Yesterday I attended a conference co-sponsored by Politico that featured panels chock full of advisors and consultants from both campaigns as well as several journalists to sort of deconstruct the election. One of the more interesting topics that came up time and again was whether Joe Lieberman would have been a better choice for McCain's VP -- better meaning more likely to have helped McCain win than Sarah Palin did.

The most interesting thing about the debate over this question was the difference in opinion that existed between the Obama camp and the McCain camp. In general, both sides agreed on what the turning points of the election were and what factors led to Obama's victory. But on this point, the McCain folks were intractable: Sarah Palin was the best choice for them at the time.

Was this simple spin -- the refusal to concede what is in retrospect conventional wisdom, that Palin was a disaster for McCain, or was it a sincere analysis of the strategy at the time? I think a little bit of both.

Here's pretty much how the argument went:

Steve Hildebrand, Obama's Deputy Campaign Manager: If McCain had chosen Lieberman or another Democrat, it would have taken away Barack's "post partisan" thing and would have reinforced McCain's maverick thing.

Adam Mendolsohn, GOP consultant: In mid to late August the race was so close, they needed to pick someone who would not collapse the Republican base.

Hildebrand: In the general election you need to forget about your base, they'll be with you, you need to go after moderates and independents.

Mendolsohn: I don't think it's as easy to say the base would have been there. There was a lot of discussion with folks who understand the base and how the convention works and what a Lieberman pick would mean and they were very concerned. They were saying "this will be a huge disaster." In 1992,a large part of the base stayed home. Sarah Palin was a strong solid logical pick for the base.

Mike DuHaime, McCain Political Director: Our hope with Governor Palin going forward was that there would be a connection to moderate women and independents and there was after the convention. She did appeal to working women as well as the base. Ultimately that did not carry all the way through election day but it was not initially just a base pick.

The McCain side insisted that no one else would have given them the bump they received out of the convention and the fundraising spike, without which they would not have been competitive. This financial advantage that Obama had was particularly problematic for them in the immediate aftermath of the Palin announcement when it became evident that "Obama could do 5 things at once, we could do 1" and they allowed Obama to portray Palin as an extreme right winger.

The McCain team were clearly going out of their way to defend the choice and not throw Palin or McCain under the bus and that's fine. I actually think their reasoning versus a Lieberman pick is sound. Lieberman would have been a disaster for them for different reasons. But what they laughably failed to acknowledge on that stage yesterday was just how devastating the pick itself was to McCain's credibility. Once it became evident just how unprepared Palin was for top office, as Mike Allen said during a later panel yesterday, the Palin choice helped make John McCain the risky one, which gets to the heart of why McCain lost on Nov. 4th. As Obama pollster David Binder put it, ultimately:

The risk of the unknown with Obama was less than the risk of the known with McCain.

Todd blogged on this below with his thoughts, but I want to add some as well. It seems clear that Coleman is intent on having this go to the 5-person board with his having a lead. Right now, with 64% of the recount done, Coleman leads by 120 votes. The trend would indicate that Coleman winds up with a lead of less than 100 votes.

Again, I do not read that much into the challenge numbers themselves, as we don't have an overall indication as to which way the challenges are made: some are made by Coleman or Franken to challenge a vote to count and some are made by Coleman or Franken to challenge a vote to not count.  ie, they are not all challenging of the others, some are challenges against the way the votes are counted in the recount. This becomes obvious while watching the video in Todd's post on which type of ballots the Coleman campaign is challenging-- some they don't want counted for Franken and some they want counted for Coleman.

But its very clear that some frivolous challenging is going on by Coleman in order for him to maintain his lead. In Ramsey County a few days ago, there's this:

Murray replied, "If you want to deal with them, you can take my determination to court."

Then from yesterday, in today's Star Tribune, Coleman is retracting his earlier statement that he would not challenge the results of the canvassing board.

Another 10 percent is expected to be counted by tonight, and the SoS Ritchie is saying the recount could be done prior to thanksgiving, making way for all of the challenges to go to the canvassing board. There are cases where the machine count does not match up with the hand count, in total ballots.

