The Associated Press has a news article opining that growing minority populations in various counties is good news for Obama.

“The key this time is there are a fair number of battleground states that are becoming more diverse, and maybe diverse enough to make a difference,” said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

The article doesn’t really go into why minorities are more likely to vote for Democrats generally and Obama specifically. Is it just brown people voting for brown people? That may be part of it, but I don’t think it’s that simple. I wonder if it has to do with McCain and the Republicans promoting a return to a traditional, largely mythical past — maybe it’s the 50s, maybe it’s Eden — from which we have deviated to our detriment. The problem being that this return to tradition probably wouldn’t mean good things to minority populations, inasmuch as they weren’t treated very well.

Ironically, in the past, America was always the young, brash nation; looking toward the future and not having much reverence for the past. Hopefully we won’t drift into the sort of knee-jerk ancestor worship that leads to stagnation.

(H/t Balloon-Juice) So, Barack Obama gives a speech where he lays out some energy proposals. A member of the audience asks what he can do. Obama says that one thing is to simply inflate his tires. If everybody inflated their tires, it would apparently reduce oil consumption by 3 – 4% — which is probably more than what would be gained by McCain’s drilling proposal. The Republican response is to lie about what Obama said and to titter at the notion of people inflating their tires. Obama’s response:

The money quote: “It’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.” While it might be bad for policy decisions, Americans don’t go broke or lose office by trying to out-dumb the other guy. There is a strong strain of American anti-intellectualism. Larry the Cable Guy is living proof of that.

Filling one’s tires may be smart and effective, but nerdy and effeminate. Drilling the hell out of Mother Earth is just about as manly as you can get. And, as Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Ted Haggard, Bob Allen, and Glenn Murphy remind us, there is nothing more conservative than manly men doing manly things with other men.

Update And, the Indiana angle:

ELKHART, Ind. (AP) — Democrat Barack Obama on Wednesday taunted Republican presidential rival John McCain for first mocking the idea of keeping tires inflated for energy conservation and then agreeing the practice works.

”It will be interesting to watch this debate between John McCain and John McCain,” Obama said as he campaigned in Indiana with Sen. Evan Bayh, widely considered a top-tier candidate for running mate.

Niki Kelly has an article on Obama campaigning in Elkhart this morning to talk about energy policy. This, of course, is fueling speculation about Obama’s vice-presidential selection since that’s easier for people to talk about than the more complicated issue of energy policy. Evan Bayh is seen as a potential running mate, though I am doubtful.

I’ll probably be annoyed with myself for this post-title when this campaign tightens up, but it’s looking a lot like McCain has jumped the shark.

Just think that a couple weeks ago the entire campaign was engulfed by scrutiny of Obama’s suggestion that he might be “refining” his plan for a 16 month timetable for withdrawal — a twitter, if that, on the seismograph of campaign course corrections. Now consider that over the span of a few weeks Sen. McCain has gone from predicting a decades long presence of American troops in Iraq and attacking any discussion of timetables for withdrawal to endorsing Maliki’s push for a 16 month timetable and tying himself in knots trying to explain why what Maliki’s endorsing is any different from Obama’s.

When confronted with Maliki’s own words saying that he supports what Obama supports, McCain now falls back on that last redoubt of philanderers, asking the American people, “Who you gonna believe? Me or your lyin’ eyes?”

Apparently Obama took a trip. I didn’t pay much attention to it, but apparently the press did – and, why not, it was a change from the usual campaign events.

McCain was apparently critical of Obama traveling abroad, which is odd, since I McCain wanted him to travel abroad. Perhaps McCain is irritable about not getting to set Obama’s precise itinerary.

Now I expect a flurry of negative coverage of Obama in an effort to inject “balance” after some heavy-duty whining about the largely positive coverage Obama received while overseas.

The Bush Administration, and by extension, John McCain, are having a tough time spinning away the fact that the Iraqi administration they claim to admire seems more comfortable with Obama’s plans for Iraq.

SPIEGEL: Would you hazard a prediction as to when most of the US troops will finally leave Iraq?

‘As Soon as Possible’

Maliki: As soon as possible, as far as we’re concerned. U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes.

The Bush administration has tried to dismiss the Maliki endorsement by suggesting that he was misquoted, misspoke, or something got lost in translation. Turns out, not so much.

I suppose the argument can be made that Maliki’s an idiot who doesn’t know what’s good for his own country, but that sort of undermines the notion we’re spending a ton of money and lives on Iraq for the pure-hearted motive of allowing the Iraqis to engage in this sort of self-determination.

Update

Oh, and McCain is a douche bag, having said this:

It seems to me that Senator Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.

That statement has more than a whiff of desperation about it.

Matt Taibbi provides us with another impressive article. While middle class Americans are staring down the barrel of some of the toughest economic times in recent memory, our political media continues to serve up a pointless gruel of distractions.

Taibbi’s basic point.

What the political media wants to talk about:

The press, meanwhile, is clearly flailing around for a sensational hook to use in selling the election, as the once-brightly-burning star of blue-red hatred seems unfortunately to have dimmed a little — just in time, perhaps, to torpedo the general election season cable ratings. They are working hard to come up with the WWF-style shorthand labels they always use to sell electoral contests: if 2000 was the “wooden” and ?condescending? Al Gore versus the “dummy” Bush, and 2004 featured that same ?regular guy? Bush against the “patrician” and “bookish” John Kerry (who also “looked French”), in 2008 we?re going to be sold the “maverick” McCain against the “smooth” Obama, or some dumb thing along those lines. Time has even experimented with a “poker versus craps” storyline, feeding off the incidental fact that Obama is a regular poker player while McCain reportedly favors craps, which apparently has some electorally relevant meaning — and if you know what that something is, please let me know.

We’re also going to be fed truckloads of onerous horseshit about the candidate wives.

What the political media ought to be talking about:

Our economic reality is as brutal as it is for a simple reason: whether we like it or not, we are in the midst of revolutionary economic changes. In the kind of breathtakingly ironic development that only real life can imagine, the collapse of the Soviet Union has allowed global capitalism to get into the political unfreedom business, turning China and the various impoverished dictatorships and semi-dictatorships of the third world into the sweatshop of the earth. This development has cut the balls out of American civil society by forcing the export abroad of our manufacturing economy, leaving us with a service/managerial economy that simply cannot support the vast, healthy middle class our government used to work very hard to both foster and protect. The Democratic party that was once the impetus behind much of these changes, that argued so eloquently in the New Deal era that our society would be richer and more powerful overall if the spoils were split up enough to create a strong base of middle class consumers — that party panicked in the years since Nixon and elected to pay for its continued relevance with corporate money. As a result the entire debate between the two major political parties in our country has devolved into an argument over just how quickly to dismantle the few remaining benefits of American middle-class existence — immediately, if you ask the Republicans, and only slightly less than immediately, if you ask the Democrats.

The conclusion:

These fantasy elections we’ve been having — overblown sports contests with great production values, decided by haircuts and sound bytes and high-tech mudslinging campaigns — those were sort of fun while they lasted, and were certainly useful in providing jerk-off pundit-dickheads like me with high-paying jobs. But we just can’t afford them anymore. We have officially spent and mismanaged our way out of la-la land and back to the ugly place where politics really lives — a depressingly serious and desperate argument about how to keep large numbers of us from starving and freezing to death. Or losing our homes, or having our cars repossessed. For a long time America has been too embarrassed to talk about class; we all liked to imagine ourselves in the wealthy column, or at least potentially so, flush enough to afford this pissing away of our political power on meaningless game-show debates once every four years. The reality is much different, and this might be the year we’re all forced to admit it.