As Time describes, Huckabee's tome (Do The Right Thing: Inside the Movement That's Bringing Common Sense Back to America) is part political memoir, part policy prescription - and part payback. Former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, his rival in courting the GOP's religious right base during the primaries, is mocked as "anything but conservative until he changed the light bulbs in his chandelier in time to run for president." Aggravating matters still, Huckabee "took as a sign of total disrespect" Mitt's refusal to call and congratulate him on his victory in the Iowa caucus which ultimately derailed Romney's campaign.

According to Time, much of Huckabee's venom is directed at his ersatz Christian conservative allies who backed other candidates during the Republican primaries. He blasts Pat Robertson and Bob Jones for backing Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, respectively. Huckabee pans Gary Bauer for his "ever-changing reason to deny me his support." Lamenting "that so many people of faith had moved from being prophetic voices," Governor Huckabee unleashed his fury at the End Times Pastor John Hagee who ultimately backed McCain:

"I asked if he had prayed about this and believed this was what the Lord wanted him to do," Huckabee writes of his conversation with Hagee. "I didn't get a straight answer."

Huckabee's evident feelings of betrayal towards his fellow culture warriors on display in this new book are understandable. After all, among the first of his six books was everything they could have asked for.

In advance of a White House run, most would-be presidential candidates author the obligatory book featuring a heroic biography and bland policy prescriptions. But as David Corn reported, in 1998 Mike Huckabee instead penned a declaration of culture war in his vituperative tome, Kids Who Kill: Confronting Our Culture of Violence.

While Huckabee during the 2008 primaries claimed to be a "uniter" ("We've got to be the united people of the United States"), in 1998 he was anything but. Written the wake of a Jonesboro, Arkansas school shooting, Huckabee laid virtually of all of America's ills at the feet of everyone - and everything - he hates:

"Despite all our prosperity, pomp, and power, the vaunted American experiment in liberty seems to be disintegrating before our very eyes."

"Abortion, environmentalism, AIDS, pornography, drug abuse, and homosexual activism have fragmented and polarized our communities."

"It is now difficult to keep track of the vast array of publicly endorsed and institutionally supported aberrations - from homosexuality and pedophilia to sadomasochism and necrophilia."

Of course, Mike Huckabee's extremism hardly ends there. As I documented here, here and here, Huckabee called for the quarantine of AIDS victims, advocated a faith-based U.S. Constitution, predicted victory over Islam at the End of Times, declared wives should graciously submit to their husbands, credited God for his rise in the polls, undermined the teaching of evolution, offered faith-based pardons for prisoners, called on Americans to be "soldiers for Christ" in "God's army," equated homosexuality with bestiality, and so much more that the chattering classes reviewing Do the Right Thing will conveniently forget.

As it turns out, with his draconian social agenda, Mike Huckabee isn't alone in staking a claim to lead the Republican Party. With today's news of her $7 million deal, Huckabee is going to have some competition on the bookshelves - from Sarah Palin.

UPDATE: The Romney camp responds, calling "this type of pettiness is beneath Mike Huckabee."

As Georgia Congressman Paul Broun learned last week, politicians and pundits of all stripes should resist the temptation to compare their opponents to Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Apparently, the staunch conservatives at the National Review didn't get the memo. Facing both conservative calamity at the polls and defections in its own ranks, the Review's Deroy Murdock suggested that a 1930's Nazi-style purge is just what the doctor ordered for the Republican Party.

As the New York Times detailed Monday, the National Review in the wake of the Republican wipe-out is, like the party it parrots, in a state of crisis. Sarah Palin critics Kathleen Parker, Christopher Buckley and now David Frum have been forced from its pages. (Given that Palin induced editor Rich Lowry to sit "up a little straighter" and see "starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America," the Review's harsh reaction to their apostasy is unsurprising.)

Enter contributing editor and Hoover Institution fellow Murdock. Fresh off the Review's latest fundraising cruise (the "Hate Boat?"), Murdock announced it is the season for recriminations. His solution for the beaten, battered and moribund GOP?

Now, what about those whom Obama and his supporters vanquished? What the Republican party badly needs is a Night of the Long Knives.

While no doubt tongue-in-cheek, Murdock's choice of metaphor is an unfortunate one for an arch conservative party now reduced to a rump of rabid supporters backing a draconian social agenda.

The Night of the Long Knives, after all, was the brutal 1934 purge in which Adolf Hitler consolidated his power in the Nazi party and Germany. As Encarta summarized it:

Night of the Long Knives [was the] sudden bloody purge within Germany's Nazi Party on June 30-July 1, 1934. It was carried out by Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Interior Minister Hermann Goring, and Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS or Schutzstaffel (German for "Security Squadron"), the elite military force of the Nazi Party. The principal victims of the "Night of the Long Knive" were Ernst Rohm and his chief lieutenants within the Sturmabteilung (the Storm Troops, also known as the SA). But many others were included, notably men who had opposed Hitler from 1931 to 1934. Among these were Hitler's main critics within the Nazi Party, Gregor Strasser and General Kurt von Schleicher, the former chancellor. The "Night of the Long Knives" was the name given to the operation by the Nazis themselves; the expression refers to acts of vengeance.

For his part, Murdock in "Restoring Reaganism" provides a lengthy who's who among the Republican brain trust as "the guilty" who should be "cast into the nearest volcano." They are all there - McConnell, Boehner, Blunt, Frist, Hastert, Delay, Stevens, Gingrich and even Karl Rove. Above all, Murdock blames George W. Bush, "the GOP's Jimmy Carter" (if not its Ernst Rohm) as the man who "surrendered the White House to the opposition." (Only a year ago, Murdock lauded the waterboarding of terror detainees by President Bush's administration, declaring, "Waterboarding is something of which every American should be proud.")

As for the ideologues who backed the GOP's now failed leaders, the knives are out. It's no wonder Deroy Murdock's former National Review colleague David Frum is "frightened."

UPDATE: Meanwhile, right-wing radio hate jockey Michael Savage will feature a former member of the Hitler Youth to discuss "the election of Barack Hussein Obama as reminiscent of the way the Nazi regime came to power."

On Tuesday, Senate Democrats will decide the turncoat Joe Lieberman's fate as the chairman of the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee. But whether Lieberman retains his chairmanship or even his place in the Democratic caucus, President-elect Barack Obama will apparently play little to no role. It's just another stark contrast with George W. Bush, whose campaign of retribution against Jim Jeffords in 2001 drove the Vermont Senator out of the Republican Party.

That some of Joe Lieberman's former colleagues are turning up the heat is clear. After the milquetoast Senators Evan Bayh and Amy Klobuchar called for Lieberman merely to apologize for his treachery, a growing chorus of voices is now calling for payback. Vermont's delegation of Pat Leahy and Bernie Sanders insisted Lieberman must face real consequences for carrying John McCain's water. And on the eve of Tuesday's secret vote by Democrats on chairman Lieberman's fate, Byron Dorgan (D-ND) simply deemed the Connecticut Quisling's support for McCain and Republican Senate candidates unacceptable.

