Item 1. Courting the middle class discussion is Roland Martin (h/t Kelly), laying down the four issues that both candidates really need to address without flourish, without fawning.  Excerpt?  You bet:

Oh, these guys are wonderful with their sales pitches. They have the ability to make every single one of you feel so special and loved; no one else is more important to them — at that moment.

I must admit, the pathetic pining and pandering for middle-class votes has turned so moronic that at times it drives me nuts.

First, who in the world are we even talking about? If you listen to the candidates and their campaigns, those in the middle class could make upward of $200,000 a year, while some suggest middle class means earning as little as $20,000.

Item 2. On the topic of privilege, this writing by Tim Wise was shared with me this morning (h/t Bill Sell).  It was a combination of scary, honest and motivating.  My question here is: how do we combat this?  A sample provided below:

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.[...]

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”[...]

 White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a “trick question,” while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O’Reilly means you’re dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.[...]

Item 3. Glen Greenwald (Glenzilla on the net) has a piece about the Bush Doctrine and whether there is agreement about what it is.  Which is a great topic unto itself (and while Obama supposedly opposes it, his description of what the Bush Doctrine IS in this article seems to leave something to be desired). 

However, Glen also very succinctly sums up the Sarah Palin issue - even clarifying it for me, especially in the area of “experience”.  It also debunks several of the notions regarding the fact that the Vice President position isn’t a big deal.  I’m reposting a large section here because it is very good.

Personally, I’m not particularly bothered by Palin’s so-called “lack of experience.” I considered the fact that Obama hadn’t spent large amounts of time enmeshed in our horrific Washington Establishment to be one of the strengths of his candidacy, and I largely view Palin’s lack of Washington experience the same way. The difference isn’t their “experience,” but the fact that one has had almost two full years to judge Obama’s views, positions, approaches, thought-processes and capacity for judgment as he’s been subjected to the glaring scrutiny of the campaign, and a complete picture of Obama, for better or worse, has emerged.

By stark contrast, Palin is a blank slate — not just in terms of what we know about her, but worse, in terms of what her beliefs are. Outside of a few discrete issues of interest to her (drilling for oil and opposition to environmentalism), and aside from some deep religious fervor and trite right-wing slogans that have been implanted in her brain during these last several weeks, she doesn’t really appear to have any actual thoughts about most political matters. As John Cole put it: “Sarah Palin is the distilled essence of wingnut. She has it all. She is dishonest. She is a religious nut. She is incurious. She is anti-science. She is inexperienced. She abuses her authority. She hides behind executive privilege. She is a big spender. She works from the gut and places a greater value on instinct than knowledge.”

To see why that matters, look at this excerpt today from a new book by The Washington Post’s Barton Gellman, which details how Dick Cheney’s office exerted virtually exclusive control over large numbers of key U.S. programs, and specifically over the illegal warrantless eavesdropping program — facts that Gellman had previously documented. There is every reason to believe that Palin, too, would wield very substantial power as Vice President.

In general, the White House is now far and away the most powerful branch of our government — state power is centralized there to an unprecedented degree. The presidency is so powerful that it’s almost impossible for a President not to share substantial responsibility with the Vice President. Moreover, if McCain wins, he is quite likely to perceive — accurately — that his victory was due in large part to Palin and the enthusiasm she generated. Independently, her immense political popularity among key GOP factions will empower her. The fact that McCain seems completely uninterested in any issues other than fighting and starting wars and his petty fixation on earmarks — underscored by his acute indifference to domestic policy — will leave vast areas for her to manage. His advanced age and previous health problems makes it far more likely than usual that the Vice President will become President.

More alarming than the extremism of the positions that she has clearly formed is the fact that, as her startling ignorance of “the Bush Doctrine” reflects, she doesn’t seem to have clearly formed positions on very much of anything. She’s clearly willing to spout standard right-wing talking points, and perhaps that’s all she’ll ever end up embracing, but it’s one’s inability to know any of that, and the McCain campaign’s commitment to ensuring that we won’t find out between now and November, that makes her potential ascendancy to that office so deeply disturbing.