It’s only February, but the 2010 elections are heating up fast…

In fact, ROTI has already chosen its favorite candidate of the upcoming election cycle. It’s Carly Fiorina, a California Republican who hopes to challenge longtime incumbent Senator Barbara Boxer in November. Fiorina may not be the most wise or deserving candidate out there, but she has one thing going for her that I personally find irresistible…a knack for enraging her opponents, entertaining onlookers, and setting fire to everything she touches.

What’s not to love?

Carly Fiorina first made headlines as the extraordinarily high-profile CEO of HP, and during her stint at the head of the electronics giant, she managed to turn the company’s most devoted loyalists into her mortal enemies, destroy HP’s legendary corporate culture, and ram through a massive merger that went awry. But no worries, because she scored a lucrative golden parachute!

She then became the high-profile economic spokesman for John McCain, propounding the economic ideas that carried him to victory in 2008. Oh whoops, actually flip that and reverse it. Her straw-grasping defenses of Sarah Palin were so effective, they ultimately led to the campaign dumping her altogether.

Now Carly Fiorina is running for Senate, despite the fact that she has skipped most every election she has been eligible to vote in during her lifetime. It hasn’t taken her long to electrify the Republican primary with an unbelievably stupid website and an instantly-classic viral campaign video. This lady is awesome!

One thing that even her mortal enemies have to give Carly Fiorina credit for is that she truly was a trailblazer in the world of business — one of the first women to become a power player in corporate culture.

After the former Cara Carleton Sneed (wouldn’t C.C. Sneed have made for an amazing political name?) graduated from Stanford in 1976, she worked as a secretary, assistant and temp at a number of corporations, including HP. After she joined AT&T in the early 80s, she worked her way up the corporate ladder, taking a jackhammer to the old glass ceiling and playing a critical role in AT&T’s spinoff from Lucent.

By the turn of the century, Carly Fiorina was considered one of the world’s foremost businesswomen. That’s when HP tapped her to lead the company into the new millennium. Unfortunately, what HP found out is that legendary status as a gender trailblazer does not necessarily entail the possession of top-notch corporate skills, especially when taking over a company as a complete outsider.

Fiorina’s main problem was that she busted into HP with guns blazing, hell-bent on transforming a company that had prospered for years through the “HP Way” established by its founders, Bill Hewlett and David Packard. Long before Apple Computer, Hewlett-Packard was the original tech company started in a suburban garage, and it grew into a megacorporation by obeying the following maxims:

1. We have trust and respect for individuals.
2. We focus on a high level of achievement and contribution.
3. We conduct our business with uncompromising integrity.
4. We achieve our common objectives through teamwork.
5. We encourage flexibility and innovation.

As an informative article called “10 Reasons People Hate Carly Fiorina” on the site Business Pundit explains, Fiorina bombed at HP because she completely failed to respect any of these principles.

After the tech bubble burst, Fiorina started swinging the axe, canning 18,000 employees. Meanwhile, she was an outspoken proponent of globalizing the workforce (ie. outsourcing), and didn’t hesitate to buy herself a corporate jet so she could make her many, many speaking engagements. HP employees asked themselves, “We should trust her…why?”

Fiorina implemented a top-down management structure, shattering the collaborative processes that had served HP well for so long. While she was off launching new marketing initiatives with Gwen Stefani, her hand-picked cronies bossed around the department heads that had long been given latitude to run their own shops. Instead of pushing for innovation, she relied on market dogma and marketing platitudes. HP could have been the company to design the iPod or otherwise revolutionize the tech industry, but instead it simply milked its printer-ink profit center and hyped up its CEO.

Perhaps most insidiously, Fiorina pushed the company to crush leaks at all costs, initiating a program that ended up violating a number of federal laws, including wiretapping and “pretexting.” So much for Hewlett and Packard’s “uncompromising integrity.”

The HP Way was meaningless to Fiorina, who makes a point of trashing it to this day. In her world, the genius of a marketing executive far outweighs the technical chops of an engineer. That’s why some have called her the “Anti-Steve Jobs,” by unfavorable comparison to the brilliant engineer-marketer who has driven innovation AND business success everywhere he’s gone.

All this explains why when Fiorina made a push to acquire Compaq, one of HP’s main competitors in the personal computer market, the move was fiercely opposed by many shareholders and employees, leading to a massive public showdown that Fiorina barely managed to win. The deal led to some short-term hemorrhaging and ultimately to Fiorina’s dismissal.

While the purchase of a deflated Compaq ultimately proved to be a decent move on Fiorina’s part, it was nevertheless the impetus for her ouster. Fiorina had so utterly failed to lead HP, and had burned so many bridges along the way, that the company’s board and employees simply did not trust her anymore. Her willingness to continually shake up HP, ostensibly for her own glorification, proved too much for the company to handle. They sent her packing with a $20 million severance package and closed the book on the disastrous Fiorina Era.

Portfolio named her one of the Worst American CEOs of All Time. So naturally, her next move was to join political life.

