It’s clear why Charlotte and St. Louis are in the list — North Carolina and Missouri were the two states with the closest margins of victory in the 2008 presidential election. John McCain won Missouri by .14 percent — 3,903 votes. Obama won North Carolina by .32 percent — 14,177 votes.

Ohio was also close, though not to the same degree as Missouri and North Carolina. Obama took the Buckeye State by 4.59 percent — 262,224 votes. Still, Cleveland’s pick as a finalist shows the DNC wants to do everything it can to keep Ohio in the Democratic column. Most unofficial studies indicate Ohio will have two fewer electoral votes in 2012 than it did in 2008 — down to 18.

The inclusion of Minneapolis on this list is an oddity if one only looks at the 2008 results. Minnesota gave Obama a very comfortable 10.2 percent victory margin — far larger than the wins Al Gore and John Kerry scored in the state in the previous two contests. But the state is perpetually on the GOP’s radar. Also worth noting: Minneapolis co-hosted the Republicans’ 2008 convention with neighboring St. Paul, and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty is very likely to be a contender for the Republicans’ 2012 presidential nod.

Participants at the meeting were impressed by Obama’s strong command of the issues at hand and appalled by McCain’s acknowledgment that he had not even read Paulson’s three-page bailout plan.

A Republican sitting some distance down the long table whispered to a pair of Democratic senators, “Everyone here is ready to vote for Obama, including the Republicans.” [Democratic House Financial Services Committee Chairman] Barney Frank was even more disgusted than usual. “This was about as unpresidential as it gets,” he said later.

Bush’s expressive face said it all. When Obama spoke, he paid careful attention, as if he knew that here was his successor. When McCain spoke, Bush’s face was quizzical and unconvinced, as if he’d eaten something sour.

But that was the civilized portion of the meeting. Shortly thereafter, Paulson begged Democrats not to attack the bailout plan. But it was the Republicans who had withdrawn their support, and Frank was incensed at Paulson’s suggestion that Democrats were somehow to blame.

Barney Frank muscled his way past Harry Reid and started yelling. “F— you, Hank! F— you! Blow up this deal? We didn’t blow up this deal! Your guys blew up the deal! You better tell [GOP Rep. Spencer] Bacchus and the rest of them to get their s— together!” When Paulson tried to equivocate, Frank threw in another “F— you, Hank!” — his third of the day.

For all the bedlam at the meeting, Obama and his team emerged confident that the election was theirs to win — and that the country needed them to win.

“That was surreal,” Obama said on the speakerphone from the car on the short ride back to the hotel, with several campaign aides on the call. “Guys, what I just saw in there made me realize, we have got to win. It was crazy in there.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t be president,” he said in his familiar wry tone, only with more amazement than usual. “But he definitely shouldn’t be.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) during his presidential campaign (WDCpix)

In the final months of the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain’s (R-Ariz.) campaign learned of a lawsuit filed in Pennsylvania that asked the state to strip Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) of the Democratic nomination on suspicion that he was not an American citizen. The complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief was filed by Phil Berg, a former deputy state attorney general who left government in 1990 for a series of gadfly political campaigns. His last round of notoriety had come when he filed RICO complaints against George W. Bush, Saddam Hussein and multiple members of the Bush administration for “accountability” for the 9/11 attacks. Still, Berg’s complaint had gotten glancing local media attention, and the Democratic National Committee’s counsel had filed a motion to dismiss it. One lawyer who was doing some work for the campaign was tasked with reading Berg’s lawsuit and gauging its chances of success.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“The conversation was along the lines of ‘this is idiotic, but explain to me why,’” said the lawyer, who spoke under condition of anonymity to TWI. “I looked at whether the lawsuit was going to be dismissed. I said yes.”

Berg’s main problem was the one that has bedeviled the small, but growing, number of lawyers and amateur attorneys who have filed frivolous lawsuits against President Obama on the “question” of his American citizenship. He and they have run up against the doctrine of standing, which requires plaintiffs to prove that they have been or will be harmed by the law that they’re challenging. Like the people who challenged McCain’s citizenship in 2008 and 2000, or the people who challenged Dick Cheney’s right to run for vice president because he, like George W. Bush, resided in Texas, “birther” plaintiffs have failed again and again to get their cases heard because they lack standing.