But one voice counseling restraint is that of Barack Obama. The man most impacted by Joe Lieberman's scurrilous attacks and scorched earth campaigning has announced he does not "hold any grudges."

To be sure, no one could fault Obama for seeking vengeance against the supposed independent Senator from the Nutmeg State. After all, Obama campaigned for Lieberman (at the Lieberman team's request) during his bitter reelection battle against Ned Lamont in the 2006 Democratic primary:

"I am absolutely certain Connecticut is going to have the good sense to send Joe Lieberman back to the U.S. Senate so he can continue to serve on our behalf."

Lieberman repaid Obama's support for him in 2006 by stabbing him in the back in 2008. Luckily for Joe Lieberman, Barack Obama is not George W. Bush.

When Vermont Republican Jim Jeffords bucked President Bush over his planned $1.6 trillion tax cut for the wealthy in 2001, Bush retaliated with the same vicious "politics of payback" that came to define his tenure in the White House. As I noted in 2004:

An early indication of the vindictiveness of this administration came with the saga of Vermont Senator Jim Jeffords' defection from the GOP in 2001. This is a tale of double-retribution. First, Jeffords refused to back the Bush tax cut plan in 2001. As The New Republic reported in June 2001, the White House responded by gutting special education programs supported by Jeffords and by threatening the Northeast Interstate Dairy Compact critical to the Vermont milk industry. To add insult to injury, the Bush team took the unprecedented step of not inviting Jeffords to a White House event honoring a teacher from Vermont. They even denied Jeffords' office White House tour passes for his constituents. His departure from the GOP seemed understandable then and now; his one-time colleagues of course are making his tenure as an independent a lonely one.

Like General Eric Shinseki, counter-terrorism czar Richard Clarke, Treasury Secretary Paul O'Neill, Medicare actuary Richard Foster and many more, Senator Jeffords paid the price for crossing George W. Bush and his Republican allies. When Jeffords in May 2001 declared himself an independent and temporarily turned control of the Senate over to the Democrats, Trent Lott (R-MS) called it "a coup of one" and groused, "There is only one person to blame for all this, and that's Jim Jeffords." Ironically, Joe Lieberman responded to Jeffords' joining the Democratic caucus by announcing:

"This is historic. It gives us the opportunity to set the agenda."

Ultimately, Jeffords was shunned by his Republican brethren and was even booted from the Singing Senators, a group of GOP colleagues which ironically included Idaho's Larry Craig. Ostracized and isolated by his former friends, Jeffords retired from the Senate in 2007.

As for Joe Lieberman, Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said he would welcome him with open arms. After Lieberman's disgusting, cowardly betrayal of the Democratic Party, they can have him. Some principles are more important than a potential filibuster-proof majority on paper.

As for Barack Obama, he's apparently content to stay out of the imbroglio over Lieberman's fate. After all, the President-elect has bigger issues to worry about than expending time - and political capital - on the Benedict Arnold from Connecticut. Besides, payback just isn't his style. Like most Americans now, he's probably asked himself, "What would Dubya Do?" and decided on the reverse.

Nothing focuses the mind, the expression goes, like the sight of the gallows. And so it is for beaten and battered Senate Republicans when it comes to the use of the filibuster to block the judicial nominees of President Barack Obama. After years of insisting President Bush's picks for the bench deserved an "up or down vote," Arizona Senator Jon Kyl and his allies in the GOP minority are now threatening to turn to the judicial filibuster. Of course, after two consecutive election day drubbings and a record-setting term of obstruction in Congress, the Republicans' deathbed conversion comes as no surprise.

Addressing the conservative Federalist Society last week, Senator Kyl fired the first salvo in the coming battle for the future of the judiciary. Regurgitating tried and untrue Republican talking points about so-called "judicial activism," Kyl warned his audience that he would filibuster Supreme Court nominees he deemed too liberal:

Kyl, Arizona's junior senator, expects Obama to appoint judges in the mold of U.S Supreme Court Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, David Souter and Stephen Breyer. Those justices take a liberal view on cases related to social, law and order and business issues, Kyl said.

"He believes in justices that have empathy," said Kyl, speaking at a Federalist Society meeting in Phoenix. The attorneys group promotes conservative legal principles.

Kyl said if Obama goes with empathetic judges who do not base their decisions on the rule of law and legal precedents but instead the factors in each case, he would try to block those picks via filibuster.

If that seems like a 180 degree turnabout for the junior Senator from Arizona, that's because it is.

Back in 2005, Kyl was at the forefront of then-majority Senate Republicans threatening Democrats with the "nuclear option" rule change to bar future judicial filibusters of Bush appointees. At a November 28, 2005 campaign event for Kyl, President Bush praised his ally's fight to block the filibuster:

"I can't thank Jon Kyl enough for making sure the judges I nominate get a fair hearing and an up or down vote on the floor of the United States Senate."

When now-Justice Samuel Alito came before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his confirmation hearing, Kyl as usual parroted the trusted GOP sound bite:

"I look forward to a dignified hearing followed by a fair up-or-down vote on the Senate floor."

Alas, that was then and this is now. After receiving what President Bush called a "thumping" in the 2006 mid-terms, the Republicans lost their Senate majority. And now, "the Decider" when it comes to Supreme Court nominations will be Democrat Barack Obama.

Earlier this year, that prospect moved the band of hypocrites at the Weekly Standard to praise John McCain for his role in preserving the judicial filibuster. While the Standard's Dean Barnett previously bemoaned McCain's "uncanny ability to drive virtually all conservatives nuts," Adam White and Kevin White in January lauded McCain's leadership in the "Gang of 14" that saved the judicial filibuster. Not because McCain's position on the so-called "nuclear option" was right in principle, of course, but because it preserved the ability of a Republican minority to block future Democratic judicial nominations:

Finally, it must be noted that McCain's opposition to the nuclear option did not merely serve short-term conservative interests in the specific context of Bush's nominations; rather, it served long-term conservative interests in the federal bench generally. As McCain has warned, there will come a day--perhaps soon--when a Democratic president will nominate decidedly non-conservative justices and judges, and a Democratic Senate majority will want desperately to confirm them. When that moment arrives, conservatives will call on the Republican minority to utilize every tool in the Senate minority playbook to thwart those nominations--especially the filibuster...preservation of the filibuster threat may ultimately prevent the ascent of Supreme Court judges that Laura Ingraham and Rick Santorum would dearly regret.

Of course, the "up or down vote" talking point long ago disappeared from the vocabulary of the Senate GOP. The minority "roadblock Republicans" of the 110th Congress easily set the record for blocking legislation via the filibuster.

As Robert Borosage detailed, while Democrats in the House kept their promise to pass a raft of bills including Medicare drug negotiation, the minimum wage, student loan reform and more, Republicans in the Senate stymied overwhelmingly popular bills at every turn:

"Bills with majority support -- raising the minimum wage, ethics reform, a date to remove troops from Iraq, revoking oil subsidies and putting the money into renewable energy, fulfilling the 9/11 commission recommendations on homeland security--get blocked because they can't garner 60 votes to overcome a filibuster."

