Sarah Palin said that recent descriptions of her by unnamed McCain aides as a “diva” and a “whack job” who alienates campaign staff were untrue – and she wants to meet with anyone who might feel that way. “I have never met any of those who I have heard to have written something or say something negative,” Palin said. “I would love to meet these people, have a conversation instead of them superficially making a statement like that.” Palin also is optimistic about the election. “I truly believe that the wisdom of the people will be rebuilt on (Election Day),” she said. “As they enter that voting booth, they will understand the stark contrast between the two tickets.”
Barack Obama will air a 30-minute program at 7 tonight, the first time since Ross Perot that a presidential candidate has aired a prolonged campaign commercial in prime time. Based on the trailer and Obama’s campaign speeches this week, the program will make a closing argument for his campaign and will highlight everyday voters, their everyday troubles and his plans to address them, the New York Times reported. The program will also include a live broadcast from an Obama rally in Florida.
Given that Obama has a lead in polls, is the program a risk? Could it come across as over the top? A “Saturday Night Live” skit had Obama playing it safe by turning the program into a variety show that included a singing Bill Clinton.
Kansas remains ruby-red McCain country, with the Republican favored to win 53 to 41 percent over Barack Obama in the latest SurveyUSA poll co-sponsored by Wichita’s KWCH, Channel 12. But Obama led by 10 percent among the 15 percent of Kansans who said last week that they had voted early. McCain led by 15 percent among those yet to vote.
The Web site politicalhumor.about.com has been rounding up the best bumper sticker slogans of the presidential campaign. Those for Republicans include “McCain-Palin: A Hero and a Hottie,” “Your Wallet: The One Place Democrats Are Willing to Drill,” “Burly Men for Palin, Girlie Men for Biden,” “Clinging to God and My Gun While I Vote Republican” and “I Wanna Be Sarah’s Intern!” The Democrats‘ include “John McCain: Like Bush, But Older,” “This One Is Voting For That One,” “McCain-Palin: Unstable and Unable,” “Polar Bears Against Palin” and “If I Owned 7 Houses, I’d Think the Economy Was Great Too!”
It was fair game to talk about John Edwards’ $400 haircut (which conservative commentators did for weeks), because Edwards was basing much of his presidential campaign on poverty issues. So why is it sexist, as Sarah Palin’s campaign claims, for the press to report that the Republican National Committee spent $150,000 in one month on designer clothes and accessories for Palin and her family? Or that her campaign spent almost $23,000 in the first half of October on a makeup artist and another $10,000 on a hair stylist? After all, much of Palin’s campaign speeches are appeals to Joe Six-Pack and Joe the Plumber. As columnist Maureen Dowd noted: “Sexism would be to treat Palin differently, or more delicately, than one of the guys.”
“In the fourth quarter if you’re down a little bit you don’t say, ‘Well, OK, I guess it’s over. It was a nice game.’ No! That’s when you dig in and push harder,” said Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kan., stumping for his friend John McCain in eastern Pennsylvania last week. Brownback warned that electing Barack Obama would allow “five people in robes” on an activist U.S. Supreme Court to sidestep the rule of law and find new rights in the Constitution. At the McCain-Palin headquarters in Scranton, the local roots of Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden also came up. “I didn’t know Joe was from Scranton,” Brownback said.
“Neither did we,” answered several listeners in unison.
A USA Today article noted that Kansas Republicans comes in “two shades of red that often clash” – for social conservatives and pro-business moderates.
But John “McCain has really bridged that divide,” said Thomas Frank, author of “What’s the Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America.” “The country club set really like McCain, and values voters really like (Sarah) Palin.”
As a result, and despite Barack Obama’s familial ties to El Dorado, as Kansas State University political scientist Joseph Aistrup told the newspaper, “The question is not whether McCain wins, but by how much.”
Nothing to do this weekend? Mix it up with the John McCain and Barack Obama soundboards assembled by Slate, which were patterned after a famous array of Arnold Schwarzenegger sound clips. Favorite utterances from the Slate soundboards include McCain’s “I do know this: Jamming gaydar is not a federal responsibility” and Obama’s “If it’s not this, then it would be something else.”
“It’s ridiculous that this needs saying, but: Fake Americans are Americans,” columnist Leonard Pitts wrote about comments by Sarah Palin and other Republicans about certain “pro-American” or “real” parts of the country. “And if we disagree with so-called Real Americans politically, our passion is nevertheless rooted in the same place theirs is. Love of country.
