I am rapidly becoming a total addict to the Nielsen Wire blog, which today posted perhaps their most useful and practical survey information of all time: charting how Republicans and Democrats watch TV. While some of the differences are exaggerated, there were some notable differences - particularly on one show that’s near and dear to my heart.

As might be expected, however, several programs had clear partisan bents.  On Comedy Central, for example, Democratic viewers paid the most attention to “The Colbert Report,” while “South Park” was the network’s most engaging show among Republicans.

Mediaweek has more. I don’t need more prompting, though, to repost something from last season about South Park at Redstate 2.0. You can read the original post here, with comments.

I know not all of you are South Park fans. I’m a huge fan of their work, and as RS editors know, I try to force them all to watch the episodes and marvel at the phenomenal social commentary hidden behind a layer of the absurd and/or the obscene.

The South Park guys aren’t conservatives - they’re libertarians. But they’re awesome libertarians. They hate the global warming preachers, NAMBLA, Jesse Jackson, Hillary Clinton, and save some of their strongest bile for the celebrity political activists - George Clooney, Rob Reiner, Rosie O’Donnell and Barbara Streisand. They can’t stand politically correct authoritarians and they authored the definitive anti-9/11-truthers response (which actually ends up being kinda pro-W, believe it or not). They’ve made Al Gore into a walking joke among Comedy Central viewers. Yes, they bash the Catholic Church a lot and they have some cutting remarks about redneck Americans and country music…but their episodes bashing Richard Dawkins and atheism are far more vicious, and amazingly composed.

And they really, really loathe hippies. Really. Like, even more than me. Can’t blame them. Their native Colorado has about the worst hippie infestation I’ve ever seen. There’s really no hope for that place.

Anyway, that brings us to Cartman’s brief commentary about abortion in the other night’s episode - don’t worry, nothing horribly NSFW in this clip (though there is plenty in the whole episode, which you can find here if the clip isn’t working):

Surprisingly, well, good. Hmm. This isn’t a pro-life clip, but it obviously ridicules the idea that abortion is anything but a cop-out that sacrifices another human life to an individual’s whim.

There’s no reason to think that Parker and Stone meant anything by this other than the context of the joke…but still. It’s something. And it’s good.

Thanks to South Park Studios awesome redesign, you can now watch a whole collection of clips with the Abortion tag. Most of them are either mocking the selfishness of the people involved, the ulterior motives of those seeking the destruction of human life (particularly the stem cell episodes), or in some cases, using brutally accurate descriptions of abortion to make a gag joke.

I seriously doubt the South Park guys are pro-life. I just think they have a low tolerance for B.S. from either side. And in this case, most of the B.S. isn’t on our side.

Since I live in the newly swing state of Virginia and specifically in very swinging Loudoun County, and have voted here in every election since I could vote, allow me to point out what would be obvious to anyone who lived here: the amount of enthusiasm for John McCain among the people who get voters to the polls and determine whether this county is red or not is almost nonexistent.

Part of it’s ideological, in the sense that many of the conservative activists in Virginia are more Lou Dobbsian than you might expect (there’s a reason Huckabee beat McCain by a 2-1 margin in Roanoke), but it says something that I can’t even find as many volunteers in this county as George Allen had in the final days after Macaca - the volunteer base was one of the reasons Allen made a late surge, making up a good deal of ground, and still almost won here running against a self-styled centrist Democrat in a year that was terrible for Republicans. Allen only lost the county in 2006 by 7,000 votes, less than 3 tenths of a percent. His total margin of loss statewide was 10,000 votes, less than .5 tenths of a percent. In other words: Loudoun alone determined Webb’s victory.

The Obama campaign has deluged us with smiling volunteers, most bussed in from other places. I got a notebook-sized book, with a hand-written message, left at my door while I was at church the other day. It is the finest piece of political literature I’ve ever seen. It’s gorgeous. It’s beautiful. All flowing Gotham font and perfect image selection. It makes Kitten look like the most moderate, experienced Democrat you’ve ever seen. You want to put it on your coffee table.

McCain’s people left a torn door hanger shoved against my door with a picture of him looking like he was constipated. Knocking on doors on a Sunday morning - well, that’s fine for the Democrats, but for the Republicans? Please.

This year, the Republican Party selected the most ideologically moderate, media-friendly nominee of my lifetime. They picked him because, like Dole in 96, he was the guy who deserved his shot. They picked him because they thought the fact that he’d made a career out of stabbing his party in the back would befriend him to the horde or make him difficult for the New York Times to attack.