Here’s Carly with her homeboy Johnny Mac. Ironically for someone with a reputation as a job-slasher and outsourcer, Fiorina carried the economic banner for McCain with an emphasis on job creation. But during the summer of 2008, McCain was still preaching that the US economy was basically sound and that the only real threat lay in an Obama victory. At the time, he clearly didn’t realize what a liability Carly Fiorina was to the campaign.

He found out soon enough, when Fiorina mentioned that Sarah Palin didn’t have the expertise required to run an American corporation, and then by way of clarifying her remarks, stated that NONE of the presidential or vice-presidential candidates had the chops to be a CEO, including McCain! Hilariously, all this occurred in the context of Fiorina’s attempt to defend Palin from “sexist” attacks.

The fact that what Fiorina said was pretty much the truth (and besides, the government is NOT like a corporation, no matter how many candidates with private-sector careers may claim that it is) didn’t keep the McCain campaign from flipping out in rage at Fiorina’s loose talk. She was quickly shoved off of the stump and not heard from again.

As we all know, McCain went down to a huge defeat, thanks largely to his tone-deafness on economic matters.

Another brilliant success story from the life of Carly Fiorina!

For the small band of Fiorina-watchers out there (I’ve personally been entranced by her incompetence since 2001), the prospect of her challenging Babs Boxer in 2010 was electrifying.

She has not disappointed thus far, either, launching a political campaign that has caused jaws to drop and eyes to roll.

It all began with the preview/launch of her absurd campaign website, preserved and savaged by this YouTube video:

Carlyfornia Dreamin’?! It wouldn’t take a lot of effort to work up some song parody lyrics comparing her horrible website to poop and deriding it as “gay,” but that would be an unforgivable insult to the color brown and gay people — oh and by the way, Fiorina is a big fan of sexual orientation bigotry, being a staunch supporter of Proposition 8.

The LA Times busted her for skipping dozens of elections throughout her time as a California resident, and she gave some lame excuse about not feeling “connected” to politicians. The CA Democrats were only too eager to paint her as a corporate fat-cat and failed CEO, while her Republican opponents blasted her as a Juanita-come-lately in search of another powerful perch from which to preen.

But Carly’s no dope. She recently retook the offensive with a political ad so amazing, it’s gone massively viral and entranced even the most disinterested of political watchers.

Behold, the now-legendary Demon Sheep Spot!

When it comes to negative political advertising, it simply does not get better than this.

This ad has it all — intellectual dishonesty regarding government spending, comparison of the opponent to swine, amazingly damning voiceover guy, weird acronyms, and the elusive “WTF” factor. (This could only be the work of the weird and wonderful Fred Davis, who also created the Obama Celebrity spot and the King Roy ad.)

No wonder the “FCINO” ad has captivated the attention of even disinterested political watchers. I’m obliged to give a hat tip to ROTI contributor C. Dave, who first noticed this amazing spot, but since then I’ve seen it shared on Facebook, Twitter and Google Reader. It really is a masterpiece.

This version is amazing:

Then there’s this amusing Twitter page that purports to be from the Demon Sheep himself:

Carly Fiorina has done it again — taken an otherwise boring, pedestrian moment and transformed it into something combative, dramatic, and extraordinary.

As far as ROTI is concerned, she makes a superb candidate for office. If she finds a way to get elected, she’ll only continue her record of spectacular disasters and high-profile blunders. Yes, this will be unfortunate for the people of California, but think of the material she’ll bestow on our little corner of the Internets!

I guess she’s not the only one who’s “Carlyfornia dreamin’.”

After Chris, Jonathan Horn, and I learned about the president’s $700-billion-bailout proposal and drafted the remarks announcing it to a stunned nation, Ed said the president wanted to see us in the Oval Office. The president looked relaxed and was sitting behind the Resolute desk. He felt he’d made the major decision that everyone had been asking for. That always seemed to relax him. He liked being decisive. Excuse me, boldly decisive. The president seemed to be thinking of his memoirs. “This might go in as a big decision,” he mused.

“Definitely, Mr. President,” someone else observed. “This is a large decision.”

The president asked his secretary, Karen, to bring him the Rose Garden remarks he’d just delivered that day, September 19, announcing his action plan. He got slightly exasperated when she was delayed in printing them out. When he finally got them, he put his half-glasses on and looked at them. “See, this was fine today,” he said. “But we got to make this understandable for the average cat.” He proposed an outline for another speech that talked about the situation our economy was in, how we’d gotten here, and how the administration’s plan was a solution.

“This is the last bullet we have,” the president said at one point, referring to the bailout. “If this doesn’t work…” He shook his head, and his voice trailed off. That wasn’t good enough for me. If this doesn’t work, then what? We’re done? America is over? I looked around at everyone else. What does that mean?

Just when you thought the flood of GWB Administration tell-alls had slowed to a trickle, one last gem comes rolling down the drainpipe.

It’s the work of Matt Latimer, who came to the White House as an ambitious young movement conservative, only to suffer severe disillusionment as he watched the Bush posse fumble helplessly with an economy sliding into ruin.

He’s written a piece called “Me Talk Presidential Some Day” for GQ, and it is bonafide.

The first inkling that Latimer is about to lower the boom on GWB comes when he describes how his dream job turned into a surreal sideshow:

In 2007 I finally made it to the Bush White House as a presidential speechwriter. But it was not at all what I envisioned. It was less like Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing and more like The Office.

