“Hello Governor Palin, this is Kent at U-Haul on Glacier Hwy. I’m calling to confirm your reservation of a 26′ Super Mover. Can you please call me back at this number if you’re still going to be needing that? Thank you, ma’am.”

Usually it’s just an anecdote, like Ronald Reagan’s apocryphal “welfare queen” who had “80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards” and drove a phat Cadillac thanks to her surfeit of unlawfully-obtained government dollars. Reagan deployed this phantom woman–who was really an amalgam of a handful of worst cases of welfare abuse–as an example of the typical welfare recipient and his justification for dismantling the social safety net in America.

I TiVo’d this third and last Presidential debate of the 2008 campaign since I knew I had to work late last night. But I was in my car listening to the showdown about twenty minutes in when I started hearing the invocation of “Joe the Plumber.” I thought at first that it was a generic citation, like “Joe Six-Pack.” Then it came up again and again. By the time I’d made the 19 miles from Tigard to the Interstate Bridge heading over to Vancouver, I’d heard “Joe the Plumber” cited no less than a half-dozen times.

By the time I made it out of my car and hauled my groceries into the apartment, it had passed curious and moved onto annoying. I finished a quick beer and a cigarette outside and rewound the TiVo, and came back to at least eight more questions about how Obama and McCain’s economic policies would affect Joe. It had been less than an hour since myself and the rest of America had heard tell of Joe, and it only took about ten minutes more, through the candidates’ closing statements and into the post-debate analysis, before this curiosity had become a craze and we’d officially entered the realm of the absurd.

I fell asleep with the TV on CNN and the entire night was a fever dream of men with crescent wrenches, pipe cutters, and lunch buckets sitting around a table during a Cabinet meeting as President Joe the Plumber urged the invasion of Brazil to claim their water resources and how formally encouraging his “If It’s Yellow, Keep It Mellow; If It’s Brown, Flush It Down” Wastewater Evacuation Policy could save Americans nearly $180 billion on their water bills every year.

The elite were the plumbers, and the rest of the world were worker bees that labored to keep them supplied with PVC tubing. I don’t remember exactly what I was doing in the dream, but I know I was wearing Carhartts.

I awoke to a world more profoundly retarded than the one I’d left behind just six hours earlier. Joe the Plumber had become a full-fledged phenomenon, with Joe the Plumber hoodies, boxers, and women’s spaghetti tanks all over the Web. Joe was on the television opining about Social Security, taxes, and getting government off our backs. He marveled at the attention and hoped aloud that maybe this newfound notoriety could open some doors that had forever been closed to him.

With an alacrity only possible in the Internet age, though, by the time I showered, hopped in the car, and turned on the radio, it was apparent that the Joe the Plumber mania had peaked sometime between when I was packing my lunch and flossing my teeth. Six blocks from my house, through the intersection I’d come from the other direction just twelve hours earlier when I was learning about Joe on the radio for the first time, it was clear that the Joe the Plumber backlash was on.  With a vengeance.

He isn’t properly registered to vote. He has a tax lien filed against him for unpaid property taxes. The business that he wants to buy doesn’t pull anywhere near $250,000 a year–his boss fixes toilets and leaky faucets, and operates his business out of a back room in his house. Joe made about $40,000 in 2006. His name and the name on his voter registration don’t match (just the kind of fraudulently-registered voter that Ohio Republicans are screaming to exclude from voting). And he’s not even a licensed plumber.

It’s Friday now, and Joe the Plumber is a distant memory, another relic of one of the most bizarre elections that most of us can remember, a fleeting distraction from a frenzied moment in time–and we’re still 18 days from the actual election.

This is just a slice of the bizarre time warp that passes for democracy in 2008. We’re going to witness a dozen or two more operas played out in the next two and a half weeks. Whoever is the protagonist onstage when the clock strikes November 4th will probably be the victor. Welcome to 21st century electoral politics, on truck-driver amphetamines.

Wait. What?

Or so the latest cries of Democratic Party-perpetrated “voter fraud” by its shadowy agents in that mysterious cabal they call “ACORN” would have you believe. It’s this week’s right-wing talking point: The Democrats are using ACORN to taint this election and pack the voter rolls with ineligible, serially registered, or out-and-out fraudulent voters. Images abound of scheming dishwater-drab old Jewish hippie women, shifty middle-aged white men with pony tails and Birkenstocks on their gray-wool stockinged feet, and cigar-smoking African-American men who talk like Samuel Jackson’s Ordell Robbie in Jackie Brown and use the office’s petty cash drawer to buy bottles of Hennessy–all of them conspiring together to send an army of criminals to every corner of the country to put the fix in for November 4. If, God help us, they succeed, then on November 5 it’s going to be all abortion-on-demand, the criminal prosecution of Christians, and fruit baskets at the border for every arriving illegal alien.