Former Senate Minority Whip Trent Lott (R-MS) was one of the essential architects of the filibuster fever in the Grand Obstruction Party. While Lott decried that "the Senate is spiraling into the ground to a degree that I have never seen before" and "all modicum of courtesy is going out the window," Lott was also brutally frank in 2007 about his strategy to prevent any Democratic wins come hell or high water:

"The strategy of being obstructionist can work or fail. So far it's working for us."

As John McCain's junior partner in Arizona Jon Kyl made clear, that same strategy will be in place for President Obama when the time for judicial confirmations comes. As for the defeated and disheartened right-wing bloggers who once called the Gang of 14 "disappointing", "a nightmare" and "a bunch of m-fing cowards," they'll be just fine with that.

UPDATE: As a reader rightly noted by email, the GOP's unsurprising pledge of obstructionism makes the outcomes in the Alaska, Minnesota and Georgia Senate races all the more important.

Among the lowlights of the presidential campaign was the bogus charge from John McCain and his Republican allies that Barack Obama's tax plan was "socialist." Ending the Bush tax breaks for the wealthiest Americans while providing tax relief for most working families, the GOP's amen corner shrieked, verged on communism. But as the election returns showed, voters were having none of it, including those making over $200,000 year. To the consternation of some on the right, the affluent in 2008 concluded that to do well, they needed to do good by putting a Democrat back in the White House.

As I first noted the day after the election, exit polls revealed that Barack Obama beat John McCain 52% to 46% among those earning over $200,000 annually. In 2004, the same group overwhelmingly backed George W. Bush over John Kerry by 63% to 35%. (Unfortunately, the exit polls do not show more granularity above the $200k threshold. In all likelihood, McCain did much better among the top 1% of earners who would have received 58% of the benefits of his tax cut.)

Writing in the Politico today, former Hillary Clinton pollster and strategist Mark Penn noted the significance of that seemingly surprising result. After all, during the campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly stated, "if you make $200,000 a year or less, your taxes will go down." Apparently, the 6% of voters making more were just fine with the prospect of a tax increase:

Barack Obama promised he would lower taxes for 95 percent of Americans and presumably raise them for the 5 percent who benefited most under President Bush's tax policies. But, remarkably, the most affluent 5 percent supported Obama and that was perhaps the key to his victory last week.

For the Republican water carriers at the Weekly Standard, this apparent betrayal by the class traitors of the upper crust was more than they could bear:

Thomas Frank got a lot of attention a few years ago for his book What's the Matter With Kansas, in which he wondered why lower-income voters would back candidates who offered them little in the way of expanded government services. Frank and a host of liberal analysts found it astounding that so many Americans would vote against their perceived economic interests, and instead vote their cultural sensibilities...

...Don't hold your breath waiting for What's the Matter With the Top 5%. It's apparently understandable that educated and cosmopolitan voters regard other issues as more important than the personal bottom line. It's only the working voters of middle America whose votes ought to be predetermined.

Sadly for the downtrodden masses at the Standard, America's upper income earners unlike Frank's Kansans may well have been voting in their own economic self-interest.

Education and the changing global economy explain a lot. Penn noted that "69 percent of all Americans in polls I conducted in recent years now also call themselves 'professionals,' a new class transcending the old class labels or working or middle class or the wealthy." In 2008, Barack Obama won the support of voters at every level of education, including those with college degrees (50% to 48%) and post-graduate degrees (58% to 40%). In comparison, Bush lost to Kerry by only 11% among post-graduate voters and won those with university diplomas (52% to 46%).

And to be sure, Penn's new professional class remembers well both the glory years of the Clinton administration and the onset of the Bush recession. Having their tax rates returned to Clinton-era levels is a price many are apparently willing to pay in order to return to Clinton-era levels of prosperity.

Which brings us to a final point. Wealthier voters may be slowly absorbing the inescapable historical lesson that the American economy and the stock market alike almost always do better under Democratic presidents. As I noted previously:

The superior performance of Democratic presidents covers virtually the entire spectrum of economic indicators. As Elliott Parker of the University of Nevada, Reno detailed in a 2006 paper, since 1949 Democratic administrations have done better than Republican ones when it comes to unemployment (5.2% to 6.0%), job creation (-.0.4% decrease in unemployment, compared to 0.3% increase), GDP growth rate (4.2% to 2.9%), and even corporate profits as a share of GDP. And to be sure, he found the Dow benefits from Democrats in the White House.

There's no shortage of studies to show that stock market returns are higher under Democratic leadership. (As it turns out, Wall Street's performance is also better when Democrats control Congress.) In 2000, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov of UCLA's Anderson School of Business concluded that "that the average excess return in the stock market is higher under Democratic than Republican presidents - a difference of 9 percent per year for the value-weighted portfolio and 16 percent for the equal-weighted portfolio." As the New York Times noted of the UCLA study in 2003, "It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats."

(For more analysis and charts highlighting Democrats' superior stewardship of the economy, visit here.)

Back in 2000, George W. Bush famously told the audience at the Al Smith dinner in New York:

"This is an impressive crowd - the haves and the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you my base."

Much to the dismay of Bill Kristol and his GOP echo chamber at the Weekly Standard, Barack Obama made that base a little smaller last week.

To be sure, Obama's victory prevented the emergence of a conservative Supreme Court supermajority committed to sweeping away Roe v. Wade. With the potential retirement of Justices Stevens (88) and Ginsburg (75), Obama may have the opportunity to make at least two nominations to the Court. (There may be 14 openings on the nation's appellate courts, all but one which currently has a Republican majority.) Given Justice Kennedy's condescending and paternalistic opinion in the 5-4 Gonzales v. Carhart case upholding the so-called federal partial birth abortion ban, the direction of the Court and the fate of Roe surely hung in the balance last Tuesday.

On that point, John McCain, Sarah Palin and the Republican Party were quite clear. McCain not only supported judicial appointees in the mold of John Roberts and Samuel Alito, he reversed course to support overturning Roe v. Wade. And to be sure, the 2008 Republican platform incorporated Palin's extremist views on abortion, banning the procedure even in cases of rape and incest:

"We support a human life amendment to the Constitution, and we endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment's protections apply to unborn children."

In Colorado, anti-abortion activists tried - and failed - to enshrine the GOP plank's logical extreme in the state constitution. The ballot measure known as Amendment 48 would have defined a "person" as "any human being from the moment of fertilization." That ultra-hard line position would not merely have prohibited abortions in the state, as the New York Times noted, "it could ban widely used forms of contraception, curtail medical research involving embryos, criminalize necessary medical care and shutter fertility clinics." Opposed even by National Right to Life and Focus on the Family (groups which argued the measure's "timing and language are not right"), the amendment was overwhelming rejected by Colorado voters by a lopsided 73% to 27% margin.

