Richard Kim and Betsy Reed
Special to CNN

Sarah Palin begins her manipulation of the readers of her book "Going Rogue" in the title, embracing as a badge of honor the accusation leveled at her by McCain campaign staffers during the last bitter days of election 2008 - even though she's exemplified the political insider throughout her career.

In "Going Rogue," she describes the campaign as disorganized and defeatist and writes that Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain's aides had a "jaded aura" about them.

She's a "diva" who is "playing for her own future and sees herself as the next leader of the party," one anonymous McCain staffer alleged at the time. Now, Palin wants payback.

It's not yet clear who will emerge the victor in this Republican Party version of "Thunderdome." But it's telling that Palin intends to twist the meaning of "rogue" - an untrustworthy and unprincipled person - into its very opposite.

Keep Reading...

Matthew Continetti
Special to CNN

Sarah Palin appears on Oprah on Monday to mark the launch of her book, "Going Rogue." She'll follow up with an extensive interview with Barbara Walters, a multicity book tour and appearances on the Fox News Channel and talk radio.

She'll grab plenty of headlines. As you read about Palin's old-media tour, it's important to remember that she's also a pioneer in the political use of new social media. Not that she gets any credit.

Sometimes the most important revolutions are the quiet ones. This is especially true in the case of technology, which has a way of sneaking up on us.

Take cell phones, for example. A decade ago, they were a luxury item. Suddenly, everyone seemed to have one. What had once been a sign of status became commonplace, all with hardly anybody noticing - and without any central direction.

Keep Reading...

Gloria Borger
CNN Senior Political Analyst

Right now, the political intelligentsia is consumed with the outcome of a congressional district in upstate New York.

After all, it's a great story: The longtime incumbent Republican leaves his safe district to become Barack Obama's army secretary. The region's GOP pooh-bahs meet behind closed doors and pick a social moderate - a longtime Republican assemblywoman - to run in the special election. She slides dramatically in the polls after conservatives pitch their tents in the district to loudly oppose her. At the last minute, she quits - and endorses the Democratic nominee.

She has been driven out of the race by the purists.

Sure, there's a lesson here for the political establishment: It's never a good idea to pick your candidate in a deal made behind closed doors.

Keep Reading...

Senator McCain believes that America must succeed in Afghanistan

John McCain
Special to CNN

For the first time since September 11, 2001, America is having a vigorous national debate about how to succeed in Afghanistan. This debate is entirely worth having. Whenever America sends its citizens into harm's way, it must do so with eyes wide open.

Though no veteran would ever think of himself as "pro-war," I believe that the fight in Afghanistan is critical to our national security. Our goals there are achievable and success is worth the continued sacrifice.

We must succeed in Afghanistan for many reasons, but one stands above all: the world walked away from Afghanistan once, and it descended into a cauldron of violence, hatred and human rights atrocities that served as the base for the worst terrorist attack in history against our homeland.

We cannot let that happen again, and we cannot let the Taliban and its al Qaeda allies conquer Afghanistan once more. Failure of this kind would also destabilize the entire strategically vital region, including nuclear-armed Pakistan.

Keep Reading...

Alexander Mooney
CNN PoliticalTicker

The man who ran John McCain's presidential campaign warned Friday that Sarah Palin could lead to a 'catastrophic' election result for the GOP in 2012 if the former Alaska governor captures the party's presidential nomination.

"I think that she has talents," Steve Schmidt, the former campaign manager of McCain's failed presidential bid, told CNN's John King. "But my honest view is that she would not be a winning candidate for the Republican Party in 2012, and in fact, were she the nominee, we could have a catastrophic election result."

Keep Reading...

A guard talks to a detainee at Guantanamo earlier this year.

Lindsey Graham and John McCain
For The Wall Street Journal

When President Barack Obama declassified and released legal memoranda from the Department of Justice, he opened the door to a drawn-out battle over the Bush administration's use of coercive interrogation techniques on suspected terrorists. We believe that any subsequent attempts to subject those who provided such legal advice to prosecutions are a mistake. They will have a chilling effect on the candor with which future government officials provide their best counsel.

The country must move on from debates about the past, because pressing questions about U.S. detention policy in the war on terror requires us to make difficult choices - and to make them soon.

In January, the president announced via executive order that the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay will close within a year. The announcement was easy - but it left unanswered the hardest questions about detainee policy for the future.

