticking. Whatever will be in the future for the Palestinians, the vast majority of them are no longer under Israel’s jurisdiction. The demographic threat is simply a device to force Israel to make the concessions the Palestinians demand of them. To Beilin, the idea that peace negotiations should, in any way, meet Israeli requirements is inconceivable. And it’s astonishing that now 15 years after Oslo, that he could still make the argument that Israel’s failure to meet Palestinians demands is the “best pretext” for “the fanatics.” If his peace making premise was correct, the fanatics would have little or no standing now. In fact, the Arab world has not been transformed as he so blithely assumes.
Near the end Beilin expresses his hopes and fears:
He says he fervently hopes for a victory by Barack Obama — but also that the economic and other crises don’t overwhelm the new administration. “God forbid if this conflict is marginalized,†he said. “If we are marginalized, it will be to kill each other.â€
As long as the Arab Israeli conflict is front and center, it raise the price of peace for Israel and it gives Beilin a platform to sell his badly concocted prescription. Beilin’s hyperbole isn’t about the fear of violence, but the fear that his own importance will be diminished.
Yossi Beilin, as a member of the Knesset subverted Israeli law in order to get Oslo passed. Since Oslo was predicated on the honorable intentions of Yasser Arafat it failed miserably. Yossi Beilin’s retirement from politics is a much overdue slide into irrelevance earned by his arrogant inability to take responsibility for his historic failure.
Crossposted on Soccer Dad.
It doesn’t matter what the polls or the news say any more, it’s time to get out there and push the lever for John McCain and Sarah Palin.
This is who I’m voting for.
If you have an elderly neighbor, offer to drive them to the poll. Make sure they know who you’re voting for. You never can tell—you might be able to swing a vote or three for McCain.
We put out a special edition of Shire Network News. I have a contribution. Go listen.