Now, I've been paying close attention to Ramsey County. After Thursdays count, commenting:

However, Fridays results for Ramsey county showed there now being 47% counted, with Franken losing 10 and Coleman losing 45, for a net of 35 for Franken. That would appear to be a reversal of the trend, and the number of challenges show a new trend. Coleman went from having 2 challenges to having 62, and Franken went from having 8 challenges to having 53, all when only another 16 percent of the ballots were counted. Here's why:

So now, I expect that though Franken will likely whittle down the Coleman lead to less than 100 with the remaining 26% of the recount, we are going to see the 1,669 challenges to dramatically increase.

Mark Ritchie had predicted 1,500 challenged ballots, and Nate Silver had estimated roughly 1,800, both of which now seem too conservative. Chris Steller, 2500? Higher:

A division of less than 100 votes, with thousands of challenged votes remaining, is where we are headed, to the canvassing board.

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- Over the last year, there have been 30 hate crime murders against transgender victims.

- An international panel considers suspending all tuna fishing in the Mediterranean for a year in response to dramatically falling stocks.

Happy Friday.

Some interesting developments since earlier this week when Al Franken seemed like Mr. nice guy when it came to challenging Coleman ballots. As of this posting, according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune website, with 64% of votes recounted, Franken has made up 95 votes to close to within 120 votes of Coleman. It should be noted, however, that this number is with Franken challenging 848 of Coleman's ballots and Coleman challenging 821 of Franken's. Remember that all challenged ballots get removed from the count until they can be assessed by the canvassing board.

Nate Silver explains:

Meanwhile, the number of ballot challenges -- cases in which one or both candidates appeal an initial ruling my local elections judges -- has increased significantly. Among ballots added to the Secretary of State's totals since last evening, the Franken campaign has challenged 7.5 out of every 10,000 ballots, and the Coleman campaign 7.2 out of every 10,000. These figures are more than double the number of challenges on the first two days of the recount process.

Interestingly, contrary to what the tally is showing, the Franken campaign earlier today claimed that the difference between him and Coleman is actually under 100 votes.

...the Franken campaign claims the true difference is much less than that when you take into account disputed ballots that aren't included right now in the totals but are likely to be resolved pretty easily by the state canvassing board.

Even if a challenged ballot is taken out of the total recount pool for the time being, the Franken campaign thinks it has an idea of what the numbers will eventually look like based on the opinions of the election workers at the individual sites -- and they think the real Coleman lead right now is less than 100 votes...

How can this be? Check out this video from The Uptake to get a sense of just how liberally Coleman is challenging, no doubt to give the illusion that he has a wider lead than he actually does.

Clearly all these votes will be placed in Franken's column ultimately, it's just that in the short term there's no downside to Coleman's challenging them and the upside is the illusion of a bigger lead than he truly has. Nate does see a downside in the long run, however:

The disincentive to challenge ballots is precisely this sort of thing -- challenges that look so ridiculous that they'll weaken your ability to take the moral highground. If the Coleman campaign is on the ball, they'll be ready to show similar frivolities from the Franken campaign as well. The Uptake also reports that the Secretary of State is also taking under advisement a proposal to make all challenged ballots available for public viewing on a website.

Votes are still being counted in CA-04, which is the race between Charlie Brown (D) and Tom McClintock (R) for John Doolittle's seat. As the count has continued, the vote margin, which has consistently favored McClintock, has been sort of fluctuating within 1000 or so votes. Today, we've gotten some good news from the Brown campaign: now that provisional ballots are being counted, Charlie has pulled to within 359 329 votes.

This just in via e-mail from Todd Stenhouse, Charlie's campaign manager:

Including provisional ballots just reported from Nevada County, the race is now closer than it has been at any point since election day---Charlie has now closed the gap to just 359 votes! [...]

Every day, we are hearing that election day provisional ballots, thousands of which have not yet been tallied, are breaking for Charlie by substantial margins in Placer, El Dorado, and Nevada Counties.

This news is particularly sweet considering McClintock's sort of premature declarations of victory e-mails over the past two weeks.

