McCain Salvages Shred of Decency

The following brief video shows a stop on the McCain campaign today, in which some conservative bigot tells him that she doesn’t trust Obama because ‘he’s an Arab.’

It would have been nice if McCain had been a little more strident in denouncing bigotry and lies. But it’s not bad.  If only he’d conduct his campaign like that.

The Race Today: From Right to Left

Left-wing blogger Digby, HERE (you may have to scroll down for it; this particular blog doesn’t link articles to their own pages,) has an interesting short piece on last night’s debate. One piece in particular stuck out to me:

She is exactly what she says she is, a socially conservative hockey mom, who fell into a job with a big title, but which is obviously done by her staff.

Which may well be accurate. She’s very likeable, even if one thinks she is totally floundering, or holds many of her views in contempt.

Then she goes on to compare Palin to George Bush, which I think is unfair; Bush at least served for six years as Governor of Texas, during which he at least learned how to sound like he knew something of what he was doing, and Texas is a huge state with deep connections to many other states, and to Mexico, unlike thinly-populated and isolated Alaska. Then again, Palin hasn’t screwed anything up as badly as Bush did several failed businesses, the Rangers, Texas, or the United States. Her incompetence is merely obvious while his is time-tested.

Joe Klein, whose views seem erratic enough to me to assume nonpartisanship, writes HERE his assesment of the debate performance. Like others, he appears to feel that Palin did just fine, but that Joe Biden was the very clear victor. He puts it better, I think, than Digby:

The fact that Palin made it through the debate without running off the stage shouting, “I can’t do this!” should not obscure the fact that there was only one person tonight whom anyone with any sense—even John McCain, I imagine—would trust as President.

Finally, we have Charles Krauthammer, writing for the conservative Washington Post, who’s about as far to the right as you can get without being issued a complimentary pair of jackboots and a red armband, appears to have conceded the election, HERE:

Obama has shown that he is a man of limited experience, questionable convictions, deeply troubling associations (Jeremiah Wright, William Ayers, Tony Rezko) and an alarming lack of self-definition — do you really know who he is and what he believes? Nonetheless, he’s got both a first-class intellect and a first-class temperament. That will likely be enough to make him president.

Krauthammer is using the right-wing talking point here that ‘we don’t really know who Obama is,’ which is an effort to emphasize his foreignness to white Americans. It’s the sort of callow, racist pander that the Republican party has used so effectively since Richard Nixon, that model of conservative ethics, said in 1970, “Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote… The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are.”

I hate to break it to Chuck, but whle he may have bought into that particular piece of propaganda, anyone who’s been paying attention for the last couple of years has a pretty good idea of who Obama is and what he stands for – and if you’re not sure, you can read about exactly what he stands for HERE. You don’t even have to read any of Obama’s books. For comparison, you should also read THIS, and then decide for yourself which candidate has a firm platform with lots of specifics and which is speaking in broad, meaningless platitudes.

Nevertheless, as I say, Krauthammer – and a fast-growing percentage of the conservative intelligentsia – is now reduced to sucking it up in preparation for a big loss next month.

VP Debate, Briefly Analyzed: No Shift in Momentum

The New York Times has a decent summary HERE.

Sarah Palin did okay. After the catastrophic interviews circulating for the last week, a serious misstep would have probably sunk her ticket, but she didn’t make one, and if she at times rambled or lost coherence… well, so did Joe Biden. Both candidates came off as pretty likable, and both dodged their share of questions, but Joe Biden is better at that.

In this sense, Palin won the debate by not imploding or yammering incoherently when she was caught totally flatfooted by a question. If you actually paid any attention to the issues, though, Biden came out on top. Early polling seems to agree.

Palin’s positions were idiotic, but that’s not her fault, exactly – conservatism is based around the notion of placing The Ideology above the facts, for example in the case of climate change. The idea that one could acknowledge climate change and seek to fix it while claiming that it’s not important to understand its root causes is pretty transparently stuipd.

Biden, on the other hand, despite his tendency to drift, stayed surprisingly on-message all night – a McCain Administration would be pretty much the same as the Bush Administration – effectively, I thought. And he clearly had a much greater command of facts and details than Palin did – many of her ‘facts’ were in fact hollow talking points, like the spurious “voted to raise taxes ninety-some times” line that gets trotted out by Republicans every election cycle. Biden countered that kind of made-up statistic whenever it was pulled from the hat, and beat the drum of ‘failed conservative economic policy’ very steadily.

In short, I doubt that last night’s debate will shake the race up any – but that means that momentum is still very much on Obama’s side.

The Dope on John McCain

Are you voting for John McCain?

If so, you should read THIS before you commit to that decision. It pretty much covers all the bases; his cavalier youth and failed military career, his womanizing and abandonment of his first wife and their children, the contempt that the Reagans held him in, his entanglement with Charles Keating’s corrupt apparatus… it’s not a quick read.