Read More...

John McCain and Joseph Lieberman
The Washington Post

Later this month, the Obama administration will unveil a new strategy for the war in Afghanistan. This comes as most important indicators in Afghanistan are pointing in the wrong direction. President Obama's decision last month to deploy an additional 17,000 U.S. troops was an important step in the right direction, but a comprehensive overhaul of our war plan is needed, and quickly.

As the administration finalizes its policy review, we are troubled by calls in some quarters for the president to adopt a "minimalist" approach toward Afghanistan. Supporters of this course caution that the American people are tired of war and that an ambitious, long-term commitment to Afghanistan may be politically unfeasible. They warn that Afghanistan has always been a "graveyard of empires" and has never been governable. Instead, they suggest, we can protect our vital national interests in Afghanistan even while lowering our objectives and accepting more "realistic" goals there - for instance, by scaling back our long-term commitment to helping the Afghan people build a better future in favor of a short-term focus on fighting terrorists.

Read more...

David Rogers
Politico.com

After a losing presidential campaign in 2000, John McCain came back to the Senate and established himself as a force no White House could ignore. Eight years later, he’s home from defeat again, facing a very different landscape dominated by President Barack Obama and the collapsing American economy.

From Afghanistan and Iraq to military procurement reform, McCain tells POLITICO he is already working with Obama. Last week alone, he had breakfast with Defense Secretary Robert Gates, appeared with the president at a White House press event and took a phone call from Vice President Joe Biden soliciting McCain’s input on how to crack down on pork barrel spending.

“These are terrible, perilous times, so I will seek ways to work with the president of the United States,” McCain says in an interview. “I don’t want him to fail in his mission of restoring our economy.”

But there’s the rub: On the central issue of the economy, the two men are so far apart it is difficult to see them collaborating effectively.

Read more...

Roger Simon
Politico.com

The Columbia Journalism Review revealed this week that the “high command” of the John McCain campaign hired a blogger “to attack” and engage in “bullying” the press during the last six months of the presidential campaign.

Gee, how did that work out? Help much?

And why did the campaign need to hire outside help for that? I thought it had been doing a pretty good job of not liking the press on its own.

Read More...

CNN's John Roberts speaks to Meghan McCain about her father, President Obama, and Sarah Palin.

Dana Bash | BIO
CNN Senior Congressional Correspondent

Bump into John McCain in a Capitol hallway these days, and you’re lucky if you get anything beyond a polite hello. Ask him a question on any policy or political issue, and he will almost always decline comment, and keep moving.

But the former Republican presidential nominee is not planning to keep a low profile for long.

CNN has learned that McCain may get seats on an unusually high number of key senate committees, so that he can engage on a wide range of high profile issues before congress, and his formal rival in the White House.

“He wants to be a player,” McCain’s good friend Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-SC, told CNN in a phone conversation.

“He feels an obligation to the people of Arizona and the rest of the country to use his time in the Senate to be productive.”

For example, three sources close to McCain say he is hoping to secure a seat on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee in order to work with its Democratic Chairman, Ted Kennedy, on health care reform.

McCain has worked across the aisle with Kennedy on several controversial issues, like immigration reform and a patients’ bill of rights. But he also differed sharply with Barack Obama during the campaign on how to reform the country’s health care system. McCain wanted to move away from employer based health care, and opposed the Obama plan to expand on the current system.

Sources also say McCain is hoping to sit on the Homeland Security Committee, chaired by his good friend Joe Lieberman, and the Energy Committee, so that he can work closely with the Obama administration on a high priority area where they do have common ground: fighting global warming.

A Senate GOP leadership source tells CNN that their final committee assignments will not be complete until Wednesday or Thursday, and it is still not clear if McCain will get seats on these committees.

However the GOP source insists “the more things McCain wants to be involved in, the better for us.”

McCain has already been quietly engaged with the Obama team on issues relating to his most high profile Senate role – ranking Republican on the Armed Services Committee.

McCain sources say that he had concerns about Dennis Blair as Director of National intelligence, and sent a list of detailed questions for Blair to answer before the Obama team formally announced his nomination.

Jonathan Soros
Wall Street Journal

In his election-night victory speech, Barack Obama said he would be a president for all Americans, not just those who voted for him. But as a candidate he didn't campaign with equal vigor for every vote. Instead, he and John McCain devoted more than 98% of their television ad spending and campaign events to just 15 states which together make up about a third of the U.S. population.