I suppose you could argue that desperate times require desperate measures. After all, you have to do something if your brother isn’t the Governor, or if you don’t have the Supreme Court in your party’s back pocket, or you don’t have a wealthy contributor who brags at party fundraisers that the upcoming election is a lock–and who also happens to be the nation’s largest producer of electronic voting machines. Or you have a friend in the Ohio Secretary of State who will make sure the wealthy white districts have plenty of voting machines and making the poor and ethnic urban districts fight over the remaining six.

Of course, using any of these circumstances to advocate ACORN misdeeds would require conceding that not only has ACORN as an organization committed misdeeds, but that the fraudulent efforts of some of their less-than-ethical low-level employees have actually put the coming election in the hands of a million-man army of phony and illegible voters. That would also require believing that one Mr. Mickey Mouse will be allowed to cast his vote in Florida, that Dallas Cowboys quarterback Tony Romo will show up to vote in Las Vegas, or that no one will notice if Cuyahoga County teenager Freddie Johnson votes under each of his 73 registrations.

A little background: ACORN, the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, was founded in 1970 by Wade Rathke and Gary Delgado. ACORN is, as it has been for much of its existence, an advocacy group for low- and middle-income community families and individuals, promoting health care, good wages, safe neighborhoods, and voter registration.

It’s the latter ACORN cause that has the right so exercised. The country is littered with lawsuits and even some criminal legal actions against ACORN for allegedly registering fictitious and dead voters. John McCain accuses them of “perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history and maybe destroying the fabric of democracy in our society.”

That’s a weighty charge against a few dozen people who don’t, at first glance, appear capable of or at least interested in bathing themselves. ACORN has in recent years hired individuals to hit the streets to register voters. It’s grueling work, and they generally do their due diligence to hire individuals who possess some scintilla of social and political conscience and are out there to do the right thing. But, as John McCain and Sarah Palin might say, their reward is in heaven, if it’s there at all. It certainly isn’t in their paycheck.

Democracy is thankless work, unless you’re Ted Stevens. The average salary of a high-powered ACORN manager is something in the neighborhood of $53,000. With that kind of obscene largesse and a credit score of about 680, you could buy a Kia Rio and taunt your peers with the rewards of your obscene ambition. You’re certainly not paying anything close to that to your entry-level underlings.

Have you seen those Maruchan Yakisoba Noodle trays they sell in WinCo for $0.98? Walk through any ACORN office at lunch and that’s what a lot of their organizers are eating. Those $3.50 a pack GPC cigarettes? That’s what at least a handful of their signature gatherers are working for

Often the recruiting for signature gatherers comes down to a simple two-item checklist: 1) Warm skin.  2) A pulse. ACORN has taken to, in years past, the controversial practice of offering their hires a bounty on each gathered voter registration card. With the avalanche of lawsuits in recent years, they look pretty moronic for the misdeeds of their help, who knew they could get two bucks or so for every name they could sign up.

On the other hand, these aren’t positions that are filled by a headhunter. Decry today’s work ethic as much as you want, the jobs that don’t even pay a Hamilton an hour generally don’t attract the highest caliber of workers. Ask anyone who’s had to manage people in the service-based economy of the last two or three decades and they’ll likely tell you that it’s, at best, a numbers game–plow through enough candidates and there will be at least one or two decent ones hearty enough to still be standing–and, at worst, a crap shoot–you can throw those dice again and still wind up with people you wouldn’t trust to preside over drying paint in your living room, much less your professional enterprise. If you can only afford to pay loser wages, you’re by and large going to attract…yes, exactly.

Think about that gas station/convenience store where you pick up your machine-blended cappuccino or 44-ounce Diet Pepsi every morning before you head into work. Did you notice that the young man at the cash register didn’t look like the young man who rang you up last week–and he didn’t look like the one the week before that? Maybe they didn’t like getting up at 5:30 AM and slogging their way across town for $6.55 an hour, or maybe the station owner fired them when he caught them sneaking hits off their pipe while they were supposed to be out back hosing out the mop bucket, or when he replayed the security camera and saw them stuffing nine giant frozen burritos in their backpack.