After watching Karl Rove’s bizarre farewell to White House staffers and hearing the president dismiss the conservative movement I believed in (“I know it sounds arrogant to say,” he told me, “but I redefined the Republican Party”), I thought I could muddle through till the end.

Washington might not have been the city I had dreamed of, but I figured things couldn’t get much worse.

The job mostly consisted of penning “legacy speeches,” touting the accomplishments of the administration in its final days. They’d plan to boast about how “the fundamentals of the economy are strong,” but after a while it became patently obvious that it wasn’t the case.

Pretty soon, Latimer found himself in a full-on crisis situation, as the White House tried to lead the country out of a disaster that it had helped precipitate with its happy-go-lucky economic message.

It didn’t help things that the GOP presidential nominee, John McCain, was trying to thread the needle between sticking close to the President to fire up the base and distancing himself from the President to attract moderate voters.

And then there was his brilliant idea to “suspend the campaign” when the economic poo really hit the fan. That did NOT go over well at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave:

Ed and the president decided to give a prime-time address to the nation, and Vice President Cheney was sent to the Hill to argue for our bill (a bill he may or may not have believed in) and was apparently hammered by House Republicans. There were reports that only four Republicans out of nearly 200 supported the plan. From what I was starting to glean about the whole scatterbrained operation, four seemed like too many. Hours before the president was to speak to the country, Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign informed Josh Bolten that McCain was going to phone the president and urge him to call off the address and instead hold an emergency economic summit in Washington. If the president did speak that night, the McCain campaign didn’t want him to outline any specific proposal.

Of course, this threw the proverbial monkey wrench into our plans—and at the eleventh hour. I overheard the president call McCain’s plan “a stunt.” Dana Perino said the negotiations were nearly over, and suddenly he was going to swoop in and muck things up?

The president’s political adviser, Barry Jackson, was blunt, calling McCain a “stupid prick.”

[...]

When the president came into the Family Theater to rehearse the speech in front of a teleprompter, he didn’t like the idea of just talking about principles. It sounded like the administration was backing away from its own plan (which it was).

“We can’t even defend our own proposal?” the president asked. “Why did we propose it, then?” This was not bold decision making. There were about a dozen people gathered in the theater to watch him rehearse, and all of us remained silent as the president looked at us for an answer.

The president walked over to sip some water from one of the bottles on the table near his lectern. “This speech is weak,” he said. He looked at me and Chris. “Frankly, I’m surprised, to be honest with you.”

There was more silence.

“Too late to cancel the speech?” the president asked into the air. He was joking…I think. Finally, Ed (who hadn’t exactly rushed to jump into the line of fire) explained that we had to make this change to the address because the proposal the president liked might not end up being the one he had to agree to.

“Then why the hell did I support it if I didn’t believe it would pass?” he snapped. There was yet another uncomfortable silence.

The most brutal part of the tale comes when Bush realizes that his conception of the bailout plan is totally wrong, and it’s not the sweet deal for America that he’d tried to believe it was.

Try explaining THAT to the average cat.

Finally, the president directed us to try to put elements of his proposal back into the text. He wanted to explain what he was seeking and to defend it. He especially wanted Americans to know that his plan would likely see a return on the taxpayers’ investment. Under his proposal, he said, the federal government would buy troubled mortgages on the cheap and then resell them at a higher price when the market for them stabilized.

“We’re buying low and selling high,” he kept saying.

The problem was that his proposal didn’t work like that. One of the president’s staff members anxiously pulled a few of us aside. “The president is misunderstanding this proposal,” he warned. “He has the wrong idea in his head.” As it turned out, the plan wasn’t to buy low and sell high. In some cases, in fact, Secretary Paulson wanted to pay more than the securities were likely worth in order to put more money into the markets as soon as possible. This was not how the president’s proposal had been advertised to the public or the Congress. It wasn’t that the president didn’t understand what his administration wanted to do. It was that the treasury secretary didn’t seem to know, changed his mind, had misled the president, or some combination of the three.

[...]

After finally getting the speech draft turned around and sent back to the teleprompter technicians, we trudged back to the Family Theater, where the president rehearsed. In the theater, the president was clearly confused about how the government would buy these securities. He repeated his belief that the government was going to “buy low and sell high,” and he still didn’t understand why we hadn’t put that into the speech like he’d asked us to. When it was explained to him that his concept of the bailout proposal wasn’t correct, the president was momentarily speechless. He threw up his hands in frustration.

“Why did I sign on to this proposal if I don’t understand what it does?” he asked.

The president was clearly frustrated with what was going on, but there was little he could do at this late hour. He went up to take a nap, saying he was beat. He looked it. I’d never seen him more exhausted. His hair was out of place and shaggy. His face looked drained and pale. Even more distressing, he was wearing Crocs. As I looked at him I thought to myself, how many more crises can one guy take?

Probably the juiciest delights from Wareham’s account pertain to GWB’s takes on the 2008 presidential candidates. They were universally negative.

After all, GWB felt that he had personally transformed conservatism, and how could any of those chumps fill his shoes?

