Instead, the campaign tapped Portman to push young people who already support Obama to press their parents to do the same. It’s part of a larger effort by the Obama campaign, “The Talk,” that aims to turn its sizable edge among young voters into a persuasion machine.

“Are you sure if your parents are voting for Obama?” asks the campaign pitch. “If not, you may be the only person who can convince them.” There’s a website with videos, policy information and tips especially for parental outreach:

Think about their perspective. If they are Republican, or are concerned about Barack’s policies, think about where they are coming from and what makes them think the way that they do.

Don’t wait until the last minute — it might take a few conversations for you to convince them, so start as early as possible.

Portman recorded her video in Cincinnati, Ohio, where she stumped for Obama and had “the talk” with her grandmother. Eat your heart out, Sarah Silverman:

PRODUCTION NOTES: This short, simple video turns on Portman’s personal appeal — with the kind of tight close-ups you don’t see in the campaign’s Biden YouTube collection. Drawing in young people with star power, the video swiftly redirects them to “The Talk” website.

Consider the following example from Lake County, IN., which many critics of ACORN have pointed to as a case of voter fraud:

As you can see, canvasser Dain T. submitted the form for a certain Jimmy Johns, who turned out not to be a voter but a sandwich shop.

His supervisor, Latisha Hicks, suspected something fishy, investigated the matter and had Dain T. fired for falsification. According to ACORN, he was then turned over to election officials for prosecution.

This would appear to cut against assertions by some GOP officials that ACORN intentionally, or negligently, filed false registrations.

Sometimes, upon investigation, the supervisor determined that there was no wrongdoing. In the example below, Hicks determined that although the handwriting on several voter registration forms was similar, it was not similar enough to warrant suspicion.

UPDATE 10/15: The folks at ACORN initially gave me these forms without the names blacked out. After consulting their lawyers, they sent me these blacked-out forms and asked me to substitute them in. I obliged.

In his view, Sarah Palin ticket takes Montana, Georgia (and Alaska) out of play for Democrats, although adviser says he never thought they were in play anyway. In weeks ahead, adviser anticipates that campaign will use Palin not just in small and medium markets, as is traditional for a vice presidential candidate, but in large markets as well.

If Palin plays as strongly with Christian conservatives as pundits suggest, voters in heavily evangelical swing states like Iowa, Indiana, North Carolina and Virginia will be seeing an awful lot of her. As my colleague Ari Melber notes, there is plenty of time for numbers like this to change — but Palin appears to be wildly popular, at least initially.

That’s the benefit of being a virtual unknown.

If Palin can tip the balance in just a few close states, she could fundamentally reshape the map and give the Obama campaign a good reason to re-evaluate its quixotic 50-state strategy.

With two months left, it may prove practical for the Democratic Party to focus its resources more exclusively on the battleground states where Obama actually stands a chance. Particularly if McCain is able to compete financially.

That’s because I’ve been away from “home” for a long time now. I went to one of those fancy schools that was mocked last night. I’ve lived in Chicago and New York and Washington. I’ve traveled the world. But I’ve always said I’m an Ohio boy at heart. Or so I thought.

Now, I don’t know if I want to cling to that anymore. Palin would like you to believe that we’re not supposed to escape our small-town upbringings. That’s a fine notion, but it made me think about what we’re supposed to do. I’ve always said that I left Ohio not out of a need for some great escape from small-town life, but because the work I wanted to do was elsewhere.

I suspect that Sen. Barack Obama felt somewhat the same way when he left Hawaii for Columbia University and then Harvard Law. But Palin would make you believe there’s something wrong with that. It’s playing the class card and it’s simply wrong.

It’s using this idea of false authenticity to a place, to reject what our great founders envisioned as the forward movement in the American experiment — to say because someone chose not to stay in their humble beginnings he shouldn’t be trusted.

There are many times when I’m proud to say where I’m from. But Palin cheapened that narrative and millions like it last night. Today, I’ll just say that I live in Washington — with no backstory. And leave it at that.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, a non-partisan organization that tracks money in elections, employees of a law firm founded by Charles Keating Jr. have bundled more than $50,000 in contributions to Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign.