“Many Real Americans won’t believe that. For them, love of country and social conservatism are inextricably linked, one and the same. Me, I don’t care for the straitjacket of ideology, preferring the freedom to accept or reject ideas on their merits. So when social conservatives championed, say, individual accountability and responsible fatherhood, I was happy to join them. But that was back when I knew what ‘conservative’ meant.”
“Just like that, Democratic vice presidential candidate Joe Biden has given voters the single reason why they should not elect Barack Obama president of the United States,” wrote columnist Cal Thomas. “In rambling remarks in Seattle, Biden guaranteed that if Obama is elected president there will be an international incident to ‘test him’ less than six months after his inauguration.”
Thomas cited as historical examples the two Russian tests of John F. Kennedy and, on the flip side, the reaction by the Iranians when Ronald Reagan was elected.
Thomas’ conclusion: “Why shouldn’t a President Obama be tested by the world’s tyrants? And wouldn’t it be better if they feared a President McCain and decided not to put him to the test? Not having a president tested in this way would benefit America, the fragile economy and world order.”
John McCain warned during the presidential debate last week that ACORN, a group that he praised when he was its keynote speaker in 2006, was “on the verge of maybe perpetrating one of the greatest frauds in voter history” and “may be destroying the fabric of democracy.” But columnist Bob Herbert argued that “when it comes to voting, the real threat to democracy is the nonstop campaign by the GOP and its supporters to disenfranchise American citizens who have every right to cast a ballot.”
Herbert wrote: “In one politically crucial state after another – in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, you name it – the GOP has unleashed foot soldiers whose insidious mission is to make the voting process as difficult as possible – or, better yet, impossible – for citizens who are believed to favor Democrats. For McCain to flip reality on its head and point to an overwhelmingly legitimate voter-registration effort as a threat to the ‘fabric of democracy’ is a breathtaking exercise in absurdity.”
Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin is doing her part to boost the economy. The Republican National Committee spent $150,000 just in September to clothe and accessorize Palin and her family, including nearly $50,000 at Saks Fifth Avenue and nearly $5,000 on hair and makeup. “With all of the important issues facing the country right now, it’s remarkable that we’re spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses,” a McCain spokeswoman said. Yeah, we could be talking about former 1960s radicals.
Meanwhile, a new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll found that 55 percent of voters say Palin is not qualified to be president, up from 50 percent two weeks ago.
“The truth few wish to utter is that the GOP has abandoned many conservatives, who mostly nurse their angst in private,” wrote columnist Kathleen Parker about Christopher Buckley’s decision to endorse Barack Obama and resign from National Review, the publication that his father, William F. Buckley, founded. “Years of pandering to the extreme wing – the ‘kooks’ the senior Buckley tried to separate from the right – have created a party no longer attentive to its principles.”
Though many conservatives have treated Buckley as a traitor, Parker contends that he is demonstrating his father’s swashbuckling, defiant spirit in reminding Republicans of how far they have strayed off course.
John McCain’s efforts to distance himself from President Bush appear to be making some progress, the Washington Post reported. Among independents, 54 percent now see him as offering a new direction. That’s up from 44 percent before the third presidential debate, when McCain declared that “I am not George Bush.” McCain has been airing a campaign commercial in which he looks into the camera and says, “The last eight years haven’t worked very well, have they?”
When ABC’s “Nightline” visited El Dorado, hometown of Barack Obama’s maternal grandfather, as part of the “50 States in 50 Days” series, it found no one willing to predict Obama would beat John McCain there on Nov. 4. Republican Mike Cooper told ABC that when Obama visited Butler Community College in January, “I had several customers that I had talked with who lived in the area, and three or four of them said anybody with the name Barack Hussein Obama shouldn’t even be here.”
Teachers have the right to express their political preferences so long as their doing so does not interfere with their job and the education of their students. A good argument can be made that political buttons and the like can spark classroom discussion about the candidates, politics and government. It can be educational for students to know what the issues are, and to form their own opinions about the election. It is hard to see how wearing a campaign button would disrupt education, Such expression would be more likely to enhance it. Suppression of political views sends the wrong message to students. – Watertown (N.Y.) Daily Times editorial
If teachers are using them as political billboards – announcing their partisan identifications from their chests – the question of the intrusion of politics in the classroom cannot be avoided. One way of answering it is to claim that teachers who wear campaign buttons are performing a valuable educational purpose. But you don’t have to be overtly partisan in order to proclaim the virtue of participating in the political process. You can get that message across with a button that reads “I will vote on Nov. 4.” But what about a faculty member’s rights? This is the most often voiced objection to a button ban. It curtails the constitutionally protected speech of teachers. When faculty members are not in class, they remain free to sport their buttons, and when they leave the campus, the employer has no say at all about what they do or do not wear. – Stanley Fish, New York Times
Joe Biden predicted Saturday that Barack Obama, if elected president, would quickly face a challenge from some hostile power or terrorist group. “Watch, we’re going to have an international crisis, a generated crisis, to test the mettle of this guy,” Biden said. The McCain camp is trying to capitalize on the comments and argue that the United States can’t afford to elect an untested chief executive.