John McCain, the temperamental media darling, had spent most of the past eight years running against the Republican Party and the president—Republicans on Capitol Hill and at the White House hated him. Choosing John McCain as our standard-bearer would be the height of self-delusion. It would be like putting Camilla Parker Bowles in charge of the Princess Diana Foundation.

As it turned out, I was the one who was deluded. The people I worked with in the White House were the most loyal of the Bush loyalists. Dana Perino was so sensitive to criticism of Bush that she once said she couldn’t watch the Democratic convention because it would be “too mean” to the president. Yet I watched them embrace McCain enthusiastically—backing a guy who’d worked so hard to undermine them. It was a cynical bargain.

The president, like me, didn’t seem to be in love with any of the available options. He always believed Hillary Clinton would be the Democratic nominee. “Wait till her fat keister is sitting at this desk,” he once said (except he didn’t say “keister”).

He didn’t think much of Barack Obama. After one of Obama’s blistering speeches against the administration, the president had a very human reaction: He was ticked off. He came in one day to rehearse a speech, fuming. “This is a dangerous world,” he said for no apparent reason, “and this cat isn’t remotely qualified to handle it. This guy has no clue, I promise you.”

He wound himself up even more. “You think I wasn’t qualified?” he said to no one in particular. “I was qualified.”

[...]

Bush seemed to feel considerable unease with the choice of McCain as well. I think he liked Romney best. (The rumor was that so did Karl Rove.) My guess was the president hadn’t so easily forgotten the endless slights he’d suffered, but there was little he could do. To him, McCain’s defeat would be a repudiation of the Bush administration, so McCain had to win. The president, who had quite a good political mind, was clearly not impressed with the McCain operation.

I was once in the Oval Office when the president was told a campaign event in Phoenix he was to attend with McCain suddenly had to be closed to the press. The president didn’t understand why when the whole purpose of holding the event had been to show Bush and McCain together so the press would stop asking why the two wouldn’t be seen together. If the event was closed to the press, the whole thing didn’t make sense.

“If he doesn’t want me to go, fine,” the president said. “I’ve got better things to do.”

Eventually, someone informed the president that the reason the event was closed was that McCain was having trouble getting a crowd. Bush was incredulous—and to the point. “He can’t get 500 people to show up for an event in his hometown?” he asked. No one said anything, and we went on to another topic. But the president couldn’t let the matter drop. “He couldn’t get 500 people? I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford.” He shook his head. “This is a five-spiral crash, boys.”

We tried to move on to something else. But the president wouldn’t let go. He was stuck on the Phoenix event. At one point, he looked off into space and said to no one in particular, “What is this—a cruel hoax?”

Chris and I were tickled by that comment. For weeks, we would look for ways to use it. “They are out of Diet Pepsis at the mess. What is this, a cruel hoax?” I went to dinner with a friend. “They don’t have cheeseburgers?” I said, looking at the menu. “What is this, a cruel hoax?”

Bush’s take on Palin was equally amusing. We’re so used to thinking of the former POTUS as a dunce, so it’s always great when a moment of pure clarity pokes through.

Even the normally levelheaded Raul Yanes, the president’s staff secretary, was overtaken by Palin mania. He’d been slightly annoyed with me for not jumping on the McCain bandwagon and for saying aloud that I thought McCain would lose. Now, of course, I had to be enthusiastic about the ticket. “You still think we’re going to lose?” he asked me laughingly.

“Yep,” I replied.

Raul looked incredulous. “Well, you obviously don’t believe in facts!”

I was about to be engulfed by a tidal wave of Palin euphoria when someone—someone I didn’t expect—planted my feet back on the ground. After Palin’s selection was announced, the same people who demanded I acknowledge the brilliance of McCain’s choice expected the president to join them in their high-fiving tizzy. It was clear, though, that the president, ever the skilled politician, had concerns about the choice of Palin, which he called “interesting.” That was the equivalent of calling a fireworks display “satisfactory.”

“I’m trying to remember if I’ve met her before. I’m sure I must have.” His eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?”

Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.”

Then he made a very smart assessment.

“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.”

Thank you, Matt Latimer, for giving us this glimpse of Dubya’s last days, and showing him at his best and his worst. History owes you a debt of gratitude.

To read the full article – including a tasty gem about how a top economic advisor was best known for deploying whoopie cushions around the West Wing – click here.

News outlets are now reporting that Arizona’s governor, Janet Napolitano, is going to be named Secretary of Homeland Security by President-elect Obama.

POLITICO reports:

Napolitano brings law and order experience from her stint as the Grand Canyon State’s first female attorney general. One of the nation’s most prominent female elected officials, she made frequent appearances on behalf of Barack Obama during the campaign. She was reelected to a second four-year term in 2006.

Transition insiders have long expected that she would be offered a Cabinet slot, although she had also been mentioned for other posts, including attorney general.

Napolitano, 50, endorsed Obama in early January, just as the primaries were kicking off, and the female up-and-comer’s decision to back the Illinois senator got widespread coverage.

In 2005, Time magazine named her one of America’s five best governors, calling her “A Mountaineer on the Political Rise.”

