has the perfect response to McCain’s incessant and shameless use of the POW card.
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Category: McCain
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McCain Throws an Elbow
Matt Drudge is reporting that the McCain campaign will leak the identity of their Vice Presidential pick at 6 pm tonight, and confirm the identity at 8 pm. Barack Obama is scheduled to give his acceptance speech between 10 pm and 11 pm. Obviously, this is a tactic designed to break into Obama’s news cycle.
It’s cheap. It’s pretty low class. And it’s excellent politics.
I think the McCain camp is miscalculating here – and although an announcement tomorrow might cut into Obama’s bounce, leaking the news tonight will cut into any benefit McCain might derive from it.
But the real bet must be that by leaking the news tonight so soon before Obama’s speech they can force him to react to the pick or look foolish not doing so.
I’m not sure exactly how this will play out – but McCain is playing a dangerous game here. And I’m not sure his campaign is up to it.
Of course, McCain does seem a bit cranky in his recent interview with Time magazine:
In 2000, after the primaries, you went back to South Carolina to talk about what you felt was a mistake you had made on the Confederate flag. Is there anything so far about this campaign that you wish you could take back or you might revisit when it’s over?
[Does not answer.]Do I know you? [Says with a laugh.]
[Long pause.] I’m very happy with the way our campaign has been conducted, and I am very pleased and humbled to have the nomination of the Republican Party.You do acknowledge there was a change in the campaign, in the way you had run the campaign?
[Shakes his head.]You don’t acknowledge that? O.K., when your aides came to you and you decided, having been attacked by Barack Obama, to run some of those ads, was there a debate?
The campaign responded as planned.
I guess McCain has now decided to go out of his way to alienate the group he once called his base – presumably following the same Rovian strategy that Bush did.
McCain obviously does not care about his independent brand anymore.
After listing the tremendous strategic blunders of the Bush administration‘s neoconservative approach to national security and foreign policy, Andrew Sullivan concludes:
Insofar as neoconservatives do not understand this, and cannot understand this, they are a clear and present danger to the security of the West. Their unwillingness to understand how the US might be perceived in the world, how a hegemon needs to exhibit more humility and dexterity to maintain its power, makes them – and McCain – extremely dangerous stewards of American foreign policy in an era of global terror. They are diplomatically and strategically autistic.
McCain’s response to the calamities of the past eight years has been to compound them all.
Jonathan Chait to Matthew Yglesias in conversation over at Bloggingheads.tv, discussing McCain’s lack of awareness of the number of houses he owns:
Chait: It’s right at the intersection of rich, out-of-touch, and old. It’s like the perfect –
Yglesias: Right…
Chait: …it’s in the perfectly overlapped center of all these things.
Yglesias: I actually feel kind of bad…
[digg-reddit-me]
[Image by oxmour licensed under Creative Commons.]
Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?
Because her father is Janet Reno.
I just wanted to point out this McCain joke (told around the time of Chelsea’s 18th birthday) to all the PUMAs out there who have made a big deal about Obama’s disrespect of the Clintons.
Outrage is not a policy. Worry is not a policy. Indignation is not a policy. Even though outrage, worry and indignation are all appropriate in this situation, they shouldn’t be mistaken for policy and they shouldn’t be mistaken for strategy.
Strobe Talbott, deputy secretary of state under President Clinton, Russia specialist, and president of the Brookings Institution, commenting on the McCain campaign’s and the Bush administration’s response to the Georgia crisis.
[digg-reddit-me]
LENO: Welcome back, Sen. McCain, for one million dollars, how many houses do you have? (Jay laughs, McCain squirms and chuckles)
MCCAIN: You know, could I just mention to you, Jay, and a moment of seriousness. I spent five and a half years in a prison cell, without—I didn’t have a house, I didn’t have a kitchen table, I didn’t have a table, I didn’t have a chair. And I spent those five and a half years, because—not because I wanted to get a house when I got out.
From Ben SmithJonathan Martin at Politico. H/t Andrew Sullivan – who calls McCain’s approach “A Noun, A Verb, and POW”.
For pure incoherence, it’s hard to beat McCain answer. As a demonstration of shameless exploitation of a dark period in his life, it’s hard to beat McCain’s answer.
It’s shameless. I don’t think a parody would have been as effective at eviserating McCain’s over-reliance on his POW status.
Andrew Sullivan compares and contrasts Obama and McCain in his most recent piece for The Sunday Times:
Obama is politically liberal and temperamentally conservative; McCain is temperamentally liberal and politically unpredictable. Obama is cerebral; McCain is emotional. Obama is reserved, sometimes aloof; McCain is a social gadfly and seemingly terrified of being left alone and silent. Obama wins press adoration but is not close to journalists; McCain is personal friends with hacks of all sorts. Obama makes plans and executes them with sometimes chilling discipline; McCain veers from one passion to another, winging it – and somehow pulling it off…
The difficult question Americans have to ask themselves is not who is the right man – it is who is right for now. After 9/11, Afghanistan and Iraq, as Russia reasserts itself, as Iran closes in on a nuclear bomb, as Pakistan threatens to crack apart and as the US economy teeters on crisis, which of these two men has the qualities needed to succeed?
If you believe the problem with America’s war on terror is that it has not been ambitious enough, or tough enough, or monumental enough, McCain is your man. If you think the United States needs to be feared more than it needs to be loved, McCain is your man. And if you think that the economic policies of the past eight years – specifically Bush’s low tax rates – are necessary for growth, McCain is the obvious choice.
Frank Rich in yesterday’s Times coins a new slogan for Obama’s campaign:
…[T]he unsettling subtext of the Olympics has been as resonant for Americans as the Phelps triumph. You couldn’t watch NBC’s weeks of coverage without feeling bombarded by an ascendant China whose superior cache of gold medals and dazzling management of the Games became a proxy for its spectacular commercial and cultural prowess in the new century. Even before the Olympics began, a July CNN poll found that 70 percent of Americans fear China’s economic might — about as many as find America on the wrong track. Americans watching the Olympics could not escape the reality that China in particular and Asia in general will continue to outpace our country in growth while we remain mired in stagnancy and debt (much of it held by China).
How we dig out of this quagmire is the American story that Obama must tell…Americans must band together for change before the new century leaves us completely behind. The Obama campaign actually has plans, however imperfect or provisional, to set us on that path; the McCain campaign offers only disposable Band-Aids typified by the “drill now” mantra that even McCain says will only have a “psychological” effect on gas prices…
Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization? Does a bellicose Vietnam veteran who rushed to hitch his star to the self-immolating overreaches of Ahmad Chalabi, Pervez Musharraf and Mikheil Saakashvili have the judgment to keep America safe?
R.I.P., “Change We Can Believe In.” The fierce urgency of the 21st century demands Change Before It’s Too Late.
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A Page from Nixon’s Playbook
Over at The Plank, Jason Zengerle discusses how Steve Schmidt and friends over at the McCain campaign turned Obama’s popularity into a negative:
…you’d think that his popularity – which is something extrinsic to the candidate – would be impossible to demonize. Sure, Hillary Clinton tried, with her digs at Obama for making nice speeches before big crowds, but those attacks ultimately fell short. It wasn’t until the McCain campaign’s celebrity ad – and the repeated meme in other McCain spots of Obama standing before adoring crowds chanting his name – that Obama’s popularity came to be viewed as a sign of his own haughtiness.
This reminds me of what Rick Perlstein describes in Nixonland, as the conflict between the Orthogonians and the Franklins that Nixon used to gain political power.