John McCain’s campaign has been attacking Barack Obama about his ties to former 1960s radical William Ayers. But columnist George Will noted that these charges come as “many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts - telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans’ accounts have recently shed.”
“In this context,” Will wrote, “the McCain-Palin campaign’s attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama’s Chicago associations seems surreal.”
And desperate.
Nobody gives Ralph Nader a chance in the presidential election, but some of what he had to say Thursday night in Lawrence certainly matched the public mood these days. Some highlights:
“Taxation without representation is back. Big time.”
“The corporate crime wave is eating the life and soul of America.”
“The Constitution starts with ‘we the people’ in the preamble. Not ‘we the corporations.’”
“I have never seen a Congress so cowardly.”
“There is too much memorization, regurgitation, vegetation in public education.”
So it’s official: Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin unlawfully abused her power when she fired Public Safety Commissioner Walter Monegan, according to a legislative investigator. “I feel vindicated,” Monegan said. “It sounds like they’ve validated my belief and opinions. And that tells me I’m not totally out in left field.” But because the report does not recommend sanctions or a criminal investigation — and the McCain-Palin campaign already has tarred the inquiry as partisan — it’s still hard to see Troopergate doing much to hurt Palin’s appeal with the GOP base.
Columnist Kathleen Parker is concerned about the ugly turn the McCain campaign has taken, particular Sarah Palin. In addition to continuing her accusation that Barack Obama pals around with terrorists, Palin has been trying to blame her interview misfires on the media. At a rally this week in Florida, the crowd responded by taunted and yelling obscenities at reporters covering the event, and one Palin supporter shouted a racial epithet at an African-American soundman for a network and told him, “Sit down, boy,” the Washington Post reported. Parker contends that such incitements are a “dangerous game” and that “McCain may want to call off his pit bull before this war escalates.”
John McCain’s reference to Barack Obama as “that one” during Tuesday night’s debate has led to buzz and even T-shirts. Discussing a goody-stuffed energy bill, McCain said, “You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one.” Obama campaign staffers variously termed it an “odd” moment that showed McCain’s disdain for his opponent, while a McCain spokeswoman said “they are again proving to be the fussiest campaign in American history.”
On CBS’ “The Late Late Show,” host Craig Ferguson had trouble thinking of when it would be appropriate to refer to a senator in that way. “Maybe if you had to pick a U.S. senator out of a lineup,” Ferguson said. “‘Which one of these senators tapped your foot in the bathroom?’ ‘That one.’”
“Is there more experienced people? Yes,” said Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Goddard, about vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. But Tiahrt told The Eagle editorial board Wednesday that Palin is one of the toughest people he knows and that she has brought enthusiasm that was absent in the GOP campaign. “That has value,” he said.
Turns out the Mavericks don’t appreciate John McCain being called a “maverick.” The Maverick family of Texas has been making a name for itself in libertarian and progressive politics since the 1600s. And the term “maverick” comes from Samuel Augustus Maverick (in photo), whose unbranded cattle in the 1800s became know as “mavericks.” Current family members chafe at the claim that McCain is not part of the Republican herd, given how often he votes with his party. “He’s a Republican,” Terrellita Maverick said. “He’s branded.”
John McCain compared Barack Obama during Tuesday’s debate to Herbert Hoover (in photo), saying Obama wants to raise taxes in a time of deep economic uncertainty and shrinking growth. Hugh Hewitt of Townhall.com says that “the argument about the disastrous economic policies being pushed by Obama must be made by McCain every day going forward.” Hewitt contends: “I don’t want to put the country through Great Depression 2.0, and I don’t want a vast army of academics and social engineers descending on D.C. with plans on how to remake America in their own extremist image.”
Neither presidential candidate stood out in Tuesday’s dull debate. John McCain and Barack Obama mostly repeated the same answers from their first debate, and neither effectively explained how he would respond to the financial meltdown and stalling economy.
As far as the horse race goes, McCain needed a game-changing performance to stop Obama’s momentum, and he didn’t deliver it. By large margins, viewers surveyed said that Obama won the debate.
But viewers wanting specifics and a recognition of our new economic reality likely were disappointed by both candidates.
Sarah Palin indicated during last week’s debate that she agreed with Dick Cheney’s (in photo) “unitary executive” theory of the vice presidency. “We have a lot of flexibility in there” under the Constitution, she said, adding that she was “thankful that the Constitution would allow a bit more authority given to the vice president also, if that vice president so chose to exert it.” But as a New York Times editorial noted: “The Constitution does not state or imply any flexibility in the office of vice president. It gives the vice president no legislative responsibilities other than casting a tie-breaking vote in the Senate when needed and no executive powers at all. The vice president’s constitutional role is to be ready to serve if the president dies or becomes incapacitated.”