Today, as the Electoral College votes are cast and counted state-by-state, we will be reminded why. It is the peculiar mechanics of that institution, designed for a different age, that leave us divided into red states, blue states and swing states. That needs to change.

The Electoral College was created in 1787 by a constitutional convention whose delegates were unconvinced that the election of the president could be entrusted to an unfiltered vote of the people, and were concerned about the division of power among the 13 states. It was antidemocratic by design.

Under the system, each state receives votes equal to the number of representatives it has in the House plus one for each of its senators. Less populated states are thus overrepresented. While this formula hasn't changed, it no longer makes a difference for the majority of states. Wyoming, with its three electoral votes, has no more influence over the selection of the president or on the positions taken by candidates than it would with one vote.

Read More...

Editor’s Note: Leslie Sanchez is a former adviser to President Bush and CEO of Impacto Group, which specializes in market research about women and Hispanics for its corporate and nonprofit clients.

Leslie Sanchez | Bio
CNN Political Contributor
Republican Strategist

Ever since John McCain and Howard Dean in 2000 showed the Internet's potential for fundraising, the question was always whether the Web could be effective at "GOTV," or getting-out-the-vote.

Among young voters at least, Barack Obama has proven that it can - and, in the process, he's uncovered a major flaw that cuts to the core of the Republicans' approach to party organization and discipline.

Obama poured many of his campaign's millions into his social networking operations on the Web, which his campaign rightly saw as critical to building grassroots support and enthusiasm.

A community organizer by training, occupation and nature, Obama saw his databases for the potential they represented - an army of supportive voices, a legion of potential volunteers, and a division of precinct captains.

Such is the world not just of Chicago ward organizations, but of politics everywhere.

The McCain campaign, reflecting the broader skepticism I've seen in the GOP about the Web, doubted whether the Internet could get voters out of their Barcaloungers (or, in the case of younger voters, off their futons) and into the polling booth.

Read more...

Tim Lister
CNN Executive Editor

Why all this fuss about ‘redistribution?’ In the waning days of the election campaign, Senator McCain combined the word with socialism to condemn [now] President-elect Obama’s tax policies. It was always a crowd-pleaser with the faithful. The line of attack sprang from Obama’s legendary encounter with Joe the Plumber, when he said: “I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody.”

My friends and acquaintances back in Europe found it intriguing that a remark like this should be cause for controversy. Many a party and political career in Europe has been built on the principle of redistributing wealth. In Britain, the Labour Party’s constitution includes this vision of society: “a community in which power, wealth and opportunity are in the hands of the many, not the few.” And that’s the party of Blair and Brown, not exactly socialist firebrands. Even parties of the center-right in Europe embrace redistribution through progressive tax policies.

The English philosopher and godfather of the free market, Adam Smith, wrote in ‘The Wealth of Nations”: "It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue but something more than in that proportion." The year Smith finished his famous book, the American colonists mutinied against the British government’s plan to impose taxes on them, in effect a plan to redistribute their wealth to His Majesty’s Treasury. Maybe that’s the source of the very different attitudes toward redistribution.

But is it possible after the shocks of the last few months that attitudes toward the distribution of wealth are converging? When the redistribution flap began, CNN contributor David Gergen made this observation: “In 1979, 30 years ago versus today, the people in the bottom 80 percent are losing, compared to back then, $600 billion a year. The top one percent of the population is gaining compared to back then.”

On October 22nd, Senator McCain inveighed: “The redistribution of wealth is the last thing America needs right now. In these tough economic times, we don’t need government spreading the wealth, we need policies that create wealth and spread opportunity.”

On that same day, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, concluded that among its thirty members (most of the industrialized world) the United States had the highest rate of inequality – except for Mexico and Turkey. It noted that the distribution of earnings (the income gap between the top and bottom ten per cent) in the U.S. had widened 20 per cent since the mid 1980s, and that 23 per cent of the elderly were in poverty (versus 20 per cent in 1985.) This long-term trend has accelerated since 2000.

Combine that trend with the financial crunch and the popular backlash against “Masters of the Universe” on Wall Street, and maybe “spreading the wealth around” was a message that appealed to more Americans than the McCain campaign imagined.

A new voter registers at a Democratic Party booth in September in Denver, Colorado.