True McCain supporters will, of of course, dismiss it as propaganda, because conservatism mandates obedience to The Ideology and The Leader above all. And, in fairness, the article is partisan, painting McCain as a douchebag of little ability, entrenched connections and towering ambition. But it does it with actual facts.

McCain on Adopted Daughter: “You can’t imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona.”

One wonders just how reliable THIS is. Certainly, even aside from the flatly idiotic idea that we should have ‘nuked’ Iraq in 2000, before 9/11 (which Iraq had nothing to do with but which was one of the justifications used for the subsequent invasion and occupation,) it paints a picture of John McCain as an absolute creep. Take particular note of McCain’s alleged comments regarding his adopted daughter Bridget:

Oh, that was Cindy’s idea – I didn’t have anything to do with it. She just went and adopted this thing without even asking me. You can’t imagine how people stare when I wheel this ugly, black thing around in a shopping cart in Arizona. No, it wasn’t my idea at all

My God. The words ‘reprehensible’ and ‘abhorrent’ do not suffice. This is beyond the pale.

Now, it could be BS. And truthfully, I hope it is – I would prefer to think that McCain is not the monstrous scumbag those comments show him to be.

Obama Soaring in Polls, McCain in Tailspin

Sources everywhere are reporting that Barack Obama’s poll numbers are surging, and John McCain’s are slipping. Increasingly, it’s looking like McCain is in an irreparable decline. The news is so ubiquitous that I’m only going to link to the MSNBC/New York Times article on the subject and let readers find more reports for themselves. Obama is now opening his lead, so narrow a few weeks ago, into the double digits, including in some states that were once held to be solidly red.

It’s tempting to say that this is because the failing economy is now in the news spotlight, and people (rightly) have more confidence in Obama’s ability to manage that than McCain’s. This is true, but it’s only part of a more complicated equation.

McCain made himself look the fool in his stunt last week regarding the bailout plan. Indeed, this leadership failure makes him look so inept that one is forced to wonder if it didn’t happen by some sly backroom machination orchestrated by the Obama campaign, the DNC, or some other Democratic group. A Presidential candidate can be self-depreciating, but he can’t seem inept, and McCain does right now.

Too, there are deepening concerns about Sarah Palin’s qualifications to be Vice President; criticism even from the right that she’s not ready, polls indicating rapidly shrinking public confidence in her abilities, and the astonishingly awkward Katie Couric interview, which has gotten so much press primarily because the McCain campaign has so tightly restricted media access to her. If she does fewer interviews, those she does do take on greater importance and higher visibility, and she botched the CBS job.

It must be remembered that the McCain campaign picked Couric to do the interview precisely because she’s known for a soft touch. Yet Palin was unable to answer, and indeed stammered over or evaded, basic questions like “what Supreme Court decisions have you disagreed with?” and “what newspapers or magazines do you read to keep up with national and world affairs?” It’s possible (indeed, likely) that the campaign stuffed her head so full of facts that she couldn’t keep it organized in her head, and thus stumbled over basic but unanticipated questions. Again, if you didn’t know better, you’d swear Palin answers had been scripted by the Obama camp – she could not possibly have come off seeming more evasive and…. stupid than she did.

While I happen to think that Palin is totally unprepared for her role and would make an abominably bad President (and, let’s face it, none of her most ardent supporters are voting for her for VP – they’re hoping the ticket wins and McCain dies,) I am certain that she is not actually stupid. She’s the newly-elected governor of a small, geographically isolated state that hadn’t even found her footing in a gubernatorial role yet. She was already cramming her head with facts about how to run Alaska, likely from the well-informed pages of The New American. McCain’s people have given her even more to swallow. She is in an unfortunate and in many ways unfair position, but it was McCain’s ill-advised choice that put her there.

McCain’s issue is judgement. He has tons of experience and a strong personal narrative, but all the experience in the world doesn’t help if you make idiotic decisions, and McCain has a decades-long history of that. The Obama campaign has pressed this a bit, but probably not enough – but the choice of Palin as VP is looking like a worse decision with each passing day. That and the bailout fiasco of last week are dooming his campaign. It may even have gotten to the point where even another risky move cannot save it – if he does something else that a couple of months ago would have been perceived as ‘bold’, will it now look to the public like another transparent stunt by a desperate candidate? If his campaign isn’t at that point yet, it’s teetering on the very brink.

McCain was on his back gong into the Republican National Convention – he had to do something spectacular and surprising to regain some momentum, and he did with the Palin pick. But the sunshine’s gone away now, and it increasingly looks like the only people who will vote for McCain because they believe in Palin are a small number of fundamentalists who see nothing wrong with abjurations against witchcraft, speaking in tongues or the hastening of the End Times. In that choice, McCain made the election about Palin rather than himself, and that was clearly a mistake.