In South Dakota, too, residents voted down harsh new abortion restrictions designed to prompt a constitutional challenge to Roe. Two years after voters narrowly beat back a ban on all abortions in the state, Measure 11 supporters crafted a new amendment offering limited exceptions for incest, rape or the life and health of the mother. (That would be the same "health of the mother" John McCain derided with air quotes during his final debate with Barack Obama.) By 55% to 45%, South Dakotans said no to the unconstitutional infringement of women's reproductive rights.

Even California had abortion restrictions on the ballot. For the third time, Golden State voters faced a measure putting in place onerous new requirements for parental notification. (As the Times noted, the proposition "would make it difficult for young women caught in abusive situations to obtain an abortion without notifying their parents, even in cases where the father or stepfather is responsible for the pregnancy.") By a narrow four point margin (52% to 48%), Proposition 4 and its 48 hour notification rule were rejected by Californians.

Of course, while pro-choice advocates may have won some battles on Election Day, the war is far from over. Across the nation, anti-abortion forces continue to advance "slippery slope" laws design to gradually undermine the pro-choice consensus in the United States.

In the wake of their victories with so-called partial birth abortion laws and the Unborn Victims of Violence Act, abortion foes continue to push legislation advancing pseudo-scientific (and unsubstantiated) claims about "fetal pain" and "post-abortion syndrome." (The demeaning language of the latter played an essential role in Justice Kennedy's shocking Gonzales v. Carhart opinion.) Other states look to enact fraudulent health warnings and burdensome new regulations on the operation of family planning centers, laws which have left the entire state of Mississippi with a single abortion clinic. And four states - Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Oklahoma - now require mandatory ultrasound procedures for all women seeking an abortion.

When all else fails, there is demonization. The day after Barack Obama's historic election, Jill Stanek, the source of the discredited "infanticide" smear against him, denounced the President-elect as a "barbarian."

(This piece originally appeared at Crooks and Liars.)

That the election of Barack Obama as the United States' first African-American president was historic is an understatement. But perhaps lost in the excitement and emotion of Obama's victory speech Tuesday was just how truly American it was. Weaving into his address the words of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., Obama tapped into the noblest tradition of American national unity. And in so doing, President-elect Obama traced the historical arc of the United States as a work in progress, a nation trying to fulfill its goal of becoming a more perfect union.

To be sure, in Chicago Barack Obama turned to the 16th president to offer an olive branch to the Republican Party he vanquished on November 4th:

"Let's remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House -- a party founded on the values of self-reliance and individual liberty and national unity. Those are values we all share. And while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress."

But Obama wasn't content to end there. Acknowledging the gravity of the political schism gripping the United States, Obama recalled Lincoln's plea from his First Inaugural:

"As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, 'We are not enemies, but friends -- though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.' And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn, I may not have won your vote tonight, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your president too."

Lincoln's words, coming just weeks before the outbreak of the Civil War in 1861, stand among the purest expressions of national unity in the American canon:

"We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature."

As Obama suggested throughout his speech Tuesday, the partisan discord and political conflict he decries represent a threat to the very real work Americans together must do to ensure their "democracy, liberty, opportunity and unyielding hope." Facing two wars, an economic emergency and global energy and climate crises, Americans must be prepared to struggle and sacrifice to overcome:

"The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even in one term, but America, I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you: We as a people will get there."

In preparing - in exhorting - Americans for the difficult times ahead, Obama echoed the civil rights icon Dr. Martin Luther King. Speaking to striking sanitation workers in Memphis the night before his assassination, Dr. King on April 3, 1968 hauntingly assured them of their ultimate triumph, one he might not live to share:

"We've got some difficult days ahead. But it doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land."

Speaking to 200,000 people in Chicago's Grant Park and to an audience of millions more worldwide, Barack Obama made clear that the American people - all of them - will get there.

With his address Tuesday, Barack Obama sought to extend the march of national unity and equality running from Lincoln through King and beyond. His ascendancy is not its culmination, but a step along the way. And to be sure, Obama stressed, the transformation of the United States into the "more perfected union" that 106 year-old Ann Nixon Cooper witnessed in her lifetime is far from finished:

"America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there's so much more to do. So tonight let us ask ourselves, if our children should live to see the next century, if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?"

Just weeks before his own assassination in the waning days of the Civil War in 1865, Abraham Lincoln in his Second Inaugural issued the defining call for American national unity. "With malice toward none, with charity for all," the Great Emancipator said, "let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds...to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." 98 years later on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Martin Luther King told Americans, "I have a dream."

On Tuesday night in Chicago, Barack Obama reminded us that the dream - Lincoln's dream, King's dream, his dream - is ours. And in 2008, it is again time "to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth that out of many, we are one."

During a Women and Leadership event back in March, Governor Palin was asked about Senator Clinton's response to media scrutiny - and criticism - she received on the campaign trail during the Democratic primaries. Palin made it clear to moderator Karen Breslau of Newsweek that she considered Clinton's conduct unbecoming:

"Fair or unfair, I think she does herself a disservice to even mention it...When I hear a statement like that coming from a woman candidate with any kind of perceived whine about that excess criticism or, you know, maybe a sharper microscope put on her, I think, man, that doesn't do us any good. Women in politics, women in general wanting to progress this country. I don't think it's, it bodes well for her -- a statement like that...It bothers me a little bit hearing her bring that attention to herself on that level."

Eight months and one devastating rejection by the American people later, Sarah Palin is singing a different tune. In a series of increasingly bizarre interviews after election day and back in Alaska, the Governor ignored the old maxim that when in a hole, stop digging. Her sullied reputation and beating at the ballot box, she claimed, had nothing to do with her own comical performance as a candidate and everything to do with bias and "gotcha" journalism on the part of the mainstream media.

The morning after the election, Palin's standard practice of blaming the media was back on display. The same woman who hilariously claimed her First Amendment rights were being abridged by the press announced:

"I want to make sure that Americans do understand that there is a little bit of disappointment in my heart about the world of journalism today.

And I don't want any individual journalist to take it personally but--I have such great respect for the role of the media in our democracy, it is a cornerstone, it allows the checks and balances. But only when there is fairness and objectivity in the reporting.

And I want to make sure that Americans can have great faith in that aspect of our society, the media. So whatever I can do there to help and to be able to allow credence to be given to the media, I want to help in that respect. That's where I would start."

On Friday, Palin went a step further in blasting the journalists who trained on her the same media "microscope" she suggested it was natural for Hillary Clinton to experience:

"For the most part, absolutely, media persons, reporters, have been absolutely right on and there has been fairness and objectivity. There have been some stinkers, though, who have kind of made the whole basket full of apples, once in a while, smell kind of bad."

As for her anonymous colleagues on the McCain campaign who decried her ignorance about Africa, NAFTA and so much else while labeling her and her family "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," Sarah Palin ignored her past counsel to Hillary Clinton and took the low road:

"It's mean-spirited, it's immature, it's unprofessional, and those guys are jerks."

