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The Obama campaign’s new ad is an unfair and personal attack on McCain and his character. It’s a cheap shot. And it’s a perfect response to John McCain’s unfair and personal (and also dishonest) attacks on Obama in recent weeks.
This is how Democrats hit back.
If this is the kind of campaign McCain wants to run, there’s a whole lot more where this came from.
You can run too…But be patient – the link is a bit slow.
(Hint – just change the values of the name in this link.)
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Heh.
If anyone knows the original source of this, let me know. I found it here. And the author is………
Patrick Moberg. Also the guy who met the girl with the flower in her hair on the subway…
Edit: Welcome Andrew Sullivan readers.
And welcome Use My Computer users.
[digg-reddit-me]Drudge has the scare headline up today. And pundits across the world are speculating about why Obama hasn’t blown McCain away yet. Yet I’m still confident in Obama’s campaign.
One of my first blog posts – and my first blog post to gain a sizeable readership – ran last October 12 when Obama was trailing Hillary by sizable margins and was entitled: “Why I Am Confident About Obama.”
My conclusion – despite the media’s almost universal consensus that no one could take down the Clinton juggernaut at that late date (with a 20 point lead nationwide and a slim lead for Clinton in Iowa) – was:
Clintonian hubris, an Obama strategy to put the pressure on Clinton late, with Iowa in a statistical dead heat, and a ton of other primaries following hard-upon Iowa. It seems to me that Obama has a good chance of winning even if he doesn’t hit his stride.
The overall perception driving me to this conclusion was that Obama was the natural candidate for this time – that his candidacy and person fit the moment in a way no other candidate’s did. George F. Will, among a few other astute observers of American politics, saw this too. Obama was the candidate that fit the times – and he had a smart and hard-nosed plan for getting the nomination from Hillary and the presidency from any Republican. The intellectual ferment, the grassroots enthusiasm, and the international support for Obama all confirm that he is the candidate of the zeitgeist.
These fundamentals have not changed.
Which is why, now, with McCain ahead of Obama by five points nationally (the first lead he has had against the presumptive Democratic nominee) and with McCain outspending Obama in many key states, and with many media supporters of Obama beginning to panic and conservatives beginning to gloat, and McCain finally finding his voice given the prospect of a war with Russia – I am still confident about the Obama campaign.
I trust the Obama campaign has a plan and that they will execute it well. That plan will include hitting McCain hard when he has less money to spare. There’s no guarantee, but Obama’s chances are still very good – and he has been consistently doing better in the polls than Gore or Kerry at similar times in the race. Obama has said that he is in this to win.
I hope so – and I know I will do all I can to ensure that he does.
Zardari was known as “Mr 10%” in Bhutto’s first term as prime minister because of bribery allegations, later as “Mr 20%”.
Andrew Sullivan has been questioning McCain’s cross-in-the-sand story. You know – that heart-tugging tale that McCain tells at every event he goes to – in order to demonstrate his Christian faith (and mention his bravery as a POW). And if you have a story like that in your life, you have every right to tell it.
But as Sullivan has been pointing out, McCain’s story is a bit suspicious. He once told the story as if it had happened to someone else. He had never told the story before 1999 despite his numerous public statements, descriptions, and essays about his time in captivity. And the story has gradually changed since it’s first telling in 1999, resembling more and more the story Chuck Colson told about Alexander Solzhenitzen.
Andrew Sullivan – who has been very supportive of McCain over the years – and supported him in the Republican primary – has been making the case in respectful terms, always trying to give McCain the benefit of the doubt.
The McCain campaign, with it as ever, responds in a blog post:
It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman’s memory of war from the comfort of mom’s basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others. John McCain has often said he witnessed a thousand acts of bravery while he was imprisoned, and though not every one has been submitted into the public record, they are remembered by the men who were there (one such only recently reported by Karl Rove though it escaped mention in any of Senator McCain’s books). But as Swindle said, this is a “desperate group of people trying to make something out of nothing.”
Of course, the article the McCain blog links to explains how reticent McCain is, always refraining from telling stories about himself – which is why he answered every question he was asked by Pastor Rick Warren Sunday night with an anecdote that made him seem like a G. I. Joe. Telling such anecdotes is what McCain does – and what Karl Rove claims in his op-ed piece that McCain does not do enough (because he is so modest!).
Of course, what is most telling about this McCain post is that he references a role-playing game from the 1970s.
This guy’s older than the polio vaccine. No, really.
