Taking a page from American Idol, the group ostensibly seeks to strip away the influence of the entrenched interests that shape Republican and Democratic presidential platforms and presidential tickets. Bypassing the agendas established by labor unions and chambers of commerce, for example, people will surf to the American Elect website and directly nominate the candidates the organization is working to make sure appear on ballots in all 50 states.

Political analysts understandably have viewed the organization with skepticism.

Although American Elect positions itself as motivated to address a system broken in part through corruption, it doesn’t have to reveal its funders and so far it is keeping the identities of some of them secret.

Obvious questions linger:

Is American Elect really just a spoiler organization, bankrolled by either Democrats or Republicans in order to establish a third-party candidate who will siphon off votes from a mainstream opponent?

Is American Elect less about political innovation than about money-making? Is it a gimmick?

Does handing over the power to nominate candidates directly to an angry disillusioned public risk aiding and abetting a spectacular nationwide digital-era experiment in “throw the bums out” anti-voting– an experiment that could end ludicrously in a Kardashian administration?

On the last score, at least, the American Elect website attempts to offer assurances:

Americans Elect candidates will be certified by an independent committee and must meet a set of standard qualification criteria such as background checks. But more importantly, the Americans Elect ticket will be chosen by millions of registered voters—Democrat, Republican and independent. We believe that when Americans participate directly in the nominating process, we will have a positive debate that leads to a qualified, representative choice.

American Elect CEO Elliot Ackerman has said the group is only hoping to add a third candidate to the 2012 election ballot. He couldn’t get more than a few words in to explain the organization’s aims on MSNBC.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

He got more time to elaborate on Comedy Central:

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Bachmann’s spokesman told the Associated Press that Goeas would return to Bachmann’s congressional office.

“Given the changing caucus and primary schedule, we will not be utilizing full-time polling consultants and (will) concentrate heavily on retail politics in Iowa,” said Alice Stewart, a Bachmann spokeswoman. “Ed will work on several projects with us this month, then we shift focus to Iowa and he will shift to other projects not associated with the campaign.”

Bachmann campaign manager Ed Rollins and deputy campaign manager David Polyansky left the campaign in September.

The move of campaign staff to Bachmann’s congressional office, as reported by the AP, gives credence to recent concerns that Bachmann’s campaign is running out of cash, as Politico reported. Her recent videos have been largely low-budget affairs, as opposed the cinematic efforts released earlier in her campaign. Financial disclosures aren’t due until the middle of the month.

Bachmann’s campaign has been spiraling downwards since her victory in the Iowa Straw Poll in August.

ABC’s John Parkinson writes:

Although aides in Bachmann’s congressional office said she has received frequent encouragement from supporters to challenge President Obama next year, they would not confirm quite yet that she officially was throwing her hat into the ring.

However, Bachmann’s senior staff did admit the Minnesotan is not ruling out a presidential campaign. “Nothing is off the table,” Bachmann chief of staff Andy Parrish told ABC News when asked whether the Iowa trip signaled Bachmann’s intent to run for president.

“The congresswoman is excited about her first trip to Iowa this year.”

Bachmann has already proven herself to be a fundraising juggernaut, giving her an immediate advantage if she chooses to enter the field of presidential candidates. For her 2010 re-election campaign against Democrat Tarryl Clark, she brought in $13.4 million. Bachmann has around three million of that sum left over for future campaigns.

Bachmann’s name has been floated as a potential Republican candidate to challenge Minnesota U.S. Sen. Amy Klobuchar when she is up for re-election in 2012. Based on early polls conducted by Public Policy Polling, Bachmann is the clear favorite among state Republicans for the Senate nomination, easily topping former Gov. Tim Pawlenty or former U.S. Sen. Norm Coleman. But those same polls indicate that Bachmann struggles outside the comfort of her own party or congressional district, with all Minnesota voters favoring Klobuchar by a 56-39 percent margin over Bachmann.

Karl Rove (J.D. Pooley/ZUMA Press)

Washington memoirs are all about settling scores. Karl Rove’s “Courage and Consequence: My Life as a Conservative in the Fight” takes that tradition to new and self-parodying heights. To read Rove’s recollections of George W. Bush’s White House is to believe that, for eight years, men of “courage and moral clarity” governed the United States and were beset by critics who refused to give them any credit. On page after page, Rove names the naysayers and picks apart their claims. He’s most at ease — his delight jumps right off of the page — when he’s able to recount times he shoved the criticisms back in their faces.

