Tight As a Tic

Bozeman, Montana

Polls show it maddeningly close in Buckeye land, but none of them is fresher than seven days old. Rassmussen (9/23) has it McCain 47, Obama 46, Other, 3, Undecided, 3.

Insider Advantage (9/22) has it dead even, 46-46, with Other at 1 percent and Undecided at 7.

This is just me, but I think Thursday’s Biden-Palin debate could have a major effect on the numbers in this still unsettled race, in swing states like Ohio and nationally.

I tend to get superstitious about these things. And I can’t believe that Palin in debate will seem as shockingly … shallow as she was in the Katie Couric interviews. If true, it means she will beat expectations (now at approximately zero). In turn, that would give a boost to what Republicans manage with a straight face to call their “ticket.”

On the other hand, I’ve known Joe Biden as a friend for more than thirty years. When he is on top of his game, he’s as good a debater as there is. Be on top of your game, Joe.

God, we can’t wait to get out there to work off some of this nervous energy!

Our beloved dog Rascal, however, has chosen this moment to relapse on an intestinal illness we thought he’d licked a week ago. We’ll have to delay our departure by at least a day to take him to a specialist in Helena to pinpoint what’s going on. Can’t leave a sick dog with our daughter here in Bozeman. Aargh!

Four Days ‘Til Launch

Bozeman, Montana

On Wednesday, my wife and I will drop everything we’re doing and drive to Ohio to campaign for Barack Obama and Joe Biden for the last month of the campaign.

We hope we can provide a modicum of help in a battleground state for a ticket we hope and believe will lead the country into a new era of progressive governance and away from the law-of-the-jungle, soak-the-middle class, robber baron era of most of the last thirty years.

But the most important thing we will influence will no doubt be our own psyches. If we sit by as observers much longer, we’re both going to blow a gasket. Rather than hoping neoconservatives won’t steal this country, we want to help Obama and Biden stop them from it, and roll back the trickle-down fleecing, the environmental pillaging and the preemptive war-making that has already occurred.

We hope this journal will give you an up-close and personal look at the campaign from the trenches of a hotly contested state that may decide the election. In 104 years–with only three exceptions–no one has won the White House without winning Ohio’s electoral votes.

So, we’ll now throw everything we have into Ohio to try to restore the best instincts of the country we grew up in. If, god forbid, Obama should lose, at least we’ll have a good answer when our granddaughters ask us, “Pop-Pops and Nana, what did you do in the table stakes election of 2008?”