Again from Stenhouse:

Earlier this week, our opponents arrogantly and falsely proclaimed "the fat lady hasn't begun singing yet, but she's on stage and wearing a McClintock button."  

As he watches his lead evaporate, McClintock knows this opera is far from over.  And that singer has gone backstage to re-accessorize.

Nice.

This race is closing fast. Just 2 days ago, the margin was 592. The key here is that for Charlie to win, every single vote needs to be counted but at this point, between lawyers and staff, that is an extremely expensive proposition. Please send Charlie some love HERE to make sure every single ballot is counted and to prepare for what may be an extended recount.

[editor's note, by Todd Beeton]David Dayen at calitics has the update that it's actually now down to just a 329 vote spread.

In May 2006 Timothy Geithner, president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and Barack Obama's likely choice for Treasury Secretary, gave a speech to the New York University Stern School of Business Third Credit Risk Conference. You can read the full text here. Some excerpts:

Credit derivatives have contributed to dramatic changes in the process of credit intermediation, and the benefits of these changes seem compelling. They have made possible substantial improvements in the way credit risk is managed and facilitated a broad distribution of risk outside the banking system. By spreading risk more widely, by making it easier to purchase and sell protection against credit risk and to actively trade credit risk, and by facilitating the participation of a large and very diverse pool of non-bank financial institutions in the business of credit, these changes probably improve the overall efficiency and resiliency of financial markets.

With the advent of credit derivatives, concentrations of credit risk are made easier to mitigate, and diversification made easier to achieve. Credit losses, whether from specific, individual defaults or the more widespread distress that accompanies economic recessions, will be diffused more broadly across institutions with different risk appetite and tolerance, and across geographic borders. Our experience since the introduction of these new instruments--a period that includes a major asset price shock and a global recession--seems to justify the essentially positive judgment we have about the likely benefits of ongoing growth in these markets.

Despite the benefits to financial resilience, the changes in the credit markets that are the subject of your conference have also provoked some concerns and unease, even among those on the frontier of innovation and the most active participants in these markets.

These concerns are based in part on uncertainty--a candid acknowledgment that there is a lot we do not yet know about how these instruments and the increased role of nonbank institutions in these markets will affect how the financial markets are likely to function in conditions of stress. [...]

Let me conclude by reiterating the fundamental view that the wave of innovation underway in credit derivatives offers substantial benefits to both the efficiency and stability of our financial system.

Sounds like change we can believe in!

Update [2008-11-21 17:28:12 by Todd Beeton]:Bloomberg is reporting that Geithner at Treasury is a done deal.

President-elect Barack Obama picked Timothy Geithner, head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, to be his Treasury secretary, with Lawrence Summers getting a senior White House role, a Democratic aide said.

Obama is also likely to nominate New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson as Commerce Secretary, and to announce his picks on Nov. 24, the person said on condition of anonymity.

Get ready for an onslaught of annoying media analysis now that the New York Times has confirmed that Hillary Clinton will be Obama's Secretary of State.

Here's Bob Woodward from the transcript of this weekend's taped Chris Matthews Show:

Being president is about control, and tell me who ever controlled Bill or Hillary Clinton. They can't control each other. ... I think it's because Warren Buffett and Paul Volcker and others have convinced Obama, 'You're going to have to focus like a laser on the economy. That's issue Number One. And give Hillary and Bill the world.' ... I think people are fantasizing or smoking something if they think Joe Biden's going to call Hillary Clinton up and say, 'This is what we want you to do.'

Spare us.

Look, the Clintons are certainly big players in the Democratic party - not really surprising given that Hillary's a Senator and that Bill is, you know, a former President.

And a huge amount of the Clinton's public image is a media creation, fabricated disproportionately from a crowd of celebrity journalists that have lived and breathed DC for decades.

Do I think the Clinton's are perfect? No politician is. But I do think Hillary Clinton will make an excellent Secretary of State. I also have complete confidence that the man we elected President doesn't share the Village's view of an administration as a huge, real-life game of Risk.