[GOP1]In the memoir’s final chapter, humbly titled “Rove: the Myth,” the architect of a two-term Republican presidency reports how angry he was when he read a passage in then-Sen. Barack Obama’s second book lumping him in with Newt Gingrich, Grover Norquist, and Ralph Reed as “conservative operatives” with “fiery rhetoric” like “No new taxes” or “We are a Christian nation.”

“I certainly don’t believe and have never said, ‘We are a Christian nation,’” writes Rove. “I put the offending page in my pocket and went about my business.” Later that day, he encountered Obama and fell victim to “feistiness,” challenging the senator for using “my name and the word ‘said’ and quote marks.” Obama, Rove reports, blanched when the torn-out page was shown to him and tried to wriggle out of the conversation: “It seemed to me he didn’t much care that he had attributed to me something I had never said and found offensive.”

Four years later, Rove offers up the encounter as proof that Obama’s image as “the truest, purest proponent of a fresh new style of politics” is a ruse, and snarls that “the last time I checked, I hadn’t bombed any government building (like, say, Obama’s great friend William Ayers); or asked that God ‘damn’ America (like, say, Obama’s former pastor and close friend Jeremiah Wright); or declared that I was proud of my country for the first time in my life only when I was in my forties (like, say, Obama’s wife, Michelle).”

It’s a revealing passage — it takes up three whole pages — that demonstrates just how Rove thinks. Accused of being a steamrolling, divisive political operative, he locates a loophole in the argument, and closes by insulting the wife of the person who criticized him. Apart from some gripping narrative sections about how the inner sanctum of the White House reacted to the September 11 attacks, “Courage and Consequence” reads less like the story of one of history’s most powerful presidential advisers and more like a quickie fightback book from some apparatchik ensnared in a petty scandal.

Rove’s quest to debunk and overpower his enemies in politics and the press begins with his account of the “broken family” that raised him. Nineteen pages in, he starts swinging at journalists — James Moore, Paul Alexander, Wayne Slater — who’ve looked into the suicide of his mother and the rumored homosexuality of his father for clues about his psychology. “The writers who are fascinated with whether my father was gay,” Rove snarls, “are really more interested in implying that all people who have gay relatives or friends must support same-sex marriage; otherwise they are bigots and hypocrites. And if one of these people happens to be Karl Rove, so much the better.”

In other, less personal sections of the book, Rove takes the same care in dissembling what his enemies have been saying. Throughout, he settles scores with political opponents while seeing past the fault in his own. Recapping one of the coups of his early career, he admits that he “destroyed the career” of former Texas Railroad Commissioner Lena Guerroro by leaking the proof that she had embellished her academic record. “Did I pass on to a reporter the information that pointed to our opponent’s lie?” Rove writes. “Absolutely, you bet, and I have no regrets about it whatsoever. Why should I? The information, after all, was true. That should have some bearing on this issue.”

Rove doesn’t have the same attitude about information that damaged his own client, George W. Bush. Rove devotes a chapter title — “Derailed by a DUI” — and five pages to how Democrats killed the 2000 Bush-Cheney campaign’s momentum with a leak about Bush’s 1976 DUI arrest in Maine. Mournfully, Rove recounts the reaction of his campaign — “Bush called it ‘dirty politics’ and said, ‘I don’t know if my opponent’s campaign was involved, but I do know that the person who admitted doing it at the last minute was a Democratic and partisan in Maine.” Rove’s regret was that he didn’t outsmart the Democrats by leaking the information before they did: “Of the things I would redo in the 2000 election, making a timely announcement about Bush’s DUI would top the list.”

Rove’s pride and tunnel vision about his campaign tactics aren’t anything new in the Washington memoir genre. Much of Sarah Palin’s “Going Rogue” featured the same sort of finger-pointing about her brief bid for the vice presidency. If anything, Rove takes more obvious relish in attacking the people who made his campaigns difficult — it’s mostly “the kooky left-wing blogosphere” that thinks he ran a dirty campaign against John McCain in 2000, or that only an “imbecile” could have believed the 2004 exit polls that showed a Kerry-Edwards win, and so on.

