The day job, that is, which seems to primarily consist of running for the next office. Senator Obama tries to bring the funny.

“I mean, mother, governor, moose shooter?! I mean I think that’s cool, that’s cool stuff,” Obama said about Palin’s biography.

When discussing McCain’s energy plan, Obama poked fun at his line on drilling. “What were the Republicans hollerin’, ‘drill baby drill’? What kind of slogan is that?! They were getting all excited about drilling!”

Maybe you had to be there.

And how politically stupid is it to make fun of hunters in Michigan (which in fact does have moose in the western UP)?

Byron York has an actual history of what Obama did. Jim Geraghty has some related thoughts:

…note that Obama and his supporters speak a great deal about Obama’s choice to be a community organizer, and not so much on what he actually did. We’re continually expected to applaud the decision to try instead of asking about the results. We never hear, “because of his work, Factory X reopened,” or “because of Obama’s creation of job retraining program Y, the community’s unemployment rate reduced from A to B.”

Yes, with so-called “liberals,” it’s always about the good intentions, and we’re not supposed to pay any attention to actual results.

Lileks has some thoughts as well:

We’re having a block party tonight – yes, another block party; damned community can’t stop organizing itself (if I may repeat something I said over at Tim Blair’s place – successful communities, or those on track to becoming successful, organize themselves; if you need someone to come in and do your organizing for you, he might as well call himself Mollusk Wrangler or Sloth Herder. I say this as a former community organizer myself, but that’s another story) so we’ll all stand outside and chat and eat pot luck.

If your community needs an “organizer” it’s probably not much of a community. It’s just a lot of people living in close proximity.

And just a hint for some in comments: given Obama’s image problem with his messiah complex, it’s probably not politically helpful to compare him to Jesus…

Senator Obama says he’s not going to take our guns away, because he doesn’t have the votes in Congress. What a politically brilliant thing to say in Pennsylvania. And he says that he’s not going to take them out of our house. What he doesn’t say is that he doesn’t want us to take them out of our house, either.

Obama’s supporters don’t seem to believe in the Constitution:

While 82% of voters who support McCain believe the justices should rule on what is in the Constitution, just 29% of Barack Obama’s supporters agree. Just 11% of McCain supporters say judges should rule based on the judge’s sense of fairness, while nearly half (49%) of Obama supporters agree.

This by itself is reason to vote for McCain.

People who go to work for the government with the expectation that it will provide them with retirement security are kidding themselves.

Getting local politicians *and* local unions to think more than a year or two is all but impossible. Do you realize that practically no local jurisdictions even have a Liabilities Budget?

It’s just part of that visionary and long-range thinking on the part of governments.

Here’s a Time article on how the Obama campaign plans to deal with Sarah. I was struck by the very first graf.

Nobody was more surprised by John McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate than the people who run Barack Obama’s campaign. “I can honestly say that we weren’t prepared for that,” says David Axelrod, Obama’s top strategist. “I mean, her name wasn’t on anybody’s list. It was a surprise to a lot of Republicans as well.”

Well, why weren’t they prepared for it? A lot of the non-left blogs have been speculating about her for months. Rush reportedly was talking her up months ago, and there have been threads at Free Republic about her. She had come to Arizona to visit McCain’s house there. It was no big intellectual challenge to figure out that she was on the list, if not the short one.

Is this kind of intelligence cluelessness the way they plan to run the country?

Bill Whittle is now sold on John McCain:

I had heard before that John McCain had been beaten in prison, and I admired him for it. But when he said he had been broken . . . I gasped. When this sometimes cocky, arrogant old man told me he had once been a cocky, arrogant young man until he was “blessed by hardship,” until he had been broken and remade — and in that remaking discovered a love of country so fierce and pure that even as a patriot myself I will never approach it — well, in that moment John McCain won my heart, to add to the respect and admiration he had already had.

When John McCain told me what I and untold millions of Americans have always believed, what others tell me to be ashamed of and mock me for — that I live in the greatest country in the world, a force of goodness and justice in dark places, a land of heroism and sacrifice and opportunity and joy — to me that went right to the mystic chords of memory that ultimately binds this country together. Some people don’t know what it is, but there is such a thing as patriotism — pure, unrefined, unapologetic, unconditional, non-nuanced, non-cosmopolitan, white-hot-burning patriotism. John McCain loves this country. I love it too. Not what it might be made into someday — not its promise, always and only its promise — but what it was and what it is, a nation and an idea worth fighting and dying for.

He also points out that Sarah has stolen Barack’s mojo. Read the whole thing.