"In my face"; plus reports: ground game, COLO Springs, and MORE

In the bald face effort to change the tenor, tone and narrative of the race that by all accounts---including the Republican pundits---McCain is losing, Obama has responded in kind: "He can't say it to my face". On ABC NEWS last night with Charlie Gibson: Obama, last night, effectively dared McCain, (link to video) to bring up Ayers to his face!



In short Obama suggested that [the all powerful Maverick] McCain is a basically a coward, It appears Obama now is willing to invite a direct confrontation over Ayers since it would give him a chance to directly hit McCain with the charge that he's trying to distract from the economy with frivolous attacks. Further more it would on the national stage clearly expose the ultimate hypocricy where the Chicago Annenberg Challenge which Obama and Ayres served on the board is the same Anneberg family that just endorsed McCain as longtime Pennsylvania Republicans. Huffington Post reports that:

On Wednesday morning, John McCain's campaign released a list of 100 former ambassadors endorsing the GOP presidential nominee.

Second on the list, though her name is misspelled, is Leonore Annenberg, currently the president and chairman of the of the Annenberg Foundation...the name of the Chicago education board where Barack Obama and William Ayers sat in the room six times together...where As a former Republican representative in Illinois told NPR on Monday, smearing Obama for his board association with Ayers is "nonsensical."

I think the real metaphor is that Obama has stuffed McCain's craziness in avoiding what probably is the worst economic climate since when my father was wearing cloth diapers is stuffing McCain/Palin's shot in the face!





The Huffington Post also gives a detailed report of the revolutionary strategy and implementation of Obama's ground game building the largest and most powerful volunteer organization in modern politics. It is a powerful read for all of us to know we are involved in something more than merely a political campaign but revolution of sorts that will define the next generation of the 21st Century.

Inside the Obama campaign, almost without anyone noticing, an insurgent generation of organizers has built the Progressive movement a brand new and potentially durable people's organization, in a dozen states, rooted at the neighborhood level.

The "New Organizers" have succeeded in building what many netroots-oriented campaigners have been dreaming about for a decade. Other recent attempts have failed because they were either so "top-down" and/or poorly-managed that they choked volunteer leadership and enthusiasm; or because they were so dogmatically fixated on pure peer-to-peer or "bottom-up" organizing that they rejected basic management, accountability and planning. The architects and builders of the Obama field campaign, on the other hand, have undogmatically mixed timeless traditions and discipline of good organizing with new technologies of decentralization and self-organization.

Win or lose, "The New Organizers" have already transformed thousands of communities—and revolutionized the way organizing itself will be understood and practiced for at least the next generation....

That was followed up by a New Times OP ED Report about the strange and changing political scene here in the Red Zone others call Colorado Springs, CO.

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — I didn't hook up people to electronic monitoring devices, nothing to measure leg trickles and blood-sugar spikes in response to off-key talking points.

I had no magic maps, no demographic weighting formulas. I simply went to the heart of one of the fastest-growing, most Republican counties in the land — as red as rib-eye steak on the e-coli side of raw — and wandered aimlessly, like John McCain in Tuesday's debate.

Here in Colorado Springs — the Vatican of evangelical political power, home to the Air Force Academy and a community where optimism usually matches the sunrise glow at the base of Pikes Peak – you can see what will happen in less than a month.

My friends: it's not good for Senator McCain.

"As a small business owner, it's very hard to watch a lifetime of hard work and savings just wither away in the last two weeks," said Jan Martin, a native of this more-than-mile-high city, and a lifelong Republican. "The debate on Tuesday night has, if anything, bolstered my opinion."

So Jan Martin, who also serves on the city council, will cross party lines in less than a month and vote Barack Obama for president, she said. She's not leaving the Republican party – she's deserting the nominee.

Unfortunately all is not good news for Colorado as the NY Times has a news piece that includes our state in unlawfully purging voter rolls. This is beyond the reported declaration that 35,000 new registrants were deemed incomplete and ineligible, this includes sytematic purging of roles beyond death or moving rates.

Tens of thousands of eligible voters in at least six swing states have been removed from the rolls or have been blocked from registering in ways that appear to violate federal law, according to a review of state records and Social Security data by The New York Times...Still, because Democrats have been more aggressive at registering new voters this year, according to state election officials, any heightened screening of new applications may affect their party’s supporters disproportionately. The screening or trimming of voter registration lists in the six states: Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina--could also result in problems at the polls on Election Day: people who have been removed from the rolls are likely to show up only to be challenged by political party officials or election workers, resulting in confusion, long lines and heated tempers....

The six swing states seem to be in violation of federal law in two ways. Michigan and Colorado are removing voters from the rolls within 90 days of a federal election, which is not allowed except when voters die, notify the authorities that they have moved out of state, or have been declared unfit to vote....

In three states — Colorado, Louisiana and Michigan — the number of people purged from the election rolls since Aug. 1 far exceeds the number who may have died or relocated during that period.

States may be improperly removing voters who have moved within the state, election experts said, or who are considered inactive because they have failed to vote in two consecutive federal elections. For example, major voter registration drives have been held this year in Colorado, which has also had a significant population increase since the last presidential election, but the state has recorded a net loss of nearly 100,000 voters from its rolls since 2004...In Colorado, some 37,000 people were removed from the rolls in the three weeks after July 21. During that time, about 5,100 people moved out of the state and about 2,400 died, according to postal data and death records.

I am going to finish on a high note where Politico.com pens a revealing piece stating that the upcoming election is actually a result of an "economic tsunami" worse than 1992 or 1980 and in my book mirrors 1932 where the nation was subjected to similar Republican orchastrated laissez faire speculation policies.

Three weeks of historic economic upheaval has done more than just tilt a handful of once-reliably Republican states in Barack Obama’s direction. Democratic strategists are now optimistic that the ongoing crisis could lead to a landslide Obama victory.

Four large states McCain once seemed well-positioned to win—Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida—have in recent weeks shifted toward Obama. If Obama were to win those four states—a scenario that would represent a remarkable turn of events—he would likely surpass 350 electoral votes.

Under almost any feasible scenario, McCain cannot win the presidency if he loses any of those four states. And if Obama actually captured all four states, it would almost certainly signal a strong electoral tide that would likely sweep the Southwestern swing states—Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada—not to mention battlegrounds from New Hampshire to Iowa to Missouri....“Now it’s a whole different world,” Maslin said. “The economy is way beyond 1992. In 1980, it was Iran hostage crisis and the economy. I’ve never seen an issue take this kind of prominence.”

Gallup finds that 69 percent of Americans believe the economy is the most important issue facing the nation. The second most cited issue, the war in Iraq, is named by only 11 percent of voters.

Bill Clinton’s former pollster Doug Schoen calls this the “economic tsunami.”

And it’s this tsunami that has altered the electoral map in a way that Obama himself could not.

“The Obama campaign did a lot of important foundation work to expand the Democratic map. And I give them credit for that,” Maslin said. “But the real expansion of the map is coming from an outside event, namely the economy, and not the tactics of the Obama campaign.

“Obama has not changed the map,” Schoen said. The map has changed because, in light of the economic turmoil, “McCain has become an almost unacceptable alternative” to President Bush.

Only one in four Americans have a positive view of the president, according to Gallup, the lowest rating of Bush’s presidency. That is only one point above Richard Nixon’s floor, 24 percent—which he registered when disgrace forced the first presidential resignation—and just three points higher than the lowest public approval ever, which was notched by Harry Truman in 1952 during the Korean War.

Only 9 percent of Americans are “satisfied” with the direction of the United States, the lowest level since the question was first asked by the Gallup Poll in the late 1970s.