[digg-reddit-me]A few months ago, on the Long Island Railroad in the evening on my way home after work, a young black woman asked me if she could sit on the inside seat. (I always sit on the outside, and this was a three person seat.) After she sat down, she noticed the Barack Obama button I had on my bag at the time and pointed to it and said: “Thank you.”
We went on to have a conversation about the campaign and the Broadway play she had just been to – but that, “Thank you” bothered me. She was not a member of the campaign or a relative of Obama’s. I, in fact, have raised over $3,000 for the Senator, donated a good deal myself, and have tried through this blog as well as other activities to support his campaign. Although I do not know this for certain – based on the tone, the way she said it, and the rest of our conversation, I think that she was thanking me, as a white person, for supporting Barack, “her” candidate.
What I felt, but did not say, was that I was supporting Obama not because he was black or because any of my friends are black or because I wanted to make up for persecution of blacks in American history – but because … well, I’ll get to that in a minute.
One more story. A co-worker of mine described Obama to me as an empty suit, a typical, spineless, academic, elitist, whose only redeeming and unique quality is his race. ((Although I attempt to converse with my co-worker about this, our conversations always end up in some nether world of side topics – debating evolution or global warming or whether Congress has any power to intervene in foreign policy.)) He never believes me when I deny that my support of Obama is because of his race.
I have explained several times on this blog my gradual evolution from a McCain supporter in 2000 to an Edwards then Hillary than Obama supporter in 2007, including most recently here. By the summer of 2007, I had decided to support Obama – and had started talking about trying to work for the campaign. ((Unfortunately, a relative of mine persuaded me otherwise, saying that the wise thing to do was to wait it out.))
Since then, my opinion has been reinforced by events more often than it was challenged.
My decision to support Obama did not hinge on any single issue or position, but was a reflection of my attempt to gather as much information as possible about all of the candidates. I assumed that the direction the country needed to go in was rather obvious – as most Democrats and many moderate Republicans agreed, from Secretary of Defense Gates to Secretary of Treasury Paulson to Secretary of State Rice to Senator Clinton to Senator Obama to (I thought) Senator McCain. The real question is what specific policies, what methods, what means could be used to get there.
I did not support Obama because he was black, liberal, progressive, young, charismatic, or an idealist.
What did lead me to support Obama first was his character and judgment: he is a liberal pragmatist, with a conservative temperament, who seeks to understand the world as it is, to identify our long-term challenges, and to push (to nudge it) in a positive direction by tinkering with processes and institutions and creating tools to get people more involved in the government.
In addition, there are three extremely positive movements that are associated with Obama’s candidacy:
The intellectual ferment around Obama’s campaign – with Lawrence Lessig, Cass Sunstein, Richard Thaler, Samantha Power, and many others, all reflective thinkers who have influenced his campaign policy and would play a role in an Obama administration – is tremendously exciting. Added to this ferment is a sense of humility that is a bit odd. Samantha Power, who traveled to war zones around the world in 1990s, and learned the lessons of Rwanda and Sarejevo and Kirkuk deeply, does not believe unilateral American force must be used to stop genocide. Rather she places the blame on a flawed international system. Lawrence Lessig describes our political system as inherently corrupt – yet his Change Congress movement is not a radical call to arms but a series of modest proposals designed to catalyze serious changes. Cass Sunstein’s and Richard Thaler’s libertarian paternalism probably best encapsulates the pragmatic steps that can taken to greatly improve the lives of most Americans.
The grassroots movement supporting Obama also reveals the hidden side of this past four years – as George W. Bush created a liberal majority. This movement represents a new force in American politics.
The international support for Obama demonstrates that, like many Americans, people around the world want a new face to represent America – a re-branding, and hopefully a reevaluation of America’s priorities around the world.
By the time John McCain abandoned sensible policies in his quest to win over the Republican base – and emphasized his least attractive quality, a preference for the use of military force – I had already decided Obama was the best candidate.
Mr. Bush would like to be remembered for his leadership in fighting terrorism, but his decisions have defied common sense, including his dismissal of the fact that Mr. bin Laden remains at large. In a 2002 press conference, he said, “I just don’t spend that much time on him.” In 2006, he told conservative columnists that sending troops “stomping through Pakistan in order to find bin Laden is just simply not the strategy that will work.”
Mr. Bush is operating according to a logic that says the right way to win against Al Qaeda is to invade Iraq, which had no connection to Al Qaeda. And the right way to dismantle Mr. bin Laden’s terrorism network is to express unconcern about chasing him down while relentlessly pursuing his driver.