Presidential nominees have used the vice presidency to balance the ticket by naming a running mate from a different region, or one who speaks with a different ideological accent to a specific constituency. This means that a president’s death generates a double shock: The nation not only mourns a fallen leader, it must deal with a replacement who may push in a new direction.
Teddy Roosevelt (in photo) - who replaced William McKinley when he was assassinated in 1901 - may have been a great progressive president, but he had been named as vice president by the archconservative McKinley simply to carry New York. The country elected a right-winger but ended up with something else entirely.
Recent elections have lulled us into a false sense of security. But John McCain’s surprising choice should lead us to think again. We should designate the secretary of state to be in charge until a special election can be held to replace a president. - Bruce Ackerman, professor of law at Yale University, for the Los Angeles Times
That’s rather like saying that football teams don’t need a backup quarterback because, after all, the other guy is likely to have a different style and we’d therefore be better off having the kicker fill in.
The death of a sitting president is a national shock. If it comes as a result of assassination or other unnatural cause, it’s a genuine national crisis. That’s not a great time to be fumbling around for a successor, let alone scrambling to hold a special election.
It’s hard to think of a modern example when the secretary of state was both more prepared for executive leadership and closer to the president’s ideology than his vice president. We choose secretaries of state by an entirely different process than presidents, emphasizing different skill sets. To the extent that people are genuinely afraid of John McCain dying and Sarah Palin being given the launch codes, they’re less likely to vote for McCain. - James Joyner, outsidethebeltway.com
In two late-September polls of Kansans, John McCain enjoyed a double-digit lead on Barack Obama. But what to make of the difference in the size of McCain’s lead? Rasmussen Reports had him ahead by 20 percentage points, up from 15 points a month earlier. SurveyUSA put McCain 12 points ahead of Obama, down from the 23-point lead a month earlier (its results are the opposite among 18- to 34-year-olds, by the way, with Obama now on top by 13 points).
Rasmussen Reports also put Sen. Pat Roberts 20 points ahead of Democratic challenger Jim Slattery, up from 19 points in August.
The “Saturday Night Live” skit on the vice presidential debate noted the drinking games built on Sarah Palin’s repeated use of the word “maverick.” At tonight’s town hall-style debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, viewers might want to listen for the Republican’s references to Iraq surge architect Gen. David Petraeus (in photo), who got seven mentions by McCain at the first debate. “When was the last time a serving U.S. military officer was made to play such a large role in a presidential campaign, even if involuntarily? There may be no modern precedent,” wrote Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post. He concluded: “by employing the general so heavily in his rhetoric, McCain is doing a disservice to a commander whose skills the next president will sorely need - especially if he is Obama.”
John McCain’s campaign has begun a concentrated effort to undermine Barack Obama’s character, GOP strategists said. In addition to a television advertisement attacking Obama’s honesty, vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin has been accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” She was referring to former Vietnam-era radical William Ayers, who hosted a fundraiser for Obama a decade ago (and whose views and past actions Obama already has denounced).
Meanwhile, Obama is fighting back against what he calls “Swift boat-style attacks” with a Web video about McCain’s membership in the Keating Five and involvement in the savings-and-loan scandals of 20 years ago (which McCain already has called “the worst mistake of my life”).
“Mrs. Palin may not know as much about the world as Mr. Biden does, but at least most of what she knows is true,” a Wall Street Journal editorial argued. It said that Joe Biden made factual mistakes during last week’s debate about Lebanon, Afghanistan, Bosnia and negotiating with Iran.
Sarah Palin and John McCain have tried to blame her disjointed television interviews on the “media elite,” but it just doesn’t fly. Both have accused the media of “gotcha journalism” for asking follow up questions when she has tried to avoid answers. Friday, while pledging to be more available for questions from voters and the media, Palin complained: “If you cease to answer a question, you’re going to get clobbered on the answer. If you choose to try to pivot and go on to another subject that you believe that Americans want to hear about, you get clobbered for that, too.” There a simple solution: Answer questions.
“The over-the-moon reaction by conservative commentators and activists to Sarah Palin’s debate performance puzzled me - until I came up with a hypothesis to explain the phenomenon,” Eugene Robinson wrote in a Washington Post blog. “Tell me if you think I’m right or wrong: For ‘movement’ conservatives, the vice presidential debate was less about 2008 than about 2012 and beyond. . . . Under my scenario, for ideological conservatives it will be a pity if McCain loses to Barack Obama but not a disaster. If that happens, I can pretty much guarantee that Sarah Palin will be back four years from now. Somewhere, the ‘Palin 2012′ bumper stickers are probably already being printed.”