Marisa Trevino
Latina Lista

The importance of the Latino vote is now an irrefutable fact. Not because Barack Obama was able to garner 67 percent of the Latino vote versus Sen. McCain’s 31 percent, but because Latinos turned out in record numbers in key battleground states turning the electoral college tide in Obama’s favor....

Since this is politics, the kind of support Latino voters gave the Democratic Party did come with strings attached. The big question is does that payback come in the form of a key Cabinet position going to a Latino/a or can it be satisfied with the Obama Administration addressing in his first 100 days an issue that was among the top three for Latino voters...

Read more...

Sen. John McCain and President-elect Barack Obama meet Monday in Chicago, Illinois.

Ed Henry
CNN White House Correspondent

Beyond the written statement with all the happy talk, one senior Obama transition official said the President-elect and Senator McCain also discussed a couple of hot-button issues – closing Gitmo and reforming the immigration system.

The official said that while the two men are in “broad agreement” about the need to shut the military prison down, they are still a long way from figuring out the details on how to implement it. But the official said this is one of many issues where the Obama team is “very pleased” that McCain is showing a willingness to work with the incoming President.

On immigration, the official acknowledged they didn’t get too far into the details and it’s a longshot they can get reform next year but they were pleased by how the meeting featured a lot of “very cooperative” promises.

The official said the other issues discussed included a “whole series of reform issues” ranging from McCain’s favorite – earmark reform – to even defense procurement issues.

The official jokingly added there was “no fistfight” as they largely steered clear of issues of disagreement from the campaign

Barack Obama and John McCain at the end of their final presidential debate.

James Carney
Time Magazine

Less than two weeks ago, on election night, John McCain pledged to do "all in my power to help [Barack Obama] lead us through the many challenges we face." On Monday, McCain will travel to Chicago to discuss ways he can fulfill that promise in a private meeting with the President-elect.

There were some who doubted the sincerity of McCain's pledge, coming so soon after the end of a campaign that featured a series of personal attacks on Obama. But it pays to remember that the self-styled maverick was never very comfortable as the standard bearer of a party that he had opposed so many times on so many issues. And the party long felt the same way.

Last Friday brought notice that the relationship between the two would soon be returning to form when South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint became the first high-profile Republican to lay the blame for McCain's loss on McCain himself. "We have to be honest, and there's a lot of blame to go around," DeMint told a GOP gathering in Myrtle Beach, S.C. "But I have to mention George Bush, and I have to mention Ted Stevens, and I'm afraid I even have to mention John McCain." DeMint then offered a list of McCain's anti-conservative apostasies, including his support for campaign finance reform, immigration reform and legislation aimed at combating global warming.

The items on DeMint's list of lament read like talking points to jump-start Monday afternoon's conversation in Chicago between McCain and Obama. According to an Obama aide, the President-elect views McCain as a potential ally on the kind of reform issues for which the two men share broad agreement. "There are areas of general agreement and beliefs — on immigration, earmark reform, energy, climate change, government reform, spending reform," says the aide. "Where there's agreement on both sides, they want to figure out ways they can work together."

Read more...

Jack Gray
AC360 Associate Producer

What a difference two weeks make.  Barack Obama is meeting in Chicago today with John McCain.  I’m sure McCain is looking forward to it.  Because there is nothing at all humiliating about flying halfway across the country to hear the guy who beat you say, “John, don’t forget to have my secretary validate the parking for your Hertz rental.”

Meanwhile, the guessing game continues about whether the president-elect will nominate his longtime ally Hillary “Shame on you Barack Obama” Clinton to be Secretary of State over such vocal critics as John “Barack Obama can help our country turn the page” Kerry and Bill “Barack Obama will be a great and historic president” Richardson.

There is concern among some that there could be conflicts of interest between Hillary Clinton’s leadership of the State Department and her husband’s overseas business dealings.  With that in mind, the Obama transition office is looking into the former president’s fundraising, consulting deals and speaking fees.  And his stint as a greeter at the Riyadh Wal-Mart.

The big G-20 Economic Summit was held this weekend in Washington.  I was considering going down for it but I thought better.  The last time I hung out with that crowd I woke up in an Arby’s dumpster after Nicolas Sarkozy convinced me to skip out on the bill.