In amounts ranging from $200 to $2,300, about 30 partners and employees of the legal firm Keating, Muething and Klekamp, as well as their family members, have contributed $50,200 to McCain’s 2008 campaign. All but two of the contributions came in July, and all but three of those July donations were logged on July 31, suggesting they were delivered at the same time. As with any bundle of campaign contributions, it’s difficult to determine which donor was the “bundler,” the person who solicited the contributions on the campaign’s behalf. McCain’s online roster of bundlers, which purports to name any individual bundling $50,000 or more for the campaign, does not associate any of McCain’s major fund-raisers with the Keating firm.

McCain and Keating were forever linked by the “Keating Five” corruption scandal during the savings and loan crisis of the late 1980s. McCain and four other lawmakers were accused of improperly interfering with federal banking regulators investigating Keating’s Lincoln Savings and Loan Assn., which ultimately failed — costing the federal government and investors billions of dollars. Keating spent more than four years in prison as a result.

Keating was a major campaign contributor to each of the five legislators. During the scandal, it became known that McCain had taken several trips at Keating’s expense — including vacations to Keating’s home in the Bahamas, which McCain later paid for. McCain was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing by the Senate Ethics Committee, though the committee reprimanded him for exercising poor judgment.

While there is certainly nothing improper about McCain receiving contributions from individuals at Keating’s firm, it is a reminder of McCain’s past ethics problems — before he styled himself a maverick reformer. The scandal has hardly been mentioned this election cycle; but it does remain an arrow in the Democrats’ quiver if or, perhaps more likely, when things get ugly.

(Photos by U.S. Congress, Lauren Victoria Burke)

Democrats have been relishing every minute since Sen. John McCain announced that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin would be his vice presidential running mate. The attacks have been fast and furious. Palin lacks experience; she has ties to the far right; she has scandals lurking in her personal background. Palin, Democrats say, is McCain’s Dan Quayle.

This is among the most stinging comparisons in contemporary politics — bringing back memories of the running mate of Vice President George H.W. Bush in 1988. One Republican at the Democratic National Convention in Denver last week, surprised by the pick, predicted, “Democrats will have a field day typecasting her as Quayle in a pantsuit.”

The comparison has some merit. It is easy to look back at the media coverage of Quayle in August of 1988 and to find language that closely resembles today’s talk about Palin.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But the Democrats are forgetting the important point: Quayle was on the winning ticket. The candidate with the far more seasoned running mate, Massachusetts Gov. Michael S. Dukakis with Texas Sen. Lloyd Bentsen, was trounced that year.

When Bush picked Quayle, he wanted to shake up the race by bringing a charismatic conservative and younger face onto the ticket. Bush chose Quayle over more established finalists like Sens. Robert Dole, Pete Domenici, Alan Simpson or Rep. Jack Kemp and former Transportation Sec. Elizabeth Dole. Bush knew that conservative activists did not trust him, perceiving him to be part of the “white shoe” Northeastern Republican establishment, far more comfortable with compromise and bipartisanship than the younger renegades of the Reagan Revolution.

Quayle seemed the perfect antidote. He was part of the up-and-coming cohort of congressional Republicans who maintained close ties to the conservative movement. Quayle made a name for himself in 1988 by attacking President Ronald Reagan for holding arms negotiations with the Soviet Union and betraying the conservative cause.

“Perestroika is nothing more than refined Stalinism,” Quayle said, talking about the reforms then underway in the Soviet Union. Conservatives were initially excited about the choice. The right-wing activist Phyllis Schlafly said that Quayle brought “youth, attractiveness, conservative image . . . all the elements of a great and winning ticket.”

But things quickly started to go wrong. One problem was the sharp contrast of the team’s age and appearance. Bush made Quayle look too young for the job. Democrats played on this, attacking Quayle’s inexperience. Dukakis, after all, had selected Bentsen, an experienced elder statesman.

There were also revelations about Quayle’s connections to Paula Parkinson, a stunning female lobbyist at the center of a 1980 scandal, who had revealed that she had used heavy-handed techniques to sway legislators. Parkinson, who later posed nude in Playboy, was the focus of a Justice Dept. investigation into whether politicians had traded favors for sex.