Do you stop buying your gas and soda there because the station owner hired a few thieves and morons? Probably not. And certainly no one is hauling him into court and charging him with a systemic attempt to justify raising your burrito prices. The truth is, for every two or three idiots or criminals he fires, there are one or two or three like Lou the pump jockey (I’m using an Oregon frame-of-reference–we’re the only state other than New Jersey that doesn’t allow self-serve gasoline) who have been there a year or more who are out there every time you come in for gas cleaning your windshield and giving you a friendly wave when you leave.

The ratio is probably a little better for an organization like ACORN, where, in addition to the layabout cheats that a tedious, low-paying job will often attract, they do get people of genuine ideals who would like to help elevate America’s traditionally-abysmal voter turnout and maybe in the process elevate a candidate or two who might be more interested in investing in jobs, infrastructure, and education than in tax breaks for oil companies and hoodie manufacturers who decide to relocate to Vietnam.

All of that aside, the other red herring that’s swimming through the slimy water is the charge that these fraudulent registrations are somehow putting democracy at risk. Well, for one thing, many states require that organizations like ACORN turn in all of their voter registration cards, even if they contain obviously disqualifying information. It doesn’t matter how many they catch in their own review process, every one of them has to be turned into the state elections authority for review. Second, not only has the 2008 election not happened yet, but “voter fraud”–where a voter deliberately shows up to a polling place to cast a ballot they are not legally eligible to cast–is one of those transgressions that pops up about as often as an Elvis postage stamp they accidentally printed with a mustache. In fact, the only case of voter fraud that comes to my mind is that of Ann Coulter.

What is of greater concern to “the fabric of democracy in our society” are the Republicans across the country pulling bundles of cash out of their war chest to challenge every voter registration that might be a potential Obama or down-ticket Democratic voter, hoping to tie up the process in red tape and leave the matter unresolved come election day If, in fact, their registrations are proven to be valid–when this all gets resolved by, say, December or January–then they can consider themselves legally registered and can vote without challenge when the next county bond levy comes up.

If ACORN is in the business of stealing elections, they really should be out of business, because they suck at it.

That’s when it works, of course. When it doesn’t–as is usually the case–it doesn’t. No one gives it another thought. At least they tried.

It’s when a team starts calling it on every play that the eyebrows go up.

It was sometime in September that the McCain-Palin team passed the point where they ran out of bullets and resorted to throwing their guns at the enemy, hoping to force a concussion or put out an eye. But every morning there’s that hardscrabble determination again when someone on the campaign or within the party manages to find something–an old J-316 folding knife covered with ossified cheese and sausage grease, a suspect smoke grenade pulled out of a pond months earlier–a in a field pack that everyone thought was empty weeks ago.

I’ve been remiss in weighing over these last few weeks, but it seems like too high a bar to clear. The McCain-Palin campaign is daily doing my work for me. The candidate comes out on the day that the flaming American financial infrastructure starts dropping like WTC Two and insists, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” He “suspends” his campaign–while his campaign staff continues to trample the hustings and spread ad dollars like they’re using a leaf blower–and attempts to fly triumphantly into Washington, D.C. to save the day, where he hasn’t cast a Senate vote in nearly six months, and is first told to please stay out of town and let the working lawmakers fix this mess, and then to see his would-be save-the-day arrival be answered with a scuttled bailout vote.

His running mate claims foreign policy experience because she can see Russia from her state–and the only place in the state where anyone can actually see the erstwhile Evil Empire is a far-flung village that time has largely forgotten and that she’s never visited. Katie Couric catches her dumbstruck like a Mom asking her 13-year-old daughter why she found three bottles of Mike’s Hard Lemonade in her underwear drawer, when she asks her, first, what regulatory decision she can name that her would-be boss supported, what Supreme Court decision she objected to besides Roe v. Wade, and–the one that’s stumped every genius who’s ever had to endure the pressure cooker of facing a MENSA panel–”what newspapers or magazines do you read?”

Granted, as he’s said that the economy “is not something I’ve understood as well as I should,” it’s not surprising he’d rather ask the country to pass him the salt and turn the dinner conversation to something else than discuss the worst collapse in the American economy since the days when a disproportionate amount of Americans were warming themselves over burning barrels. Still, he’s standing in the middle of a burning living room insisting that it needs a different color of drapes.