Here in Manhattan, Diane Sawyer has scored a big “get.”  She taped an interview last week with Ashley Dupre, the prostitute hired by former New York Gov. Elliot Spitzer.  ABC insiders, however, are eager to downplay the perception that they’re cashing in on a salacious tell-all.  They’re spreading the word that the interview will not be about Dupre’s high-profile dalliance but rather the complex socio-economic and moral issues raised by prostitution in America.  That and how Elliot Spitzer likes to leave his socks on during sex.

And finally, to those of you who have written to me asking if I would sign up for that Twitter thing – I’ll be honest, at the ripe old age of 28 I have no idea what Twitter is or even whether it’s a verb or a noun.  Frankly, part of me thinks it’s a scam to get my ATM code.  And yes, I know Rick Sanchez does it but unfortunately his show is on at the same time I have to wash Anderson’s car.

Hey, we can’t all be Secretary of State.

Jack Gray
AC360 Associate Producer

Well, it’s about time.  Now that the presidential election is over America can return its focus to that which is truly important.  For example, perhaps you’ve been so caught up in politics that you didn’t know Jennifer Aniston is on the cover of next month’s Vogue.  And inside the magazine she discusses her new Christmas movie: “It’s a Wonderful Life…Until Angelina Jolie Steals Your Husband.”

Then there’s Lindsay “Hey Anderson Cooper, if you think my mother is a trainwreck just wait until you hear my political analysis” Lohan, who offered her take on the election to that venerable chronicler of American history known as Access Hollywood. “It’s an amazing thing,” she said, “it’s our first colored president.”  Thanks, Archie Bunker.  You can stop talking now.

Anyway, it’s been more than a week since Barack Obama won the presidency and Republicans seem to have accepted their loss.  Heck, even John McCain has moved on.

McCain was on Jay Leno last night to talk about Veterans Day.  He also gave a spirited defense of Sarah Palin.  I think the exact exchange went something like Leno: “did Sarah Palin hurt your campaign?” McCain:  “Um, her husband is a great snowmobiler.”

Meanwhile, remember John “I’d like to point out that my wife’s cancer was in remission when I cheated on her” Edwards?  Well, he’s back.  Edwards and his mullet re-surfaced last night to give a speech in Indiana.  And just to prove he’s not hiding from anything Edwards agreed to take questions.  From college students.  Submitted in writing.  In advance.

Then there’s this whole Motown auto industry bailout thing.  President-elect Obama said there is nothing to worry about.  Which made me feel encouraged.  Until I saw him get into his new Hyundai limousine.

Even those of us who take mass transit instead of driving are being hit by the economic crisis.  New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority is reportedly set to raise subway fares to three dollars a pop next year.  I just hope that the guy who sat across from me today making pirate sounds won’t be priced out.

Finally, did you hear that American Express wants a bailout now, too?  Apparently, because of the economic crisis, people aren’t spending as much on retail items.

And by people they mean Joe Biden.  And by retail items they mean hair plugs.

Blake Cabot
Technology Entrepreneur

I’m a fiscal conservative, and have been a Republican all my life. Although the social values issues pushed by Republicans over the past two decades have never appealed to me, I believe in international trade and less government, as long as it’s not accompanied by a ballooning deficit. And I expect competence.

But there has been no accountability in the Bush Administration: After Abu Ghraib and the disasters of Iraq, Bush didn’t fire Rumsfeld or any other senior member of his staff. So John Kerry had my vote in 2004, though I wasn’t happy about it. And adding $5 trillion to the debt - as Bush has done - is not fiscally conservative.

McCain’s idea of lowering taxes for everyone across the board – when we’re already adding hundreds of billions of dollars of debt – pushed me over the edge. And then to have Republicans call Obama a socialist, while they were nationalizing a huge part of the national economy – well, that has nothing to do with the Republican Party that I grew up in.

By contrast, Obama’s take on issues made a lot of sense to me, and he was inspiring as a public speaker – especially his speech in Iowa about how this whole country needed drastic changes.

So I decided this was the election of my generation and signed up to go work for Obama in mid-summer. On September 13th, I headed to Camp Obama in Brooklyn. The camp felt very much like business school training, focusing on motivation, management techniques, and specific tasks to be done in the field. Ten days later I was on my way to Lebanon, Pennsylvania as a deputy field organizer.

