Virginia Creeper Season

We may be sugar maple-deprived out here, but we don't lack for fall color. Our eye-catching performers, some native some not, include (besides subj) vine maple, sweetgum, sumac, sourwood, witch hazel, euonymous, and larch, just for starters. Red, red, red, rainbow, red, and yellow, respectively.

Josh at Talking Points has a fun post on the increasing self-destruction of the McSame campaign. I especially enjoyed the paternal biology aspect:

My dear, departed father, a biologist to the core, loved the phrase 'ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny', which is a perfectly deft but utterly inscrutable way of saying that the stages of growth of a fetus in the womb mimics the evolutionary history of the species itself *. (If that's still not completely clear, see this.) But we also know, if not from science than from Science Fiction or at least Star Trek, that as organisms die they often cycle back through their own individual histories, tracking off their defining moments as they wind down into oblivion.

And yesterday I had an political epiphany. As the McCain campaign staggers toward its conclusion, with electoral columns and pediments standing since 1966 buckling under their weight, the party seems to be cycling back through its history of character assassination, McCarthyism and wedge politics flimflam, only now with an desperate and parodic impotence taking the place of punishing rhetorical violence.

Southern strategy race-baiting, check! Hyper 9/11ist 'the Dems are terrorists' character assassination, check! Rep. Michelle Bachmann's neo-McCarthyite manifesto and call for a new HUAC, check! 'The Democrats want to bring socialism to America', check! Who lost Georgia? Aspirational neo-Cold Warism, check! Mix these in with a general stew of 70s-90s soft-on-crime, Dems are pedophile weirdo-freak-loser wedge politics and we've basically got the full ground covered.

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It being Boy's Night In last night, Eric and I again indulged in Jambalaya, featuring andouille sausage, tasso ham, and prawns. And of course the holy veg trinity. Lip-smacking good.

Tonight we went a different way. While appetizing ourselves with Garroxta, nettle-infused Gruyere, Epoisses, and Parmesan, E grilled some gorgeous little tenderloins to perfection while helping me assemble a Gruyere-inflected potato galette. We rounded it off with baby bok choi doused with garlic-and-red pepper flake-infused oil and soy sauce. Oh my!

And then Marg weighed in with her apple-and-pear galette dessert! To swoon for!

We are so very fortunate to be in a position to savor food in this way. We need a good deal more "socialism," the term being slung around by McPalin as if it were a curse, to assure that these opportunities are not limited to the few.

This post at FDL led me to the following two links. I will excerpt each of them, but strongly encourage your further pursuit, presumably including instructive repartee in comments on posts:

I don't think anyone here has written yet about Robert Draper’s attempted dissection in the New York Times magazine of the schizophrenic McCain presidential campaign. Digby captures the gist of it well ("Republicans have become so enraptured by their hype about 'marketing' and 'branding' that they've forgotten that you need to have something in the package you're selling besides air"), but the full article is an amazingly rich source of anecdotes — some insightful, some dubious, and some just plain weird. This story told by pseudo-strategist Steve Schmidt to Draper may fit in all three categories:

The smartest bit of political wisdom he ever heard was dispensed by George W. Bush one spring day at the White House residence in 2004, at a time when his re-election effort was not going especially well. The strategists at the meeting — including Schmidt, who was directing the Bush campaign’s rapid-response unit — fretted over their candidate’s sagging approval ratings and the grim headlines about the war in Iraq. Only Bush appeared thoroughly unworried. He explained to them why, polls notwithstanding, voters would ultimately prefer him over his opponent, John Kerry.

There’s an accidental genius to the way Americans pick a president, Schmidt remembers Bush saying that day. By the end of it all, a candidate’s true character is revealed to the American people.

Leaving aside that this obviously wasn’t true for Dubya (although it may be proving that way for McCain), I'm with John Cole: What are we supposed to make of a so-called strategist who says he got the best political advice of his life from George Bush? Isn’t that like taking performance advice from Howdy Doody or Charlie McCarthy?

Then again, I suppose that’s what Sarah Palin did.