As the campaign continues to collapse in upon itself, they’ve taken another dive into the bag to see if there’s anything left that they can pull out. All they’ve been able to find are the tired, dusty remains of Reverend Wright and William Ayers. In the absence of any real policy or facts, they’re limping into crunch time with the last-gasp desperation of a reunited Molly Hatchett firing up “Flirting With Disaster” to keep most of their bored 126 fans from walking out of the Esther Dundas Memorial Amphitheater at the county fairgrounds.

Unfortunately, everyone who isn’t sticking around to catch a nipple-slip from Governor Palin has already left the building.

Even the man who tried to prosecute William Ayers in 1973 said recently that he’s “amazed and outraged” at McCain-Palin’s latest attempt to tie Obama with a man alleged to have helped hatch an ill-fated terrorist conspiracy when Obama was eight. Obama met him nearly forty years later, when Ayers and his wife held a coffee for Obama at their home, and they later served on a local antipoverty charity that met four times a year. This is what the McCain-Palin campaign is selling as “palling around with terrorists.” Next time you come to class bring a pencil with some lead in it.

We’ve got a long fourth-quarter to go and anything’s possible. But if Obama grabs another fumble and takes off down the sidelines, don’t be surprised if someone on the McCain sideline loses their nut and clocks him with a Gatorade bucket as he runs past.

Time and again during their first debate, Senator Obama was served one Quayle-Bentsen moment after another, and couldn’t bring himself to tee off on his opponent.

If McCain wanted to make the point that Obama would coddle our enemies, he was wrong on fact, which Obama did a fair job of refuting, but the Senator from Illinois didn’t do himself any favors by offering repeatedly “John is right in that….but.” One word, Senator Obama, and, for your own good, please memorize it: “Editing.” You conceded that your opponent was right no less than seven times, and everyone of those was already edited into a John McCain commercial before you received your congratulatory kiss from Michelle, and every single “but” and everything that followed is already riddled with shoeprints and being swept up from the cutting-room floor as we speak.

I can’t give many props to the way the Democrats fight–mostly because they won’t fight at all. This was Nancyball–and I mean “Nancy” both in the sissified pejorative and in the toothless leadership of House Speaker Pelosi.

God help them when they die if they happen to run into Lyndon Baines Johnson in the afterworld. He’ll hand them their asses before they know they’ve been torn from them. LBJ was the most vicious and unforgiving man who ever walked the halls of power of the United States government, as President, as Vice President, and no more so than when he was Senate Majority Leader. This was a man who knew how to win elections.

At least twice, John McCain brought up the issue of veteran’s affairs, and how he’s a friend of the American serviceman. That was a gift that Obama should have torn open like it was Christmas morning and he was nine. John McCain claiming to be a friend of the American serviceman is roughly akin to a chainsaw salesman claiming to be a friend of trees.

Never mind the G.I. Bill that he lobbied against and couldn’t even be bothered to show up to vote on. That passed the Senate 75-22, and the only other two no-shows were Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn, who had to attend a funeral, and Ted Kennedy, who was just diagnosed with a brain tumor. Even the 22 who voted no at least had the courage to show up and put themselves on the record.

McCain defended his opposition with the excuse that he preferred what he said was a much-better version of the bill being backed by the White House and having been sired by his friend, South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham.

Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA) gave him a D for his votes on veterans’ issues. I got a D in Geometry back in the day and on the basis of that alone I would never have had the temerity to sell myself as a friend to math.

By the way, Lindsey Graham got a D- from IAVA. Obama got a B+.

The Disabled American Veterans in 2007 found that McCain voted for veterans funding legislation barely 20 percent of the time. In 2006, he was one of only 13 Senators to vote against $450 million for veterans’ outpatient care and treatment, and told them to go pound it on $1.5 billion for veterans’ medical care. Suck it up, soldier. I lived in a cement broom closet for five years and all I needed when I got home was scotch and some Brazilian tail.

In 2005 and 2006, McCain voted against a proposal to rebuild the third-world infrastructure at many veterans’ hospitals (because it would have meant a small rollback in the capital gains’ tax cuts Bush granted to 0.2% of the richest Americans). What’s good for American business is good for America’s veterans. Ask anyone who manufactures yellow “Support Our Troop” magnets or “These colors don’t run” American flag-festooned t-shirts.

Incidentally, that same year (2005) McCain got another sub-F score (25 percent) from the DAV. Meanwhile, that liberal Muslim America-hater, Barack Obama, registered 92 percent on their scorecard. Do the Disabled American Veterans hate America? Probably not, but a good look at the records of Senators McCain and Graham, it isn’t like they wouldn’t have good reason.

