Posts

“Holed Up”

/in /by

As many people have pointed out, the McCain campaign are sending Sarah Palin back to Alaska to hide out until the journalists forget about her.

CHUCK TODD:Well Ron, We’ve been able to see that there are a few folks who are saying [Palin is] actually going to hole up in Alaska for a little, she’s got to see her son off who’s going to be deployed to Iraq, so we may not see her on the campaign trail for a little while.

RON ALLEN: Yes she hasn’t been home for a long time, and she’s obviously got some business to deal with there.

Obviously, part of the reason the campaign is sending Palin away to the woods is because the media has made it clear they’re not satisfied with only scripted interactions with her–the McCain campaign needs to get Palin away from the media at least until they do some real vetting of her. (Though, as Mudflats points out, there are journalists in AK, too.)

But I think there are several things contributing to their last minute change of plans.

  • They intend to shield her from the media, as everyone has mentioned.
  • McCain campaign staffers have been in AK for several days, trying to bury all the dirt on Palin; I’m certain they need her personal involvement to bury some of it, not least on TrooperGate, in which her promised cooperation has disappeared in the last several days. 
  • She’s a quick study, no doubt, but she still has a great deal of cramming to do before she can answer any real questions about McCain’s policy or foreign policy in general.
  • If the MI Independents quoted in this focus group are even remotely representative, then I suspect the McCain camp has internal polling showing that Palin helps immensely in some places, but drags down the ticket in others. Sterling Heights is adjacent to Oakland County, where all those Independent voters were panning the Palin pick. I think the campaign realized they better get a better sense of where Palin helps them before they roll her out and offend voters in swing states.
  • After last nights underwhelming speech, McCain is being overshadowed by his Veep candidate. He needs to reassert himself as the dominant player on the ticket, before Palin comes out of her hibernation and wows the crowds again.

Read more →

Eliza Doolittle, Neocon

/in , /by

The McCain campaign’s efforts to claim that Sarah Palin’s "trip" to Ireland and her osmosis with Siberia qualify her to handle the vice presidential foreign policy portfolio have utterly failed. Here’s Lindsey Graham trying to put the best face on her inexperience.

"She can do fine in foreign policy because of the infrastructure we have around us. She’s smart, and she will learn over time," he said, adding that when it comes to selecting a vice president, "there is no perfect person. If we could have found someone who’s an expert in everything, we would have picked ’em, right?" 

But they’re not giving up. Since the awkward revelation of Palin’s daughter’s pregnancy, Palin has been holed up in a hotel, cramming on foreign policy.

Which is why it will be so interesting to see what the McCain campaign does with the blank slate that is Sarah Palin, foreign policy expert. First out of the blocks, in fact, were Joe Lieberman and his AIPAC buddies, eliciting promises that Palin would expand the US relationship with Israel.

She spent Tuesday in her hotel suite meeting with campaign aides and working on her speech. She had private sessions with Connecticut Sen. Joe Lieberman and members of the pro-Israel group AIPAC, said people familiar with her schedule. An AIPAC spokesman said Gov. Palin told its members she would "work to expand and deepen the strategic partnership between the U.S. and Israel."

That’s a pretty radical departure from the antisemitic rant she heard the other day in church:

An illustration of that gap came just two weeks ago, when Palin’s church, the Wasilla Bible Church, gave its pulpit over to a figure viewed with deep hostility by many Jewish organizations: David Brickner, the executive director of Jews for Jesus.

Palin’s pastor, Larry Kroon, introduced Brickner on Aug. 17, according to a transcript of the sermon on the church’s website.

“He’s a leader of Jews for Jesus, a ministry that is out on the leading edge in a pressing, demanding area of witnessing and evangelism,” Kroon said.

Brickner then explained that Jesus and his disciples were themselves Jewish.

“The Jewish community, in particular, has a difficult time understanding this reality,” he said.

[snip]

Brickner also described terrorist attacks on Israelis as God’s "judgment of unbelief" of Jews who haven’t embraced Christianity.

Moreover, Lieberman’s (and AIPAC’s) views are also a departure from Palin’s earlier hopes that McCain had a plan to end the war.  Read more →

Karma: McCain’s Veep Announcement Timing Backfires

/in /by

John McCain’s campaign thought they were being very clever, scheduling their VP announcement for the morning after Obama’s historic speech in Mile High. They calculated–correctly–that they could blunt the media excitement about that speech by staging their own big media event.