Napolitano is extremely popular in Arizona, and since she was an early Obama supporter, many people were wondering why she was never shortlisted for VP, like Kansas Governor Sebelius or other prominent female possibilities.

To this, political columnists for mainstream publications would say, “Well, uh, there might be some problems with that, anyway, what a nice day it is today!!”

But since ROTI is not hindered by things like public outrage, we’re gonna come right out and say it. Janet Napolitano is clearly a lesbian, and you don’t win Virginia, Indiana and North Carolina with a geigh on the ticket. Sad but true.

Nobody in the mainstream media will acknowledge this, but it’s pretty well known if you’ve spent any time in the Grand Canyon State that the Governor is unmarried, unlinked to any gentlemen, and sports a style that would fit right in at a WeHo bar. (Actually, the alt-weekly Phoenix New Times was willing to go there.)

So while this will go unremarked-upon by almost every publication and TV show, we have reached yet another barrier-breaking moment in American politics. America takes yet another step into the 21st century! Not only will we be entrusting homeland security (and associated issues like immigration) to a strong, independent, self-made woman – we’ll be protected by a tough, no-nonsense ass-kicking (albeit closeted) lesbian!

We’re pretty pleased about this most of all because beyond identity politics, Napolitano is smart, capable and all-around pretty awesome. And as Governor of a border state, she truly understands the correct approach to our country’s immigration problems. (For reference, immigration was one of the few issues that former border state Governor George W. Bush was totally right about.)

The interesting side story to this is that Napolitano is term-limited, and would be done as Gov. in 2010 regardless. Many people speculated that she might take on John McCain for his Senate seat.

As 538 reports, the polling is mixed on this matchup:

Napolitano, popular among her constituents as well as with the netroots, was to be term-limited in 2010, but was reportedly considering a run for Arizona’s Class 3 senate seat, currently occupied by John McCain. At least one poll had shown Napolitano ahead of McCain in a trial-heat matchup, although McCain remains fairly popular in Arizona and had led Napolitano in other polling of the state.

A promotion to Homeland Security would not inherently dash Napolitano’s prospects of running for the Senate. Florida’s Mel Martinez, George W. Bush’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, stepped down from his position in 2003 to run for Florida’s open senate seat, and last year, Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns did the same to run for Nebraska’s; both Republicans won. Martinez and Johanns, however, had served in their positions for the better part of three years, whereas Napolitano would presumably have to vacate her position by early 2010 to run a competitive race against McCain. Martinez and Johanns, moreover, were running for open seats that they were favored to pick up, whereas Napolitano would have to run against one of the icons of the Senate, albeit one who recently suffered a notable electoral defeat.

[...]

There is also a chance — maybe even a fairly good chance — that John McCain chooses not to run, although my gut-level read of the situation is that McCain would not want to end his career on a losing streak and therefore becomes less likely to retire if he does not have to worry about Napolitano.

Guess how many counties John McCain won in all of New England?

One. One freaking county.

So where did Johnny Mac pull it off?

Surely in his beloved state of New Hampshire, where he flew on the last weekend of the election. Oh…no? Not New Hampshire. Lost every county in New Hampshire? Well, he narrowly lost three counties, that’s like a moral victory. Sigh.

OK, one of those wealthy New York City suburbs in Connecticut. They gotta be pretty conservative there. Ohhh they all voted for Obama too?

No!! No we got it – that one congressional district in Maine worth one electoral vote that they put money into after their campaign in Michigan collapsed! God love ya, McCain, so effing mavericky!!

No, he lost that too.

The only county in ALL of New England captured by John McCain was in central Maine: Piscataquis County. This county had 17,235 people at the time of the last census. 98% white, median salary $28 grand. McCain won this county by 4,785 to 4,430.

Okay, now we feel bad for kicking a guy when he’s down. But honestly, this is unreal. The fact that Obama took virtually every county in New England is shocking.

McCain won most of the counties in states that he lost, like Pennsylvania and Virginia. Obama won more than a dozen counties in Texas, cut a swath of counties through the South, and even took four counties in McCain’s home state of Arizona. Conversely, McCain took quite a few counties in Illinois.

But in New England? Obama tossed a one-hitter through six.

And the hit was a broken bat bloop that looked like a poop.

What happened here? The Republican Party was a force in the Northeast as recently as twenty years ago.

The incompetent campaign “masterminded” by Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis takes a lot of the blame. Obama’s massive fundraising from Massachusetts and Connecticut didn’t hurt his chances in the rest of the states. Southern New Hampshire, for example, was utterly blanketed in ads through the Boston media market. The economic crisis and long Republican reign spelled defeat for the GOP on a statewide basis in a generally liberal region.

But they had McCain! His credentials going into this race had to endear him to a variety of regions throughout New England…probably not whole states, but a handful of counties at least. Didn’t happen.

The real reason for the region-wide wipeout is the social agenda of the (less populous) states that voted all their counties the other way. All two of ‘em.

Culture wars used to be a winning gameplan for the Republicans, but when you get blasted this badly in a region worth 34 electoral votes, it’s time to start rethinking the Palin in 2012 strategy.

Up yours, Alaska and Oklahoma.