I don’t want to have to tell Senator Obama how to run his campaign. I have a book coming out. There’s football. And I didn’t watch a single movie during the frenzy of the primaries and I’d really like to do a little catching up. And, not having children and with little chance of living past my 60th birthday, I don’t have a big dog in this fight.

But no real prizefighting fan wants to see an embarrassment. I was one of those millions of Americans who wanted to jump out of my skin and through the television in 1988 when Michael Dukakis gave his dispassionate, theoretical, professorial answer to Bernard Shaw’s question of whether Dukakis would favor the death penalty were his own wife raped and murdered. Obama didn’t embarrass himself to that extreme, but it’s his aged opponent who’s supposed to remember to put his teeth in before he steps up to the stage. Except for a few good bites, the Illinois Senator was all gums night.

So, brother, where art thou? It’s all well and good that you’re a gentleman and you want to keep this conversation civil, but let’s keep that nobility and high-mindedness to a talking points level. Your opponent has been the one flinging the most scat. You need to respond in kind, and poke him in the eyes just for good measure. Get elected first, and THEN you can elevate the discourse. As Paul Krugman noted in The New York Times just a few weeks ago, “Politics ain’t beanbag.” The whole “vanquished Democratic contender” thing has so jumped the shark. And they’re running out of chairs.

You’ll meet in Nashville. Again, I think the opposition has already established that this is a knife fight. In your best interests, Senator Obama, please bring a gun this time.

Say what you will about her art, but she is an artist, and she does it to great effect: John McCain really is a man older than his years who looks out of touch and, if his rhetoric in his shameless pursuit of the Presidency is any indication, actually might want to eat your young.

For the Democrats, this kind of unsolicited dissident art from a bomb-thrower in the rank-and-file doesn’t help in today’s hyper-reactive, image- and soundbite-manipulable media milieu. Everyone, whether the Democratic faithful or the Republicans who know in their heart that John McCain is the party’s worst choice for a nominee since…well…let’s just put it that Alf Landon and Bob Dole aren’t looking so bad right now.

It’s already an old story that John McCain has sold his soul to become President. But the question is: When does the electorate-at-large start recognizing him as a lunatic? Partisan politics aside, no objective observer can deny that the Arizona Senator long ago lost any pretense of fairness and balance. Obvious apologies to FOXNews, but even this heretofore-loyal choir has been looking at their shoes and awkwardly asking if there was maybe a different preacher they could sing to.

You know you’re failing Torpedo Politics 101 when Karl Rove and George Will suggest that you’re going too far. You also don’t help yourself when you come out on the day of the biggest economic hiccup in America in the last 79 years and insist, “the fundamentals of our economy are strong.” He may have been correct in that, as Thom Hartman pointed out on Air America, gold was experiencing record surges, which meant that someone still had money, even if it isn’t you or me or anyone on our street or within a five ZIP code-radius of us. But there’s politically tone-deaf, and there’s politically retarded, and with that dunderheaded, Pollyanna assessment of an American economy that was collapsing under the weight of its own debt, the McCain “Straight Talk Express” bus immediately turned yellow and shrank by 30 feet.

There was a time when politicians didn’t try to get away with the lies that McCain has since he began his Presidential campaign in earnest. That was a time before 24-hour news channels. Now, the news machine is like a rapid-fire paintball gun, and most viewers can barely assess the daze and stun of one shot, before the next one comes, and so on and so on and so on, in tommy-gun succession.

Senator McCain has taken the art of the lie to breathtaking new levels, and for writers looking for a new angle, every day gets more and more tired when all they can find for the big story is that he’s done it again. Different day, different topic, but the same brazen dishonesty.

This is the nadir of cynical politicking: He who lies loud enough wins. Just keep your opponent on the defensive. There’s an old saw about LBJ that, during one of his Congressional races, he suggested leaking a story that a rural opponent had had intimate encounters with the livestock on his farm. Aides expressed incredulity that anyone would believe that his opponent had inappropriate liaisons with his animals, but LBJ insisted that that was his point: “Exactly! Make the son-of-a-bitch deny it!”

John McCain’s marble bag has been empty for at least a year now, but he’s been able to raise enough money to hire some top-shelf puppetmasters to commandeer the now-flaccid vessel that once housed his body and soul, and make him dance for the ones he brung. So far, he’s doing just what they’ve asked of him.

By the same token, politics is an even tighter–and weirder–sine curve than entertainment, and everyone loves an underdog. Barack Obama came back from a post-primary lull and ruled the mid-summer, with a whirlwind tour of Europe and the Middle East, and was back to his Spring Messiah form just three weeks ago, packing Invesco Field in Denver with the biggest party nominating speech the country has ever seen.