They thought wrong. As Mark Salter expresses it in what should be held as THE classic rant of this cycle to Jeffrey Goldberg - and it’s all true! - it’s not McCain who’s changed, it’s the media that’s covering him.

JG: What do you think of the assertion that McCain is exploiting his P.O.W. experiences?

MS: I find that very offensive. Barack Obama gets to tell his story why? Because it’s more potent?

JG: How are you feeling about the press these days?

MS: Look, I think, starting with the Democratic primary, there has been a different standard for Obama than there has been for any candidate running against Barack Obama. And maybe this should have set off more warning bells with me. I think much of the media has a thumb on the scale for Obama. I think the thumb has been there the entire time. There are many honorable exceptions, I don’t mean to tar everybody, but I think there’s one standard for us, and one standard for Obama. He has run more negative ads than McCain has run ads. They run from the quite misleading to the blatantly untrue.

Once he stopped jabbing GOPers in the eye with a sharp stick and started running as the nominee of a party, the media reacted:

JG: Looking back, do you think there was something false about your salad days with the press?

MS: No, I’m trying not to draw general lessons about the press or us or the meaning of life out of all of this. Otherwise I’d despair. I think the media is driven by a need to see this history happen. And I think they’ve rationalized it, they think they’re on the level with McCain, that he’s not the old McCain. But he is the old McCain. He just doesn’t know what happened to the old press corps. They rationalize a reason to go get him. Every Obama attack they carry. Every McCain criticism of Obama they rush to blunt even before Obama does.

JG: Putting aside Palin, is one of the problems you’re facing the fact that there’s no foreign policy discussion right now?

MS: Iraq was supposed to be the issue of the campaign. We assumed it was our biggest challenge. Funny how things work.

The Republicans ignored the fact that with the exception of the surge, John McCain has been out of step with the base about just about every policy he’s chosen to stick his neck out to support. He’s just burned too many bridges along the way to this moment. If you don’t get the people who can deliver 2,000 home schoolers on 24 hours notice to support you, you can’t win this state.

Nowhere is McCain’s wrongness about one of his key issues, the public financing of elections, going to hurt him more than in the Virginia TV market - Sunday afternoon, over the course of multiple football games, I saw what felt like 75 Obama ads - three separate ones, alternating, repeating every commercial break - messages of fix your health care, cut your taxes, McCain is a fraud. I did not see a single McCain ad. Not one.

The public financing gambit from McCain was always based on the proposition that, with the right candidates in either party, an agreement of restrictions on the weapons at hand would be good for democracy. It would enable both candidates to engage in a dozen town hall meetings, which McCain loves, and spread their message in limited and less negative form. But when you count “1, 2, 3″ and drop all your weapons but a Bowie knife, and the other guy is standing there with a Surface to Air Missile on his shoulder, saying “Eh, I changed my mind,”, well, you’re pretty much screwed.

Winning Northern Virginia exurb voters, like winning most elections outside of an urban environment, is done by having volunteers, activists, and targeted GOTV efforts. It is done through massive mobilization and organization and, on a few key policy points, running well-designed and well-targeted ads (Obama has the luxury of not having to target at all - he’s doing the sledgehammer method, running ads on every channel I watch, every sporting event, every comedy show, even late night cartoons). I was stunned at the number of mobilizers, organizers, and longtime volunteers who were sitting this McCain ride out completely before the Palin pick (which energized the volunteer base like nothing else - her rallies are easily twice the size of his). And this isn’t just true in Virginia. But those are the stories for the morning after.

This morning, this showed up in my inbox. I walk to this park every week, sometimes twice. And on Wednesday, Barack will be coming to town.

This Wednesday, October 22nd, please join Barack Obama in Leesburg, where he will talk about his vision for creating the kind of change we need.

Change We Need Rally
with Barack Obama

Ida Lee Park
Festival Field
50 Ida Lee Drive, NW
Leesburg, VA

Wednesday, October 22nd
Gates open: 3:00 p.m.
Program Begins: 5:30 p.m.

RSVP

http://va.barackobama.com/LeesburgChange

This event is free and open to the public. Tickets are not required; however, an RSVP is strongly encouraged. Space is available on a first-come, first-served basis.

For security reasons, do not bring bags and please limit personal items. No signs or banners permitted.

Obama’s about to head to Hawaii to see his ailing grandmother - poor gal, the one he called a “typical white person” - but a rally in Leesburg, VA, a place that elects a solidly moderate GOPer in Representative Frank Wolf like clockwork every two years, is more important.