“We monitored the progress of these lawsuits against the Obama campaign,” said Trevor Potter, a Washington attorney who served as general counsel to the 2008 and 2000 McCain presidential campaigns. “The McCain campaign faced a series of lawsuits like this, too, alleging that he could not be president because he was born in the Panama Canal Zone. Both campaigns took the position that these plaintiffs lacked standing.”

But the flawed conception of the many “birther” lawsuits, coupled with the inexperience and foul-ups of “birther” lawyers, have only fed the frenzy over Obama’s legitimacy to serve as president of the United States. A survey of the lawsuits filed against Obama reveals a reliance on widely debunked rumors, bogus stories sourced back to web sites, affidavits from “experts” who refuse to provide credentials or even their real names, and frequent and blatant misunderstandings of basic constitutional law. The dismissal of “birther” lawsuits has allowed conspiracy theorists to believe that the information in those suits is accurate–a belief that manifests itself in the emails, phone calls, and town hall meeting rants that have pushed the theories into the mainstream media and the halls of Congress.

While they ruled out any chance of the “birther” lawsuits holding up in court, lawyers for the McCain campaign did check into the rumors about Obama’s birth and the assertions made by Berg and others. “To the extent that we could, we looked into the substantive side of these allegations,” said Potter. “We never saw any evidence that then-Senator Obama had been born outside of the United States. We saw rumors, but nothing that could be sourced to evidence. There were no statements and no documents that suggested he was born somewhere else. On the other side, there was proof that he was born in Hawaii. There was a certificate issued by the state’s Department of Health, and the responsible official in the state saying that he had personally seen the original certificate. There was a birth announcement in the Honolulu Advertiser, which would be very difficult to invent or plant 47 years in advance.”

“Birther” lawyers and bloggers, who gained an unexpected prominence in the mainstream media, have consistently denied Hawaii’s own records of Obama’s birth. They have also built up a corpus of information which, they argue, would invalidate Obama’s claim on the White House even if he was born in the United States. These rumors, and the inability of “birther” lawyers to test them in court, have proven pervasive enough to fuel the conspiracy theories.

After the DNC requested a dismissal of Berg’s lawsuit, he responded in a Sept. 29, 2008 filing that cited numerous Internet rumors and incorrect citations of American and international law. Berg cited “Wikipedia Italian version” and “Rainbow Edition News Letter” as evidence that Obama had not been clear about which hospital he was born in; he alleged that Obama must have been adopted by Lolo Soetoro, the Indonesian man who married Obama’s mother when the future president was five years old, because he attended elementary school in that country. Because a contemporary school record referred to Obama as “Barry Soetoro” and listed his nationality as “Indonesian,” Berg argued that there was “absolutely no way Obama could have ever regained ‘natural born’ status.”

“That’s just completely wrong,” said Mitzi Torri, an Arizona-based immigration lawyer. Torri pointed to the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952, which sets a high bar for renunciation of American citizenship. According to the INA, an American can only forfeit his citizenship if he commits treason, if he makes a “formal declaration of allegiance to a foreign state,” or if he becomes a citizen of another country “upon his own application or upon an application filed by a duly authorized agent.”

“Berg wants to say,” said Torri, “that this document from a school in Indonesia, which has no signature, which has no standing whatsoever, is more important than Obama’s birth certificate or our immigration law.”

Berg’s filings made other claims that have shown up in anti-Obama lawsuits and in the proliferation of “birther” Website. One relies on an audio tape of Obama’s step-grandmother Sarah Obama, who lives in Kenya, being goaded into saying (through a translator) that the future president was born in Kenya before quickly correcting herself. (A doctored version of this tape, which cuts off before the retraction, is posted on YouTube.) Another claim: Obama traveled to Pakistan in 1981, when it was illegal for an American to do so, suggesting that he used a non-American passport. The problem is that there never was any such ban.

“We have no record of any travel ban between America and Pakistan during that period or since,” said Noel Clay, a spokesman for the State Department.

“We got that from someplace,” Berg told TWI on Thursday. In an email, he added his paralegal was “reviewing” his files on Pakistan. Yet the false claim appears in Orly Taitz’s lawsuit on behalf of perennial presidential candidate Alan Keyes, which argues that Obama visited Pakistan “when entrance to Pakistan was banned to Americans, Christians and Jews,” proof that he gave up his American citizenship.

In October 2008, when Berg v. Obama et al was dismissed for lack of standing, the attorney told sympathetic reporters that the DNC had “admitted” the truth about Obama’s citizenship by not rebutting his claims. Joseph Sandler, who filed motions to dismiss Berg’s case and other Obama citizenship lawsuits as general counsel, explained why claims like these are never debunked by lawyers for the president.