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And here is brief from NYT, to repeat, deserving of a full read for any who might be wary of being pigeon-holed with a certain "incurious" executive:

On the morning of Wednesday, Sept. 24, John McCain convened a meeting in his suite at the Hilton hotel in Midtown Manhattan. Among the handful of campaign officials in attendance were McCain’s chief campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt, and his other two top advisers: Rick Davis, the campaign manager; and Mark Salter, McCain’s longtime speechwriter. The senator’s ears were already throbbing with bad news from economic advisers and from House Republican leaders who had told him that only a small handful in their ranks were willing to support the $700 billion bailout of the banking industry proposed by Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson. The meeting was to focus on how McCain should respond to the crisis — but also, as one participant later told me, “to try to see this as a big-picture, leadership thing.”

As this participant recalled: “We presented McCain with three options. Continue offering principles from afar. A middle ground of engaging while still campaigning. Then the third option, of going all in. The consensus was that we could stay out or go in — but that if we’re going in, we should go in all the way. So the thinking was, do you man up and try to affect the outcome, or do you hold it at arm’s length? And no, it was not an easy call.”

Discussion carried on into the afternoon at the Morgan Library and Museum as McCain prepared for the first presidential debate. Schmidt pushed for going all in: suspending the campaign, recommending that the first debate be postponed, parachuting into Washington and forging a legislative solution to the financial crisis for which McCain could then claim credit. Exactly how McCain could convincingly play a sober bipartisan problem-solver after spending the previous few weeks garbed as a populist truth teller was anything but clear. But Schmidt and others convinced McCain that it was worth the gamble.

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Despite their leeriness of being quoted, McCain’s senior advisers remained palpably confident of victory — at least until very recently. By October, the succession of backfiring narratives would compel some to reappraise not only McCain’s chances but also the decisions made by Schmidt, who only a short time ago was hailed as the savior who brought discipline and unrepentant toughness to a listing campaign. “For better or for worse, our campaign has been fought from tactic to tactic,” one senior adviser glumly acknowledged to me in early October, just after Schmidt received authorization from McCain to unleash a new wave of ads attacking Obama’s character. “So this is the new tactic.”

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And then we have Digby Herself. This is how it ought to be done:

The NY Times magazine has a fascinating feature about the McCain campaign in this week-end's edition. The inside look at the Palin choice is really interesting. Republicans have become so enraptured by their hype about "marketing" and "branding" that they've forgotten that you need to have something in the package you're selling besides air:

On Sunday, Aug. 24, Schmidt and a few other senior advisers again convened for a general strategy meeting at the Phoenix Ritz-Carlton. McInturff, the pollster, brought somewhat-reassuring new numbers. The Celebrity motif had taken its toll on Obama. It was no longer third and nine, the pollster said — meaning, among other things, that McCain might well be advised to go with a safe pick as his running mate.

Then for a half-hour or so, the group reviewed names that had been bandied about in the past: Gov. Tim Pawlenty (of Minnesota) and Gov. Charlie Christ (of Florida); the former governors Tom Ridge (Pennsylvania) and Mitt Romney (Massachusetts); Senator Joe Lieberman (Connecticut); and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (New York). From a branding standpoint, they wondered, what message would each of these candidates send about John McCain? McInturff’s polling data suggested that none of these candidates brought significantly more to the ticket than any other.

“What about Sarah Palin?” Schmidt asked.

[...]

After that first brief meeting, Davis remained in discreet but frequent contact with Palin and her staff — gathering tapes of speeches and interviews, as he was doing with all potential vice-presidential candidates. One tape in particular struck Davis as arresting: an interview with Palin and Gov. Janet Napolitano, the Arizona Democrat, on “The Charlie Rose Show” that was shown in October 2007. Reviewing the tape, it didn’t concern Davis that Palin seemed out of her depth on health-care issues or that, when asked to name her favorite candidate among the Republican field, she said, “I’m undecided.” What he liked was how she stuck to her pet issues — energy independence and ethics reform — and thereby refused to let Rose manage the interview. This was the case throughout all of the Palin footage. Consistency. Confidence. And . . . well, look at her. A friend had said to Davis: “The way you pick a vice president is, you get a frame of Time magazine, and you put the pictures of the people in that frame. You look at who fits that frame best — that’s your V. P.”

[...]

After McCain’s speech brought the convention to a close, one of the campaign’s senior advisers stayed up late at the Hilton bar savoring the triumphant narrative arc. I asked him a rather basic question: “Leaving aside her actual experience, do you know how informed Governor Palin is about the issues of the day?”

The senior adviser thought for a moment. Then he looked up from his beer. “No,” he said quietly. “I don’t know.

”This is where Karl Rove's politics hit the wall. Indeed, it's where the conservative movement hits the wall.

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