November 4, 2008, 8:54 p.m.

John,

CNN called Pennsylvania during the shampoo. and New Hampshire as well. The relatively quick calls on both those states is good news, indeed.

Aside: When Obama picked Biden as his running mate, my thought was that it was a tactical move in order to force McCain to choose Tom Ridge. I thought the Obamans thought that the McCain camp wouldn’t concede Pennsylvania, especially if they believed Clinton’s performance there showed Obama was vulnerable. So they would have to counter the slight advantage Obama got from selecting Biden with the larger advantage of picking Ridge. And I thought the Obama folk thought they could beat McCain/Ridge in the rest of the country because two moderate Republicans would bring soft support from the Republican base.

It looked like McCain thought that, too, which is why he didn’t take the bait and went with Palin. But we’re looking right now at the great cost of that choice, and the intelligence of putting Biden on the ticket. Who knows what the rest of the map would look like for a McCain/Ridge ticket, but we would biting nails right now if Pennsylvania was too close to call. Palin brought philosophy to the ticket, not geography, and you win a war by taking land, not winning minds.

It’s something the Republicans have lost sight of the last eight years.

—Kevin

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About the Authors

John Warner and Kevin Guilfoile are the authors and illustrators of the no. 1 bestselling My First Presidentiary: A Scrapbook by George W. Bush. Warner is the editor emeritus of McSweeney’s, the author of So You Want to Be President?, and the proprietor of Tow Books. Guilfoile's first novel was the thriller Cast of Shadows. His second novel, The Thousand, will be published next year by Alfred A. Knopf. You can read past installments of the Guilfoile-Warner Papers here.

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