The investigation did not turn up evidence of wrongdoing. But it was discovered that Quayle was one of the representatives who attended a golf trip with Parkinson in Florida. Quayle insisted that he had done nothing wrong and had gone to “play golf.”

The senator looked ever more like a deer in the headlights as he faced questions about how he got a spot in the National Guard as a result of his privileged upbringing.

Republicans were frustrated at their convention, just days after the announcement, when all the media attention in New Orleans was on Quayle rather than the Republican message. GOP strategist Ed Rollins lamented that the carefully planned out convention “got stomped on” by the Quayle selection.

Quayle also made mistakes after the convention. The most infamous occurred at a photo-op at a school in Trenton, N.J., where Quayle mistakenly corrected a student who had spelled potato correctly. He said the young boy had left an “e” off the end.

During the vice presidential debate, Quayle compared himself to John F. Kennedy, responding to a question about whether his lack of experience mattered. Obviously prepared for this, Bentsen jumped on the comparison, and said “I served with Jack Kennedy. Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator you’re no Jack Kennedy.” Bentsen was widely regarded as the winner that night.

Democrats did not stop. One of their favorite sayings was “Quayle: Just a heartbeat away.”

But the Bush team came back. Even as Democrats attacked Quayle and his candidacy deteriorated, the GOP strategist Lee Atwater and his team kept their guns focused on Dukakis. They painted him as weak on defense, in favor of high taxes and out of touch with mainstream values as a “card-carrying member of the ACLU.”

In the end, this was what mattered most to voters. The strategy worked. The Republicans trounced the Democrats. Bush won 53.4 percent of the popular vote and a whopping 426 electoral votes—all with Quayle on the ticket.

There have been other races where controversial picks did not sidetrack a presidential candidacy. During the 1952 presidential campaign, for example, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s pick, Sen. Richard M. Nixon, came under fire from press revelations that he maintained a secret slush fund filled by California supporters. The story broke just days after Eisenhower had announced his selection.

Eisenhower was prepared to drop Nixon, but the senator went on television. Nixon made a speech, arguing that he and his wife, Pat, were common Americans without wealth, and he mocked the accusations against him. He said, most notably, that he would not return a cocker spaniel, Checkers, that a supporter had given his two little daughters. He spoke of his wife’s “respectable Republican cloth coat” and asked supporters to write directly to the Republican National Committee to show their backing. The polls were in Nixon’s favor — and the Eisenhower-Nixon ticket sailed to victory.

In the past few days, Democrats have been focusing on one aspect of the 1988 campaign — Quayle’s many problems — while forgetting the overall story: Bush and Quayle won.

Democrats could certainly point to the weaknesses and dangers in the Palin selection, but they should be cautious. If they allow Palin to distract them from their main target — McCain and his support for the unpopular economic and military policies of President George W. Bush — they might just find themselves like Dukakis and Bentsen in 1988, on the losing end.

Julian E. Zelizer is a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He is the co-editor of “Rightward Bound: Making America Conservative in the 1970s” (Harvard University Press) and is completing a book on the history of national security politics since World War II.

Fox News is promoting Obama's Thursday appearance.

As Sen. John McCain accepts the GOP presidential nomination on Thursday night, his opponent will enter the “No Spin Zone.”

Yes, Sen. Barack Obama is headed for Fox News, in a bid for Republican votes, by appearing for the first time ever on Bill O’Reilly’s prime-time show. While McCain aims his acceptance speech at voters beyond his base, Obama will be talking to the bright red Republicans who watch O’Reilly’s highly rated show. In the last presidential election, a whopping 88 percent of Fox viewers voted Republican, while only 7 percent voted Democratic.

Obama’s appearance also caps an unusually long and rocky exchange with O’Reilly.

