WE Blog

Miami Herald columnist Carl Hiaasen offers an Election Day prayer for the Sunshine State, writing: “Deliver us from scandal, Lord. Let our optical-scanners perform flawlessly. Let the trucks that carry our precious ballot boxes not be hijacked and later abandoned behind a strip joint, and let those who count those ballots be pure of character and pretty good with math. Most of all, Lord, let there be no need for lawyers. But if, in Your infinite wisdom, You see a need to test the faith of this great country with another electoral crisis, please consider doing it in Virginia or Ohio, or maybe North Carolina. God, anywhere but here. Amen.”
Meanwhile, Politico notes another lucky break for Barack Obama, should push come to shove over counting votes: Democrats now fill the secretaries of state jobs in the battlegrounds of Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico and Ohio.

Turns out there’s some scholarly, if sexist, justification for Sarah Palin’s pricey wardrobe. Northwestern University researchers asked 73 college students to look at photos of congressional candidates from 2006 and rate the candidates for competence, dominance, attractiveness and approachability. The study indicated that in male candidates, seeming to be competent is what counts for potential voters. “For female candidates, it really matters if they’re perceived as competent and perceived as attractive. Those two qualities are sort of twin predictors of whether or not someone is going to be more or less likely to vote for them,” said Joan Y. Chiao of Northwestern’s psychology department.

Columnist Charles Krauthammer argues that John McCain is more prepared to deal with the economic crisis than his poll numbers would suggest: “Generally speaking, he sees government as a Rooseveltian counterweight (Teddy with a touch of Franklin) to the various malefactors of wealth and power. He wants government to tackle large looming liabilities such as Social Security and Medicare. He wants to free up health insurance by beginning to sever its debilitating connection to employment – a ruinous accident of history (arising from World War II wage and price controls) that increases the terror of job loss, inhibits labor mobility and saddles American industry with costs that are driving it (see: Detroit) into insolvency. And he supports lower corporate and marginal tax rates to encourage entrepreneurship and job creation. An eclectic, moderate, generally centrist agenda in a guy almost congenitally given to bipartisanship.”