But then came Sarah. The GOP charged back and they’ve owned the news cycle for the last 19 days. And if we’d like to tap the rock star/stadium metaphor again, suddenly Obama just as well have been Grand Funk Railroad selling out Shea Stadium in 71 hours in 1971–yes, you outsold the Beatles, but one of you made it to Cleveland, and the other today languishes in the 75 cent used LP rack at Salvation Army.

What a difference a few weeks and an ADD public makes, though. John McCain is now being lambasted as a brazen and shameless liar, the Sarah Palin dolls are about fifteen minutes from being stacked up by the crate outside Tuesday Mornings across America, and Barack Obama is now being touted as a would-be Comeback Kid.

Politics is a perverted theater on a par with any dark, sticky auditorium that ever showed a John Holmes film. And 2008 is as unseemly as it’s ever been.

It’s practically an inevitability in an age where information (and misinformation) pummels the American awareness there’s going to be some sensory disorientation among the soft and undecided. It’s like one of those six or seven 4th of July fireworks accidents we see on CNN every year. After the adrenaline rush of the assault, the first thought is, “Who do I blame?” You feel assaulted and reactive, it’s hard to see clearly from the smoke and the sting of the point-blank pyrotechnic discharge, and your ears are ringing like a test pattern. Even though your cooler head would recognize that this was a tragic accident, all it takes is for one person to point out another and shout, “It was his fault!”

Hopefully you can get out of harm’s way and out of range of the violent, uncontrolled explosions, and get a little perspective.

Assuming, of course, you’re not one of the unlucky few whose interest perishes in the tragedy, and you spend Election Day on the sofa with an armload of beers and a greasy bag from Carl’s, Jr., watching NCIS reruns instead of investing with your ballot in the future of your country.

Barack Obama isn’t going to be the reborn underdog for long. The American public being as captivated by shiny objects as they are, another theme will emerge from the lab of the wild-eyed Republican alchemists, and then it will be the Dems’ turn to whip up a captivating brew that can seize the momentum and manipulate it to their advantage until election day. It’s no surprise that the Republicans will play the terror card, but the Democrats have plenty of fright they can peddle. It’s going to be a six-week game of Musical Scares, and it’s going to be all about who is sitting in that lucky seat come daybreak on November 5.

In the meantime, it’s going to be a whiplash of charges and countercharges, of exaggerations, outright lies, and real concerns that will probably be lost among the cacophony and get no traction at all. With the proliferation of daily polling, the numbers will be all over the place.

Then there’s the economic Chernobyl to add a little more drama to an already dramatic race. In the end, the only October Surprise will be if any of us can afford to put gas in our cars to get to our polling place.

Sure enough, Barack Obama came out with all guns blazing today, starting with a scathing ad that opened with a nostalgic font for the year “1982″ against a backdrop of a disco ball (okay, they were about three years off on that one, but that’s nitpicking), followed by images of a woman speaking on a cordless phone the size of a Kleenex box and a man fumbling with an archaic computer, and a 46-year-old Representative John McCain (R-AZ) freshly inaugurated into the United States Congress, with a bad comb-over and already looking very old–certainly much older than the currently 46-year-old Senator Barack Obama–pounding on his desk and seemingly telling a nation of children to get off his lawn.

Air America’s Tom Hartman has relentlessly assailed the Democratic Party for their incapability at stagecraft, and he’s been right, but this was a visual thumping. The GOP nominee looked like he was produced from a newsreel archive of bald, frothing Mississippi Senator Theodore Bilbo railing against the Negro menace.

And it didn’t end there. Another ad released today showed a litany of McCain stump promises, mostly touting his promise to liberate Washington from the choking influence of lobbyists–and a citation with every image of the high-powered lobbyists infesting the McCain-Palin campaign like cockroaches.

Someone said recently that Barack Obama won’t shrink because he’s from Chicago, and as such he isn’t afraid to bring a gun to a knife fight. More to the point, he’s from Chicago, and as the ghosts of Richard Daley and Joe Kennedy would surely testify, they know a thing or two about winning elections in Chicago.

Not to suggest that Obama might be dispatching his aides to get the ballots of the deceased and incarcerated to the ballot boxes, but he probably knows how to bring a little street to the fight if the situation requires it.