That's one possibility. Of course, another is that with her stunning ignorance of policy foreign and domestic, her complete absence of intellectual curiosity and her alarming extremism on social issues, Sarah Palin was a critical ingredient in the defeat of the Republican ticket. But that objective conclusion - as reflected in pre-election surveys and exit polls - may be a bitter pill for her to swallow. The truth, Sarah Palin has apparently concluded, does not always set you free.

When it comes to media objectivity, Sarah Palin would do well to speak less and reflect more on the wisdom of Stephen Colbert. As he told President Bush in 2006, "reality has a well-known liberal bias."

Unsurprisingly, it took less than 24 hours for the conservative chattering classes to blame the Bush recession on President-elect Barack Obama. The usual suspects, including Rush Limbaugh, Fred Barnes and Dick Morris, pinned two days of steep stock market declines on Obama's election. Of course, the recent bloodbath on Wall Street has nothing to do with Obama and everything to do with what John McCain deemed "the fundamentals of our economy" being weak. And as history shows time and again, the American economy and stock market almost always do better under Democratic presidents.

That the economy under Bush's guidance is in dire straits is undeniable. After shedding 1.2 million jobs this year, unemployment jumped to 6.5%, the highest level in 14 years. The number of Americans receiving long-term jobless benefits catapulted to a 25 year high while U.S. manufacturing output plummeted to a 26 year low. Home foreclosures skyrocketed by 71% in the third quarter. Devastated by the credit crunch, the American auto industry teeters on the brink of collapse; GM lost $2.5 billion last quarter and could run out of cash next year. In that same quarter, U.S. GDP slumped by 0.3%. It's no wonder that consumer confidence spiraled to its lowest level on record.

In the midst of the meltdown of the U.S. financial system and the dramatic downturn of the American economy, the increasing volatility - and steep losses - on Wall Street should come as no surprise. As Meg Browne, a currency strategist at Brown Brothers Harriman, put it, "The market already knows the economy is pretty sick."

But to hear the right-wing's water carriers tell it, it's all Barack Obama's fault.

Following the drop-off on Wall Street the past two days, the conservative commentariat placed the blame on the new President who has yet to assume office. Echoing CNBC's Larry Kudlow, Dick Morris claimed the markets will "continue to tank...not just because he's a radical, not just because he's a Democrat, but because he's going to raise the capital gains tax. While Fox News' Gretchen Carlson announced, "there's a lot of feeling in the market not reacting very well to the election of Barack Obama," Fred Barnes proclaimed, "There is great uncertainty out there about [Obama's] policies." And on Thursday, the always execrable Rush Limbaugh laid it all at Obama's feet:

"The Obama recession is in full swing, ladies and gentlemen. Stocks are dying, which is a precursor of things to come. This is an Obama recession. Might turn into a depression. He hasn't done anything yet but his ideas are killing the economy. His ideas are killing Wall Street...

...The market's down today because of the jobless numbers. That's how the Drive-Bys see it. Uhhhhh, we have the largest market plunge after an election in history. Thank you, man-child Barack Obama."

Leaving aside for the moment the obvious fact that Barack Obama is not yet in the White House, the conservative hate machine ignores two inconvenient truths. First, of course, the economic calamity that is the Bush recession is well underway. Second is the inescapable historical record which reveals that the economy and the stock market do better under Democrats.

To highlight this point, the New York Times in October asked readers to imagine having put their money where its mouth is. Contrary to Republican mythology, Americans fare better in the market - much, much better - under Democratic administrations:

As of Friday, a $10,000 investment in the S.& P. stock market index would have grown to $11,733 if invested under Republican presidents only, although that would be $51,211 if we exclude Herbert Hoover's presidency during the Great Depression. Invested under Democratic presidents only, $10,000 would have grown to $300,671 at a compound rate of 8.9 percent over nearly 40 years.

(For the eye-popping chart of the S&P's performance under each of the presidents from Hoover through Bush 43, visit here.)

As the broader record shows, the best path to prosperity is to elect Democratic presidents.

The superior performance of Democratic presidents covers virtually the entire spectrum of economic indicators. As Elliott Parker of the University of Nevada, Reno detailed in a 2006 paper, since 1949 Democratic administrations have done better than Republican ones when it comes to unemployment (5.2% to 6.0%), job creation (-.0.4% decrease in unemployment, compared to 0.3% increase), GDP growth rate (4.2% to 2.9%), and even corporate profits as a share of GDP. And to be sure, he found the Dow benefits from Democrats in the White House.

There's no shortage of studies to show that stock market returns are higher under Democratic leadership. (As it turns out, Wall Street's performance is also better when Democrats control Congress.) In 2000, Pedro Santa-Clara and Rossen Valkanov of UCLA's Anderson School of Business concluded that "that the average excess return in the stock market is higher under Democratic than Republican presidents - a difference of 9 percent per year for the value-weighted portfolio and 16 percent for the equal-weighted portfolio." As the New York Times noted of UCLA study in 2003:

"It's not even close. The stock market does far better under Democrats...

...Professors Santa-Clara and Valkanov look at the excess market return - the difference between a broad index of stock prices (basically the Standard & Poor's 500-stock index) and the three-month Treasury bill rate - between 1927 and 1998. The excess return measures how attractive stock investments are compared with completely safe investments like short-term T-bills.

Using this measure, they find that during those 72 years the stock market returned about 11 percent more a year under Democratic presidents and 2 percent more under Republicans - a striking difference."

In 2002, Slate similarly concluded that "Democrats, it turns out, are much better for the stock market than Republicans":

Slate ran the numbers and found that since 1900, Democratic presidents have produced a 12.3 percent annual total return on the S&P 500, but Republicans only an 8 percent return. In 2000, the Stock Trader's Almanac, which slices and dices Wall Street performance figures like baseball stats, came up with nearly the same numbers (13.4 percent versus 8.1 percent) by measuring Dow price appreciation. (Most of the 20th century's bear markets, incidentally, have been Republican bear markets: the Crash of '29, the early '70s oil shock, the '87 correction, and the current stall occurred under GOP presidents.)

According to almanac editor Jeffrey Hirsch, the presidential party figures are among the most significant he's found. If the stock market were random, we'd expect such a result only one-quarter of the time. "I don't know why people are convinced Republicans are good for the stock market," Hirsch says.

Why? Because the Republican amen corner of Kudlow, Barnes, Limbaugh et al continue - with great success - to perpetuate the myth that the regulation-free policies of the GOP that so benefit them personally somehow help the American people overall. Of course, when those policies invariably fail, Americans become (in Phil Gramm's words) are merely "a nation of whiners" whose perception of the economic downturn (in John McCain's words) is "psychological."

And so it goes. George W. Bush has bequeathed an economic disaster to Barack Obama. By accepting responsibility as President to fix it, according to the fraudsters of the right, Obama assumes paternity as well.

