With just over a week until Election Day, prominent Republicans seems to be concentrating less on campaigning and more on concocting new lines of loyalty within the GOP.

I don’t get it.  If this election is showing anything, it’s showing that people want to decide between two issues-based visions for our future rather than who can most effectively bury the other person in mud and slime.  An Obama vs. “McCain 2000″ could have been the best campaign in decades.  So why are Republican party members intolerantly closing ranks around Sarah Palin?  She seems to be a blast from the neocon past, not a fresh breath of air.  I may not like Romney, but he’s accomplished (Bain, 2002 Olympics, governor of Massachusetts) and isn’t the apparently reflexive ideologue she is.

On top of this, isn’t party splintering what doomed the Democrats for years?  And weren’t the Republicans basically gloating over this in the mid-nineties?  So why are they condemning themselves to the history repeat?

With nine days to go, the polls are starting to show a steady trend in favor of Obama:

Ultimately, I think (and hope) this shows that Americans are responding to a positive message of change rather than to increasingly nasty tactics (such as the various robocalls, the mutilation hoax, and increasing untruths about Obama’s plans).  America is also seeing the McCain campaign (and the Republican Party) turn on itself:

• Kristol Rips McCain Camp, RNC for Handling of Palin
• Possible GOP Civil War
• Lieberman starts hedging his bets on Obama
• A Palin Insurgency?

One of these days I’m going to get back to blogging regularly.  As I think about it, I should have been blogging throughout the election season (my preference is pretty well known at this point).  I earlier compared this campaign to the last season of The West Wing.  Unfortunately, Sen. McCain walked away from the principles that made him a compelling candidate in 2000 and decided that the sleazy tactics that worked for GWB (and McCain denounced then) would work for him as well.

Meanwhile, Sen. Obama is picking up endorsements left and right:

Chicago Tribune (which has never endorsed a Democrat for president):

It may have seemed audacious for Obama to start his campaign in Springfield, invoking Lincoln. We think, given the opportunity to hold this nation’s most powerful office, he will prove it wasn’t so audacious after all. We are proud to add Barack Obama’s name to Lincoln’s in the list of people the Tribune has endorsed for president of the United States.

LA Times:

We may one day look back on this presidential campaign in wonder. We may marvel that Obama’s critics called him an elitist, as if an Ivy League education were a source of embarrassment, and belittled his eloquence, as if a gift with words were suddenly a defect. In fact, Obama is educated and eloquent, sober and exciting, steady and mature. He represents the nation as it is, and as it aspires to be.

Denver Post:

Republicans love to mock Obama’s history as a community organizer. But here was a man with no money to offer, no patronage to dispense, no way to punish his opponents. All he could do was to work with people from all walks of life, liberals and conservatives, business people and the unemployed, and bring them together in common cause for a better community. Could there really be better preparation to reunite a worried and divided America to again pursue our “more perfect union”?

…and Colin Powell: