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Driven by the urgency of creating jobs & protecting #hcr, #wsr, Social Security & Medicare, I am running for Dem Leader.less than a minute ago via Twitter for BlackBerry®Speaker Nancy PelosiSpeakerPelosi

You know what? Good for her.

"On the flat, in the crowd, half blind with dust, we look back with envy to those happier warriors, whose battle is won and whose achievements wear so serene an air of accomplishment that we can scarcely refrain from whispering that the fight was not so fierce for them as for us." —Virginia Woolf, “Modern Fiction,” collected in The Common Reader, 1925.

Molly Dewson was very sad in the spring of 1934 because of the politics, so she wrote a letter to her friend Eleanor Roosevelt. Dewson was the head of the women’s division of the DNC, and she was in a tizz because Congress was evidently so [...]

It's the first Tuesday in November, so you know what that means? That's right: it's time to fucking vote.

There will be no whining about not making any real difference, like that bullshit Freakonomics piece argued, or the weather, or the complete dearth of respectable candidates. This is your duty as an American. And being guilted into voting is what it means to be American. You do consider yourself an American, don't you?

An hour into today's rally for Democratic candidates, and two-thirds of the gymnasium at Canyon Springs High School is full. Representatives Dina Titus and Shelley Berkley have each gotten up and announced that we are in attendance at not just a Michelle Obama appearance but also we are at the "largest phonebank in the history of the world!!!" They also suggested we take out our "cellulars to call someone so we can be the largest phonebank ever!!!"

If there’s anything that could save Harry Reid from getting ousted by Sharron Angle on Tuesday, it would be his campaign’s ability to run a competitive ground game: tight coordination of precinct canvassing, disciplined phone banking, targeted literature distribution, quality control over hundreds of volunteers and—above all—clean, up-to-date voter lists.

Based on what I saw yesterday at Democratic Party headquarters in Las Vegas, it’s not happening for Harry Reid.

You have seen this, or something similar, throughout the last week and will continue to see variations for another couple months at least:

With conventional wisdom congealing around the idea that Democrats are likely to lose the House and narrowly hold on to their majority in the Senate, there are already plenty of people talking about what the election results a week from today might mean for President Barack Obama's 2012 re-election race.

The most common analysis emerging from this chatter is that the election is nothing but bad news for Obama — a rejection of the agenda he pushed over the last two years and a spark [...]

1. "A slow-rolling, slow-motion terrorist attack on the United States."

2. "Every time we give amnesty for an illegal alien, we deport a liberal."

3. "As a result of this perverse incentive, an entire ‘anchor baby’ industry has developed which exploits a legal loophole caused by a misinterpretation of the Constitution."

These days we the people are emoting. And it’s not just Sarah Palin trumpeting around, and Carl Paladino mad as hell. Even people to the left of Attila the Hun are pissed. Jon Stewart’s rallying and calling the President timid. Tom Friedman is sad we’re not number one anymore. Mike Bloomberg is so fired up that he’s endorsed Meg Whitman to become governor of California.

What’s with all these people telling us what, and how, they feel? It very well could be the economy, but I think that the answer maybe has something to do with the word itself: people.

After John McCain closed out the Sharron Angle rally on Friday, her campaign coordinators played a bit of amateur propaganda. Pictures of foreclosed houses, stock photos of agonized couples looking at stacks of unpaid bills, a chart of unemployment rates, all flashing by quickly to a soaring soundtrack. At the crescendo of all this pictorial despair appeared the image of First Lady Michelle Obama. In it she is reclining on a beige chaise lounge in a sleeveless violet dress, one hand cupped along the side of her neck, revealing her diamond wedding ring that matches her teardrop diamond earrings, and above her is the big word Vogue, the [...]

Posted inside all the phonebank cubbies at Sharron Angle's Las Vegas headquarters, there’s a sheet that instructs her volunteers how to deal with anyone who has questions regarding Sharron Angle's relationship to the Mormon Church. This is because Angle's pastor has denounced the LDS Church—of which her opponent, Harry Reid, is a member—as a "cult." So concerned people are to be given the number of a "well known leader" and "Friend." I called to speak with this former bishop of the LDS church.

By the time Sharon Angle conceded to returning Senator Harry Reid, well past midnight, her victory party at the Venetian's ballroom had thinned out to a couple hundred diehards: bleary staffers, despondent volunteers, long-time (Republican) party contributors. Noticeably absent were the tea partiers. At the beginning of the night and throughout the campaign, they were easy to spot: they are a dustier sort of Republican, outfitted in jeans, zany political shirts and always gripping signs with slogans like “Trust God Not Government.” After the Las Vegas Sun called the race in favor of Reid at 9:43 p.m., nearly all had disappeared. Except one.

Here in New York, where we have changed ballot systems, voting may be a slightly more confusing process than usual. The state has switched to some kind of ludicrous Scantron form, which is much less satisfying than pulling levers and hearing that awesome clank once you've done your part for democracy. I'm sure it's all a temporary stopgap until we're all voting on iPads or whatever, but if your polling place is crowded—it's possible, I guess; I went at 10:30 and it was only slightly busier than it was during the primaries—you will probably have to wait for a bit while the volunteers explain the process to the elderly people [...]

Happy Election eve, everyone! We’ve already been solemnly instructed on how tomorrow’s vote is a referendum on a poncey New Elitism, the hardy, head-stomping virtues of the Tea Party, and our ever-precarious national sanity. But the 2010 midterms are really the coming-out party for the political bagman class, fortified by the Supreme Court’s 2009 Citizens United decision knocking down the last anemic remnants of campaign finance regulation. With a final infusion of GOP money down the homestretch, this year’s midterms are the most expensive history, clocking in at around $4 billion, outpacing the $3.1 billion price tag for the 2000 presidential cycle, and possibly inching toward [...]

I spent yesterday at Sharron Angle for Senate Campaign Headquarters, in a strip mall in northern Las Vegas. The phonebank volunteers were targeting likely Angle supporters in rural parts of the state to take advantage of early voting, which ended last night. Most of my fellow volunteers (I was, I believe, the only fake volunteer) were over fifty—with the exception of Summer and Jordan, two bubbly seventeen-year-olds who both had family in the military—and white and not originally from Nevada. By coincidence, the three women in my adjoining cubby were from all from Pennsylvania, having moved to Nevada after their children were grown. The ladies, with their various shades [...]