The McCain camp seems to be reacting to his downward spiral in the polls by going on the attack again, talking up the connections between, for example, Obama and Jeremiah Wright, who is, to my mind, far less crazy or controversial than, say, radical cleric and hatemonger John Hagee, whose support McCain has no difficulty embracing. McCain has gotten some traction with this kind of stuff in the past (and indeed, fabricated facts and scare tactics worked well for his team back when they were trying to get George Bush elected,) but it may be too late for that now – Obama controls the campaign narrative that thoroughly.

Bailout Failure is a ‘Major Blow’ to McCain Campaign

CNN is calling the failure of the Wall Steet bailout bill ‘a major blow’ to John McCain’s presidential campaign. And truth be told, after spending a couple of days hooting about how he was going to ‘lead’ lawmakers to make the bailout happen, its failure makes him look like an impotent ass.

McCain did push for the revised bill, making phone calls to Republicans and asking them to support it while playing up to the media more involvement than he really had. Not enough of them respected McCain enough to get it passed, and now both backers and opponents of the bailout are angry about it. Regardless of whether another bill passes or not, every day of economic turbulence is good for Obama, because it’s 28 years of conservative deregulation and trickle-down economics that put the nation in this mess.

I’m not suggesting that this bailout is a good idea, neccessarily, and interestingly enough there appear to be both supporters and opponents on both the left and the right. A real leader might see an opportunity here to create a meaningful coalition on the issue.

But for McCain, this raises real questions about his judgement and leadership ability. Charging in was a risky move of the kind he appears to relish, and he both overcommitted and underacted in trying to get a solution in play. It didn’t work out, just as his selection of Sarah Palin is looking pretty sour right now.

Make no mistake: McCain’s numbers are going to drop as a result of this fiasco. On the other hand, at least he tried – a beaten George Bush’s speech last night seemed like pleading rather than leadership. Nobody respects the poor guy anymore.

National Review Calls For Palin to Withdraw

The National Review, a Leftist Media outlet, has called in today’s editorial for VP candidate Sarah Palin to resign from the Republican ticket because she’s clearly unqualified and in over her head. Kathleen Parker is, of course, right, as anyone who watched any of her interviews has seen. The exception is the one she did with Sean Hannity – who predictably went to such lengths to make her look good that I expected hugs at the end.

Let’s not underestimate the importance of this; it’s the National Review we’re talking about, the mouthpiece of conservative economic thought. This kind of talk weakens Palin considerably among thinking Republicans. Yes, there are some, and I’m guessing that most of them read The National Review. Yet, if Palin steps down – even of her own accord – it’ll make John McCain look like a dolt who makes bad, knee-jerk decisions. He is, but a Palin withdrawl for any reason also costs McCain the support of the far-right fanatics who make up such a big segment of the Republican base because they are so very good at organizing.

If Parker is right, and Palin weakens the ticket because she’s ‘Clearly Out of Her League’ (and the capitalization is Parker’s,) we’ll find out at the Vice-Presidential debate on October 2nd. Old Hand Joe Biden should tear her apart – and probably runs the risk of coming off like a dick picking on a girl if he does so too easily.

But if she withdraws, she sinks the ticket, period – McCain is very unpopular with Christian extremists because a different John McCain called them ‘agents of intolerance’ a few years ago, before this one spread his cheeks for Jerry Falwell and James Dobson. McCain cannot win in November without pandering to that base. It’s why he picked Palin in the first place, and the only reason that the extremists might vote for him. Sarah Palin may be a liability, but the Republicans are stuck with her.

UPDATE: I was literally thinking that the Liberal Media wouldn’t pisk this up. But they did. And as CNN helpfully points out, infamous liberals like George Will, David Brooks and David Frum have also gone out of their way to question Palin’s qualifications.

McCain Claims Victory in Debate That Hasn’t Happened Yet

John McCain’s campaign is claiming in internet ads that he won the Septempber 26th debate with Barack Obama. This is, of course, predictable; after every debate pundits from both sides will show up and say that their person won it.

What isn’t predictable is that the debate hasn’t happened yet. Does this make McCain look stupid and his campaign inept or what? Is the average person stupid enough to believe the ads? The McCain campaign is betting that they are.

Something to Like in the McCain Platform

I have found something in John McCain’s platform that I can actually support. Jokes about this also being cut and pasted from the Bush platform notwithstanding, Obama’s much more detailed platform does not have a comparable plank.

Call this my personal insurance policy should he be elected President. Assuming of course, that the wishes of Palin supporters do not come to pass.

A bankrupt country with a shattered economy will have a hard time paying for it, though.