Signed, New England

However, Weingarten recently utilized his chat to air his grievances regarding Washington’s finest wheelchair-bound conservative, and fellow Post columnist, Charles Krauthammer, and a recent column containing a pretty extreme claim. After writing to Krauthammer without getting a response, he took his gripes public.

Dear Charles Krauthammer:

As a fellow pundit, I understand the temptation to make extreme, unsupportable pronouncements for the sake of drama or in the heat of political passion. I, for example, have written on more than one occasion that the current vice president of the United States is Lucifer the Dastard, Harvester of Souls. I confess today in the light of reason that I cannot prove this, however likely it might be.

Moreover, I sympathize with the impulse to overstate the virtues a person at his or her funeral. On the tongue of the compassionate eulogist, even a juiceless reprobate attains a little virtue and personality.

So, in short, I do understand what you did and why you did it. It still doesn’t make it any more defensible. You must be spanked for it. I shall do so now.

In your last column you declared John McCain “the most worthy presidential candidate ever to be denied the prize.”

Had you confined the field of candidates to only those, say, in your lifetime, you would merely have been mistaken. But “ever” transforms error into folly. It dishonors your venerable column, with which I never agree but which almost always admire.

“Worthy” is a word that allows for broad interpretation. The dictionary says: “Estimable,” “honorable,” and “deserving.” In the context at hand, I’ll add, “fit to serve.”

It is not necessary to denigrate John McCain in order to establish the enormity of your overstatement. For the purpose of this argument I will stipulate that McCain qualifies as “worthy.” This requires me to ignore the ghastliness of his vice presidential selection, which I consider reckless, irresponsible, opportunistic, deeply cynical, misogynistic, lascivious, contemptuous of the public’s intelligence, and, most to the point, unpatriotic. It was a raised middle finger to the rest of the nation.

However, your problem here is not in praising McCain, who is in most other ways praiseworthy. Your problem, as I have said, is your unjustifiable use of the superlative. John McCain is a former war hero and an able United States senator who was reprimanded only once for ethics violations, and who will mostly be remembered, if he is remembered at all, for that ludicrous vice presidential choice, and for some bill about the intricacies of campaign finance reform (creating a law that you hate and would like to see repealed.)

Below is a list of guys you have declared him more worthy than.

Ready, Charles?

Good! This will hurt a little.

1. Henry Clay. Founder of the Whig party, one of the earliest supporters of freeing slaves, visionary leader, champion of a strong and indivisible union, a giant figure in American history, unsullied by scandal, admired even by his enemies. In 1957 a U.S. Senate committee chaired by John F. Kennedy named Clay one of the five greatest senators in American history. Among Clay’s most vocal admirers was Abraham Lincoln.

2. Daniel Webster. Hey, Charles, guess what? Webster is also on that list of five! He was also a little more articulate than McCain, and forever immortalized as a great lawyer and orator in the play “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” A speech he gave in 1830, on the issue of nullification, is generally regarded as the greatest speech ever given in Congress, immortalized in more than one painting. (Andrew Wyeth never painted “McCain delivers the McCain-Feingold Act.”) Oh, yeah, Webster was one of the biographies in “Profiles in Courage.” JFK called his defense of the 1850 compromise, despite the risk to his presidential ambitions and the denunciations he faced from the north, one of the “greatest acts of courageous principle” in the history of the Senate.

3. Samuel J. Tilden, from whom the presidency was corruptly stolen in 1876 but whose patriotism remained so stalwart that he instructed his allies to accept the decision in the interest of national harmony, and to avoid a constitutional crisis. His tombstone reads: “I Still Trust in The People”. He was a great fighter against political corruption.

4. Alfred E. Smith, one of the most dedicated political reformers in the 20th century, destroyer of the sweatshop. “Smith is the best of all of these on your list,” says a friend of mine who is a presidential historian and has researched the life of Smith.

Worthier than McCain: You don’t see presidential contenders doing hilarious standup at the Johnny Mac Dinner!

5. Charles Evans Hughes. Lessee, before his unsuccessful campaign against Woodrow Wilson, Hughes served as a justice of the Supreme Court. After his loss, he returned to the court as its chief justice. So he was a pretty worthy guy. He boldly led the resistance to FDR’s craven political attempt to pack the Supreme Court. He was a conservative, but a highly principled one: He extended the definition of slavery to include peonage, which were horrendous conditions of servitude,. And he wrote the visionary opinion declaring that prior restraint of the press was unconstitutional. If you can define worthiness in part by who thinks you are worthy, Hughes’s closest colleagues on the court were Lewis Brandeis, Harlan Fiske Stone and Benjamin Cardozo.

I do think it curious, Charles, that you didn’t consider as more worthy Barry Goldwater, the patron saint, and conscience, of the neoconservative movement. And you’ll note I didn’t even try to make the case for Al Gore or Adlai Stevenson, though I personally find them “worthier” than McCain. We’d never agree on them, anyway. And I didn’t need them to make my case. Did I?

No response yet from Krauthammer! But we think the case was pretty effectively made…

(P.S. Ignore exit polls.)

Looking for some insight into the mind of the late-breaking voter?