But their determination to pull off this nasty timing trick appears to be one of the biggest things that prevented them from managing the Palin announcement for maximum benefit. I have no doubt that Sarah Palin’s speech tonight will be the highlight of the Republican Convention (not least because she will be the only non-wrinkled speaker of the lot, and she is a great speaker on her own right). But it’s not clear the McCain campaign will repair the damage they did to themselves by managing the announcement as poorly as they did. In other words, their maneuvers to bigfoot Obama’s press coverage may be precisely the thing that prevents them from winning maximum benefit from what, handled differently, might have been a game-changer.

Here’s a timeline:

"Late" in week of August 17-23: Rove still trying to convince Lieberman to withdraw from VP consideration

Saturday, August 23: Obama names Biden as his running-mate

Sunday, August 24: Christian Conservatives finally convince McCain to give up on Lieberman pick; McCain speaks to Palin by phone

Tuesday, August 26: Hillary gives a great speech at DNCC, warmly endorsing Obama

Wednesday, August 27: Arthur Culvahouse conducts first in-depth face-to-face vetting interview of Palin; Palin also speaks to Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter; campaign first learns of Bristol’s pregnancy

Thursday, August 28: McCain campaign still researching Pawlenty; at 11 AM, McCain first meets face-to-face with Palin, he offers VP spot to Palin; Obama accepts nomination before 80,000 people at Mile High

Friday, August 29: McCain introduces Sarah Palin as his running mate

Monday, September 1: After the Enquirer tells the campaign it will reveal the news, McCain campaign reveals Bristol Palin is pregnant; McCain team dispatches team to Alaska to conduct more research on Palin;  at 10 PM, McCain campaign informs Phyllis Schlafly that Palin will cancel her appearance at Tuesday afternoon Republican National Coalition for Life event, which was set to honor the Governor

Tuesday, September 2: McCain releases email and video introducing Sarah Palin

A couple of things stand out from this timeline. As was already pretty clear, McCain first called Palin only after he knew Obama had not selected a woman for his running mate and he decided on her only after Hillary did so well at the DNCC. Read more →

Notice What’s Missing from this Thorough List of Vetting Discovery?

/in /by

The McCain campaign has finally realized how badly picking Sarah Palin as his running-mate reflects on the candidate. To rebut the reports that "the McCain team used little more than a Google Internet search as part of a rushed effort to review Palin’s potential pitfalls," they’ve trotted out an anonymous aide to provide details of the vetting they did.

Before she was chosen to be Sen. John McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin submitted to a three-hour interview with the head of his vice presidential search team, and responded to a 70-question form that included "intrusive personal questions," a senior campaign aide said Monday.

[snip]

The process included what aides described as a full search of public documents and videos of her speeches. That included a review of Alaska newspapers, but not Palin’s local newspaper because aides worried that going through back issues would indicate that she was under consideration to be McCain’s running mate. 

This anonymous aide would have you believe that they’ve found everything that has been amusing and appalling us all weekend.

"Nothing that has come out did not come out in the vet. She was fully vetted," the senior aide said. 

But here’s the list of things they claim to have found in the vetting process (the list given in this AP article is identical):

  • Troopergate
  • Bristol’s pregnancy
  • Todd Palin’s DUI
  • Her ticket for fishing without a license
  • Her earlier support for Pat Buchanan

Now compare that to one of the lists that tries to capture Palin in all her wonderfulness (here’s one from Bowers). There are a few things missing:

  • Palin’s claim to oppose the Bridge to Nowhere was a lie
  • Palin not only directed one of the 527s McCain claims to hate–it supported profile in corruption, Ted Stevens
  • Palin was also a big fan of the earmarks that McCain claims to oppose as a central plank of his campaign
  • Palin, the apparent Veep candidate for a campaign whose theme got changed to "Country First" to accommodate such an inexperienced Veep, has ties to a secessionist groups whose motto is "Alaska First"

You think some enterprising journalist will get around to asking why McCain’s campaign neglected to mention these items in its list of things they learned before picking Sarah Palin to be their Veep?

Did they learn her reformist credentials were just a front for the same old Alaskan Republican corruption and not want to admit that they didn’t care? Or didn’t they find those tidbits?

Read more →

Hard Qweschins: What the TradMedia Will Never Ask McCain, But Should

/in /by

I shared this news…

A federal judge says the University of California can deny course credit to applicants from Christian high schools whose textbooks declare the Bible infallible and reject evolution.

…with some folks, and Peterr said, "I really hope someone asks John McCain for his opinion on this."

