During the debate, Joe Biden made the sensible observation that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad doesn’t control the Iranian security services. Rather, ultimate power is wielded by the clerical establishment with the Supreme Leader being, as the title implies, at the peak of the power structure. Michael Ledeen offers the following devastating rebuttal:

Did Biden Really Say “Theocracy,” not “Bureaucracy”? [Michael Ledeen]

Lots of keen-eared readers are telling me that. The transcript I read said “bureaucracy.” But if Biden said “theocracy” he made a grammatical mistake as well as a logical one. “Theocracy” refers to a system, not an institution. And it is incoherent to distinguish between the theocrats and Ahmadinejad, since Ahmadinejad is a theocrat. Bigtime theocrat, in fact. So Biden would be making a distinction without a difference, as we used to say in Logic 101…

So there! This has been a lesson in “pretending not to understand what the guy is saying.” If you apply this method to the word salads Palin offered up at the debate while stalling to process her note cards, you could really have fun. Like when she explained that she’s “not one to attribute every activity of man to the changes in the climate.” Me neither!

Igor Volsky’s got the video mash-up of Sarah Palin sampling Ronald Reagan’s dire 1961 prediction that Medicare would put us on the road to serfdom, followed by Reagan discussing the issue:

It’s worth being reminded now and again that conservatives really believed this stuff. That Medicare would lead to the eradication of freedom. That the Civil Rights Act was a horrible abridgment of American liberty. That withdrawal from Vietnam would lead to Soviet global domination. That Bill Clinton’s 1993 budget would destroy the economy. And that the people responsible for those — Reagan, Goldwater, Gingrich, etc. — ideas are heroes to be admired.

This is yesterday’s news, but I have to say that I was so surprised by the announcement that the McCain campaign is abandoning Michigan that I was initially inclined to believe it was some kind of fake-out. But it seems to be real enough. As a strategy, though, it’s a bit odd in my opinion. It’s true, of course, that currently McCain’s odds in Michigan are pretty long. But that reflects his currently poor national performance. Unless he does better overall, shifting resources around can’t save him. You have to ask about which states would be competitive if the national popular vote was about even and Michigan is a solid enough candidate. What’s more, it’s a state (unlike Colorado or Virginia or the 2nd Congressional District of Maine) with a history of tensions between a big city African-American political machine and the surrounding white majority — the sort of thing the McCain campaign could put to good use.

At any rate, Nate Silver has the provocative suggestion that McCain’s real problem is with his intertemporal resource allocation:

McCain’s problems ultimately stem back to the early summer, when his campaign decided to throw a ton of money into negative advertising rather than to build a robust field operation. That decision might have “worked” in the near term, as McCain chipped Obama’s lead down from about 5 points in mid-June to a virtual tie heading into the conventions. But, as with many McCain campaign decisions, it may have been one more engineered to win the battle rather than the war, as Obama’s position has bounced back with surprising vigor in the past two weeks, and the Britney Spears ads now seem like a distant and irrelevant memory.

Ultimately I don’t see much logic at all in investing heavily in early paid media. Until the conventions, gyrations in public opinion are basically meaningless and you might as well focus your time and energy on acquiring money and volunteers and building out your staff and field operations. The candidates can’t really control whether or not events in the real world set the stage for a close campaign in the fall, but they can control how well-prepared they are to win in the fall if the election turns out to be close.