By any objective measure, John McCain and his team are in the process of waging one of the most vicious and nakedly dishonest campaigns in modern memory. It was clear years ago that he sold his soul with that first George Bush hug–after the man did everything to destroy him but send Lorena Bobbit to his bedroom with a kitchen knife–but his craven ambition has only become clear the last several months, and there isn’t a morsel of his soul that he won’t sell–if he hasn’t already done so–to be able to put “1600 Pennsylvania Avenue” on that Post Office change-of-address card.

One of McCain’s ongoing lines about Obama has been, “He’d rather win an election than win a war.” Obama’s brain trust finally stepped up and did what they were paid for today and proffered a retort for Obama about McCain: “He’d rather lose his integrity than lose an election.” Wham.

No one wants to see the election go down the road of Roger Ailes, Lee Atwater, and Willie Horton, but Team McCain has made this an uglier war than Karl Rove, Donald Segretti, and the ’88 Bush team ever waged, and, just as a matter of dignity, Democrats should hand in their Man Cards if they let themselves endure another unanswered clobbering.

(A funny thing, actually: After I wrote that last sentence, out of curiosity I ran a Google search to see if Donald Segretti was still alive. Segretti worked for Richard Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President [more popularly known by its acronym "CREEP"], and is the acknowledged father of the practice of naked political sabotage and dirty tricks known as “ratfucking.” Segretti was responsible for the infamous “Canuck Letter” sent to the Manchester Union-Leader alleging that presumptive 1972 Democratic favorite, Senator Edmund Muskie, slurred American French-Canadians, and by Muskie’s response managed to see him reduced to a weeping, emasculated disgrace, effectively ending his candidacy. Segretti also fired a torpedo at another Democratic contender, Washington Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson with a rumor [generated by a letter written on Senator Muskie's letterhead] that Jackson sired an illegitimate child with a teenager. He knows a thing or two about filthy campaigning, which is why I mentioned him. Also, in the 1972 Nixon campaign, one of his protégés was none other than an ambitious young ratfucker by the name of Karl Rove. In any case, in checking on the current mortal status of Mr. Segretti, I learned that, not only is he still alive, but the most recent entry on his resume was Orange County co-chair for the 2000 Presidential campaign of…. John McCain.)

Unless he wants to enter his 50s working the Michael Dukakis professorial circuit at Loyola Marymount and UCLA, he needs to leave his decency in a neatly folded pile and dive headlong into the mud with the man who flung first. It won’t be pretty but, even though most who have witnessed this country’s trajectory over the last eight years would argue that Obama has a more sensible campaign platform, recent history ensured long ago that this wasn’t going to be a campaign about ideas. So, if you recoil at the sight of blood and the smell of feces, keep the channel on WE and we’ll talk again after November 4.

Apparently they didn’t set it low enough.

No one expected anything of tonight’s Charlie Gibson interview of Governor Palin on ABC, but even before the world got a chance to see it, headlines were already leaking out indicating a performance that fell somewhat short of Margaret Thatcher and looked at times eerily like Dan Quayle knocked around one too many times and with something to prove.

I’ll be watching tonight when I get home, but every time I pulled up my browser at work there was a new blunder trumpeted in large-point type. She claimed that she would “never presume to know God’s will.” Unfortunately, not once, but twice in a speech this year she urged the graduating class of seniors at the Wasilla Assembly of God, to pray “that there is a plan (in Iraq and Afghanistan) and that that plan is God’s will.” As long as her audience was at it, they should also pray for God to throw a little gravy Alaska’s way and see that their $30 billion gas pipeline be completed. “I think God’s will has to be done in unifying people and companies to get that gas line built, so pray for that,” she said.

The prayer for the soldiers was standard, government-issue political oratory, but exhorting the kids to pray for the gas pipeline because it’s allegedly “God’s will” was bringing her faith to the realm of the comforts of the mortal, and sending the implicit message to the graduating class of 2008 that you could also petition God for a new Ford F350 or perfect 74 degree weather on your birthday.

She may have decided, though, that it would have been unseemly to pray that it was God’s will that her state trooper ex-brother-in-law, Mike Wooten, die in a hunting accident.

She didn’t fare well when Gibson asked her whether she supported the Bush Doctrine, which the President enunciated in his September 2002 National Security Strategy, stating, “While the United States will constantly strive to enlist the support of the international community, we will not hesitate to act alone, if necessary, to exercise our right of self defense by acting preemptively against such terrorists, to prevent them from doing harm against our people and our country.”

