As for the redneck/racist factor in Pennsylvania and that general region, it appears not to be doing for McCain what it did for Hillary. It seems that many are following the lead of that guy talked about on 538.com, who tells the canvasser, “We’re votin’ for the nigger.”

I’m sure that McCain thought his tax plan and arguments would be simple and easy to digest when he first formulated them at the start of his campaign. And maybe they were, initially. His harebrained response to the financial crisis really undercut any chance he had of making a coherent closing argument on taxes, or anything else relating to the economy. So he is now stuck pivoting off of Joe the Plumber and calling Obama a socialist.

Technically, the tax credits will entail subsidies that will apparently be drawn from general revenues, but they seem to be designed to offset payroll taxes, which provides a sort of indirect payroll tax relief without taking the potentially politically dangerous position of actually reducing payroll taxes. So this will mean that the government is paying out more than it currently does, and it is not, strictly speaking, a reduction in anyone’s actual tax rates, but basically McCain has put himself in the idiotic and unpopular position of denouncing government payments to low and middle-income families while supporting bailouts of financial institutions. Oh, yes, I forgot–he stands up for the average Joe.

I think that campaigning on reducing payroll taxes would be enormously popular with employers and employees alike, but it would open up the perilous question of what to do with Social Security. It seems to me that campaigning against a regressive tax would be a winner from both small-government conservative and progressive perspectives, and it would help advance arguments for SS and entitlement reform. McCain hasn’t the wit or the imagination to do this, and so he is in the uneviable position of providing next to nothing in the way of tax relief for low and middle-income voters.

McCain and Palin spent most of the campaign saying that Obama cannot be trusted to cut taxes, even though he says he will. But now, it seems like McCain and Palin believe that Obama is being honest about his tax plan, but dishonest in how he labels it. (He should call it Socialism). Is that an accurate read of what’s going on?

Winner: Comment of the week!

However, my primary worry is that someone might shoot him. That would be even worse.

The deeper pessimistic argument here is not that Obama is going to lose his lead, but that things will simply get worse in the next administration after he wins.

The times, they really are a changing.

And McCain truly sucks at running for president.

Buh, bye.

http://assets.espn.go.com/i/magazine/new/040922_phanatic.jpg

I was very pessimistic about Virginia until the past two weeks – reason being, Obama is a liberal in a very centrist state and Obama is no Warner. But Obama has visited Southwest Virginia a couple of times and he did not say boneheaded statements like the recent “Northern Virginia is not real virginia” brouhaha. So, I don’t know – anything can happen.