Lebanon is a largely Republican county in the middle of the state. Once a German Dutch settlement, the area had gone from union Democrat to socially conservative Reagan Republican, and remained overwhelmingly white.

I stayed at the home of local volunteers who housed me for over six weeks. I would come back often exhausted late in the evening, but there was Don, waiting up for me, to make sure I was home safe and fill me in on what had been happening. Toward the end of the campaign, as the nights became longer and more grueling, I found myself getting back at 4 or 5 a.m. There was Don, more than once, waking up and giving me a hug. My host couple couldn’t have been more wonderful.

My first task in Lebanon was to organize the various lists of potential voters that came from VoteBuilder, the online DNC database, and handed out to various volunteers and team leaders. At Camp Obama, they had said that no one was going to win this election through data entry. That, however, was exactly what I found myself doing.

My other focus initially was on registering people to vote.

Accompanied by another volunteer with some obvious drug dependency issues, I went out on a registration drive, going from door to door in a poorer part of town. Next to a Chinese restaurant on North 9th Street, we visited a seedy bar, and then a tract house that a man in the bar claimed was a crack house. There were three friendly African-Americans men in front, one of them well informed about politics. So I registered them to vote. As the district leader later commented, “Welcome to retail politics.”

On that same trip, I went to a rundown old age home, looking to persuade voters to register or vote for Obama. I met the head nurse and asked whether she was registered to vote. She said that she couldn’t because she was on parole. I responded that the law had changed two years ago and only felons serving time could not vote. Though she registered a dozen of the residents at the home, she would not register herself. I felt that she felt so defeated by the system that she wouldn’t ever vote.

Some local college teachers allowed us to register students in their classes. In that spirit, I approached the football team at Lebanon Valley College, arriving after practice to find all these rather large, sweating guys. Their coach told them to take a knee and discussed the importance of this election. They dutifully filled out their registration forms on top of their football helmets. That was the good story about canvassing at the college. I found registering the liberal arts students at LVC less rewarding. Very few seemed to have the basic ability to fill out the form. The word “municipality” stumped quite a number.

Most of the voters that we registered came from four volunteers standing in front of the local Wal-Mart. Often people would say that “they don’t vote” or that “politicians were all crooks”. One significant Christian denomination in the area, the Mennonites, don’t vote, but instead pray for their candidate. As they were unlikely Obama supporters, I was not disappointed.

One day at Wal-Mart, I asked a blond woman in her mid-30s whether she was registered to vote, and it came out that she believed Barack Obama was the Anti-Christ. I said, “First off, I might understand your not voting in general, but you have to vote against the Anti-Christ!” Coming from Texas and a Baptist high school, I knew how the end of the times worked. After registering her, I added that the whore of Babylon had not declared the Anti-Christ god in the temple of Israel. In fact, the Bible prophesies in Revelation 17:3 and in Thessalonians 2:4 to that the Anti-Christ will appear after the destroyed Temple of Israel was rebuilt and the whore identified him as God.

“No temple, no Anti-Christ.” I found myself saying this often in Lebanon. The woman at wal-Mart understood immediately and said, “You know, you’re right. Anyhow the Anti-Christ is supposed to be Mediterranean.”

The election shifted in our favor after the first debate on September 26th. Obama had kept his cool and looked Presidential during the debate, and his ideas were more in sync with the times. McCain’s unfettered market and tax cuts looked out of step when we were nationalizing elements of a collapsed financial system and we already had a deficit of $400 billion.

The financial crisis, McCain’s stunt of flying to Washington, D.C. and “suspend” his campaign, and Obama’s debate performances tilted the board in our favor from then onward.

Doors that had been slammed in our face were now quietly opening. Even local Republican councilmen were quietly telling us that they now supported Obama.

After the deadline for registering voters passed on October 6th, we shifted to persuading undecided voters to vote for Obama. Undecided in Lebanon largely meant “low information” voters. Sometimes they wouldn’t know what a Democrat or Republican was and would often choose Republican because they were vaguely aware that George W. Bush was a Republican. The only argument that caught their attention was the middle class tax cuts. Obama’s policies on health care and foreign policy were rarely of interest. One man came into the Obama HQ in Lebanon and said that the Democrat was too vague. I pointed out that his plans were quite detailed and I could give him a copy. He answered that he didn’t have the time to read. As was so often the case, he didn’t have time to inform himself but blamed the candidate for not informing him anyway.