Two things stood out immediately about the vice presidential candidates’ strategies for their lone debate Thursday night: Joe Biden had decided to debate not his opponent but rather the top of the GOP ticket, his old friend John McCain. And Sarah Palin had decided that if she didn’t like a question, she’d ignore it and answer a question that hadn’t been asked, our editorial today argues. Palin did well by outperforming the low expectations set by her incoherent interviews over the past few weeks. That appealing personality so on display at the GOP convention was back, too, as the self-described “Main Streeter” punctuated her praise for McCain and her populist talking points with folksy phrases like “bless their hearts” and “darn right.”
But Biden won on content and debate points. A survey of debate viewers by CNN/Opinion Research gave Biden a 51 to 36 percent win, and a CBS poll had him 46 to 21 percent over Palin.
Seeing the closeness of the polls, Washburn University professor Bob Beatty wonders if the general election won’t bring about a 270-270 tie in electoral votes for Barack Obama and John McCain. If that happened, Beatty writes in the Topeka Capital-Journal, the House would select the president, with each state’s delegation casting one vote, and the Senate would select the vice president, with each senator casting one vote: “So, yes, it’s possible that on Jan. 20, 2009, the chief justice of the Supreme Court could be swearing in President Barack Obama and Vice President Sarah Palin. Wouldn’t that be something?”
“After 20 years of column writing, I’m familiar with angry mail,” wrote Kathleen Parker. “But the past few days have produced responses of a different order. Not just angry, but vicious and threatening.” The responses were to Parker’s column last week in which she decided that Sarah Palin is out of her league.
“Some of my usual readers feel betrayed because I previously have written favorably of Palin,” Parker wrote. “By changing my mind and saying so, I am viewed as a traitor to the Republican Party - not a ‘true’ conservative.
“Obviously, I’m not employed by the GOP. If I were, it’s seriously in arrears. But what is a true conservative? One who doesn’t think or question and who marches in lockstep with The Party?”
Meanwhile, most voters seem to be agreeing with Parker. An AP-Gfk poll released Wednesday found that only 25 percent of likely voters believe Palin has the right experience to be president, down from 41 percent just after the GOP convention. In a Washington Post-ABC News poll, 85 percent of voters said Palin does not have the requisite experience to be president.
As vice presidential nominees Sarah Palin and Joe Biden prepare to debate tonight, Palin isn’t alone in being the subject of speculation about whether she can or will go the distance. An unsigned e-mail message making the Internet rounds has Biden leaving the Democratic ticket on or around Oct. 5 for health reasons, supposedly to allow Barack Obama to pick either Hillary Clinton or Kathleen Sebelius. That’s far-fetched in the extreme, but as Los Angeles Times blogger Andrew Malcolm put it: “Either one would throw off the Republican strategies and be a potential game-changer.”
Some of Sarah Palin’s interview answers have been compared to refrigerator magnet poetry, so Slate writer Hart Seely took her “verbiage” the next natural step. Two examples:
“On Good and Evil”
It is obvious to me
Who the good guys are in this one
And who the bad guys are.
The bad guys are the ones
Who say Israel is a stinking corpse,
And should be wiped off
The face of the earth.
That’s not a good guy.
(To CBS’ Katie Couric, Sept. 25)
“Haiku”
These corporations.
Today it was AIG,
Important call, there.
(To Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Sept. 18)
The same day Barack Obama tapped as his running mate Joe Biden, the famously verbose Delaware senator who’s been in the Senate since Obama was 11, the Republican National Committee launched a Web site to monitor Biden’s future gaffes. Biden has blundered badly several times in the last several days, often on issues relating to the economy. He’s been caught contradicting his running mate, which is among every political ticket’s 10 commandments of no-nos. And on one occasion, he got his facts wrong. With voters closely watching and worrying about the financial crisis, these inconsistencies could have real consequences come Nov. 4, now less than five weeks away. — Kate Linthicum, Los Angeles Times blogs
When Joe Biden described an Obama ad attacking John McCain’s inability to use a computer as “terrible,” the world acted as if the Joe-pocalypse had finally arrived. Jonathan Martin of Politico called it “perhaps his most off-message statement yet.” Newsday dubbed him “gaffe-a-minute Joe.” National Review’s Victor Davis Hanson said it raised “serious concern whether Biden is up to the job.” Please. Biden’s blunder couldn’t matter less. Not because gaffes never matter — they can, if they play into public perceptions of the candidate’s character — but because Biden is gaffe-proof. Whatever traps he sets for himself, however many minorities he offends, he always seems to wriggle out. It’s almost as if, by committing so many gaffes, he has become immune to their effects. “Joe Biden Makes Gaffe” is the new “Dog Bites Man.” — Christopher Beam, Slate
John McCain’s campaign has been attacking Barack Obama about his ties to former 1960s radical William Ayers. But columnist George Will noted that these charges come as “many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts - telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans’ accounts have recently shed.”