The Lesson: The Media is a fickle creature. Grudging respect is not a basis for a successful electoral campaign. And running Old and Busted against the New Hotness is a whole mess of Fail.

Michael Tomasky never would’ve written this article had Rudy Giuliani been the Republican nominee. Of course, he isn’t, and we know why - but this article makes me miss him dearly. He was without question the most experienced executive in this year’s presidential stakes, and for all his personal faults, represents the change a leader can attain who has a steady hand in response to overwhelming challenge.

No less a savant of urbanism than Daniel Patrick Moynihan, that great liberal and occasional neoconservative who never abandoned his nostalgia for Tammany’s no-nonsense efficiency (“We built the entire Bronx-Whitestone Bridge in 31 months!” he once barked to me), saw nothing but discouraging signs. I remember with crystal clarity the speech he gave to Lew Rudin’s Association for a Better New York in the spring of the 1993 election year. New Yorkers, he said, had withdrawn into “a narcoleptic state of acceptance” of a host of quality-of-life ills and annoyances. The following year, shortly after Giuliani had taken office, Moynihan told a city hearing on juvenile violence that the rate of out-of-wedlock births essentially ensured that the city’s youth was lost for years to come: “The next two decades are spoken for … There is nothing you’ll do of any consequence, except start the process of change. Don’t expect it to take less than 30 years.”

No one quite understood the force of the tornado that had just hit town. By the end of Giuliani’s first year, the city was a visibly different place—made safe, Toronto-ized, starting down the road toward being Olive Garden–ized (yes, there were downsides!); a place that suddenly was no longer the city where Travis Bickle prayed to God for the rain to wash the trash off the sidewalk and where—in real life, not the movies—display ads for porn films actually ran in the Post right alongside the display ads for Smokey and the Bandit … That is inconceivable to us now. But it, and a score of cankers like it, used to be the reality in New York. Lots of forces combined to change that, but the biggest force of all was Rudy.

Here’s my latest Washington Times oped, on Joe Wurzelbacher’s questioning of Obama, and how it shows McCain’s limits. The closer:

“The ultimate authority, they say, is in will, not reason,” G.K. Chesterton mused a century ago. “The supreme point is not why a man demands a thing, but the fact that he does demand it.” America’s electoral choice in 2008 is no longer based on reason, on the whys and wherefores of established fact, or on the citizen — the plumber — expressing his view. It is based on the new unshakeables of feeling and sentiment, on a state of mind expressed eloquently in Mr. Obama’s surprisingly honest slogan — no, not the ever-present affirmation of “Yes we can,” but the bastardized Latin of his hubristic presidential seal: “Vero Possumus.” Literally translated, it is an exclamation with all the balance and reason of a toddler stamping his feet: “I do it!”

And soon enough, barring a thousand more Joe the Plumbers brave enough to withstand the assault, he will.

Read it all here.

My latest op-ed over at the Washington Times concerns the dueling perspectives of John McCain and Barack Obama on our economic woes - and how both fail the test:

So, here’s a story to tell the grandkids around some future autumn kitchen table. Once upon a time, the American people, facing the greatest global economic crisis in a generation, headed to the polls to choose the next leader of the free world and custodian of the formerly free market. Their options were limited to the dashing young lawyer and the battle-tested combat pilot, two men who for all their appeal had never run a state, a town or a business - large or small.

It’s shocking to consider how Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama come to the challenges of the day with such little economic knowledge of their own. If both won their respective primaries thanks in the largest part to their positions on security issues - Mr. McCain elevated by his undeniable vindication on the Iraq troop surge, Mr. Obama fueled by a vibrant antiwar upsurge that now seems like little more than postwar bitterness and should change little about the outcome of the conflict - neither comes to the fray knowing more about the economy than what others tell them. And for advice, one has the banking lobby whispering in his ear while the other has the corrupt handmaidens of Fannie and Freddie holding his purse strings.

Read it all over at the WT website.

There’s no question that I really should like Mad Men. I don’t watch a lot of television that falls outside the categories of “sporting event” or “cartoon”, but if they put it down on paper, I feel like I’d be the ideal target market for this one. Along with any under-thirty guy who damns John Kennedy for ending the life of the Fedora (actually, that’s an urban myth - the truth is much dorkier, and not at all fitting with JFK’s tousled appeal), and thinks the world would be a much better place if men behaved like Cary Grant and talked like C.C. Baxter, and the uniform of choice was still the the gray flannel suit. Hell, there’s a bottle of rye sitting on my desk as I type this, next to a retro Colibri lighter in an ashtray. I should love this show.

