James Forman makes some great points

James Forman makes some great points -- and links to some important articles:

Hey the polls are good right now.  But Carter led by 9% on October 26, 1980.   Our candidate is still a mixed-race black guy whose middle name is Hussein and last name rhymes with Osama.  Complacency is not in order.

With 3 weeks to go it is time for all hands on deck.  This really is a different kind of campaign, and it is driven by volunteers.  If you're not volunteering at your local office, give it a try.  They will put you to work canvassing, making phone calls, or if you don't like doing any of that, they have lots of office work like data entry that they need help with.  At our local office in VA they are starting to send people door knocking every afternoon after work, because more folks are home then than on the weekend.  All these first time voters, minorities, sporadic voters that the Repubs think won't turn out?  Well, the only way to break the historical trend that says these groups don't vote is with constant reminders, giving people notes about where the polls are, answering their last minute questions, etc.

What are you doing Nov. 1-4?  Going to a swing state, I hope, or planning on making calls from home if you cannot travel. 

3 more weeks.  Let's not look back and think, "I could have done a little more."  

If you need help getting connected with a local office or a swing state, shoot me an email (jamesformanjr@gmail.com) and I'll help out.

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Finally, if you need a reminder about what's at stake (and I doubt you do), check out how the McCain campaign has degenerated into ugliness and hate.  Khaled Hosseini calls them out.  And Frank Rich does the same.  Both of those columns brilliant expose the way in which McCain and Palin have manipulated fear of the other, of Arabs, Muslims, foreigners, blacks (to see the psychology behind this, Shankar Vedantam's piece on unconscious racism and how blacks are perceived as foreign is a must read.  It isn't working so far, Obama's lead grows and McCain's negatives rise, but the election is three weeks out.  And the McCain camp isn't done.  Here in VA the chair of the McCain state campaign has explicitly linked Obama to Osama bin Laden.  McCain has some unknown underling spokesperson criticize the statement, but there are no real consequences.  The guy still chairs the state campaign.

I still cannot get over the exchange between the woman who called Obama an Arab and McCain.  Once I got past the wonder that you could criticize a black guy for being Arab, I get held up by McCain's response that no, he's not an Arab, he's a decent family man.  Only in the America of McCain town halls are you either Arab or decent.