“When you file a motion to dismiss, to try to get the case thrown out before any factual inquiry is made, the facts that the plaintiffs put into their complaint are assumed to be true,” said Sandler. “You have to show that even if the facts were true, they don’t have a case.”

As a result of that, extremely questionable theories and “facts” have become linchpins of ‘birther’ theories. ‘Birthers’ who refuse to acknowledge the legitimacy of Obama’s Certificate of Live Birth often cite the expertise of “Dr. Ron Polarik,” a self-described “expert in computer graphics” who maintains a blog at Townhall.com and has recorded a video, in which his face and voice are blurred, explaining how the image was “forged” with Adobe Photoshop. “Polarik” submitted an affidavit in support of Orly Taitz’s Keyes case that is signed “XXXXXXXXXXX,” making it inadmissible.

“If it ever comes down to it,” explained Gary Kreep, another lawyer for Keyes, “we’ll use his real name.”

Some anti-Obama claims take the issue entirely out of the hands of the president or Hawaii officials. Carl Swensson, a conservative activist from Georgia, has organized “Citizens’ Grand Juries” that have indicted the president for treason. Mario Apuzzo, a New Jersey attorney, has sued Obama on the grounds that he never was, and never could be, a “natural born” citizen. Both men pass over precedent for “The Law of Nations,” the 1758 treatise by the 18th century French scholar Emerich de Vattel. In one translation, de Vattel writes that “the natives, or natural-born citizens, are those born in the country, of parents who are citizens.” That’s enough for some Obama ‘birthers’ to say that Obama might be a citizen of Kenya–as one constituent of Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) put it–but he cannot be a natural born citizen of the United States. “It’s what the founding fathers used,” explained Swensson.

Constitutional scholars consider this a dubious argument at best. “The framers of the 14th Amendment thought about this,” explained Elizabeth Wydra, chief counsel for the Constitutional Accountability Center. “They wanted to make sure that the children of slaves who were brought here illegally, slaves who were brought into this country after the end of the slave trade, would be citizens.”

Apuzzo is not convinced. He argued that the founders wrote the phrase “natural born citizen” for a reason; to make sure that no one with “blood ties” to another country could become president. He speculated what might happen if Gov. Bobby Jindal (R-La.), whose parents were Indian, became president. “India is a nuclear power. Here comes the president, who says we have to go in and attack Pakistan. Are we doing that because we are defending India’s interests? You just don’t know. You can’t have Constitutional rule if you allow this.”

Because of the dismissal tactics used by lawyers for the president, John McCain, and both political parties, believers in these various theories and readings of the Constitution argue that they have never been proven wrong. Although Rep. John Campbell (R-Calif.) explained his support of a House bill that would require copies of birth certificates from presidential candidates by saying it would “put all this to rest,” the very frivolity and obscurity of the challenges to Obama suggest the beginning of a conspiracy theory that will never be debunked to the satisfaction of its believers.

–

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Now that Sen. John McCain has officially lost the presidency, Politico reminds him that he still has an audit to look forward to.

According to the report, President-elect Barack Obama, who opted out of public financing for his general election bid, will likely avoid an examination of his campaign’s books by the Federal Election Commission. Because McCain did accept public funding, an FEC audit is mandatory, at the campaign’s expense. Fortunately for him, Politico reports the McCain campaign allocated $9.4 million to pay for it.

Obama is expected to escape that level of scrutiny mostly because he declined an $84 million public grant for his campaign that automatically triggers an audit and because the sheer volume of cash he raised and spent minimizes the significance of his errors. Another factor: The FEC, which would have to vote to launch an audit, is prone to deadlocking on issues that inordinately impact one party or the other – like approving a messy and high-profile probe of a sitting president.

McCain, on the other hand, accepted the $84 million in taxpayer money, which not only barred him from raising or spending more – allowing Obama to fund many times more ads and ground operations – but also will keep his lawyers busy for a couple years explaining how every penny was spent.

I would recommend the FEC closely examine the McCain campaign’s billing of the media. This was a much-discussed potential scandal among the reporters on the McCain plane that never got reported, I suspect, for fear of getting kicked off the plane.

I never flew on the Obama plane, so I can’t say if this was an issue there as well. However, it was not uncommon to hear complaints from reporters on the McCain plane about being billed $150 for a lunch that they were not even able to eat because they were on pool duty.

