Progress Illinois

Of all the surprises to emerge from the 2008 electoral map, Barack Obama's victory in Indiana has to be the sweetest.  And most impressive.  Every single county in the state shifted towards the Democratic candidate on Tuesday (compared to 2004), leading him to a 26,000-vote margin of victory. 

Of all the red states won back by the Democrats on Tuesday, Indiana represented the steepest climb.  In 2004, George W. Bush had won the Hoosier State by over 510,000 votes -- a greater margin than in any of the other states turned blue by Obama this week:

So how did the Democrats knock off the Hoosier State? 

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A few hours ago, I took a quick tour of stage and surroundings where Barack Obama will deliver his Election Day speech tomorrow night.  As you can see in the picture above (click for larger version), the podium is in place.  Much like the stage at Invesco Field, it sits at the end of runway which will extend into the crowd.  Unlike Denver, however, the area around it is more or less enclosed on three sides.  As a result, it's surprisingly intimate.  Those lucky -- and early -- enough to watch the speech from these confines are going to be in for a real treat.

On the East, behind the stage, is a curved blue wall (no Roman columns this time.)  To the South is a row of seven elevated platforms ("pods") where the networks will base their anchors and correspondents.  To the East, about a hundred feet across from the podium, is an absolutely huge, terraced riser, reminscent of the stands at a racetrack. Then, to the North, is Hutchinson Field's open expanse, likely to be filled hours before the speech begins.  Beyond that ... who knows. The speakers are big and the park is vast.  It's gonna be a madhouse.

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In a last-minute attempt to shore up support in the Hoosier State, John McCain is going to make a pit-stop at the Indianapolis airport tomorrow:

Republican Sen. John McCain will make his first Indiana campaign stop in more than four months -- a rally at the Indianapolis airport Monday afternoon, the day before voters choose the nation's next president. [...]

Despite the unusual closeness of the race, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis told reporters in a conference call Friday morning that "we love the results of the campaign we have going on there."

He cited a poll by Rasmussen, released this week, that showed McCain with a 3 percentage-point lead, a statistical dead heat given the poll's margin of error.

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A meeting of the minds:

The Wall Street Journal has the full story.

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Much has been made this election cycle about the future composition of the Supreme Court, and with good reason. If John McCain wins Tuesday, it's practically assured that he will appoint hardline conservative judges to the bench, pushing the court further rightward and likely endangering the reproductive rights of women, whose concerns he openly mocked in the final debate. But Alexander Wohl made a valid and often overlooked point at the American Prospect yesterday -- the next president will have a major opportunity  to reshape the nation's legal landscape through appointments to the 13 federal appellate courts, as well.

Instructive here is research from Russell Wheeler of The Brookings Institution. According to Wheeler, it's likely that the 111th Congress will create 14 new circuit judges positions as recommended by the United States Judicial Conference. He also estimates that half the circuit judges who are now eligible or will become eligible for retirement by 2011 will exercise that right (even though they have lifetime appointments).

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The Associated Press is pushing back against John McCain's distortions of comments by Barack Obama during that 2001 discussion on Chicago Public Radio:

"It's always more interesting to hear what people have to say in these unscripted moments," McCain told a rally in Dayton, Ohio, alluding to Obama's now well-known exchange in Ohio with Joe the Plumber. "And, today, we heard another moment like this from Sen. Obama.

"In a radio interview that was revealed today, he said that, quote, One of the tragedies of the civil rights movement is that it didn't bring about a redistribution of wealth in our society."

Obama never said that, according to an audio file circulated by Naked Emperor News, a Web site with many postings critical of Obama.

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When detailing the slime oozing from the McCain campaign last week, we highlighted the story of Ted Zoromski, a Middleton, WI resident who quit his job at a telemarketing firm when they asked him to read a script bashing Barack Obama. As it turns out, Zoromski isn't the only Midwesterner refusing to spew this nonsense. TPM's Greg Sargent has the details:

Some three dozen workers at a telemarketing call center in Indiana walked off the job rather than read an incendiary McCain campaign script attacking Barack Obama, according to two workers at the center and one of their parents.

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Last weekend it was Missouri, where 80,000 to 100,000 showed up in St. Louis to hear Barack Obama speak.  Today, he held a rally in Denver, CO, where the police estimated 100,000 came out to see him.

Image courtesy of Obama blogger Amanda Scott.

With time running out and the polls holding steady, a desperate John McCain is throwing the kitchen sink at Barack Obama. In that sink are a boatload of robocalls, a tactic he referred to as "hate calls" when they were used against him eight years ago. As with so many other issues this cycle, McCain has now flipped and is deploying them judiciously as part of an effort to raise concerns about his rival's "character."

One call suggests Obama can't be trusted to keep America safe because he "worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans." According to the folks at Talking Points Memo, who created a great interactive map detailing where McCain's slime is surfacing, the Ayers call has gone out to homes in neighboring Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri. The call is so nasty that one Wisconsin resident quit his gig at a telemarketing firm whose job it was to conduct the calls. You can listen to it here.

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The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll found that a supermajority of respondents did not think Barack Obama's ties to Bill Ayers represent a "legitimate issue":

Skepticism about the Ayers issue was one of the factors cited by Colin Powell in his endorsement of Obama yesterday, and in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll, likely voters broadly agree: 60 percent say Obama's relationship with Ayers is not a legitimate issue in the presidential campaign; 37 percent say it is.

I can't help but wonder whether this would be the case in the absence of a global financial crisis.  My sense is that voters are simply more focused right now than they were on the cusp of the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections.  The common disconnect between who's in the White House and what's going on around their kitchen table seems to have been largely erased.  Folks know how important this decision is to their lives and the future of the country.  As such, casting their vote simply on the basis of character, personality, or even bigotry, has become a luxury they can't afford.