Joan. If you're going to do videos--and why it is that you guys feel you have to do videos is TOTALLY beyond me. Do you think your readers are somehow too stupid or lazy to read? We come here to read. Not watch you guys talk--but, if you're gonna do this, pay a consultant to do a little staff coaching.

For one thing, you appear to be looking over my head. For another, you gotta keep your chin down. Gene Siskel never solved that problem and he always looked like he was looking down his nose in contempt. That's a guy who needed camera-coaching badly.

Just put your chin down a little, and face the camera squarely...when you put your chin up and tilt your head to the right you look like you have an itch you can't scratch.

The position of the camera is important too. As is decent lighting. Some people look better with the camera a little low (still keep that chin slightly down though), and others look better with the camera a little high...

A few sessions with a good on-camera coach would probably do a world of good for you guys if you insist on this video thing.

Better...just BAG THE FREAKIN' VIDEOS. You guys are WRITERS, not on-camera talent. So WRITE.

As for why the polls are tight...this country is still just as polarized as it ever was. Many, many republicans would vote for a sea-slug before they'd vote for a Democrat. any Democrat.

And Obama is black, and smart, and that makes it worse for a lot of these "working class whites" who hate it when someone seems obviously better, smarter, and more together than they are. Bush is a prick, and a phony, and an idiot, but he was just good enough at fooling the white working class that he was one of them (a tragic joke if ever there was one), to get them to vote for him.

Most people vote on pure emotion. And that's something Obama better understand. He can have the sanest policy positions in the world, but if enough independents think he's an uppity negro, he's toast.

But, the biggest problem is all these republicans who just can't bring themselves to vote democratic. They are especially a problem in the swing-states, and I think it's going to be extremely close in the electoral college. McCain could pull this thing out and win, solely because of all those stupid GOP voters who don't have a clue and don't want a clue and vote straight GOP out of pure habit...or because they're like Elephantman and dangerously deluded.

So that's why. Obama could be the second coming of Jesus but if he's a democrat, he ain't getting a GOP vote. And that's why it's close at the electoral college level. Obama will have to bring the independents to him--which is why he's running to the center so hard--and independents and undecideds, by their nature, decide very late who to vote for, and they do it in pure, stupid emotion.

Our system of selecting leaders is clearly broken, to judge by Congress the last eight years, and Bush's re-election. The GOP and Rove have jobbed the system completely. I'm not sure what to do about that, but we better do something or else we'll end up with someone far worse then Bush at some point soon.

cross1242 is exactly right. Ever since 1980, the GOP has been unable to win on the issues. Had Americans understood how the GOP and St. Ronnie were going to eviscerate their defined benefit retirement plans and leave them to the mercy of the market, and how they were going to eviscerate their medical care insurance system for the benefit of insurance CEOs, and how they were going to fund death-squads in central America (that's well-documented..after all, it's what Iran-Contra was all about), how the GOP was going to appoint one corporate-toadie judge after another to the SCOTUS, and how everything the GOP did was going to make them poorer...Americans would never have voted for them.

The GOP has known all this, at the upper reaches of the party anyway, for at least 40 years. So, they lie. and lie. And lie some more. Twist, spin, distort. Use state-of-the-art agitprop techniques perfected by Mao and Stalin and Hitler, and made really smooth in GOP hands.

These guys would NEVER win an election if they actually said what they believe and what they want to do. Never.

So, they lie. It's what they do. It's all they can do. They're our own home-grown counter-revolutionary monarchists, and, frankly, I haven't the faintest idea what to do about them at this point except crush them at the polls. Again. And again. And again. Because, as Cross says, the true-believers will never change. They'll die first.

Is anyone as baffled as I am that 2000 years after Christ's crucifixion, and 1500 years after the Fall of the Roman Empire, in a country founded on enlightenment principles (not that Dick and George have the faintest idea what that's all about), we still let dangerous waterheads run our country, and we give utterly morons like Klavan a soapbox to spew their idiocy?

Really does make one despair for the human experiment. We are so fucking stupid. over 50 million adults voted for George W. Bush to run our country in 2004. Nearly the same number in 2000. I rest my case. We do not deserve the political freedoms we were given 200 years ago. We're too stupid to have them.