Peterr is right: asking McCain for comment would make him choose between alienating the GOP base or speaking what he might still believe to be the truth, that science is science.

Peterr’s comment got me thinking about all the other things I’ve wished McCain would be asked about.

For example, why hasn’t anyone asked McCain whether he agrees with VA head James Peake’s policy of prohibiting non-partisan voter registration in VA hospitals?

"VA remains opposed to becoming a voter registration agency pursuant to the National Voter Registration Act, as this designation would divert substantial resources from our primary mission," Peake said in an April 8 letter to Sens. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., and John Kerry, D-Mass. He was referring to a 1993 federal law that allows government agencies to host voter registration efforts.

[snip]

"You’d think that when so many people give speeches about keeping faith with our veterans, the least the government would do is protect their right to vote, after they volunteered to go thousands of miles from home to fight and give that right to others," Kerry said. "And yet we’ve seen the government itself block veterans from registering to vote in VA facilities, without any legal basis or rational explanation.

Veterans are already hammering McCain for voting against veterans benefits repeatedly; McCain can ill afford to alienate veterans further. But this policy was undoubtedly put into place by Peake to shield McCain and other Republicans from the wrath of veterans who have been badly treated by the Bush Administration.

And, as a MI resident, I have wished someone would ask McCain whether he agrees with Bush’s decision to fire the Mid-West’s regional EPA Administrator because she wanted to force Dow Chemical to clean up a mess it made in Midland, MI.

The top U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator in the Midwest resigned Thursday amid internal fights over dioxin contamination near Dow Chemical Co.’s world headquarters in Midland, according to a published report.

Read more →

Okay, the Cookies Were Stupid and Silly, But Plagiarizing Your Foreign Policy Too?

/in /by

John McCain’s campaign seems to have a serial problem with plagiarism. First there was the Passion Fruit Mousse and then there were the Oatmeal Butterscotch Cookies. Now, apparently, McCain’s stooped to stealing his foreign policy plans from others. And of all sources, he’s stealing from Wikipedia!

A Wikipedia editor notices some similarities between Sen. John McCain’s speech today on the crisis in Georgia and the Wikipedia article on the country Georgia. They appear similar enough that most people would consider parts of McCain’s speech to be derived directly from Wikipedia.

First instance:

one of the first countries in the world to adopt Christianity as an official religion (Wikipedia)

vs.

one of the world’s first nations to adopt Christianity as an official religion (McCain)

So here’s the pathetic thing. The first two times McCain got caught plagiarizing, at least it was a fairly reputable source. Rachael Ray? Hershey’s? Both reasonably respectable sources of recipes.

But Wikipedia? For a foreign policy speech?

Back when I taught college, I would always reserve a special kind of failing grade for those who stole from Wikipedia. After all, it would take someone both lazy and stupid to steal from Wikipedia, right?

The Off the Record Club Now On the Record, Still Desperate for Positive Press for McCain

/in /by

I speculated the other day that Bob Novak’s Plame leak brokers in the Off the Record Club–specifically, top McCain aides Charlie Black and Ken Duberstein–were using him as a tool again when they leaked that McCain was about to name his running-mate.

Well, lo and behold, guess who’s now on the record, once again pitching an imminent announcement of McCain’s running mate?

Anxious to counter the blanket media coverage that has followed Sen. Barack Obama on his overseas journey, Sen. John McCain is weighing whether to announce his running mate in the coming weeks before the spotlight shifts to China and the opening of the Olympic Games next month.

"He’s in a position to make [the decision] on short notice if he wanted to," said Charles R. Black Jr., one of McCain’s top political advisers.

Two top aides to the presumptive Republican nominee said the decision is likely to be announced after Obama returns from Europe on Sunday and before the Beijing Olympics begin Aug. 8. They said the campaign fears that unanticipated events coming out of China — whether in the form of athletic accomplishments or human rights protests — could deflect attention from the announcement if it were made during the Games. [my emphasis]

And if you compare this on the record story with what Novak was told–"they didn’t want it to come out the way it was going to come out"–both stories seem designed to pressure McCain not to announce his running mate when he currently plans to announce.

Many Republicans say the traditional time frame for an announcement — the days leading up to the GOP convention — is not practical this year, because the Democratic convention ends so soon before the Republican gathering. It’s unlikely, they said, that McCain would announce his pick the day after Obama gives his convention speech.

And several McCain aides said they oppose the idea of making a vice presidential announcement during the Olympics.