But I don’t. And it’s damn disappointing, because I wanted to like it.

There’s no question the design is fantastic, evoking with gusto the old New York of the golden age of advertising, as one might imagine it. It’s the stuff of the old magazines on the bottom shelf in your grandparent’s living room (or your parent’s basement if you’re a bit older). The whole thing reminds me of that famed advertising memo - I can’t remember who wrote it, someone email it to me - where the head of a firm requested that the men of the firm drink whiskey at lunch instead of vodka, because he’d prefer that their clients thought they were drunk, instead of stupid.

Sadly, the retro style is where the good stops. One of the reasons I never liked Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner’s work on The Sopranos was that my introduction to it came in the later phases, when I am told the show had a surplus of characters who were either powerfully unlikeable or completely incomprehensible as anything but the tool of a lazy writer.

In the case of Mad Men, I feel like it’s a different problem: this is Ally McBeal with guys. The situations swing between the obvious, the predictable, and the absurdly cliched. Oh, so now you’re going to play the normal 1960s show game of let’s cover gaps in our plot and make it seem like we’re being epic and ingenious by invoking a pop cultural event everybody knows about. Yes, that’s oh so new and creative. People were so uptight back then! And they had the social family drama of the upper crust as related via off-Broadway theatre! And the man feared emasculation! And there was sexual and racial tension! And they hated adoption! You learn something new every day.

No matter how talented the actors - Jon Hamm always reminds me of Mitt Romney, but he’s perfectly cast, and John Slattery is nearly as good - or the actresses (Lileks’ affection for Christina Hendrick’s Joan is totally understandable) are, they just can’t carry this drek. It’s either the stuff of bad Lifetime movies (there’s another kind?) or bad oversexed FX drama, not the kind of tautly written dramatic material any show depicting such an explosively creative period rightly deserves. Instead, the Sixties agency world is just another period for people to apply the same combination of broad strokes that make up typical TV storylines to a new canvas … and that’s not telling a story, it’s just playing games. Or as Raymond Chandler once said: “This is what is vulgarly known as having God sit in your lap.”

Past rumors are now confirmed as absolute truth in the wake of the slobberknocker comeback in Philly: Redskins Owner Daniel Snyder is, in all actuality, Michael Scott’s long lost twin brother. Well, but maybe with a little more of that John Henderson fire (from an old WaPo profile):

“Hey, turn on ESPN!” he says. “They got the Redskins! Turn it on!” I turn on the TV in my room so now we are both watching ESPN. “They’re showing us losing to Dallas!” he mutters. The Dallas Cowboys have now beaten the Redskins nine consecutive times.

“I hate Dallas,” Snyder yells. “. . . Would I cut off a finger to beat Dallas?”

“I don’t know, Dan,” I reply, “you might.”

“I would,” he says.

The original evidence is provided by Mr. Irrelevant.

A small hypothetical for you all to entertain as you watch tonight’s debate:

When Joe Biden first ran for the Senate, he ran as a Democrat in a Democratic year. In Washington, he’s been a fairly moderate Democrat - a servant of MBNA and the credit card companies in Delaware, he’s been a frequent friend of the corporation and the businessman. He’s played the Washington game a bit - sending his son to a high-class lobbying job, playing both sides of Clarence Thomas during that nomination debacle, putting his foot in his mouth on more than one occasion - but on the whole, he’s never been a radical.

Is it that hard to imagine Biden as a Republican, instead of a Democrat?

His voting pattern is not all that dissimilar from Senator Arlen Specter in Pennsylvania, or Biden’s former colleague, moderate GOPer Bill Roth. Highly educated and ambitious from his youth, he has the brash ego of a career politician and a penchant for outrageous remarks that far exceed any Macaca moments. He likes the military and Amtrak and corporations. He likes America. He dislikes hippies. He’s fairly moderate in ideology and testy in temperament.

On the other side, you have Sarah Palin - a rural feminist, with a strong religious undercurrent, a blue collar background, a PTA member, a Union member, pro-gun, pro-life, and pro-military but a bit isolationist and rather libertarian on gay rights issues. A son in the military - a recruit, not an officer - and a Huckabee-esque penchant for bashing authority. She can’t be painted into any particular corner ideologically, but she is hated by government bureaucrats as much as she is loved by the citizens of her state.