Here’s a sample of some of the charges from one receipt I received from the McCain campaign:

7/7/2008 396 DENVER CENTER FOR WI-FI $191.06

7/15/2008 402 BREAKFAST $82.23

7/16/2008 411 DUKE ENERGY CENTE WI-FI $205.85

7/17/2008 414 BREAKFAST $60.58

The meals were never extravagant. Breakfast almost always consisted of a standard buffet of eggs, potatoes, sausage/bacon, coffee and juice, a selection of cereals, etc. How that could possibly cost $82 per head is quite a mystery. Similarly, $205 for wireless Internet at a rally venue seems a tad expensive.

Perhaps the campaign was just paying whatever a vendor asked, and not caring because they would simply pass the costs on to the media outlets. Either that, or the media appears to have been illegally subsidizing the campaign.

There’s an exchange I didn’t mention then that I think is worth noting. Early on, Palin says she is frustrated that the media didn’t correct mistakes made about her record.

Q. There’s been an enormous amount of information about you that Alaskans have been exposed to the past couple of months — and lots of it very critical. What are Alaskans supposed to make of all this?

A. Regarding information regarding my record, that is now out there, much of it that was based on misinformation was a very, very frustrating thing to have to go through when the record was never corrected. And we would try to correct the record and too many in the media chose not to make those corrections.

What kind of corrections weren’t made?

I thought Palin might try to defend herself against stories that she had billed the state for her children’s travel. Or the story The Los Angeles Times broke about how she hired a lobbyist to get federal earmarks for Wasilla.

No.

It was the Harry Potter smear that went uncorrected!

Q. What misinformation are you talking about?

A. Some of the goofy things like who was Trig’s mom. Well, I’m Trig’s mom (raises her hand) and do you want to see my medical records to prove that? … And banning books. That was a ridiculous thing also that could have so easily been corrected just by a reporter taking an extra step and not basing a report on gossip or speculation. But just looking into the record. It was reported that I tried to ban Harry Potter when it hadn’t even been written when I was the mayor. So, gosh, we have so many examples, I mean every day, especially the first few weeks, every day something that was thrown out there.

The media reported that Palin had fired her local librarian after a discussion about book banning. I was the first reporter on the scene in the offices of the local paper, The Mat-Su Frontiersman, to check out the newspaper’s archives. Here on The Streak we were one of the first outlets to run a copy of the book-banning story.

The news was also included in the in-depth story that The New York Times ran on Palin’s time as mayor.

It was an anecdote that spread far and wide, but, as far as I know, no mainstream outlet accused Palin of successfully banning books, but just what had been reported at the time — that she broached the subject as mayor.

The accusation that Palin banned the Harry Potter series was part of an anonymous email making the rounds. I recall several people asking me if the email was real.

For Palin to say that the story was “reported” is a stretch. And it distracts from the story actually reported — that she did look into the possibility. This is an accusation she did not address directly.

Update: I’m surprised. The press actually did hit back against the Harry Potter ban claims. A story in USA Today points out the the email circulating was in fact a fake.

I should also note that I said Palin had not directly responded to questions about her inquiries into banning books. The story includes a comment from a Palin campaign spokesman:

“Sarah Palin has never asked anyone to ban a book,” Griffin said. “It shouldn’t be surprising that the new mayor of a city that had seen recent protests over books and was in the process of re-evaluating the book-challenge policies at its library would ask the librarian what those policies were.”

The whole interview is worth a read. She hits many topics, including a run in 2012. Here are a few highlights.

On Trooperage,

The whole {Walter] Monegan thing, I am glad that we’ve already gone through two different processes now — the personnel board, which is where it should have been all along, and the legislative investigation of it also. It’s done. It’s over. People need to move on.

The second Troopergate inquiry, run by political appointees, cleared Palin of all wrongdoing. The first report, though, found she had violated a state law and abused her power in trying to get her former brother in-law fired. If the legislature decides to take action against Palin, it won’t be before the legislative session begins in January.

On collecting per diem and charging the state for taking her daughters on trips with her, Palin said she was within her rights:

We’ve always followed the law and fully disclosed all that. The choice there in many months of the Juneau mansion being re-plumbed and all the improvements being made in the infrastructure of the Juneau house, where we weren’t going to be there anyway. Knowing that in the end it would have cost the state more money to do what other governors had done and that is either charge the state for hotel rooms. Or the state rents you an apartment like they did for Gov. Murkowski. We said no, we just won’t sell our house, knowing that we’re going to spend quite a bit of time here, especially those months where the remodels were taking place in the governor’s mansion. And we would disclose my per diem, we wouldn’t try to hide it … trying to go above and beyond, not accepting any per diem for the kids or Todd at all, they’ve lived outside of the governor’s house. Trying to follow the rules and doing what is legal and ethical and full disclosure.