We randomly found this blog post on Word Press in which an undecided voter from North Carolina finally makes up her mind.

This here’s Ginger, and she’s finally decided on Bob Barr.

Read on to find out why. This is so much more enjoyable when read aloud. The word “mellifluous” comes to mind.

I’m a North Carolina white woman, born to parents that both grew up in Southern baptist homes, in what used to be a small town, so I’m (naturally) a registered Republican. All of us are, y’all. The only time I EVER voted for a Democrat was when Jimmy Carter was runnin’ and that was because he was so Baptist and so southern, plus he reminded my Grandma Gladys of her Papa Green, so how could I not? It turned out to be a big mistake, with all those long gas lines and all, so I’ve been stickin’ with the straight Republican ticket ever since.

I have to hang my head when I admit that I voted for George W. I am sorry and I hope y’all will accept my heartfelt apologies. But, here’s the thing. I don’t think George, Jr. is really a Republican. Naw, really. I think he’s fakin’ it. I think he’s a closet liberal, who’s helped out his rich oil buddies by startin’ wars. I even think he might have sold his soul to the World Bankers, and those One World Government Illuminati types that just want to make enough money to be able to live in fancy caves underground, when the rest of us go up in the mushroom clouds.

So now I don’t feel like I can trust the Republicans anymore. I miss Ronnie Reagan. I wish he was still around to tell me one of his grandfatherly stories about how little Suzie in the third grade in Indiana needs new shoes and how my vote could help her get some cute pink and white Nikes. Without his help, I can’t seem to find my way anymore.

I wanted to be able to get behind one of the mainstream canidates.

John McCain is supposed to be conservative, but I got a feelin’ that he’s only pretendin’ to be, so all the conservative Christians will vote for him. I’m grateful that he went to war and fought for us and all. All that military experience will come in handy. His wife sure is a looker with all that perfectly coifed blonde hair. I was excited when he chose Sarah Palin, instead of some old-timey senator like Obama got. Sarah seems so down-homey and apple pie-ish, that it’s real hard not to just love her to death. But when McCain debated Obama, he looked real scary, y’all. He kept repeatin’ the same thing over and over, like some kind of scratched up little ol’ 45 record. I practically got the vapors from watchin’ it.

I absolutely loved some of Obama’s speeches. That stuff he said about his Grandma reduced me to tears. He’s so eloquent, and young, and handsome. His wife, Michelle, is cute as a button, too, with her fist-bumpin’ and all that jazz. I love that he is neither black, nor white, and yet he is both. I understand why so many people support him. But I was disappointed when he chose Biden. Biden is so old and outta touch, and so ingrained in the system that Obama says he wants to change. I wanted him to choose Hilary. Also, the whole Acorn business scares me. So does that Jeremiah preacher-man. All that hollerin’ from the pulpit got on my Baptist nerves. Now, I’m smart enough to realize he’s prolly not a Muslim, but his reputation as the most liberal senator, plus the fact that he voted “present” instead of actually standing up for anything goes against my upbringing, I reckon.

Then they both lost me over that big bailout deal. I mean, come on already! If either one of the two of them had stood up to George Bush and The Fed and just said NO to giving HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS of DOLLARS WE DON’T EVEN HAVE to the banks, then that canidate would have had my vote, right then and there, y’all. When McCain annouced that he was suspendin’ his campaign and runnin’ back to Washington, my heart was all a-twitter. I thought he was going to act all Reaganish and stand up to them-there big bankers. I thought, “Here’s his big chance to show the world how a REAL Republican is supposed to act and show everyone that he’s not going to stand for another four years of George Bush’s nonsence.”

I still can’t believe that both candidates, Obama the eloquent Liberal, and McCain the war hero Quasi-Conservative, voted exactly the same on gettin’ us even further into debt. McCain should have been against it on the general principle of wanting smaller government, and a balanced budget, like every Republcan in the history of the world has ever talked about. And Obama should have said, “Whoa, wait just a cotton pickin’ minute, if we’re gonna borrow this kind of money, let’s bail out the homeowners and throw in some programs to help out the poor folks, y’all.”

So I voted for Bob Barr. He’s the Libertarian that’s runnin’. He was flatly against the bail out, and he’s all about cuttin’ taxes, reducin’ government spending and restorin’ our civil liberties lost during the Bush administration.The media ignores him, so almost nobody has even heard of him. I’m fully aware of the fact that he’s not going to win. I know my vote won’t count for much. But I did it because I feel we need another choice. I figure if enough people vote for these Libertarians, then maybe the media will sit up and take notice some day.

[...]

Plus, he’s from Georgia, y’all. A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

Now everyone do like Ginger – make up your minds and go vote.

This weekend the venerable conservative editorial page of the WALL STREET JOURNAL decided to issue an endorsement in the presidential race, apparently something they’ve refrained from for decades. The last time the WSJ decided to take a stand was in favor of Herbert Hoover. That worked out wicked well, so it’s a mystery why they gave up the endorsement game until now.