Mercifully, the American people know better and proved it at the polls. This time, they followed the wise counsel of Harry Truman:

"If you want to live like a Republican, vote Democratic."

No doubt, Senator Elizabeth Dole's attack on Democrat and Sunday school teacher Kay Hagan as "godless" was one of the low points of the 2008 campaign. Dole's subsequent smiting by the voters of North Carolina was fitting electoral, if not divine, retribution. But as it turned out, Dole's slander against atheist Americans was hardly an isolated case of religious bigotry on the part of the Republican Party. From John McCain and Mitt Romney on down, the GOP waged a war against religious freedom and the very definition of the American community. And as many Republicans made clear, Jews, atheists and above all Muslims need not apply.

As with a fish, the rot started at the top. John McCain's journey to "crazy base world" to appease Christian conservatives he once deemed "agents of intolerance" quickly placed him among their ranks.

That became evident in September 2007. Addressing questions as to whether the one-time Episcopalian was now a Baptist, the notoriously reticent McCain without hesitation proclaimed:

"I was raised in the Episcopal Church and attended high school at a high school called the Episcopal High School. I have attended North Phoenix Baptist Church for many years. And the most important thing is that I am a Christian. And I don't have anything else to say about the issue."

As it turns out, McCain did have more to say just weeks later. In an interview with Beliefnet, McCain proclaimed:

"I would probably have to say yes, that the Constitution established the United States of America as a Christian nation."

While that earned him the kudos of at least one Christian Coalition blogger, the Anti-Defamation League's Abraham Foxman was less than tickled. Within hours, McCain was in full faith-based retreat, admitting "yes, I believe a Muslim could be president."

During the 2008 campaign, McCain might have shared that conclusion with his supporters. On October 11, 2008, Pastor Arnold Conrad opened a McCain campaign event in Iowa with an invocation that was a rhetorical call to arms against non-Christians:

"I would also add, Lord, that your reputation is involved in all that happens between now and November, because there are millions of people around this world praying to their god - whether it's Hindu, Buddha, Allah - that his opponent wins, for a variety of reasons. And Lord, I pray that you will guard your own reputation, because they're going to think that their god is bigger than you, if that happens. So I pray that you will step forward and honor your own name with all that happens between now and election day."

Just the day before, McCain was booed by his own supporters at a town hall meeting for disagreeing with a woman who announced "I can't trust Obama" because "he's an Arab." But even in defense of Obama, McCain seemed to suggest that positive personal attributes were incompatible with Islamic faith and Arab ethnicity;

"No, ma'am. He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not [an Arab]."

(In his endorsement of Barack Obama, Colin Powell addressed this exact point. "But the really right answer is, what if he is?" Powell asked, "Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?")

Disturbing as they are, McCain's fumbling assaults on religious diversity in the United States pale in comparison to his former Republican rival, Mitt Romney. In remarks and speeches throughout his Republican primary campaign, Romney made it quite plain that Muslims and atheists should be excluded from the American table.

In November 2007, the former Massachusetts governor nonchalantly declared the Muslim Americans would have no place in a Romney cabinet. As Mansoor Ijaz recounted:

I asked Mr. Romney whether he would consider including qualified Americans of the Islamic faith in his cabinet as advisers on national security matters, given his position that "jihadism" is the principal foreign policy threat facing America today. He answered, "...based on the numbers of American Muslims [as a percentage] in our population, I cannot see that a cabinet position would be justified. But of course, I would imagine that Muslims could serve at lower levels of my administration."

Mitt Romney wasn't content to create his own religious test for office. As his statements revealed, agnostics and atheists too were not merely unfit to lead the United States; they were in essence un-American.

That meaning was unambiguous in Romney's 2006 declaration to Fox News that "People in this country want a person of faith to lead them as their president." The former Massachusetts Governor made the point even more broadly during his law-dropping December 6, 2007 speech on "Faith in America." In his cynical attempt to deflect attention from his own Mormon faith, Romney proclaimed:

"Freedom requires religion just as religion requires freedom."

(As Atrios noted, how fitting that Romney was introduced in Houston that day by President George H.W. Bush, who famously stated, "No, I don't know that atheists should be regarded as citizens, nor should they be regarded as patriotic. This is one nation under God.")

Of course, these are hardly unique events for the Republican Party in this year's election. In Virginia, Congressman Virgil Goode, who previously hurled anti-Muslim slurs at his Minnesota colleague Keith Ellison, aired ads depicting his lily-white Democratic opponent as dark-skinned and bearded. Meanwhile, Fort Hill, South Carolina mayor Danny Funderburk forwarded an email proclaiming Barack Obama the anti-Christ because he was "just curious" if it was true. And to be sure, the Republican smear machine was in full swing, branding Barack Obama as disloyal, a socialist, a communist - and worse. With supporters chanting "John McCain, Not Hussein," it's no surprise that 54% of Republicans in Kentucky and a quarter of Texans wrongly believe Barack Obama to be a Muslim.

A frustrated General Powell could only shake his head:

"Yet, I have heard senior members of my own party drop the suggestion, 'He's a Muslim and he might be associated terrorists.' This is not the way we should be doing it in America."

As John McCain and Liddy Dole learned the hard way, Americans voters mercifully agreed with Powell on this point. While a February 2008 Pew Research study found that 16% of Americans are unaffiliated with any religious faith, a much larger share view themselves as "secular" in the traditional, truly American meaning of the term. As historian Wilfred McClay argues elsewhere on the Pew web site, secularism has a distinctly political sense in the United States:

"That is, secularism as recognizing politics as an autonomous sphere, one that's not subject to ecclesiastical governance, to the governance of a church or religion or the church's expression of that religion. A secular political order may be one in which religious practice or religious exercise, as we say, can flourish."

A quick glance at the 2008 electoral map shows that the Republican Party lost this battle in its crusade against religious freedom and diversity in the United States. Sadly, the war is far from over.

UPDATE: As a reader reminded me, former Arkansas Governor and minister Mike Huckabee was at the forefront of the GOP's crusade against religious diversity in America. In January, Huckabee infamously told a Michigan audiece "what we need to do is amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than trying to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family."

Here, then, are five lessons learned from the 2008 election:

Taxation with Representation. During the campaign, Barack Obama repeatedly stated, "if you make $200,000 a year or less, your taxes will go down." Apparently, voters making more than $200,000 were just fine with that; they supported Obama over McCain by 52% to 46%. (In 2004, Americans whose incomes topped $200k backed George W. Bush over John Kerry by 63% to 35%.) As it turned out, both McCain and Obama supporters by similar margins expected to see their taxes go up. At the end of the day, Americans rejected the Republicans' "socialism" slander.

Expanded Democratic Support Among White Voters. As I suggested Monday, the first major African-American nominee of the Democratic Party surpassed the performance of John Kerry, Al Gore and even Bill Clinton among white voters. Barack Obama secured 43% of the white vote, compared to 41% for Kerry, 42% for Gore, and 43% for Bill Clinton in 1996. Obama made substantial gains among white men, losing by16% (57% to 41%) to McCain while Kerry and Gore lost by 25 and 24 points to Bush, respectively. Importantly, the composition of the American electorate is changing dramatically, with white Americans now constituting only 74% of those casting ballots compared to 83% twelve years ago.