Throughout this period, we also worked to recruit volunteers. Our bait was the Obama/Biden lawn sign. People would come in for the signs and I would guilt them into volunteering with such arguments as “it’s cheaper than moving to Canada.” About half the time I would get them to do something. Over the election, we had 900 volunteers at some time or other, of which 800 were local. The number of registered voters in Lebanon County went up from 76,187 to 82,440 with 89% of the increase among Democrats. I believe that we registered more Republicans than the local Republicans did.

A Latino boy about 10 years old named Kevin came for stickers on his skateboard. I talked Kevin into putting stickers with polling place addresses on flyers we hung on the front door to get out the vote. Kevin took charge. He started counting all of the literature and slapping on stickers. As I recruited more help, Kevin would train and organize them. At one point, the room was filled with the half dozen volunteers that Kevin was managing. The next day Kevin came back to resume stickering. We asked if he wanted to come to Governor Rendel’s speech at the college. After talking to his mother and a brief visit to her to prove that we were responsible adults, Kevin met the governor, had his picture taken with him and was interviewed by the local newspaper. Kevin handled himself marvelously.

A middle age man with severe back problems, Jim, came in for a sign and I talked him into making phone calls from his home. After several rounds of phone lists, Jim asked me to pick up the completed lists at his apartment on the night before the election. Jim was so grateful for my modest help that he gave me three cayenne peppers from his own garden.

The volunteers changed the final couple of days: people came from out of town, even from other countries. There was a good-looking British couple in their early 20s who were driving from New York to Washington, taking a campaign tour. They wanted to have a powwow about policy, but I didn’t have time for that. I just put a clipboard for canvassers in their hands and said, “Go find out.” And they did.

With an inability to propose an economic plan effectively and Palin’s star on the wane, the Republicans focused on defaming Barack Obama.

And as we neared the end of the campaign, the rhetoric started ratcheting up in a nasty way. All the talk about “small town” “real America” meant something specific to the white and homogenous Christian communities in Lebanon, which others around the country may have missed. The alternative, it was clearly implied, was the multi-ethnic, metropolitan America and, as this logic went, unpatriotic, ultimately ‘non-American’ America.

Making precisely this point, someone parked their car right outside the campaign headquarters with slogans painted all over to the effect that Obama was a liar. On the rear window he wrote “No Obama: Non American!”

It became clear that inflammatory words would take 3 to 4 days to go from the candidates’ mouths to voters’ mouths in Lebanon, via talk radio. A four-page flyer was put in Republican mailboxes describing how Obama was a terrorist. Another flyer was put on the windshields of cars outside of church explaining why Barack was a Muslim.

There is no question that these tactics were used to stoke the racism of lower middle class whites.

And they gave license for a minority of racists in Lebanon to do some ugly things. When Sarah Palin made her comment about “real America,” for example, racist comments increased dramatically.

A woman in her 80s from Annville came in and told the story that she was sitting on her porch and had an Obama sign in the front yard. An SUV drove by and a teenage boy in the back seat yelled out, “Nigger lover!” This woman asked a friend to drive her to the grocery store where the van had pulled in, and waited for the boy, and his mother and father as it turned out, to come out of the store. She said, “Now tell me to my face what you said driving past my house.”
But the family just walked right past her. She was hardly the only one to go through this sort of thing.

The Harrisburg’s Patriot News reported that at a John McCain rally, “a white female loudly demoralized a high school student group from SciTech, specifically the African-American students, by making several derogatory comments and suppositions about welfare. [The] students simply walked away, and in the process had to guide (away) one of the SciTech chaperones so that she could not confront the ignorant women shouting obscenities toward the 14-18-year-old students.” And get this: “Several adults and community leaders were in earshot, but no one with the exception of the chaperones defended the students' honor.”

And the police were no help. McCain supporters stole endless signs (something admittedly we have heard in other areas working for the other side). We asked people to call the police, because it was a violation of private property, if nothing else. According to one volunteer, the police asked her what kind of a sign it was, and when she said, “Obama,” they told her, “We can’t do anything about that.”

Experience on the campaign front showed there was a direct connection between the race-baiting tactics of the McCain campaign and an old lady being called a “nigger lover.” Irresponsible political speech like that leads to the worst in people. The 2000 John McCain never would have sunk so low. Republicans need to abandon those divisive tactics, and rediscover what they used to stand for.