If the past is prologue, perhaps I’m not too late to point out communications guru Bert Decker’s list of the 10 best and worst communicators of 2008. I was pleased to introduce San Francisco Examiner readers to Bert’s observations back when I was editorial-page editor there, and he’s never failed to produce relevant insight each year. Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has the uncommon distinction of making the 2008 list twice: once among the best, and once with the worst.
PretePress readers may recall a similar observation I made following Palin’s speech to the Republican Convention in September.
From Bert’s blog:
1. Barack Obama As his star continues to rise, there’s just no contest for #1 Best Communicator.
And it’s not just because he was elected President that he deserves #1, but that he was elected President BECAUSE of his communications ability. President Elect Obama is the first repeat at #1 (2006) and for the same reason. He vaulted from obscurity on the strength of his words and speeches at the 2004 Democratic Convention, and just kept talking. To date he hasn’t really done much except communicate. Shows you how important that skill is. One of the greatest modern orators, we’ll now see if he can replace Bill Clinton as “the great communicator” while in office.
2. Tim Russert He was one of the best, and we’ll miss him.
One of our best TV journalists died this year, and he would have made this list without the posthumous honor. Russert was personable, energetic and open but also tough, incisive and smart. Meet The Press, and Network TV News will never be the same. His son Luke Russert was eloquent in his eulogy, and maybe there will be more…
If your head’s in a spin trying to take in the results of yesterday’s election and you live in San Francisco, take a long lunch this afternoon and pop over to SPUR’s post-election analysis. Expert political numbers man David Latterman and the witty and astute Alex Clemens will explain what happened at the polls yesterday — and how it fits into the context of local electoral politics.
The focus of SPUR’s election analyses usually is on San Francisco, but this time it’s certain to include discussions of the state and federal elections as well.
This regular event has grown over the years into a required piece of post-election analysis for everyone interested in San Francisco elections, so expect a crowded room along with unique insights.
It starts at 12:30 p.m. and runs to 2 p.m., tacking on an additional 30 minutes this time to handle the huge ballot. Five bucks for non-members and free for all SPUR members. San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, 312 Sutter St. at Grant Avenue (an easy walk from BART or the Muni Metro, with limited bike parking right out front). Note that this event takes place not in SPUR’s offices, but rather on the second-floor meeting room of the World Affairs Council.
In spite of a few raucous boos from the audience, Arizona Sen. John McCain capped his 2008 campaign for the
Sen. John McCain
presidency of the United States tonight with a concession speech that recalled the dignity and grace of the way he conducted himself in the early stages of his campaign.
The late-stage McCain campaign went into the ditch in a number of ways, not only losing the race for the White House but also tarnishing the senator’s reputation in the process. McCain, however, reclaimed a big part of his personal reputation with his concession speech. He admitted defeat but also urged his supporters to consider the good of the country and work with the next president.
Remember this night well, because it’s something you’ll tell your grandchildren about, even if you voted for the other
Obama stencil found on sidewalk in San Francisco Aug. 24, 2008
guy. Barack Obama has been elected the next president of the United States of America.
Obama’s election as the first African-American president is a watershed moment, and if this great country is very lucky it will be a moment that inspires a new generation of Americans to work for the common good, to strive for and achieve things they had perceived as out of their reach, to recognize that the promise of this nation is and always has been theirs.
I’ve emerged from under the cruel thumb of my baby-borne cold too late to write anything of significance in advance of today’s election, unfortunately. But on the plus side, I feel pretty good now, which probably also has something to do with the fact that I’m basking in the afterglow of casting my vote in what has been a fascinating election on the federal, state and local levels.
PretePress readers overwhelmingly believe Barack Obama beat John McCain in the third presidential debate, and
Obama stencil found on sidewalk in San Francisco Aug. 24, 2008
by an even larger margin indicated they expect Obama to be the next president of the United States.
It was an unscientific poll by anyone’s standard, and included some conflicting responses, so take the results with plenty of grains of salt — but the fun survey I created after Wednesday’s presidential debate (using WordPress’ nfity new PollDaddy poll feature) was interesting nonetheless.
Of the PretePress readers who took the poll, 84 percent said Barack Obama won the debate, while 16 percent gave the victory to John McCain.
Barack Obama will be elected the next president of the United States, 95 percent of respondents believed — even though only one-quarter of respondents identified themselves as registered Democrats.
The rest of the poll:
90 percent of respondents said they were citizens of the United States.
95 percent said they were registered to vote in the U.S. (get out that salt).
50 percent of participants said they did not belong to any political party, 25 percent said they were registered to vote under the Democratic Party, 10 percent said they were Republicans, 5 percent Greens and 0 percent Libertarians. 10 percent said they were registered under some other party.
You can see the original post will the poll here, but I’m still learning to use the PollDaddy polls and at the moment I’m not sure how to turn off the poll. The results you see in the original post may not match the results at the time of this writing.
