Brewed Fresh Daily

John McCain’s choice of Alaska’s 20-month governor Sarah Palin as his vice presidential candidate is right out of the Machiavellian Karl Rove’s playbook, meant to distract.

The unusual choice is meant to play “head games” with the opposition and the gullible news media. It’s intended to divert. It is meant to confuse. Nothing more.

I don’t believe McCain’s choice has anything to do with pilfering Hillary Clinton’s primary voters. No one could be so stupid as to think women would fall for such a silly maneuver. It’s insulting.

So why would you choose a running mate with literally no experience when your main attack has been that your Democratic opponent lacks experience? Why this obvious twist? Could there be a reasonable explanation?

Yes, in Rove’s topsy-turvy political gaming. It’s Rove at his most amusing. If this isn’t a Rove decision it must be his team’s doing. They’re advisors to McCain.

The line prepared as Republican talking points – expecting the inexperience question to be tossed against Palin by Democrats and questioned by pundits – will be that she’s as experienced as his opponent Barack Obama. It thus diminishes Obama. It couldn’t diminish Palin whose record is thin as the melting Arctic ice.

It’s a clever trick - if truly cynical move - by the lackluster McCain. He tries to play the maverick he once was but has decided that his only chance to be President now is to play the Rove way – cynical, dirty and deceitful.

The only thing that is making this race close – given the real disaster we’ve been left by the Republicans, President George Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney – is the issue of Obama’s race. You can expect it to be played subtly and not so subtly by the Republicans in the next few weeks.

Obama’s race is the only thing that is keeping this from being a total Democratic landslide, which it may be anyway since voters know that the last eight years have been a pure and historic disaster.

Four more years of this should trump even racism.

While a post about baby boomers should probably be over on Optimistic Rebel, I think this article by Lisa Chamberlain fits better here on BFD:

[T]he white baby-boomer’s lack of support for Obama is nothing short of shocking. Charlie Cook – hands down the best political analyst working today, and you won’t see him bloviating on The Countdown with Keith Olberman – revealed the nasty truth back in June.

“It finally dawned on me that white Baby Boomers are the group that is really hurting Barack Obama,” Cook wrote in his National Journal column. “Of all people, the generation that brought us the Vietnam War protests and the Summer of Love is proving to be a very tough nut for the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to crack.” Cook pointed out that among whites between 50 to 64, Obama is losing by a whopping 18 points, 51 percent to 33 percent. I don’t know if the numbers have moved much since June, but that was after Hillary “suspended” her campaign.

Cook concludes, “By doing very well among African-Americans and reasonably well among Hispanics, Obama could easily overcome his deficits among whites under 50 and over 65. But losing whites born between 1944 and 1958 — pretty much the lion’s share of the Baby Boomers — by 18 percentage points? Wow. That’s a burden…”

Hillraisers: The New Naderites? | Newgeography.com