presidential election – Page 9

How not to raise the age issue

There is something unseemly about this post on FiredogLake from TBoggs about Sen. Joe Biden’s mother-in-law:

It should be noted that, at 78, the late Mrs. Jacobs is only six years older than former prisoner of war John McCain. Now it is entirely unlikely that Mrs. Jacobs spent five and a half years being tortured in a Vietnamese prisoner of war camp which might have had some bearing on her untimely death, but we do know that she had the good fortune to live in a country where women outlive men by slightly over five years.

Not that any of the math or actuarial tables mean anything.

Exactly. It doesn’t matter, or only matters nominally. The death of Bonny Jean Jacobs should not be a campaign issue. (And, don’t forget, Joe Biden is only six years younger than McCain.)

Irritable candidate syndrome?

So, just to get this straight, Sarah Palin looked like she was a deer caught in a headlight during the Katie Couric interview, because of “irritation with the questions.”

“I was thinking, ‘Man, Americans wanna know about how I think we’re gonna win the war,’” and solve the country’s economic problems, she said, not learn about what she reads.

This is nonsense, of course, but we’re likely to keep hearing it over and over again until Nov. 4.

Voter numbers rising fasterthan the Mets bullpen’s ERA

I received an e-mail press release from the state Division of Elections today that touches on a story we published in Thursday’s South Brunswick Post on the growing voter numbers in South Brunswick.

The gist of the story is that there has been a tremendous interest in this year’s presidential race and that it is likely to draw more people to the polls than ever before.

Numbers released today by the state appear to back this up:

As of October 1, a total of 5,127,790 New Jersey residents were registered to vote, an increase of 330,445 voters since the last General Election in November 2007.

That’s an almost 7 percent increase in registered voters since last year and there are still 11 days left to register.

That may not seem like a large percentage, given that we moved from a year in which the state Senate was the highest office on the ballot, but it is combined with a level of excitement that I think will lead to a higher percentage of those registered actually going to the polls than in many years.

State officials see the same thing:

“I’ve been active in the elections process for more than a decade, and I’ve never witnessed anything like the excitement out there right now,” said Robert Giles, director of the state’s Division of Elections. “The response to these voter registration efforts has been excellent, and the number of new registrations has exceeded our expectations. I urge every citizen to register now, because there are less than two weeks to go before the deadline.”

We at the Post urge the same thing.

First polls are in on debate

The initial polling appears to show that the public viewed Joe Biden’s performance last night as the stronger one during the debate, which is probably not good news for the McCain campaign.

The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. said 51 percent of those polled thought Biden did the best job, while 36 percent thought Palin did the best job.

But respondents said the folksy Palin was more likable, scoring 54 percent to Biden’s 36 percent. Seventy percent said Biden was more of a typical politician.

Both candidates exceeded expectations — 84 percent of the people polled said Palin did a better job than they expected, while 64 percent said Biden also exceeded expectations.

I’ll have more later — I want to give the transcript a good going-over, because I think it is important that the cliches, talking points, etc., be dissected and examined.

VP debate post-mortem 3

The transcript of the debate is available at The New York Times and I thought I’d offer a few thoughts about her use of catch phrases.

From Gov. Sarah Palin’s first response, talking about the bailout plan and John McCains (uhem) role in it:

I think that the alarm has been heard, though, and there will be that greater oversight, again thanks to John McCain’s bipartisan efforts that he was so instrumental in bringing folks together over this past week, even suspending his own campaign to make sure he was putting excessive politics aside and putting the country first.

Now, consider: The ticket apparently is still prepared to foist the kanard of McCain’s selfless decision to abandon his campaign and broker a bailout deal, a deal that failed to materialize and that most of those involved say he had no role in.

That said, this response offers a glimpse into the basic themes she will be pushing throughout the night, through the use of campaign catch phrases — “John McCain’s bipartisan efforts” and “putting the country first.”

She then launched the “maverick” meme — “maverick, maverick, maverick” — which left me thinking of the Biden joke about Giuliani (noun, verb, 9/11), only in this case it was the noun, verb, maverick, noun, verb, bipartisan, noun, verb, country first.

I wasn’t impressed, but I wasn’t the target audience. We’ll have to wait a few days to see what the polls say.