Same with the family’s travel. That’s baffled me that all of a sudden two years later, again, never having tried to hide anything with either traveling back and forth to Juneau for first family events that were outside the capital city, in bringing Piper and, once in a while, Willow with me also, that anybody would think that I was trying to hide that they came with me … just trying to do my job and part of my job is with the first family, having them with me at some of these events.

Just to note, Palin may owe back taxes on the per diem payments and the kids weren’t invited to some of those events.

McCain’s advisers… were furious when they heard rumors that Todd Palin was calling around to Alaska bigwigs telling them to hold their powder until 2012.

Todd Palin took personal time off from his job as a producer on Alaska’s North Slope where he works the oil field for BP to join his wife on the campaign trail. So why would he be so intimately involved in his wife’s political future?

According to one of Palin’s top gubernatorial campaign advisers, who spoke to me off the record in Alaska, Sarah Palin has only two true political advisers: “Sarah and Todd Palin.”

Supporters and critics agree that the Palins are a team when it comes to Palin’s politics. The most prominent example being Todd Palin’s role in the Troopergate scandal, where he pressured his wife’s top safety official to fire their ex-brother-in-law over a family feud.

In Palin’s administration, Todd was also copied on emails about state business, like a contentious debate over the police union contract and a bill on parental consent for teenage abortions.

Just last week Sarah Palin smiled at her husband during an interview with Fox’s Greta Van Susteren when she said she was looking forward to working together in the White House

The Todd Palin-Sarah Palin dynamic is well-known in Alaska. It’s reasonable that Sen. John McCain was angry about Todd Palin’s involvement — but McCain shouldn’t have been surprised.

Last night at a social event here in Washington, a national political reporter said that Palin had attracted huge crowds in the tens of thousands during the campaign. Other reporters nodded in agreement.

I spent a few days traveling with Palin last week. In a half-dozen stops, she never attracted a crowd in the tens-of thousands-category. At one rally in Florida, she didn’t even come close to filling the venue’s 5,333-person capacity. The crowds were boisterous, even raucous, but amounted to never more than a few thousand to 10,000 — max.

A recent Kimberly Strassel column in the Wall Street Journal similarly claimed a huge crowd at a Palin rally in Cape Girardeau, Mo., last week:

Wending my way through the traffic and crowds around the Palin event in this small river city on Thursday morning, I began to wonder if the whole state hadn’t shown up. Walking the cold half-hour from the nearest parking space, I passed mobs of disappointed voters who had already been turned away for lack of space. Inside the city’s Show Me Center, thousands of roaring, stomping, sign-waving Palin fans were practically hanging from the rafters. It felt like, well . . . an Obama rally.

I just checked the crowd count with the local paper. There were 7,000 people in attendance. Another 1,800 had been turned away at the door.

That is not even close to Sen. Barack Obama’s most recent rally in Missouri, where he attracted 100,000 people in St. Louis. Obama attracted 90,000 people at his final campaign rally in Manassas, Va.

Could Palin one day attract these kinds of crowds? Who knows. But for now, she doesn’t.

Alaska Sen. Ted Stevens, who was convicted in Washington last month on seven felony counts of failing to disclose gifts on Senate disclosure forms, trailed his challenger, Anchorage Mayor Mark Begich, by as many as 22 points, according to polls taken just last week. The latest tally from Tuesday’s voting has him ahead by 1.5 percent.

Rep. Don Young is another possible example of the Stevens effect. Young is under federal investigation and has spent about $1 million on legal fees last year. Just a week before Tuesday’s elections, Young was behind in the polls by 9 points. He won his race by a solid margin.

Nate Silver notes that my theory is conventional wisdom these days. He disagrees, though, pointing out that if you take the presidential race into account, the theory doesn’t add up. The McCain-Palin ticket outperformed poll expectations by 12.4 points, about the same margins as Young and Stevens tallies.

That polling discrepancy isn’t explained by the Stevens effect. Silver has a few more thoughts here on what might have happened.

Still, I’m not convinced that many voters didn’t pull a switch-a-roo on pollsters once they got into the voting booth.