Warner: Are you the Keymaster?

“My fellow Democrats. My fellow Americans. The most important contest of our generation has begun. Not the campaign for the presidency. Not the campaign for Congress. But the race for the future.” Well, one thing becomes clear about Gov. Mark Warner after his keynote speech last night [transcript]: he’s no Barack Obama. Granted, delivering the keynote four years after our current nominee would’ve been a tough gig by any measure. (And, hey, at least he was better than Clinton in ’88.) Still, I found Warner’s speech last night to be one of the more tepid and uninteresting of the evening. Brian Schweitzer was more wry, Kucinich’s fireplug “Wake Up America!” rally was more rousing, and Bob Casey was more devastating: (“McCain’s not a maverick, he’s a sidekick.”)

It doesn’t help that, at least to me, Warner has the air of a salesman and the look of a slightly deranged muppet (if not Guy Smiley, then one of the Avenue Q gang.) He also seems to have come off the same blow-dried assembly line that gave us Evan Bayh and John Edwards — the latter is company absolutely nobody seems to want to keep this week, even in resemblance — and that doesn’t help to dispel that certain feel of inauthenticity about him. And some of the riffs in his oration, especially early on, seemed particularly platitudinous. (The thing about the future is it comes, inexorably, whether you like or not.)

Now, don’t get me wrong — I’ll be casting my Senate vote for Warner this November, and I really hope the guy wins. His record in Virginia clearly suggests he’s a capable executive who can get things done. But I still found this keynote rather unremarkable, even if I found myself in great sympathy with its call for a return to science.

The Ticket.

As many surmised (and I hoped) earlier in the week, Sen. Obama has apparently chosen Senator Joe Biden of Delaware as his running mate and future vice-president. In brief, I’m very happy with this choice (and particularly considering the evening’s early word suggested Bayh.) As I said the other day, Obama-Biden seems both a good match and a winning ticket to me. Bring on the convention.

Update: “Joe Biden is that rare mix. For decades, he has brought change to Washington, but Washington hasn’t changed him.” The ticket is unveiled in Springfield, Illinois. And other than Ron Fournier, embarrassingly having the AP carry water for McCain (again), and a handful of Clintonite dead-enders (to which McCain is now making blatant appeals), the pick seems to go over swimmingly.

Oscar Mike at Last?

“‘We have a text,’ Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said after a day-long visit Thursday by U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.” How badly do the Republicans want to keep the White House? Apparently enough that the Dubya administration, contrary to its earlier stance (and to McCain’s promises of “100 years” in Baghdad), seems to be on the verge of signing a withdrawal accord with Iraq that would have all U.S. troops out by the end of 2011. (Not that we have much choice in the matter, given that Baghdad has already made it clear it wants us gone.) Well, however politically influenced, this is clearly a step in the right direction…but it’s way too late in the game to save the GOP now. It’s not like we’re all going to forget who started — and enabled — this disastrous sideshow.

You’re no Ivan Denisovich.

Sure, Reagan did this all the time. Still, it takes either a man whose memory is too wracked by age to be president — or an inveterate liar — to simply make up this kind of story. (See also Reagan.) Apparently, John McCain’s heartwarming tale of the Christian guard in Hanoi, which he related again over the weekend at the mutual kissing of Rick Warren’s ring, was in fact lifted from Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago. (Apparently McCain, and/or his ghostwriters, are fans of the man.) Uh, Senator McCain, did you really feel you had to embellish your time in a Vietnamese prison camp? The situation should speak for itself.

For what it’s worth, McCain is blaming the controversy on “the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd.” Well, speaking as a member of the prObama World of Warcraft crowd (really, Senator, you’re dating yourself — again), I should note that the story actually originated with the Freepers several years ago, once the mythical maverick felt the need to start peddling false wares to the nation’s conservative Christians. For shame, Senator.

Update: Forget Solzhenitsyn. According to scholars (via TPM), this tale isn’t from The Gulag Archipelago at all, but rather seems to be a right-wing fairy tale emanating from the likes of Chuck Colson and Jesse Helms.

Surveying the Wreckage.

“Above all, this irony emerges: Clinton ran on the basis of managerial competence — on her capacity, as she liked to put it, to ‘do the job from Day One.’ In fact, she never behaved like a chief executive, and her own staff proved to be her Achilles’ heel…Her hesitancy and habit of avoiding hard choices exacted a price that eventually sank her chances at the presidency.” The Atlantic‘s Josh Green, who covered the dirt on the Patty Doyle firing earlier this year, tells the story of Sen. Clinton’s primary bid from the inside (thanks mainly to being the beneficiary of vindictive document dumps from across the campaign hierarchy.)

Among the many interesting revelations, Mark Penn is apparently an even bigger asshole than he seemed during the primaries. Regarding Sen. Obama: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050…his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values…Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds.” Classy.

Update: Speak of the devil. While giving kudos to McCain for his Paris Hilton ad, Mark Penn emerges from his cave to extol the usefulness of negative advertising. “Picking a president is not just about the candidates’ strengths but also about how their weaknesses can manifest themselves. Imagine if, in 2000, Al Gore’s advertisements had hit George W. Bush hard over incompetence on foreign affairs and as a trigger-happy cowboy.“

Methuselah Speaks of the Devil.

