The press conference killed me! The dog question came up and I loved his answer. Weighing Malia's allergies with the desire for a shelter dog ("a mutt like me"--OOOF).

The sentiment stands.

It's one of my favorite quotes, because I get so pissed off about this constant "tax cuts, tax cuts, tax cuts." It's up there with Oliver Wendell Holmes' statement that the most important principle is "the principle of free thought, not free thought for those who agree with us but freedom for the thought that we hate."

OMG I love that man. I am totally fangurlling the P-EOTUS.

I was sitting here thinking "The future president is speaking and I have no desire to throw something at the radio. How wonderful!"

Maybe, but I thought 6 % points is generally considered a fairly big gap as these things go. That's probably better than half the elections in the past century. Certainly those in recent memory.

In 1988, Bush beat Dukakis by nearly 8% in the popular vote and with an electoral landslide. That was the last election without an incumbent before Bush the lesser.

Aw.crap. I lost my NYT link to the conservatives saying that the moderates have ruined the party.

Doh.

Totally missed the end of Natter 61*. Oh well, it has been a busy week with the election nationally and homecoming at the school.

Woo Hoo for being in the Top 100!

Saxby Chambliss, who compared triple-amputee Max Cleland to Bin Ladin, is playing the 9/11 card again [link] I guess I'd better see if there's something I can volunteer for for the runoff.

There really should be a law like Godwin's law about using 9/11 in an argument. The Guiliani law, maybe. "Any sufficiently contentious competition between liberals and conservatives will eventually show pictures of the towers."

I just took a look at a site with Pop and EV totals back to Washington, though I just focused on the 20th century.

[link]

I was very surprised at the popular totals for FDR. The popular split for his first term was ~7 million, and the second term was ~11 million (I suck at percentages, so make your best educated guesses based on the population of the US in the 30s-40s, the grand total looks around 50,000,000 votes). My mother always told me that FDR was nearly deified in some circles, but I know he was also demonized in other circles. In 1940, with WWII getting going, the popular split was 5 million votes, even though the electoral vote was a landslide. For his fourth term, it was only 2 million popular between the front runners.

For some reason I've been thinking that there's been a lot more unity behind certain presidents, but I see now I'm wrong on that. Reagan on his second term got a huge divide, but so did Nixon on his second term. I'm not sure if I'm dismayed by the evidence of strong partisanship or just annoyed at the passing of the idea of the loyal opposition.

I begin to understand, though, how some people find the idea of popular democracy so unnerving.

Hilarious liveblog of the Obama press conference: [link]

Also, I loved that Donna Brazile piece, only partly because I love her in general. She was the speaker at my grad school graduation or something, and kicked ass, even though she clearly had learned everything she knew about us in the car on the way over.