Prior to this week, the most telling statistic in the presidential campaign was the voter turnout in the Democratic primary.

County by county and state by state, Democratic turnout consistently dwarfed Republican turnout. Minnesota was particularly revealing: in the very state where the Republicans are set to hold their convention, 214,066 votes were cast in the Dem primary, compared to 62,828 votes for the GOP candidates.

The question was whether the Democratic party could sustain that level of turnout in the general election.

The last two weeks have gone a long way toward answering that. Two stats in particular are all anyone needs to know.

First, according to Nielsen Obama’s speech on Thursday drew slightly more than 40 million viewers. To put that in perspective, not only is that the same draw as the Opening Ceremony of the Atlanta Olympics, but it pretty safely places Obama beyond celebrity. Even A-list celebrities cannot hit 40 million for a televised event. 40 million pretty clearly puts Obama in the category of icon—a personality that doesn’t just tap into the zeitgeist of an age, as all celebrities do, but comes to appear inseparable from it.

Second, 2.9 million. That’s how many text messages the Obama camp sent to announce Biden’s vice presidency.

Think about that number for a minute: most Americans, certainly young ones, do not give their cell phone numbers to anyone other than personal acquaintances. Yet 2.9 million people willingly gave theirs to a politician. Read studies like this, and it goes a long way toward suggesting that voter turnout in the general will remain just as high as in the primaries.

For the Republicans, the two numbers spell trouble. Palin may be photogenic, but Obama is an icon.

As I wrote last night, Obama came into this speech needing to show he could explain and empathize at the same time.

Bill Clinton, masterful as ever, offered him a template for how to do so. And fortunately, Obama more than took it.

Just look at this:

For over two decades, he’s subscribed to that old, discredited Republican philosophy — give more and more to those with the most and hope that prosperity trickles down to everyone else. In Washington, they call this the Ownership Society, but what it really means is — you’re on your own. Out of work? Tough luck. No health care? The market will fix it. Born into poverty? Pull yourself up by your own bootstraps — even if you don’t have boots. You’re on your own.

Well it’s time for them to own their failure. It’s time for us to change America.

What Obama is really referring to is the philosophical school of Milton Friedman, also known as the Chicago School of Economics.

In its various iterations there is no shortage of intellectual complexity, yet here Obama reduces it to something anyone can understand—and even more, he communicates that he personally can understand why someone would find that school of thought so discomfiting.

Quotes like that are political rhetoric at its demagogic best; they’re what made Bill Clinton president in 1992 and 1996, and what made Kennedy a legend in 1960.

Now that Obama has fully mastered them, they should make him both.

Wow. Bill Clinton’s speech last night was extraordinary.

Granted, I’m not sure it’s enough to heal the Clinton-Obama rift, or persuade any undecided Hillary supporters.

But on the level of oratory, it was remarkable.

What Clinton lacks in his ability to inspire, he more than makes up for in his ability to explain and, crucially, empathize. He just took the impersonal complexity of global economic system and repackaged it in personal terms, in a language and story anyone could understand.

For all his own rhetorical gifts, that’s a skill Obama has yet to master. In fact, it’s probably his most glaring weakness as a campaigner.

In that sense, Clinton’s speech was more magnanimous than it might appear. It was designed not to show Obama up, but to show him the way—to offer him a textbook example of how to explain and empathize at the same time.

Hopefully Obama was wise enough to take note. He won’t enter the White House unless he learns to do the same thing.

Back during the primaries, when Obama and Clinton were running neck and neck, I had more than a few conversations with friends about who would be the better pick.

My take was always the same: Obama, with his unique mix of public rhetoric and personal biography, would be better for the country; Clinton, with all the foreign goodwill and experience she and her husband could marshall internationally, would be better for the world. I just wasn’t sure which was more important. 

Yet I’d also add that while there was little Clinton could do to grow her base domestically, there was plenty Obama could do to shore up his foreign policy credentials.

Tapping advisers like Samantha Powers was a good start, but as Powers own gaffe demonstrated, Obama needed advisers and officials whose familiarity with foreign policy extended well beyond the academic or theoretical. In short, he needed to explicitly ally himself with someone like Biden—the Senator with the greatest familiarity with Iraq, and a pretty solid grasp of central Asia more generally. If Obama were to publicly tap Biden, I’d say, I would probably fall into his camp.

Of course, that never happened. The Democratic primary was all about America—or rather, about how American liberals wanted to see themselves—and Obama was able to win on that count alone. Save for his Iraq vote, foreign policy never really factored in in a decisive way.

However, as David Axelrod has finally begun to realize, Obama will not be so lucky with the general election. That’s why he went on his speaking tour in June and why he tapped Biden now. Forget what the pundits say: this pick was not about domestic issues, or the so-called blue-collar vote. Look at the electoral map, and this year’s campaign is going to come down to a couple mid-Atlantic states and a handful of Western ones. If Obama can take the right mix of those states, he wins. Biden helps in that regard, but either Bayh or Kaine would have helped more.