The Governor drew a Homer Simpson stare at first, before buying herself some time with the national television interview equivalent of “Can you please use that in a sentence?” She apparently thought that Gibson had meant “doctrine,” with the small “d” as she launched into a generalized view of the President’s approach to foreign policy that didn’t mention the core element of Bush’s claimed right to preemption.”

Gibson finally had to explain precisely what the Bush Doctrine was, and asked her specifically if she agreed with it. She stopped short of agreeing outright, but insisted that if there were strong enough intelligence that we were in danger, then we had the right to defend ourselves. Hardly an unequivocal yes, but at least he finally brought her around to the crux of his original question.

What was a little more concerning was her response to Gibson’s line of inquiry about what made her a Russian expert. She cited John & Cindy McCain’s flaccid claim that she was better versed to understand the slightly-less-evil-than-it-used-to-be empire because she can see them in their parkas across the Bering Strait. When Gibson asked her if the U.S. would have to go to war with Russia if they invaded Georgia again, she shrugged and essentially posited that we’ve got to do what we’ve got to do. “We’ve got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable,” she told Gibson.

Well, I’m all for it. After all, we have to do something with this military of ours. We can’t just have them sitting around doing nothing and getting paid for it.

This would all be very amusing if this were just a theoretical election or something out of Michael Moore’s Canadian Bacon 2, but this is real, and someone’s going to be President on January 20, 2009. John McCain isn’t exactly bursting with vitality and no one in international betting circles is taking the over on how long his position as President will be something other than prone. There’s a very real possibility that before next September rolls around, Governor Palin could not only be picking out White House drapes, but Supreme Court Justices. Regardless of your politics, this should concern you. Abject terror knows no political party.

We should all hope that this is a tipping point and that otherwise reasonable adults who have temporarily taken leave of their senses will run from the McCain-Palin ticket as if it had a chainsaw and a leather death mask. After all, the best time to get buyer’s remorse is before you’ve laid down your credit card.

Yet here we are. The polls are tied or show Senator John McCain slightly ahead, with a 20-point shift to McCain-Palin among white women (an apparent triumph for what many, including me, said was the naked cynicism of the choice–it’s like appointing Britney Spears as President of NOW). Barack Obama’s blockbuster nomination speech–not even two weeks old–is as vaguely recalled in the American Consciousness as Hello, Larry and my liberal nephews are gushing through their erections about the MILF who just nabbed the GOP VP nomination.

These are dark days in the Obama-Biden campaign. The Illinois wunderkind is apprehending with every passing news cycle that good looks, rock-star charisma, legions of fawning admirers, and $1.75 in your pocket will get you a seat on the #73 crosstown bus, and nothing more. Once again, the Republican Spin Machine that started with Richard Nixon and his demonic Sancho Panza, Pat Buchanan, and their knuckle man, Spiro Agnew, started with their Southern Strategy in 1968. You read about the Nigerian email deception, and you can’t imagine that in 2008 someone would still fall for it, but people at their core always want to get rich, and once again, the Republicans are in the process of getting the American people to give up their bank account number.

Barack Obama, meanwhile, looks like the man who gave $10 to the desperate wretch begging to buy a sandwich to feed his pregnant wife, and then is crestfallen to see him using his $10 to buy a pack of cigarettes and two 40s of Mickey’s.

Indeed, by the massive and adoring crowds alone that he’s drawn along the trail, he’s understandably incredulous that he isn’t addressing his throngs with one boot on John McCain’s next and a lead in the polls that couldn’t be any bigger if he were running against a surviving Manson Family member.

The Senator appeared on Countdown With Keith Olbermann tonight, and looked utterly deflated. He’s clearly been trying to find some anger out on the stump over the last few days, but he wasn’t finding it on Countdown. If it were a halftime speech, the players would already be convinced they lost and be texting their weed dealers for a hookup after the game.

This isn’t how we get international airports named after us, Senator.

From a strategic standpoint, it’s probably better for the Obama campaign that this happens now, if it has to happen at all. He has time to recalibrate, and there’s still plenty of time for the bewildering sheen to wear off the McCain-Palin ticket, especially with the never-ending avalanche of new Palin revelations that are ruling the headlines and news shows daily. Unless, of course, by mere dint of its overwhelming nature, no one has time to focus on any singular transgression before it’s supplanted by a new outrage in the next morning’s news cycle.

And the other, darker possibility is that people will continue to not care. As H.L. Mencken said, “Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” Americans have done dumber things than elect a McCain-Palin ticket. Nothing comes immediately to mind, but I’m almost certain they have.