So, the media keeps polling, and reporting on these polls, and pushing the line "Why isn't Obama further ahead?" as some sort of bizarre echo of the old "experience" argument. Meanwhile a full 72% of media coverage given to Obama is negative, compared to just 57% negative reporting on McCain.

This is despite the fact that there's literally no positive news coming out of the McCain campaign, and the only newsworthy things the presumptive Republican nominee does are along the lines of "How many of you are tired of four dollars a buck a guh a four dollars a gallon..." Meanwhile the negative Obama coverage is editorial in nature.

In short, the media is pushing a horse race, and this seems to be reflected in the polls. But is it really?

More after the bump.

Well, 2008 is almost half-over. Now seems as good a time as any to reflect on how far we've come, and what we want to accomplish by the end of the year.

On January 2, a straw poll showed John Edwards up among Kossacks, 48%, to Obama's 27%, to Hillary's 8%. By the end of the month, Edwards had withdrawn from the race, and Obama led 76% to 11%. Today, Obama is the Democratic nominee, and the electoral map currently looks like

according to Poblano. So that's all going well.

Well, we're plunged headlong at this point into a general election campaign. While for many of us (most of us, if the polls from last November are any indication) Obama was not the first choice, I strongly believe at this point that he was our best choice. The infighting and division are at an end, and it's time to make sure that John McCain doesn't complete George W. Bush's attempt to destroy our beloved country from the inside.

John McCain is a historically weak candidate for the Republican Party. He has no apparent beliefs, and will support whatever seems to be politically expedient; when he couldn't get the evangelical vote, he got Rod Parsely and John Hagee. When it turned out that these two were the "agents of intolerance" he had decried a scant few years earlier, he held on to them until it got too hot.

So, in the absence of any real candidate, the right is going to hit our guy as hard as they can. We've seen this already with the "Barack Obama is a Muslim" smear e-mail. We're seeing it again with something I won't mention here because apparently the very mention is taboo at the moment.

I wrote yesterday, or the day before, about my anger that the issues have been overrun by process when we as progressives have had the spotlight on us. I think at this point Hillary can run her own campaign into the ground without our help. So it's at this point important to remember why we're for Barack Obama in the first place, rather than focusing on why we're against Hillary Clinton now. And I'm going to do that, hopefully to some result, with my story of exactly how I came around from someone who enthusiastically supported Bush, Brownback, and Jim Ryun to someone who fits in around here, and why I'm for Barack Obama.

Obama came to Kansas City on January 29. John Edwards was my guy to that point, but I could see the writing on the wall for his campaign and was trying to find a rebound candidate, and I hadn't decided between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

I'm fairly angry with how this primary process has turned out. Not that Obama is now the presumptive nominee of the party, that was the outcome I've been hoping for since I realized Edwards was not going to be it after New Hampshire.

No, my issue of this primary season is how the focus has been on process rather than issues. I now know more about the local politics and demographics of Pennsylvania and Indiana than I ever wanted to know. I have heard about caucuses (and, indeed, participated in one) and primaries, red states and blue states, urban voters and rural voters, black voters and "hard-working" voters, pledged delegates and superdelegates, Appalachia and the strange doings of Texas and Washington.

What has been missing in much of this is an honest dialogue, which is what we've been missing in these United States for far too long. With the Foxicization of punditry, too often has pointless shouting and name-calling taken the place of rational speech; too often has the person with the patience to go ten rounds in a pointless battle been the de facto "winner" of what should be a discussion.

More below the fold....

...always assuming you have some. As a reformed right-winger, I have more than my share.

I got home late last night, and had forgotten that the twenty-first installment of America's hottest new reality show was airing until Dave, my best friend and former partner on a web site in the late '90s called RightWayNews (think NewsMax with some amount of journalistic integrity) sent me a text reporting how much he was enjoying it. I flipped on just as the tabloid portion ended, but the post-debate wrapup (God bless Keith Olbermann) informed me more than enough on what had transpired. And as they asked more and more questions, I began to actually shake with rage. I wish I was on the computer I was using last night, because I'd love to give a play-by-play of what transpired in the IM conversation with my friend. But, for the most part, it went like this:

This started as a response to billysumday's excellent diary, Why this 28 year old white guy doesn't get Ferraro, but it went far longer than a reply should. I should probably learn to not start writing things at 1:30am.

I've stolen my title here from the brilliant words of emacd and hope that does not cause offense. I guess the text of this is entirely below the fold.

I find myself sitting here this evening listening to the "Yes We Can" music by the guy in the hat and a bunch of other celebrities I don't recognize. Every time I listen to it, I get misty. And I decided to explain not only why I support Sen. Obama, but why it's important for us all to rally around him.

This was originally composed as a reply to HenryVane's great diary "Pacifism - Not a Candidate Diary." I felt that it didn't belong there as it didn't really follow the debate there. I just watched Charlie Wilson's War the other night (I don't get to the theatre much), and a good part of the debate over the movie has centered around dollar figures; he could get a billion dollars for weapons but only was aiming for a million in reconstruction.

The meme from the Republican party has long been that the Democrats don't have any kind of plan for Iraq. The left has countered that neither do the Republicans, but at least the Democrats didn't get us in this mess to begin with and have interest in getting us out of it.

The long and the short is that Iraq is--Jon Stewart put it best--a catastrofuck, and the only way to get out without looking bad is to spin hard.

The current talk from the Democrats is set timetables of things our troops need to get done by when, and bring them home as soon as possible. But President Bush's idiotic "we have to fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" statements notwithstanding, what's the real reason we're still there four years after, again to quote the President, "Major combat operations in Iraq have ended?"

I was holding the camera and keeping quiet while the Casey asked the questions. I said at the beginning that practically everyone would say 'peace,' and I was right.

Casey asked me how I knew that was going to happen, and I said "It's a time of an unpopular war. Everyone who says peace wants it to end."

Incumbent Democratic Governor of Kansas Kathleen Sebelius leads Republican challenger Jim Barnett 58-38.

Which is not surprising. Sebelius has been an enormously popular governor, and I don't think a conservative has won that post in my lifetime.

What is surprising is the KS-02 race.