But unlike Palin — unlike most people with his portfolio — Rove was in the cockpit for much of a consequential presidency that launched two wars and dramatically expanded the size of the federal government. He writes about this the same way he writes about minor tiffs and campaign tricks. He spends a page trying to debunk the idea that Bush ever told Americans to “go shopping” after the September 11 attacks. Technically, he’s right. The closest Bush ever came to using those two precise words — the moment that most people remember as the “go shopping” moment — were his September 27, 2001 remarks at Chicago’s O’Hare Airport when he urged Americans to “get down to Disney World in Florida” and “take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed.” But Rove insists that the “closest he ever came” was a different speech in which Bush praised Americans for “going about their daily lives, working and shopping and playing, worshiping at churches and synagogues and mosques, going to movies and to baseball.” Even there, Rove skips past the argument made by critics — that Bush, in a unique position to demand more of Americans, gave an “all-clear” sign and moved on. In writing about Hurricane Katrina, one of his only regrets is “flying over the region in Air Force One on Wednesday, rather than landing.” In one of Rove’s few admissions, he admits that he’s “one of the people responsible for this mistake.”

“Courage and Consequence” is filled with such arguments. Pre-release excepts about Rove’s take on the Iraq War — that his biggest regret was that he should have worked harder to spin the fallout over the lack of WMD in Iraq — foreshadowed the way Rove would tackle most of the controversies of his tenure. At several points, he simply misstates facts. He impugns the character of former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias, who was removed from his position in New Mexico after not pursuing politicized prosecutions, by claiming that Iglesias was incompetent and gunning for electoral office. Paragraphs later, he claims that the only qualm that Democrats have with former U.S. Attorney Tim Griffin — who resigned after negative attention on his own politicized appointment — is that they feared it would help Griffin’s career. Left unmentioned is the real Democratic argument, that Griffin helped the Bush-Cheney campaign challenge the voter registrations of voters in largely African-American, Democratic-leaning areas. But to Rove, the most important Republican political strategist of his generation, Democratic worries about election integrity are basically one big joke. In an unsurprising chapter about the 2000 presidential election recount — revelations are limited to the angry looks and sighs that various players gave to Rove — he refers to the Bush team in Florida as “freedom fighters whose homeland had been occupied as they grappled with a blitzkrieg of lawsuits filed by Gore’s attorneys and street protests led by Jesse Jackson.”

Very little of this should surprise observers of Rove in power or out of power, as a quotable White House aide and then as a Fox News pundit who has reliably attacked the Democrats. Rove’s disinterest in policy or consequences of policy isn’t surprising, either. (“I didn’t pretend to be Carl von Clausewitz or Henry Kissinger, but I knew the Iraq War wasn’t going well,” Rove writes of his thinking in December 2006.) The historical value of the book itself is minimal. It functions, instead, as a test of whether Rove’s combination of pique and pride will be helpful as Bush administration veterans argue that they spent eight years changing America for the better, over the cries of critics, only to watch their work be ruined by Barack Obama and his pack of elitist liberals.

The question of whether McCain did or did not flip-flop on Medicare cuts notwithstanding, McCain’s citation of FactCheck.org — the reputable fact-checking Website operated by the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center — is itself a pretty dramatic flip-flop.

In the heat of the campaign last year, I asked McCain if he had any comment on a series of FactCheck.org analyses that found that many of his campaign advertisements contained false or misleading information. McCain responded by chuckling and giving a rather dismissive answer that failed to address the heart of the question.

Me: Senator, FactCheck.org, the nonpartisan fact-checking Website, has cited nine — eight or nine — of your recent ads as containing false or misleading information. I was wondering how you would respond to this, and how do you reconcile it with your pledge to run an honorable campaign?

McCain: [Chuckling] I don’t respond to Websites that I have no idea what they’re talking about. I’m proud of our campaign. We have been fair. We have been balanced, and we have clearly pointed out the differences between myself and Sen. Obama.

So in August of last year, McCain had a low opinion of FactCheck.org when it was criticizing the factual basis of his campaign ads. But today, McCain requested that one of the site’s reports that supported him be entered into the Congressional Record.

And what’s more, if you want to be absolutely technical about it, McCain’s comments on the Senate floor today actually represent a rare (and risky!) double-flip. As I reported last year, even before McCain pleaded ignorance on FactCheck.org’s credibility, his campaign put out a press release using one of the organization’s analyses to defend the Arizona senator from an AFL-CIO attack ad about his support of veterans’ health benefits. That press release mysteriously vanished from the campaign Website sometime after I wrote about it.

It would seem that, just as he did last year during the presidential race, McCain is still trying to have it both ways.

James Carville, the Democratic strategist and longtime Clinton supporter, today sent out a request for funds on behalf of Hillary Clinton for President. For a contribution of $5 or more, Carville writes that donors will be entered to win one of three fabulous prizes: A day with former President Bill Clinton, lunch and a tour of Washington with Carville and Paul Begala OR a trip to Los Angeles to attend the taping of the “American Idol” finale! (Wow, apparently being a member of the Obama administration does give you some connections in Hollywood.)