Obama Landslide Among Hispanic Voters. In the wake of his primary battles with Hilary Clinton, the chattering classes predicted tough sledding for Barack Obama among the nation's 43 million Hispanic voters. That simply did not come to pass. Obama routed McCain among Latinos by two-to-one (66% to 32%), a margin critical to his wins in former red states like New Mexico, Colorado and Nevada. No doubt, the xenophobic, anti-immigrant rhetoric of the Republican Party produced a blowback that more than erased its 2004 performance (44%) under George W. Bush. So much for Ronald Reagan's admonition that, "Latinos are Republican. They just don't know it yet."

Ditto for Jewish Voters. Among Jewish voters, too, Barack Obama enjoyed support at roughly the same level as Democrats past. Despite the fear-mongering of the McCain campaign and state GOP operatives, Obama dominated among Jews by 78% to 21%. By way of comparison, John Kerry (74% to 25% for Bush) and Al Gore (80% to 17%) scored about the same as Barack Hussein Obama with American Jews. (Unsurprisingly, despite all of Barack Obama's outreach efforts, white evangelicals remained a GOP monolith by a staggering 50 points, little changed from the 57% delta four years ago.)

Obama Wave Among New Voters. As predicted, Barack Obama captured the overwhelming majority of new voters. First-timers, 11% of all voters on Tuesday, supported Obama by 69% to 30%. That was reflected in Obama's dominance among younger voters, where he carried those ages 18 to 24 and 25 to 29 by 34% and 35%, respectively. Overall, however, voters under 30 did not see major gains as percentage of the total electorate. They made up 18% of voters in 2008 compared to 17% in 2004 and 2000.

UPDATE: The New York Times offers an interactive exit poll tool comparing presidential election results from 1980 through 2008.

On this Election Day, the fates of John McCain and Barack Obama are now - finally - in the hands of Americans voters. But their respective destinies may have been determined by speeches each gave years ago. At the 2004 Democratic convention, Barack Obama introduced himself to the American people with a message of national unity and transformational change that has hardly changed since. But in May 2006, John McCain took to the stage of Reverend Jerry Falwell's Liberty University and, in a matter of minutes, erased everything he claimed to stand for.

As Hilary Rosen recently suggested, McCain's cynical rapprochement with Falwell and the religious right was the first in a cascading acts of political opportunism that undermined his supposed maverick image.

In his failed 2000 primary run against George W. Bush, McCain famously branded the likes of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as "agents of intolerance." During the decisive South Carolina primary, he paid a steep price for it.

So by early 2006, candidate McCain began his journey to what the Daily Show's Jon Stewart termed "crazy base world." In May of that year, McCain delivered the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University, where the late minister praised his former foe, "the ilk of John McCain is very scarce, very small." Confronted by Tim Russert weeks before as to whether he still viewed Falwell as an agent of intolerance, McCain grudgingly owned up to his flip-flop, "no, I don't."

So it should have come as no surprise that among the topics McCain addressed on May 13, 2006 was tolerance:

"Americans deserve more than tolerance from one another, we deserve each other's respect, whether we think each other right or wrong in our views, as long as our character and our sincerity merit respect, and as long as we share, for all our differences, for all the noisy debates that enliven our politics, a mutual devotion to the sublime idea that this nation was conceived in - that freedom is the inalienable right of mankind, and in accord with the laws of nature and nature's Creator."

As it turned out, the distance from Jerry Falwell to Pastor John Hagee and the Reverend Rod Parsley was a short one. And the walk away from the "respectful campaign" John McCain promised was shorter still.

The contrast with the tone and consistency of Barack Obama could not be more stark. What the Illinois Senate candidate told the Democratic convention in Boston on July 27, 2004 was not only an historic moment in the annals of American political oratory; it was an unchanging statement of his core beliefs:

"Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.

Well, I say to them tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America...

...We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."

From that moment forward, Barack Obama has been a stalwart, unshakable messenger of national unity. 80,000 people at the Democratic convention in Denver and a viewing audience of millions more heard the same plea for hope, change and unity. Even yesterday in Jacksonville, Barack Obama again asked Americans to follow the better angels of their nature:

"Despite what our opponents may claim, there are no real or fake parts of this country. There is no city or town that is more pro-America than anywhere else - we are one nation, all of us proud, all of us patriots. The men and women who serve on our battlefields may be Democrats and Republicans and Independents, but they have fought together and bled together and some died together under the same proud flag. They have not served a Red America or a Blue America - they have served the United States of America."

Whoever emerges victorious today, it is worth remembering that elections are about choices made not just by voters. The candidates make fateful choices, too. Ultimately, Barack Obama chose to stay true to himself. But John McCain made different a choice. With his unending policy reversals, the selection of Sarah Palin and, above all, that cynical speech to Jerry Falwell's bastions, John McCain sought to appease his party's radical right all in the goal of securing the Republican presidential nomination. So much for putting "country first."

With each passing day, Sarah Palin resembles more and more "George Bush in lipstick." Two days ago, she like George W. Bush in 2000 was duped by Canadian pranksters posing as foreign leaders. And today, Palin like President Bush in 2006 essentially accused her Democratic opponents of being terrorist sympathizers.

Palin's slander came during a speech in Missouri. Claiming that Democrats want to slash defense spending, John McCain's running mate picked up his earlier treason charge and amplified it:

"What do they think? Do they think that the terrorists have all of a sudden become the good guys, and changed their minds? No! The terrorists still seek to destroy America and her allies and all that it is that is that we stand for: Freedom, tolerance, equality."

If that despicable slur sounds familiar, it should. In the run-up to the 2006 mid-terms, President Bush offered virtually the same tripe.

With control of the House and Senate slipping away, Bush on October 31, 2006 insisted:

"However they put it, the Democrat approach in Iraq comes down to this: The terrorists win and America loses."

(Of course, President Bush has had plenty of company among the leading lights of the Republican Party in questioning the patriotism of the Democratic opposition. For more outrages from Dick Cheney, Tony Snow, John Boehner, visit here.)

Back in July, John McCain infamously said of Barack Obama, "It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign." A disgusted Joe Klein of Time responded by noting:

"I can't remember a more scurrilous statement by a major party candidate."

Klein, as it turns out, spoke about three months too soon. John McCain hadn't selected Sarah Palin yet.

Heading into Election Day, Senator Obama looks likely to outperform his recent Democratic predecessors across a range of policy and demographic measures. An October Rasmussen survey showed that Americans trust Democrats more than Republicans across each of the 10 issues tracked. The party of Obama enjoys double-digit leads on the economy (by 13%), Social Security (12%), health care (20%)and education (by 19 points).