Picking Biden was all about foreign policy—about having someone who could hold his own against McCain’s foreign policy credentials in the short run, and even more, about having someone who could help Obama recalibrate American foreign policy once he takes office. (Incidentally, if there’s one thing the media has not talked about enough in this campaign it’s this: the complex political manuevering that will happen in 2010-11, when the US will have to disengage from Iraq without empowering Syria or Iran. That will be the major foreign policy challenge of the next administration; and in that sense Biden’s selection was made more with an eye toward 2012.)

All of which is to say, Biden was a good choice for Obama. Not great, since the same lack of discipline that defeated Biden’s every presidential run could prove a liability once in office.

But certainly a good choice nonetheless.

In the near term, Biden will help to counter McCain’s principal strength. In the long term, he could prove invaluable—should Obama win, the next election will be a referendum on his governance abroad and at home, and Biden’s advice will figure prominently in former.

And there you have it. The Times is now reporting that Russia feels it has done enough:

President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia agreed on Tuesday to the terms of a cease-fire that could end the clashes in Georgia, saying Russia had “punished” Georgia enough for its aggression against the separatist enclave of South Ossetia.

A clear tell in all this is who the news conference was with: French President Nicholas Sarkozy. Bush stayed away, preferring to address the conflict at a cautious remove.

The more I think about it, the more I have to believe that at some point earlier on Moscow sent the Bush administration, and particularly the State department, some kind of signal that it would sign on to the fourth round of sanctions on Iran.

Shy of such an assurance, the US’s actions don’t make sense—or at any rate, without one I have a hard time believing that the Rice camp would have won out over Cheney’s call for more aggressive action. 

Thank God. The Supreme Court today upheld the longstanding right of habeas corpus—essentially the bedrock of modern constitutionalism.

From the Times:

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy said the truncated review procedure provided by a previous law, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, “falls short of being a constitutionally adequate substitute” because it failed to offer “the fundamental procedural protections of habeas corpus.”

Justice Kennedy declared: “The laws and Constitution are designed to survive, and remain in force, in extraordinary times.”

What exactly will happen to the remaining detainees in Guantanamo is unclear. But fortunately the underlying issue—namely, the commitment of the United States to a universal right to due process—has been resolved.

Some of you may recall that we started a petition last summer to help things along in that regard. For those of you who signed it, we cannot thank you enough. 

Back on the 4th I announced RepealtheMCA.org, an on-line petition to repeal the Military Commissions Act that Congress passed last fall.

Not two days later, we’ve already been reminded just how crucial such legislative pressure is. For those who haven’t heard yet: an Appeals Court ruled this afternoon that a group of plaintiffs—including “journalists, academics, and lawyers” who “regularly communicate” internationally—lacked standing to sue the NSA for its warrantless surveillance under the Terrorist Surveillance Program.

Just why did the plaintiffs lack standing? Simple, really. They couldn’t access the very information that would have proved they were being spied on.  Or as the opinion itself acknowledged: “the plaintiffs do not—and because of the States Secrets Doctrine cannot—produce any evidence that any of their own communications have ever been intercepted by the NSA, under the TSP, or without warrants. Instead, they assert a mere belief” that their communications were intercepted.

Nice logic, that. You may know that you’re talking with people abroad, and even more, you may also know that the government is spying, warrantlessly, on such conversations. Additionally, you may further know that such surveillance presents, as the opinion itself confessed, “a number of serious issues.” Yet despite all that knowledge, you’ll never be able to sue the NSA. Because it would be illegal, after all, for you to possess the very information that proved you were being spied on.

What’s so remarkable here is that somehow the patent circularity of the ruling’s logic isn’t even the worst part. Rather, it’s the self-conscious nature of the legal dodge it represents. Indeed, the justices in the majority openly acknowledge the gravity of what they’re doing. Yet there’s nothing rueful in their tone. Instead, there’s only a kind of wry insouciance—the legal equivalent of the bemused grin or casual shrug that says, “Don’t look at me, sucker. It ain’t my fault.”

Yet what troubles me most about that tone, to return to my initial point, is that there’s nothing to limit it to only certain types of classified military activity.

In particular, what worries me is that the ruling’s tenor and logic will reappear in next year’s Supreme Court decision on the Military Commissions Act. As I mentioned on the 4th, the MCA explicitly declares that “alien unlawful enemy combatants”—ie, the detainees in Guantamano, among other places—cannot submit a writ of habeas corpus in federal court. As a result, there are even clearer grounds for the Supreme Court to rule that foreign detainees lack standing to sue than there were for the Appeals Court to rule today that the NSA plaintiffs lacked standing.

As I’ll be noting again and again over the coming weeks—beginning with “The Top 10 Reasons to Repeal the MCA” on Monday—that means there’s little sense in waiting for the Supreme Court to strike the Military Commissions Act down. Instead, we need to begin pressuring Congress to repeal the MCA on its own.

For if today’s ruling is any guide, we won’t have any other choice.

Great review of Don DeLillo's latest novel, Falling Man. "To have something exist as your subject before it happens is not unprecedented in the world of literature, but the meeting of September 11 and Don DeLillo is not so very much a conjunction as a point of arrival, and a connection so powerful in imaginative terms that it instantly blows DeLillo's lamps out."

Slavoj Zizek on coerced confessions. "Those who refuse to advocate torture outright but still accept it as a legitimate topic of debate are more dangerous than those who explicitly endorse it."

Why the U.S. Attorney scandal is so significant.