That, and I’m sure Charlie Black and friends are desperate to get whathisname back in the press, now that Obama’s sucking up all the media’s attention. How many more times do you think Charlie Black is going to try this ploy, before someone labels him the Boy Who Cried "Veep!"?

The Judy Miller Standard

/in /by

Yup. David Shuster was watching the same Scooter Libby trial I was.

There are worse things for Obama than if John McCain becomes indelibly connected with Judy’s mindless war-mongering.

Update: Here’s McCain’s op-ed, now posted at NY Post. Shorter McCain: "According to political appointees (but not the non-partisan GAO), the Iraqis have achieved 15 of 18 benchmarks. But somehow, military self-sufficiency was not one of those benchmarks, so I get to stay here regardless of what Maliki has to say about it."

John McCain Battles the Veterans

/in /by

I’m not a veteran, so it’s not my place to question McCain’s claims on both his own service and his work for other veterans.

But I wanted to put up this YouTube and this post by Michigander djtyg–an Iraqi veteran–because I think the two, together, say a lot of what needs to be said. Plus, djtyg does the fact-checking that this YouTube just begs.

There’s been a lot of hoopla over the past few weeks about John McCain’s military service.

[snip]

So now the discussion is on about the values of military service. Does it have any value in politics? Could you learn those values in the civilian world instead? Does being a veteran make you an expert in military affairs?

Being a veteran does have its benefits in building character. While in the military I learned the value of looking out for other people, even at your own expense. I learned how to have the courage to do things even when I was sure I was going to die. I learned that talking about doing something and actually doing it are two different things (you’d be surprised how many grown adults don’t realize this). Being a Soldier changed who I was, and I’m better for it.

[snip]

… most Soldiers would tell you that they’re better people for having served.

Moving on to John McCain…..

As for John McCain, the question that no one wants to answer is how being a POW and a veteran have given him the qualifications to become President. This would be considered a fair question if McCain had an answer. If he said that being a Navy officer gave him leadership experience (and challenged Gen. Clark’s assesment of his leadership experience), if his policies for respecting the Geneva Conventions came from his being tortured as a POW (which he initially did, before he buckled to his right-wing base and decided to support waterboarding), and that being a veteran made him want to look out for the new veterans coming home from places like Iraq and Afghanistan, the question wouldn’t be asked anymore. But because McCain has refused to answer the question now being asked, it’s become clear that he is using his service not as an example of why he would be a good President, but as a shield from criticism.

Read more →

John McCain Says: Want to Fix the Economy? Elect a Democrat

/in , /by

A number of people are already mocking John McCain’s "plan" to fix the economy.

Savings from Victory!

First, there’s this little Orwellian gem.

The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.

Elsewhere, McCain admits we might not have victory in Iraq for 100 years. Until then, I presume we’ll be using deficit spending under President McCain to fund the garrisons of our empire that he’s loath to close down. But once we get victory, we’re going to have "savings," in that we’ll no longer be doing all that deficit spending, and somehow we’ll put the money we never had in the first place and still don’t have to pay down Bush’s Iraq disaster.

Because saying, "if we withdraw from Iraq, we won’t be spending so much money that we don’t have and can’t afford" doesn’t sound quite so honorable, does it, even if the "savings" (as in, huge amounts we won’t be using deficit funding to fund) are bigger and quicker?

McCain Writhes Around on the Third Rail in Glee!!

And then there’s this bit–where he appears to be planning to both privatize social security and cut promised benefits.

John McCain supports supplementing the current Social Security system with personal accounts – but not as a substitute for addressing benefit promises that cannot be kept.

Vote McCain! He will renege on the promises made to our nation’s seniors! Because I hear seniors don’t vote in appreciable numbers!

"Read My Lips: No New Taxes Growth"

McCain, faced with a shitty economy and the prospect of huge deficits, still isn’t going to make the mistake Poppy Bush made. Rather than talking about taxes and deficits, he’ll just magically promise growth!

Growth is an imperative – historically the greatest success in reducing deficits (late 1980s; late 1990s) took place in the context of economic growth.

Or, to state that another way, "historically the greatest success in reducing deficits (later 1980s; late 1990s) took place in the context of tax increases." Only he doesn’t mention that part; it’s so much easier to snap your fingers and make this economic disaster go away.

Democrats Are Good for the Economy, One

But I’m most amused that twice, McCain advocates doing what his Democratic colleagues have been busy doing while McCain was AWOL from the Senate. Read more →