Daily Must-Reads for 10/27/04

*Lileks on Andrew Sullivan’s Kerry endorsement. The closing line, which Lileks has delivered by Tony Blair, is deadly.
*The Sultan of Snark on Ron Suskind: “If Suskind misreads his own facts wrong in order to (willfully? subconsciously?) pander to New York Times readers’ fear of Christian fundamentalism, what other facts has he misread? And what kind of ’empiricist’ is he?” I also liked the line about the “imperturbable” Andrew Sullivan.
*Ricky West has another video up, and reminds us of Clinton’s magic coattails.
*Will Collier on heavy early-voting turnout in Georgia, nobody’s idea of a battleground. High turnout in Georgia, of all places, tends to undercut the idea that it’s Kerry’s supporters who are fired up. Remember, you have a lot of people out there who support the war and have had to keep silent as the media has poured hot boiling scorn on the war effort for the past couple of years.
Either way, I predict that the loser of this election will get substantially more votes than any prior presidential candidate in history. And if Kerry wins, Bush would break with a long tradition of incumbents losing only if they have a severe split in their party, a major third party candidate and/or a catastrophic setback on the order of Watergate, the Great Depression or the one-two punch of stagflation and the Iranian hostage crisis.
*Jay Cost (link via NRO Battlegrounders) on why he thinks the Bush-Cheney campaign has a decisive advantage in the Ohio ground game that will show up on Election Day. I’m prepared to believe, among other things, that the GOP’s get out the vote (GOTV) effort benefits from being an integrated organization as compared to the alphabet soup of “independent” groups working for the Dems, but I’m more skeptical about the idea that there’s some enormous hidden advantage here that Karl Rove knows about and we don’t.
Who controls the British pound? Who keeps the metric system down?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!
Who leaves Atlantis off the maps? Who keeps the Martians under wraps?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!
Who holds back the electric car? Who makes Steve Gutenberg a star?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!
Who robs cavefish of their sight? Who rigs every Oscar night?
Karl Rove! Karl Rove!