Sixteen Days

That's all that's left until November 4th, and today a few good things happened for the Obama campaign. He received Colin Powell's endorsement, he announced raising an earth-shattering $150,000,000 in September at an $86/contribution average and including over 600,000 new donors, and he had my eldest son on the phone here in Santa Monica calling Obama voters in North Carolina to urge their early voting and provide an 888 number for them to find out the One Stop Early Vote polling place nearest to them.

The Powell endorsement is incredibly sober, truly what Prof. Juan Cole (who's criticized Powell for his role, however neutered, in the Iraq War build-up) calls "Powell's Finest Moment." If you want to see it and haven't yet, here you go:



Powell undermines every argument for a McCain Presidency, including all the contradictory Ayers posturing. He was even harsher talking with reporters outside after the on-air, especially on the vile McCarthyite Congresswoman, Michelle Bachmann. (More on her shortly.) But one of the earmarks of this election is that the racists are making themselves known, specifically today Rush Limbaugh and Pat Buchanan who both insult the hell out of Former General, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, and Secretary of State Powell by saying he only endorsed Obama because of their shared skin color.

Disgusting. Like McCain's new red-baiting strategy, drinking from the same filthy trough as Palin and Bachmann. And his level of rhetorical self-delusion is profound -- compare this two-faced defense of smear-fest robocalls, having hired the same firm that the Bush campaign used in 2000 to ruin McCain with targeted lies:



What an incredible slime McCain has become, a kind of political Dorian Gray where in return for a hoped-for point or two poll bounce his reputation becomes uglier and uglier. And his camp is now acting in tell-tale loserish ways, banking on division to eke out a tiny victory, easy to target stuff, as Joe Biden slams home like a rock star:



You know you're losing when even your latest drummed up diversion ditches you for Mike Huckabee -- who isn't even running anymore. You know you're losing when a company doing fake voter registration and affiliation switches for your Party gets arrested for trying to subvert democracy. When yet another dyed-in-the-wool conservative newspaper endorses your opponent, in large part due to your disastrous VP choice. You know your losing when attacks on patriotism by surrogates like this:



...leads to her opponent suddenly raising $450,000 from 9,000 donors in the ensuing 24 hours. And with a name like Elwyn Tinklenberg (yes, really), that's got to be an otherwise unattainable campaign warchest.

Complacency is a killer, but Andrew Sullivan has it right that at least Obama has built a machine -- and a message -- with the shot at a rare landslide victory. There is nothing wishy-washy about Obama at all -- he's in it to win it.

As for his opponent, maybe not so much?