“Perhaps the most puzzling scene in the ad is an altered segment from The 10 Commandments that appears near the end. A Moses-playing Charlton Heston parts the animated waters of the Red Sea, out of which rises the quasi-presidential seal the Obama campaign used for a brief time earlier this summer before being mocked into retiring it. The seal, which features an eagle with wings spread, is not recognizable like the campaign’s red-white-and-blue ‘O; logo. That confused Democratic consultant Eric Sapp until he went to his Bible and remembered that in the apocalyptic Book of Daniel, the Antichrist is described as rising from the sea as a creature with wings like an eagle.“

You’re one microscopic cog in his catastrophic plan? In TIME, Amy Sullivan parses McCain’s recent “The One” ad to discover that it’s basically a dog whistle for Left Behind evangelicals, declaring Obama is the Antichrist. “A new TIME poll finds that the most conservative evangelicals are the least enthusiastic about McCain’s candidacy. Convincing them that Obama does have two horns and a tail might be the best way of getting them to vote.“

Obama is the Antichrist? Has it really come to this? I know the GOP are feeling on the verge of “Left Behind” this November, but that’s gotta be just about rock-bottom. It’s hard to even imagine an anti-McCain ad that would stoop that low (well, other than that it would probably have to involve the Queen of Diamonds.) And, what with the crazies already percolating, feeding this type of chum to the confused anti-Greg Stillson types out there borders on the criminal.

Come November, these GOP asshats had better lose, and lose big.

Grace Under Pressure.

“It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant! They think it’s funny that they’re making fun of something that’s true.” I’ll be honest: If it seems like political news has taken something of a backseat around here of late, it’s mainly because the recent developments on the campaign trail — tire gauges, Paris Hilton, and the like — just seem so inordinately stupid to me, not to mention so woefully desperate by the McCain campaign, that I’ve had trouble mustering up the level of outrage to even post about them. That being said, Sen. Obama’s still on his game, and — in a few arch sentences — he’s made the mythical maverick and his bewildered GOP shock-troops look as ridiculous as they should.

Really, this election shouldn’t even be close. McCain’s shrill, doddering, and nonsensical campaign notwithstanding, I just can’t believe that the good people of this country will turn to the GOP again, after barely scraping through the Dubya years. And, summer polls aside, I’m still feeling very confident that November will witness an Obama-headed Dem deluge. (By way of colleagues at Peasants Under Glass and The Late Adopter.)

Echoes of the Spring.

“‘The most important thing we learned is this: Hillary Clinton won 8 of the last 13 primaries,’ said Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s top strategist. ‘He is beatable.'” Facing an uphill battle against Sen. Obama, John McCain takes several pages from the Clinton playbook. Well, thanks much for pre-plowing that road, Senator. I don’t think it’ll make much difference in the end, whatever the polls say at the moment, but we might as well make the GOP work for a strategy next time.

In related news, Bill Clinton still seems stuck in a moment he can’t get out of. “‘I am not a racist,’ he continued. ‘I’ve never made a racist comment and I never attacked him [Obama] personally.’” Uh, riiight. Tell you what, Mr. President: We’ll forgive you if you just stop insulting our intelligence about it.

Update: He’s still picking at the scab. “‘You can argue that nobody is ready to be President,’ the former President told ABC News.”

Al-Maliki: What Obama Said.

“Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes…Of course, this is by no means an election endorsement. Who they choose as their president is the Americans’ business. But it’s the business of Iraqis to say what they want.” While much of the nation watched The Dark Knight, Iraqi prime minister Nouri Al-Maliki shook up our election considerably, perhaps even decisively, over the weekend by publicly backing Obama’s troop withdrawal plan in the German magazine Der Spiegel.

The Dubya White House immediately tried to lean on Al-Maliki to get him to walk back his remarks, but some hemming and hawing aside, they would seem to stand. In fact, they were reinforced today by Ali al-Dabbagh, Iraq’s government spokesman, upon Sen. Obama’s arrival to the region: “We are hoping that in 2010 that combat troops will withdraw from Iraq.“

In other words, even the Iraqis believe Obama is right and McCain is wrong on our future in Iraq. Which means the McCain campaign has just lost one of their critical tentpole issues, and has no place to go now except scream “surge, surge, surge.” “Via e-mail, a prominent Republican strategist who occasionally provides advice to the McCain campaign said, simply, ‘We’re f**ked.’“

Of course, McCain’s bleeding on the Iraq issue might be better staunched if he didn’t publicly refer to the non-existent Iraq-Pakistan border…

Ten from the Road.

“This is the week that should have effectively ended John McCain’s efforts to become the next president of the United States…During this past week: McCain called the most important entitlement program in the U.S. a disgrace, his top economic adviser called the American people whiners, McCain released an economic plan that no one thought was serious, he flip flopped on Iraq, joked about the deaths of Iranian citizens, and denied making comments that he clearly made — TWICE.” I may have been slacking of late, but others have been keeping up the good fight. By way of Supercres, HuffPo columnist Max Bergmann lists ten campaign-derailing gaffes by John McCain, from last week alone. (So that’s not counting Czechoslovakia, McCain’s switch on Afghanistan, or the unfortunate “ape rape” revelations.) I must say, he really is an astoundingly bad candidate.