In December, after Clinton was nominated for secretary of state, the issue of how Clinton could legally raise funds to pay off her campaign debt arose because federal law barred Clinton from raising money once she became a member of the Obama administration. Massie Ritsch, communications director for the all-things-money-and-politics watchdog Center for Responsive Politics, said solicitations from the campaign are allowed as long as they do not come directly from Clinton — hence this one came from Carville.

Here’s the e-mail:

The judge also revealed that he had voted early on Friday and had to stand in line for more than two hours. “It was quite a civics lesson,” Williams said.

The Advancement Project, which joined in the lawsuit with the NAACP, issued a statement saying, “With 500,000 new voters and high expected turnout the burden shouldn’t be on voters, it should be on the Commonwealth to make sure voting is accessible.”

Obama GOTV literature today.

“I feel great and it was fun, I had a chance to vote with my daughters,” Obama told reporters later on the airport tarmac, “I feel really good.”

Another reporter asked if Obama felt “sentimental.”

“You know I’m sure I will tonight – that’s when polls close,” he said, just before the campaign plane departed for Indiana. “The journey ends but voting with my daughters, that was a big deal. I noticed that Michelle took a long time though. I had to check to see who she was voting for,” he added.

Obama voted at Beluah Shoesmith Elementary School. With more than 50 state and local judges on the ballot, the Democratic presidential nominee spent quite a bit of time at the booth. NBC’s “Today Show” carried a live feed of the long ordeal, and, at one point, an anchor felt compelled to tell viewers that voting did not usually take that long, so people should not be dissuaded from turning out today. A pool report detailed the family scene:

Michelle, Sasha and Malia accompanied [Obama]. Malia went into the polling booth with Michelle and Sasah hung out in her own polling booth looking very grown up. She then looked on as Obama cast his ballot. Later, she hugged Obama’s leg looking impatient… Michelle took longer than Obama to finish her ballot. She did not look up from the ballot at all, while Obama grinned occassionally at his daughters.

With seamless timing, the Obama campaign had Sen. Joe Biden cued up to vote for the cameras as soon as Obama left the booth.

Meanwhile, it seems there will be no footage of President George W. Bush voting today. Both nominees ended up running against the incumbent. Bush already voted by mail to avoid being seen today — and maybe further damaging the possibilities of Sen. John McCain.

Sen. George McGovern with "Vote McGovern"

From The Los Angeles Times:

With the title scrawled like graffiti beneath an official campaign photograph not of McGovern but of his opponent, Richard M. Nixon, Warhol incisively pictured a cliché: Consider the alternative.

That camp dexterity with clichés is what made Warhol a big success in the 1950s advertising industry, and it’s also the key to understanding Pop Art. But there’s more. Color is wickedly deployed.

Against a flaming orange background and above a hot pink suit, Nixon’s face shades from sickly green into bilious blue. The hot and cold complementary colors vivify the image, which accomplishes the reverse of what Warhol had done to Marilyn Monroe. Intimately familiar with Catholic icons since childhood, he had made Marilyn’s publicity photograph into an idealized depiction of the queen of heaven, just days after her tragic death. Nixon, on the other hand, got the Satan treatment, like something from the hellish underworld of Hieronymus Bosch.

Of course, political posters can only do so much. McGovern lost the 1972 election in the second largest landslide in American history. At that point, the previous June’s Watergate burglary was just a brief newspaper item. Two years later Satan–er, I mean, Nixon resigned the presidency in disgrace.

With the records still unreleased this week, and no indication from the McCain campaign that they would be forthcoming, several media outlets began to wonder aloud if the campaign would make good on this promise.

The campaign finally released a letter (PDF) from Palin’s physician, Cathy Baldwin-Johnson, late last night briefly summarizing the GOP vice presidential nominee’s medical history.

There’s not much to report. According to the letter, Palin “is in excellent health and has no known health problems that would interfere with her ability to carry out the duties and obligations of the Vice President of the United States of America.”

Baldwin-Johnson reports that Palin has no major medical problems, takes no medications and has been hospitalized recently only for childbirth.

While the letter is certainly not the detailed medical history that Palin said she would release, it does appear to indicate that, should Sen. John McCain win the election, she would be physically capable of assuming the presidency if needed.

However, the release of the letter by the McCain campaign late on the eve of Election Day did not allow voters much of an opportunity to evaluate the information before casting their votes. But considering that McCain — a 72-year-old four-time cancer survivor — allowed a few reporters only three hours to review his records without allowing photocopies, Palin’s release is probably what we should have expected.