The speculation on Obama's choice for veep is running amok at this hour as conventional wisdom has it that the Illinois senator will pick his running mate Saturday in his homestate's capital of Springfield.  Fortunately, many pundits still list Senator Evan Bayh, from neighboring Indiana, as one of the leading contenders.

Sloganomics, not Economics!

Winning American elections is not about who has the better understanding or the better intellect or the better argument, It is about who has the better slogans.  Period.

McCain is contradicting himself when he challenges Obama's patriotism by claiming he would rather lose a war than lose an election. This implies Obama is foresighted enough to see what strategies would lose a war and which would not - i.e. win. He is therefore fit to be Commander in Chief because he possesses this capability.

Received a text message this evening.  Immediately sprung to my cellphone to which stated...who cares it's not from Barack Obama!

Here is a recap of the today's comments from the potential veeps:

Biden

Average Joe Has a 'Successful Dump'

Upon his return from disposing of the logs, Biden pulled up in his pickup, saying he had nothing to report, but "I had a successful dump."

"I had a successful dump. I dropped everything at the dump. It all worked out and by the way I got a second load, guys, coming and if anyone wants to help me unload let me know, those stumps weigh about 150 pounds."

Does he know how that come across?  

No one jumped at the opportunity from the press corps.

Humor is a plus.

SlOBama the high and mighty

You know I try and remain optimistic.
Everyone says not to speak ill of the Clintons for purposes of unity. Well I cant hold my tonuge any longer. HRC doesnt really want to unify.

You know its one thing to claim unity to a group of Obama supporters...but what is she doing to bring her supporters over?

Heres the latest:

The time is approaching for VP announcement by Barack Obama.  Who will it be and when will it be?  The best time is really at the Democratic National Convention on Tuesday night by Mark Warner.  Here he could announce Tim Kaine as his VP choice to get people to focus on his message instead of any message by Hillary that may be off subject.

Yes, by gum and by gosh.

And since I am grumpy I am going to share it with you.

3 things have me grumpy.

1. All this VP talk

2. All this poll talk

3. All this HRC talk

It's gotten to the point I do not even go out to the movies or show at all.

More after the break.

The New York Times reports that "Allies Ask Obama to Make 'Hope' More Specific," which I'm all for, but I'm not in complete agreement with one of these allies:

In the blunter words of Gov. Phil Bredesen, Democrat of Tennessee: “Instead of giving big speeches at big stadiums, he needs to give straight-up 10-word answers to people at Wal-Mart about how he would improve their lives.”

This quote all-too-easily evokes an episode of The West Wing (my political nerd credentials are all in order, thank you very much!) and the comparison I'm forced to make is not between Obama and the idealistic and inspirational Jed Bartlet, but between Obama and Bartlet's meatheaded opponent, Robert Richie.

(By the way, this post originally appeared in shorter form on my blog, Agora Americana)

OMG, not another Veep Diary!

Yeah, I know, nobody asked me, but...

... if I have to guess -- and like each of the 122,381 other Kossacks (approximate calculation) who have opined on this subject, I do have to guess -- I'm going with the same line of reasoning that Marc Ambinder mentioned yesterday in this post on his blog.

Ambinder relates some advice that John Kerry gave Obama about choosing a running mate:

Choose someone, he told Obama, that you trust completely. Don't expect the process to build trust. Don't choose someone with the expectation that you'll develop a trust.

No surprise there.  It's no secret that Kerry was disappointed by John Edwards' performance as a running mate.

Alot of us are expats, it seems, and some are so because of politics. But are YOU registered to vote in the upcoming US elections? Are your friends??

Because we have to do it by snail mail, and because many US county clerks are absolutely swamped this year with new voter registrations, it's a good idea to begin the process by early to mid September.  

Both the New York Times and the LA Times had articles today, discussing Obama's stealth negative ad campaign.  Well, he's out with two others it looks like, which I have not seen until now.  (If they are not new, then apologies, but they were just added it looks like to BarackObamadotcom on YouTube tonight).    

Recent polls show Obama slipping versus McCain.  How can that be when we can all see how much smarter and better Obama is?  The answer might be in the instincts that we inherited from our stone age ancestors.

When men choose a president, at least some part of our thinking is probably those stone age instincts we used in selecting the leader of the war party.  Women probably didn’t do much of the stone age war, so they might have some other kind of default hardware—mate choosing, for example.  It’s entire plausible that the criteria that served for those stone age war leaders are less than perfectly applicable to modern circumstances, but aspiring politicos need to keep those old instincts in mind.

What did you want in your SA war guy?  Courage, leadership, trustworthiness, initiative, pugnacity, vigor, celerity in judgment and action, decisiveness, and good judgment.  Conversely, you didn’t want cowardice, meekness,  passivity, lassitude, vacillation, or bad judgment.  Looking at the list it’s easy to see places where McCain scores well.  Obama is a listener and a consensus builder, and these can be mistaken for lack of initiative, leadership, and decisiveness.  Similarly his thoughtfulness and nuance.  

We all hate how the results of the 2004 Presidential election came to pass.

We are all working hard to make sure that result is not repeated in 2008.

I think I've found something cool that could help Democrats and progressives everywhere visualize what could be in 2008.

More after the jump.

We know there are lots of smart, creative visitors to this site every day.  And together, we are far smarter and more creative than any of us alone.  Best of all, we know that Actual, Real Live Obama Staffers come here and check out what's going on!  So, calling the Great Kossack Group-Mind!  Let's work together and try to come up with some great ideas for future Obama for President commercials.

Those who aren't quite ready to post an ad idea, please feel free to comment on why other people's ideas will or won't work, and to offer suggestions on how they could make them better.

Just to show how easy it is, I'll go first.

No one wants to keep the Republican out of The White House more than I do.  I support Obama and I will vote for him.  

McCain has won praise from the media for all of his bluster and tough talk on Russia.  These are the folks he refers to as "my base" and that have cozied up with the Senator for bbq at his private residence, so it's not surprising that they're eating up neocon John's act.
http://www.cnn.com/...

However, people that are looking objectively at the Georgia conflict are reaching a different conclusion.  Had we pursued the policies recommended by McCain in the past years regarding Russia, we would have forfeited most of the means we currently have at our disposal to put pressure on them.

Lately, again, in an attack that is hardly link-worthy, John McCain took Barack Obama to task for taking his presumptuous trip to Iraq... and for not visiting Iraq since, get this, January 2006! How stupid Obama must be, to mount a 50-state strategy in a year where, yes, there are 51 states. With a July 2006 population of 26,783,383 (and falling), I'm pretty sure the McCain camp is counting on Iraq's 40-50 electoral votes in November, even though Iraq's "Caliph" endorses our guy.

John McCain, it seems, is running for Emperor. And perhaps that's a fitting issue to address in this campaign, the first (to my knowledge) where neither candidate was born on mainland U.S. Two candidates from colonial reaches of empire strive to address its overextension. With PNAC's progenitors putting their tail between their legs and running, let's take a look at the election through colonial lenses, as you travel with me to the once-sovereign nation of There'sMoreland.