That issue advantage, compounded by John McCain's feeble response to the economic crisis and the GOP's increasingly xenophobic line towards immigrants, is helping fuel Obama's strong performance among critical voting blocks. As I detailed last week, media myths notwithstanding, Barack Obama will approach traditional levels of Democratic support among Jewish voters and outpoll Al Gore and John Kerry among Hispanics. And with his backing among white voters reaching 44% in the final CBS News/New York Times survey, the African-American Obama may surpass the levels achieved by Gore (42%), Kerry (41%) and even Bill Clinton (43%). Four years ago, John Kerry lost among white men by a 25 point margin (62% to 37%); according to a Fox News poll, Obama now trails John McCain by only 5 points among the same group.

But from the moment John McCain secured the Republican nomination, his fall strategy rested on creating a "character gap" between himself and Obama. As in 2000 and 2004, I argued, the Republicans would try to turn the race into a presidential personality contest:

And to win it, they need to manufacture a "character gap" between John McCain and Barack Obama...The data is clear. If the election is about the economy, health care and Iraq, John McCain cannot become the 44th president. Only if the GOP succeeds once again in transforming the race into a media medley about lapel pins, angry ministers and Muslim-sounding middle names can the Republicans hope to maintain their hold on the White House.

Sadly, we've been here before. The 2000 and 2004 exit polls clearly show the Republican Party succeeded both in portraying the presidential contest as being about character and in defining the accepted media narrative for candidates Bush, Gore and Kerry. Eight years ago, 24% of voters claimed being "honest/trustworthy" was the quality that mattered most; among them, George W. Bush trounced Al Gore by 80% to 15%.

In 2004, Bush walloped the supposed flip-flopper John Kerry by 70% to 29% among those claiming honesty was the most important presidential attribute. Among those wanting a "strong leader," Bush swamped Kerry by a staggering 75 points.

In his 2007 book The Big Con, Jonathan Chait described how Republicans consistently win elections despite almost universal disdain for their policies among the American people. In a nutshell, Chait argues that Republicans must convert elections into contests of character because they simply can't win on issues. While their man, be it George W. Bush or John McCain, is the "authentic" guy you'd "like to have a beer with," the GOP drives the media conventional wisdom that paints the likes of Al Gore, John Kerry and now Barack Obama as effete, out-of-touch elitists whose positions change with the wind:

"Media outlets functionally affiliated with the Republican Party have been able to create news that makes its way into the nonpartisan media. It is a kind of machine that manufactures images of character.

The Republicans' seminal insight was that the random process by which small events come to wield great symbolic insight into the character of presidential candidates didn't have to be random. It was possible to prime the pump, in a way." (p.169)

No doubt, John McCain tried to replicate the same trusted formula in 2008. The Republican Convention was a four-day paean to his personal biography and war-time sacrifice. (Both before and after, McCain and his surrogates deployed the POW card to shield him from criticism on everything from his 11 homes to his health care plan). And to be sure, the Republican smear machine was in full swing, branding Obama as disloyal, a socialist, a communist - and worse. With supporters chanting "John McCain, Not Hussein," it's no surprise that 54% of Republicans in Kentucky and a quarter of Texans wrongly believe Barack Obama to be a Muslim.

And yet, it appears that it may not work, not this time. Despite all of the Republicans' efforts to paint Barack Obama as "the other," the final NBC/Wall Street Journal poll showed voters see each man sharing their values by virtually identical margins (Obama 57% to 39%; McCain 57% to 38%). McCain has always led Obama on this question in previous NBC/WSJ surveys. As Republican pollster Robert Newhouse put it:

"Obama seems to broken through on the values attribute. For the first time in our polling, a majority of white voters believe Obama has a background and set of values they identify with."

On other personal attributes, Obama enjoys advantages over McCain. An October 23rd CBS poll revealed that voters saw Obama as more honest than McCain (53% to 46%) and view him more favorably (52% to 46%). In all, CBS reported Americans were more comfortable with Obama:

Obama has been more successful in evoking a positive response from voters: Sixty-two percent say they feel personally comfortable with the Illinois senator. Far fewer - 47 percent - feel comfortable with McCain. In fact, a slightly higher percentage - 49 percent - report feeling "uneasy" about the Republican nominee. Thirty-four percent feel uneasy about Obama.

On all of these questions of demography, philosophy and personality, American voters will provide the answers Tuesday. Some, like the unshakably monolithic support of evangelicals for Republican candidates, will come as no surprise. But when it comes to the GOP's perpetual character war against Democratic candidates, on November 4 Barack Obama may well open some eyes.

As it turns out, his wife Cindy continued her business relationship with Keating for 13 years. This year, McCain himself accepted over $50,000 from the law firm Keating founded. And as a New Republic investigation detailed this weekend, John McCain's leaks and likely false testimony during the Keating Five ethics inquiry could have gotten him expelled from the Senate - or worse.

As Huffington Post reported last week, McCain has apparently gone back to the Keating well in funding his presidential campaign. Two decades after pocketing $112,000 in campaign donations from Keating and his Lincoln Financial associates, the supposed maverick this July took in $51,400 from a law firm founded by his one-time political sugar daddy:

On July 31, 2008, campaign finance records show that McCain accepted more than $50,000 in contributions from 41 partners of the Cincinnati law firm Keating Muething & Klekamp. As the name suggests, the firm was founded by Charles Keating. Among the partners who contributed was none other than Keating's nephew, William J. Keating, Jr.

While McCain's ties to a Keating-connected bundler is unseemly, far more disturbing is wife Cindy's long term - and extremely profitable - business partnership with felon Charles Keating himself.

In October 1989, Senator McCain exploded at reporters from the Arizona Republic who questioned him about Mrs. McCain's business relationship with Keating and his American Continental Corporation. (In his tirade, McCain called a reporter "a liar" and an "idiot.") But as the Washington Independent recently revealed, Cindy McCain continued her lucrative partnership with Keating long after her husband severed ties with him:

Sen. John McCain's wife and father-in-law continued a lucrative business partnership with disgraced financier Charles H. Keating Jr. for 11 years after the GOP presidential nominee said he ended his close friendship with Keating in March 1987.

Cindy McCain's business partnership with Keating in a real-estate development between 1986 and 1998 netted her a tidy profit, in addition to years of significant tax benefits. Her father, who died in 2000, earned similar returns.

As the Independent noted, "McCain's campaign and his Senate office did not respond to repeated phone calls and emails concerning Cindy McCain's investment with Keating." No doubt, Team McCain was even less willing to speak with the New Republic.

In a devastating examination this weekend, TNR revealed that John McCain's Keating offenses were much more extensive - and his potential penalties far more severe - than previously reported. While McCain was ultimately reprimanded for "poor judgment" by a Senate ethics committee probing the scandal, his purported leaks and probably lies under oath about them could have gotten him kicked out of the Senate and into a jail cell:

Yet the Ethics Committee's was not the only investigation into the scandal. There were two other probes at the time that got barely any public attention--both of which largely focused on McCain himself. These were probes into illicit leaks about the