Well, someone certainly put a heck of a burr under John McCain’s saddle before the third presidential debate. Was it enough to get him back out of the ditch and onto the road to the White House?
The Republican nominee for president of the United States turned in his most lively and coherent performance of the three debates,
If John McCain was looking to ding Obama, he missed a perfect opportunity — twice. McCain brought up the criticisms that had been leveled at him and Sarah Palin by U.S. Rep. John Lewis. He noted first that Obama had yet to repudiate Lewis’ statements, but then let the conversation turn elsewhere. Not long later, McCain again brought the topic back to Lewis and again noted that Obama had not repudiated the accusations, but he got nowhere with it as he let Obama successfully divert the talk on both occasions. McCain should have said something like, “Senator Obama, you have yet to repudiate John Lewis’ unfair remarks, but I’d like to give you the opportunity to do so right now. Will you tell the American people you want no part of his accusations, right here at this debate?” Instead, McCain allowed Obama to remain comfortable and dodge the issue.
Barack Obama was as dull as dry toast. Post-debate polls put him significantly ahead of McCain, but I think that must be at least as much because of Obama’s momentum (and the perception of inevitability his campaign excels at cultivating) as the strength of his performance at the debate.
McCain clearly didn’t learn anything from reviewing old video of a grimacing Al Gore in Gore’s debate with George W. Bush. He was all forced half-smiles and nervous-looking blinks. McCain seemed sometimes to channel Jon Lovitz’s Michael Dukakis, who in a Saturday Night Live sketch famously exclaimed in reference to Dana Carvey’s George H.W. Bush, “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy!” In spite of McCain’s efforts to maintain a neutral expression, he came off like an exasperated and angry porcelain doll (albeit one with a really advanced blinking function).
Did McCain really pull out the air quotes while discussing abortion? Yes, unfortunately, he did. When Obama said he was opposed to late-term abortions but thought consideration ought to be given to the health of the mother, McCain pooh-poohed the health issue, making air quotes when saying that the meaning of “health” had been stretched too far by abortion activists. This is already the stuff of blogs and punditry, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find it featured in an ad by Thursday morning.
Although McCain did much better in this debate, he’s going to have to do much better still if he is to eke out a victory.
U.S. presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain meet at Hofstra University in Hempstead, N.Y. tonight for their third and final debate of the 2008 race. Does McCain still have a chance to turn his campaign around? Can Obama conclusively nail the race tonight?
Barack Obama
Barack Obama has what looks like an overwhelming lead in Electoral College votes, according to most polls, and he continues to press the Republican candidate in states that McCain should have sewn up a long time ago.
But John McCain has been newly energized about promoting his plan for handling the current economic crisis and recharging the U.S. economy. Tonight’s debate is viewed by some analysts as a do-or-die moment for the McCain campaign, when he either will seize his last chance to get American voters excited about his candidacy or watch the presidency slip irretrievably out of reach.
I’ll make my own prediction — it’s a safe one — and say that neither candidate will do anything tonight to change the minds of voters who already have made up their minds for the other guy. Furthermore, my guess is that Obama will convince some undecided voters to throw in with him, but will still leave most of the undecideds questioning who should get their votes.
John McCain
However, this debate does present a convenient opportunity for McCain to decide how he wants this campaign to fit into his legacy as a war hero and respected legislator. Does he make one last push in an attempt to surmount long odds, using whatever methods are expedient, at the risk of marring his reputation even if he wins? Or does he look beyond this election, distance himself from some of the campaign tactics he previously disavowed but now employs, and ask history to remember him as he was before this run for the White House?
That’s a choice only McCain can make — but if he want to keep pushing for the presidency, he needs to take advantage of tonight’s debate, even though the debate alone is highly unlikely to make the difference.
McCain has spent the past few days pushing an economic plan that he bills as new, even though much of it simply reflects the core of the Republican economic agenda of the past decade or so. But it sounds new enough to most people that McCain should keep going back to it as often as possible in the debate.
He needs to do tonight what Obama did in the first debate: present concrete ideas in clear, simple language. If McCain did no more than adopt Obama’s answering style of a simple preface followed by three or four numbered points, he would be way ahead of his performance in the past debates and well on his way to quashing the notion that his campaign has run out of ideas and can’t come up with a credible alternative to Obama’s proposals. Now that McCain has a relatively coherent plan — for the purposes of the election it doesn’t really matter whether it will work as economic policy or not — he needs to push it and push it and push it.
Obama could choose to play defense tonight, seeking long-term victory by simply avoiding errors in the debate. If he can, though, Obama should use the debate to keep McCain off-balance. McCain’s best ammo for the debate is his “new” economic plan, but pushing it as strongly as he will need to leaves McCain vulnerable to Obama coming out with a strong presentation of his own domestic policy plans.