A senior aide to Obama said the controversial anchor “shoved” him during a February altercation in New Hampshire, when O’Reilly tried to confront the Illinois senator to demand he appear on the Fox program. “I’ve worked two [presidential] campaigns, and I’ve never had a member of the press lay hands on a staff member before,” said the aide, Marvin Nicholson, who travels with Obama. Then, at a secret June meeting with Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox, and Roger Ailes, who runs it, Obama aired his concerns about the network’s biased coverage and agreed to appear on O’Reilly’s show, according to new reports from Vanity Fair and The Washington Post.

Beyond O’Reilly’s show, Fox News has been under siege this election season by several liberal groups supporting Obama. The channel was shut out of Democratic primary debates, after Democratic activists and bloggers scuttled its attempt to host debates with the Congressional Black Caucus. More recently, Fox was rocked by allegations of anti-Obama bias and racial prejudice in campaigns by Color of Change, a netroots group focused on black issues and civil rights — that was the battle featuring the rapper Nas on the Colbert Report — and a viral video campaign by Brave New Films.

Obama’s exclusive appearance, however, shows that he’s willing to tap the Fox News for potential conservative voters — even as his supporters try to marginalize its political role.

I’m reading an article from October 1996, in which a reporter named Laura Mitchell Harris asks Palin about her intentions for a shake up. How would she effectively run a city without experienced leaders? “”It’s not rocket science,” Palin said, “It’s $6 million and 53 employees.”

Note: A big thank you to the Frontiersman for opening their newsroom to me!

Update: Internet access is a bit tough to come by here, so I update frequently on twitter via phone.

“In Alaska now, with the budget under control, we have a surplus. I’ve never hesitated to protect the wages and the jobs of our people by vetoing wasteful spending. I’ve also championed reform to end the abuses of earmark spending of Congress. As the senator said, I told the Congress, ‘Thanks, but no thanks for that bridge to nowhere. If our state wanted to build a bridge, we would b ild it ourselves.’”

In the wake of the Jack Abramoff scandal, earmarks have become synonymous with corruption. Therefore extolling one’s opposition to them has become fashionable on the stump. Unfortunately for Palin, she does not point out that as a candidate for governor, she supported the earmark for the so-called “Bridge to Nowhere.” The Washington Post finds that as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Palin was perfectly willing to play ball, even going so far as to hire — GASP! — well-connected lobbyists to ensure her town got a disproportionately large piece of the federal spending pie.

As mayor of Wasilla, however, Palin oversaw the hiring of Robertson, Monagle & Eastaugh, an Anchorage-based law firm with close ties to Alaska’s most senior Republicans: Rep. Don Young and Sen. Ted Stevens, who was indicted in July on charges of accepting illegal gifts. The Wasilla account was handled by the former chief of staff to Stevens, Steven W. Silver, who is a partner in the firm.

Palin was elected mayor of Wasilla in 1996 on a campaign theme of “a time for change.” According to a review of congressional spending by Taxpayers for Common Sense, a non-partisan watchdog group in Washington, Wasilla did not receive any federal earmarks in the first few years of Palin’s tenure.

Senate records show that Silver’s firm began working for Palin in early 2000, just as federal money began flowing.

In fiscal 2000, Wasilla received a $1 million earmark, tucked into a transportation appropriations bill, for a rail and bus project in the town. And in the winter of 2000, Palin appeared before congressional appropriations committees to seek earmarks, according to a report in the Anchorage Daily News.

Palin and the Wasilla City Council increased Silver’s fee from $24,000 to $36,000 a year by 2001, Senate records show.

Soon after, the city benefited from additional earmarks: $500,000 for a mental health center, $500,000 for the purchase of federal land and $450,000 to rehabilitate an agricultural processing facility. Then there was the $15 million rail project, intended to connect Wasilla with the town of Girdwood, where Stevens has a house.

The Post reports Wasilla — population 6,700 — received $6.1 million in earmerks in fiscal year 2002, compared to $6.9 million for Boise, Idaho, which has a population of 190,000. In February, Palin submitted a request for $200 million in earmarks to the now-indicted Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska).

I’ve never been to Wasilla. I don’t know what its needs are, and some of the projects listed in The Post article seem worthwhile. It could be that $900,000 for sewer repairs is a solid investment for the people of the town. Others, probably could have used more scrutiny, like the $15-million rail link. Whatever the case, Palin’s claim to being an anti-earmark crusader is a bit off.