Unsurprisingly, after years of blasting Obama, Al Gore and other Democrats, the Journal is going with Johnny Mac. And boy, oh boy, do they ever sell it:

Mr. McCain’s bad luck is to be running in a year when character and experience aren’t enough. His party is at a low public ebb and the financial system imploded only weeks before Election Day. The first problem he could overcome with his history as a GOP apostate. The second hasn’t played to his strengths but has instead revealed his penchant for — let’s be charitable — political wanderlust.

Looked at individually, most of Mr. McCain’s economic proposals are sensibly conservative, and some are even bold. They are superior to Mr. Obama’s, and if implemented would make a recession shallower and shorter. They are also politically braver, especially his support for free trade. His health-care plan in particular amounts to genuine “progressive” change in the sense that it would redistribute tax benefits from the well-to-do to the uninsured working class. Mr. Obama’s health plan by contrast is one more incremental — if larger than usual — increase in government control. But Mr. McCain was never able, or willing, to explain the differences.

More broadly, he has never explained to fearful Americans how an economy with Republicans at the helm could fall into this ditch. His one-line explanation for the financial panic has been “greed and corruption” on Wall Street and Washington. Voters know that’s simplistic and would have been open to a larger, and truer, argument.

WELL – now that you put it THAT way, how can we be so foolish as to choose this fool! Oh wait – that’s the guy you WANT us to vote for?

In this difficult year, Mr. McCain has had the harder sale to make. His admirable personal tenacity has been better than his variable political argument. We’ll find out Tuesday if biography trumps hope.

Ryan Tate at GAWKER quips, “There you have it: Vote for McCain and defeat hope.”

While this line was no doubt part of the script – both literally speaking, and as a tactic in the kamikaze effort to take Pennsylvania from Obama – what the hell is he talking about? What is his basis for declaring that Western Pennsylvanians, on the whole, love God more than the citizens of any other region of the country? And how on earth is that germane to Murtha’s assertions?

McCain spoke first, and here’s a wrapup of his best zingers from MARC AMBINDER:

He was very very gracious and funny…

McCain says he fired all of his campaign staff; “All of their positions will now be held by a man named Joe The Plumber.”

Says that Joe Biden falsely claims that Joe The Plumber isn’t rich enough trigger the Obama tax hike; “What they don’t know is that Joe The Plumber recently signed a lucrative contract to handle all the work on all seven of their houses.”

Says his pet name for Obama is “The One”; Obama’s for McCain is “George Bush.”

“I can’t shake the feeling that some people here are voting for me. Nice to see you, Hillary.”

Bill Clinton “has been hammering away with me with epithets like, “hero.”

“It’s going to be a long, long night at MSNBC if I manage to pull this thing off. I understand that Keith Olbermann has ordered up his very own Mission Accomplished banner. They can hang it up in his padded room”

“We know the press is really an independent-minded, civic-minded, non-partisan group, like ACORN.”

A nice tribute to Obama at the end, saying that he can’t “wish him luck,” but he does “wish him well.”

Here’s Ambinder’s wrapup of Obama’s best lines, although devoid of sympathetic commentary, for whatever that’s worth. We wish we could locate the dormant comment thread where Ambinder hid his admission of voting for McCain – not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it seemed like a pretty lame way to announce his choice. That said, his blog is a must-read for political junkies.

“People tell me I share the politics of Alfred E. Smith and the ears of Alfred E. Neumann”

“I was originally told that we would able to move this outdoors to Yankee Stadium. Can someone tell me what happened to the Greek columns I requested.”

“On the Waldorf Astoria: They tell me, from the doorstep, you can see all the way to the Russian Tea Room.”

To Al Smith IV: “I obviously never knew your grandfather, but from everything Sen. McCain has told me…”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s term limits maneuverings caused Bill Clinton to say: “You can do that?”

The housing crisis “has been eight times harder on John McCain.”

“The last few weeks, John’s been out on the campaign trail asking the question Who Is Barack Obama. I’ve got to admit, I was surprised by the question: the answer is right there on my Facebook page.”

“I was not born in a manger. I was actually born on Krypton….”

“I got my name Barack from my father…. it’s actually Swahali for “That one.”

My middle name, it’s not what you think. It’s actually “Steve.”

“There was a point in my life when I started palling around with a pretty ugly crowd…. that’s right… I’ve been a member of the United States Senate.”

Hitchens is simultaneously the most thrilling (if you agree with him on a given topic) and maddening (if you disagree) scribe out there. This SLATE column is no exception.

On “the issues” in these closing weeks, there really isn’t a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their “debates” have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week’s so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.

The ineptitude of the McCain campaign is disturbing no matter how you slice it – either the Senator himself is in charge, in which case any intellectually honest person has to question his skill as an executive for running such a blundering operation, or the Rove-disciples are calling the shots, in which case Senator Obama’s claim that McCain = GWB term III seems pretty valid.

In William Kristol’s column yesterday, he simultaneously beseeched McCain to fire his campaign managers and beseeched some unknown person to let McCain and Palin off the leash – to “set them free.” I hate to break it to the unfunny Billy Kristol, but if there is someone behind the scenes secretly in charge of McCain, that kind of undercuts his legendarily mavericky maverickness.

Anyway, back to Hitchens, who we couldn’t agree with more in this instance…

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party’s right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama’s position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.