Both candidates would be unwise to even address the attacks their campaigns have made on each other in the past two weeks. It makes for dull television and seems not to play well with undecided voters in this election.
The debate starts at 6 p.m. Pacific time, 9 p.m. Eastern. On nearly everywhere. Ostensibly the topic is domestic policy, but both candidates are likely to direct their answers where they want to go.
* * *
Parting Shots: I’m no economist, but there’s one idea both Obama and McCain have suggested recently that even I know is foolish in the extreme. That idea is the proposal to offer tax relief to people withdrawing money early from their 401Ks and other retirement savings accounts, and it’s dumb on two levels. First, for many people this will serve merely to enable them to put off reckoning with their overextended lifestyle, giving them a way to spend money they previously had reluctantly saved. When that money is gone, what good will it have done them? Second, at a time when investors only worsen the economic downturn when they withdraw their money from the market, this proposal would give many more people a tax incentive to do just that. It doesn’t make any sense.
U.S. presidential candidates Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama met Tuesday for the second of three scheduled debates in the general election. Who won? Did the candidates accomplish what they needed to do?
My initial impression of this town hall-style event was that it was uncommonly dull, and I’m the sort of person who gets all worked up reading an environmental-impact report.
Barack Obama, I knew, didn’t have to wow anyone last night. Unless the world around him changes radically in the next couple of weeks, Obama’s mission is to keep stimulating voters who’ve already decided to support him and to deny McCain the ability to rest. Obama needs to be vigilant against positive poll numbers lulling him into becoming complacent, of course, but he also needs to watch against trying to push so hard against McCain that he takes unnecessary chances. Still, Obama seemed off his game Tuesday, and I think he spent too much time counterattacking McCain instead of steering perceptions in the direction he wanted.
What’s interesting to me is that I don’t think it was McCain’s debate performance at the debate that forced Obama into a reactive stance: McCain was jumpy, vague and awkward, and he didn’t effectively make a case for a McCain presidency. Instead, Obama seemed to have decided before the debate to respond to and counterattack against McCain, and it didn’t come off well.
I’ve written before that I think McCain conservatism is much better for our nation than the Bush brand, so it was with some regret that I watched McCain’s ineffective performance last night.
All right, so what grades do the candidates get?
Keep in mind that I’m grading two different things in this analysis. First, I grade the candidates on their performance in the debate, looking at it as a stand-alone contest that could be reduced to box scores like a baseball game. This tells who “won” or “lost” the debate but doesn’t get into what that means for the campaign as a whole. Second, I assess the debate not as a single night’s contest, but rather as part of the continuum of the campaign. In other words, how does the debate fit into the context of the race as a whole? The candidate who “loses” the debate doesn’t necessarily hurt his campaign, and a candidate who “wins” doesn’t necessarily help himself going forward.
Overall grades on the debate itself
John McCain C-plus
Barack Obama C-plus
The second McCain-Obama presidential debate was so boring I’m not going to spend much time on the debate itself.
As far as McCain’s performance went, he got in a number of good points and clearly won a couple of the questions, but overall he didn’t produce a memorable narrative. In the first debate he gave a good narrative of himself, but this time he couldn’t articulate a narrative of how a President McCain would turn around the American economy. There were bits here and there, but nothing that came together in a memorable way.
If all an undecided voter saw of Barack Obama was Tuesday’s debate, he would be forgiven for wondering what all the fuss is about. He wasn’t awful: Like McCain, Obama got in some points and dominated some of the questions. He also did better according to the gut-check that CNN’s Approve-O-Meter provided — strikingly better among women. But there still was no there there.
Grades on the debate in the broader context of the campaign
Posted by Tom Prete 
PretePress 
Making sense of San Francisco’s Nov. 2008 election
November 5, 2008If your head’s in a spin trying to take in the results of yesterday’s election and you live in San Francisco, take a long lunch this afternoon and pop over to SPUR’s post-election analysis. Expert political numbers man David Latterman and the witty and astute Alex Clemens will explain what happened at the polls yesterday — and how it fits into the context of local electoral politics.
The focus of SPUR’s election analyses usually is on San Francisco, but this time it’s certain to include discussions of the state and federal elections as well.
This regular event has grown over the years into a required piece of post-election analysis for everyone interested in San Francisco elections, so expect a crowded room along with unique insights.
It starts at 12:30 p.m. and runs to 2 p.m., tacking on an additional 30 minutes this time to handle the huge ballot. Five bucks for non-members and free for all SPUR members. San Francisco Planning and Urban Research Association, 312 Sutter St. at Grant Avenue (an easy walk from BART or the Muni Metro, with limited bike parking right out front). Note that this event takes place not in SPUR’s offices, but rather on the second-floor meeting room of the World Affairs Council.
SPUR
David Latterman’s Fall Line Analytics
Alex Clemens’ Barbary Coast Consulting