This also reveals a lot about the philosophies of Sen. John McCain and his running mate. McCain has taken a hard line against earmarks, and my home state of Arizona ranks dead last in federal “pork” spending. Stevens, and we now know Palin played the game: Alaska ranks first in pork.

Pork is a derogatory, catch-all term that includes a lot of projects, from Woodstock museums and bridges to nowhere to schools and hospitals. Earmarks aren’t all bad. Some are genuinely worthwhile, despite being labeled as pork.

I’m not saying everyone should behave like Stevens. Certainly, there should be a lot more oversight and appropriations should be evaluated on the basis of merit. But the reality is that McCain’s campaign pledge to veto all bills containing an earmark, which sounds great on its face and never fails to get cheers from a town hall audience, would slow the frequently glacial pace of lawmaking to a near stop. His blanket anti-earmark stance, which has been mimicked by several of his House colleagues, has left Arizona severely underrepresented in Congress.

McCain has long been more prominent as a national figure than he has been in his home state. His service to his constituents is a major aspect of McCain’s career in Washington that has thus far escaped hard examination during this campaign season. It looks like this could be about to change. Stay tuned.

Bob Tkacz, a freelance reporter who’s covered the legislature and seafood industry since 1990, described Palin as willing to answer a couple questions while dropping her daughter, Piper, off at the bus stop, a stone’s throw from both the governor’s mansion and Capitol building.

“She’s very accessible,” said Tkacz. “I’m not sure that’s the same as open.”

Tkacz described her style in news conference to that of a PTA meeting, adding that Palin keeps to the script at most times. Another reporter described her as often having staffers nearby during such conferences to field questions, too…

Dermot Cole, a columnist and editorial board member of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, said that Palin has met with the paper’s editors several times, but has generally avoided meetings that involve deep discussion of policy and issues.

“She is the most reluctant of all the governors we’ve had to participate,” said Cole, who’s spent three decades at the paper. Therefore, Cole added, “I think it’s unproven how she’s going to handle this intense scrutiny.”

Calderone also quotes Judith Erickson, wife of the editor-at-large of the Alaska Oil and Legislative Report, who indicates Palin is likely to deflect questions for which she is unprepared:

Judith Erickson noted that Palin is a quick study, and it’s her personal appeal that could win over the press corps-even when the questions tread into areas she’s unlikely to be well-versed in.

In Alaska, Palin wouldn’t have been asked to locate Afghanistan on a map, but now will be expected to answer more nuanced foreign-policy questions, as well as be prepared on domestic issues like the economy.

“She’s really good at the non-answer,” Judith Erickson said. “If you ask a question that she doesn’t want to answer, she just gives up a response that’s unresponsive. I have a feeling that she’ll do a lot of that.”

Of course, it may be more than a little naive to assume that Palin will spend much time talking to the press. We’ve written extensively about the lack of access the McCain campaign has given the national media recently — McCain has not held a press conference in nearly three weeks. In that time, the only questions he has answered have been in one-on-one interviews, mostly with local media.

I’ve been on the road with McCain the entire time since he announced Palin as his running mate, and I have yet to be within a couple hundred feet of her. The only time I’ve seen her face has been on television or on the Jumbo-trons at the rally in Dayton, Ohio, where McCain made the announcement. Palin also has yet to take a question from any reporter since her selection, local or national. Perhaps with good reason.

The McCain campaign is clearly uncomfortable allowing even the presumed GOP nominee — a seasoned politician who built his career and his reputation on “straight talk” with the press — to face the media. They’re probably not too keen on putting Palin out there, without a net, in front of reporters eager to test her qualifications for the nation’s second-highest office. One fumbled answer to a hardball question on, say, foreign policy — which, by the way, any other vice presidential candidate would be expected to answer — could prove devastating when played over and over on cable news channels, let alone a series of them. I expect Palin’s role in the campaign will be to appear at rallies, mostly in battleground states, and to interact with the press as little as possible — just like her running mate.