Is it that hard to imagine Palin as a Democrat, instead of a Republican?

She’s the member of no old guard, no political establishment, has no family wealth to fall back on. Her astounding political win in a relatively minor state comes hard fought against the male-dominated Republican leadership. She does so by taking a populist anti-corporate and anti-establishment position, talking in very blue-collar terms about climate change and the need to install immediate reforms. If there’s a comparison on the D side, she’s the female Jim Webb: brash and inspiring, the people who like her adore her, and the people who dislike her hate her intensely.

Imagine this debate, for one moment, with Sarah Palin - the socially traditionalist (need those evangelical swing voters!), blue collar union member, telegenic Democratic Veep nominee - and Joe Biden - the old white guy who’s been in Washington forever, wedded to the credit card companies, who’s never done anything but be a lawyer-politician, who’s gotten money from every interest group and traded favors with everyone under the sun - as the Republican Veep nominee?

I could see it. And I wonder how the media would treat it differently.

Update: Victor Davis Hanson has the right idea.

For the fans out there: Artist Lou Romano shares some of his Pixar work for The Incredibles. It’s some fantastic stuff.

I watched very little of it, but I think Ezra Klein’s assessment sums up the opinions of the blogosphere rather tidily:

This is a pretty traditional debate performance for Obama. Strong on substance. Few mistakes. Little in the way of killer instinct or decapitating lines. McCain, by contrast, is offering an uncommonly strong performance powered, as far as I can tell, by his raging contempt for Obama. He won’t look at him. He’s using “what Senator Obama doesn’t understand” the way Joe Biden uses “ladies and gentlemen.” His constant refrain is the places he’s visited, leaders he’s befriended, aging advisers and presidents he’s known. Obama is conveying the fact that he thinks McCain wrong. But McCain is conveying the fact that he thinks Obama an unprepared lightweight. One of these is a stronger claim than the other.

Obama is without question the more appealing fellow on a stage: he has a commanding presence, an engaging smile, a great voice for the thing. He makes things seem more substantive just by talking about them (where the same lines repeated by, say, John Kerry would seem limp and trite). He’s also fantastic when it comes to changing the subject - he can easily glide from a tough topical question to a series of vague and nice sounding policies (hence Lehrer’s frustration at points tonight). But he also has the smart professor’s disease of talking long and being a poor self-editor, thinking that using a string of numbers is an argument, and generally sounding like he loves the way he talks. This makes him ideal for a campus debate, or excellent in a venue where his opponent is restrained (see: Clinton, Hillary), but poor in a situation where the other debater comes to the forum carrying a lead pipe in his craggy old hands.

McCain is used to the dueling of the Senate floor - he’s a poor speaker generally, not an inspirational vocalist, and a reader and a narrator as opposed to an elucidator of things. Where Obama can make any muddle seem appealing, McCain is oftentimes forced to either skip the muddle or get bogged down in it and lose the audience. McCain won very few of the debates during the GOP primary, and when he did win, he often seemed like a mean old man berating students for being idiots. But he does have his moments, and when he gets a good clip going, McCain ceases to seem mean, and instead comes across as a supporting character in a David Mamet screenplay, smiling jubilantly as he brings that pipe down.

In this situation, with this opponent in the arena, McCain seems rejuvenated. Where Obama is young and smart, McCain is old and forceful. Even his smile is wartorn and uneven next to Obama’s gleam and Denzel Washington-like symmetry, but the unevenness gives him a certain grace. McCain is the known quantity on stage, and he has nothing to prove; most of Obama’s slights about him being Bush 3.0 just don’t sell, because his brand is so well-defined already. This gives him a slight advantage, as Klein notes - Obama has to come to these debates to close the deal, to sell himself as the next President, to convince the last waverers not to jump over to the other side in a time of uncertainty. McCain, on the other hand, just needs to convince people that Obama is unready to lead, a gamble in a dangerous time, a guy who’s better suited for the celebrity circuit than the Oval Office.

There’s something oddly amusing about these seeing these two very odd characters go at it. Neither of them really know anything about the biggest issue in this election, the economy - one’s a soldier, one’s a lawyer. McCain is the more emotional of the two, more inclined to act on gut instinct and passion, while under Obama’s soft exterior is a more calculating and capable politician. Four years ago, one never would’ve predicted that either of these men would end up on this stage.

Now we’re stuck with them, and there’s nothing else for it. So let’s hope they’ll still take paper money for popcorn at the next one.