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Reported from TPM Election Central:

In a sign of just how nervous senior Democrats are about Barack Obama’s situation, top Democratic Party operatives are privately urging the party’s major donors to get serious about putting big money into outside groups looking to attack John McCain in key battleground states.

Several senior Democratic strategists unaffiliated with Obama’s campaign convened a private conference call late last week with at least four dozen of the party’s most prolific donors to progressive causes and outside groups — a call designed to instill a sense among donors that things are “pretty damn urgent” right now, one of the organizers of the call tells me.

The call is yet another sign that donors and outside operatives — who had earlier gotten the message from Obama that he doesn’t want such activity — now recognize that Team Obama is privately hoping for such efforts to gear up in earnest.

David Brooks writes in the New York Times that Palin is too “brash” and “antiestablishment” to be Vice President:

Is Sarah Palin qualified to be vice president? Most conservatives say yes, on the grounds that something that feels so good could not possibly be wrong. But a few commentators, like George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Frum and Ross Douthat demur, suggesting in different ways that she is unready…

In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. They wanted rough and rooted people like Palin.

I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years. For if the Bush administration was anything, it was the anti-establishment attitude put into executive practice.

And the problem with this attitude is that, especially in his first term, it made Bush inept at governance. It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence…

Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness.

The idea that “the people” will take on and destroy “the establishment” is a utopian fantasy that corrupted the left before it corrupted the right. Surely the response to the current crisis of authority is not to throw away standards of experience and prudence…

Joseph Romm says Obama has “nailed the winning strategy” with this ad:

You’ll know that Obama is serious about winning if he and Biden, their surrogates, and their ads use this devastating line of attack on McCain’s dishonorable campaign over and over again, including the debates, through November…

This attack on McCain’s honor is the winning narrative because it has so many different benefits for Obama. First and foremost, it allows Obama to turn all of the ongoing lies by and about Palin — which are presumably designed to goad the Obama campaign to go after her, rather than McCain — into a character attack against McCain…

Indeed, like the best frames, it can be used by Obama or any surrogate to immediately reframe any new McCain attack as yet another example of McCain’s dishonor and dishonesty…

If you are not attacking you are losing.

How often do you sit back and think — is this truly happening?  Can the GOP steal an election, spend eight years tearing this nation apart, and go on to run another smear campaign to elect yet another set of absurd candidates?

Outrageous.  Unbelievable.  As Matt Damon put it last week, this is like a really bad Disney movie.

But no, this isn’t a movie — this is reality, and the future of our world is at stake.  Imagine, in the likely chance that McCain dies in office, Vice President Sarah Palin steps in to become the leader of the free world.  Just imagine.

New urgency calls for new measures.  The GOP is winning, and another onslaught of lies and attacks is yet to come.  We have to hit back fast and hard, and while Obama’s new tone will help, what we need is a new theme — a theme we glimpsed at the most electrifying moment of Obama’s speech in Denver:

ENOUGH.

You can feel it simmering just beneath the surface.  It is a sense that something in this country is fundamentally wrong.  It is an underlying outrage and fury over what has happened to our country over the past eight years – and a vigorous determination to chart a new direction.

Obama will win a landslide if he can unleash and direct this outrage.  But it will require a theme commensurate with the challenge.  ”Change” is not enough.  As Arianna Huffington writes:

“To fully become the transformational leader we need, Obama must demonstrate to the American people his capacity for indignation — for the kind of ferocious passion that fueled King and Nelson Mandela. He has to fight fire with fire, and wield anger in the service of what is right, true, and good. The fierce urgency of now demands nothing less.“

The fierce urgency of now demands a new and powerful theme – a theme that can resonate with Americans of all political stripes and can be summed up in one word: ENOUGH.

ENOUGH with this disaster economy.

ENOUGH with this disaster foreign policy.

ENOUGH with this disaster war.

ENOUGH with this ignorant energy strategy.

ENOUGH with this intolerable health care.

ENOUGH with trashing the Constitution.

ENOUGH with the lies and corruption.

ENOUGH with gambling away our future.

ENOUGH!!!  It is the rallying cry that can unite and invigorate Americans behind a simple and clear message: too much is at stake.  We have built too much to let it be taken away.  And we love this country too much to allow it to be undermined at such a critical point in our history.

So please – join me in sending this message to family, friends, and colleagues.  Let it be heard loud and clear that the American people have had enough – that we are ready to fight for our future and leave the past behind once and for all.

–Steadfast Patriot

Reported from the Washington Post, “Conflict Over Spying Led White House to Brink“:

If Addington smelled revolt, he was not far wrong. Unwelcome questions about warrantless domestic surveillance had begun to find their voice.

Cheney and his counsel would struggle for months to quash the legal insurgency. By the time President Bush became aware of it, his No. 2 had stoked dissent into flat-out rebellion. The president would face a dilemma, and the presidency itself a historic test. Cheney would come close to leading them off a cliff, man and office both…

Cheney and Addington, [Goldsmith] came to believe, were gaming the system, using secrecy and intimidation to prevent potential dissenters from conducting an independent review…

“They were geniuses at this,” Goldsmith said. “They could divide up all these problems in the bureaucracy, ask different people to decide things in their lanes, control the facts they gave them, and then put the answers together to get the result they want.”

Dec. 9, 2003, the day of the visit from Brenner and Potenza, was the beginning of the end of that strategy. The years of easy victory were winding down for Cheney and his staff.

“McCain has gone in his ads one step too far, and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the 100-percent-truth test.”

–Karl Rove