As if we needed further evidence that there’s too much money in presidential politics: Barack Obama is buying a half hour of prime time Oct. 29 on CBS, NBC and Fox, at the price of $950,000 to $1 million to each network – a drop in the bucket of the record $150 million Obama raised in September. In Fox’s case, that means Major League Baseball has agreed to delay the start of a World Series game (assuming the game is necessary) by about eight minutes.
Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama for president isn’t a big deal primarily because he is a Republican and former secretary of state for George W. Bush. It’s a big deal because Powell is so respected and influential among moderate Republicans and independents – the voters who are key to winning the election.
Powell said that his endorsement of Obama was “not out of any lack of respect or admiration for Sen. John McCain.” But he believes that Obama is better suited to handle economic problems and to improve our nation’s world standing.
Powell did criticize the tone of McCain’s campaign and the tactics of GOP operatives who spread false rumors about Obama being a Muslim. And to his credit, Powell also stood up for Muslim-Americans. “Is there something wrong with some 7-year-old Muslim-American kid believing that he or she could be president?” Powell asked. There shouldn’t be.
While viewers surveyed said overwhelmingly that Barack Obama “won” the final debate, John McCain’s campaign argues that the debate was a critical turning point for its candidate, the Washington Post’s The Fix blog reported. The campaign points to several opinion polls showing that McCain has cut into Obama’s lead by gaining support among white men.
All states get to vote in the presidential election, but you wouldn’t know it by the way Barack Obama and John McCain are focused on the Electoral College battleground states in these waning days. For its part, the Republican National Committee planned to spend $18 million in 18 days on ads in eight states: Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, North Carolina, Virginia, Indiana, Missouri and Colorado. Meanwhile, Kansans and voters in the majority of other states feel like so much chopped liver.
In a New Yorker profile of Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden, a discussion of Barack Obama’s vetting of Biden reveals that another contender “would be very happy,” in Obama’s words, “if I assigned them to reorganize the government.” That contender apparently was Gov. Kathleen Sebelius. Biden rejected that possible assignment, also declining to act as a shadow secretary of state. Biden told the magazine he liked the model of Vice President Lyndon Johnson: “I would see one of my jobs as essentially being the president of the Senate in the sense of actually not presiding as much as interacting, continuing to interact, talking to Harry Reid every day or talking to Nancy Pelosi,” Biden said, referring to the Senate majority leader and the House speaker. “Johnson actually husbanded the relationships as vice president. He’d have senators down to his home. People knew – as they know about me now – that he understood politics in the broad terms of Congress, and he understood the detail of the legislation.”
Joe the Plumber, aka Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher, may be sorry he ever approached Barack Obama during a campaign visit to his Holland, Ohio, neighborhood last week to talk about taxes. But he’s been a dream for campaign comedy. A sample:
“Do you know the saddest part about the Joe the Plumber story? Last month, he was an investment banker.” – Jay Leno
“Joe the plumber has become quite the celebrity. After the debate, he was rushed to Washington to unclog the valve on Dick Cheney.” – David Letterman
“Turns out Joe the Plumber, his name is not Joe and he is not a licensed plumber and he owes back taxes. So it sounds like he has the best plan to reduce taxes – don’t pay them.” – Leno
“Everyone has Joe the Plumber fever. Even the Statue of Liberty was holding a plunger.” – Letterman
“A full 67 percent of Americans say they’ve seen enough and they don’t want any more presidential debates. The other 33 percent are plumbers who want to hear their name on television.” – Conan O’Brien
“Events are moving fast in my campaign, and, yes, it’s true that this morning I’ve dismissed my entire team of senior advisers. All of their positions will now be held by a man named Joe the Plumber.” – John McCain
According to the Nielsen ratings, Wednesday’s final presidential debate between John McCain and Barack Obama was viewed by 56.5 million people – impressive considering it was competing with baseball, but nowhere near, say, Super Bowl viewership. The audiences for their first and second debates were 52.4 million and 63.2 million, respectively. The vice presidential face-off between Sarah Palin and Joe Biden (in photo) remains king, with 69.9 million viewers (which was 6 million fewer than for the “Seinfeld” finale in 1998).
Democrat Hillary Clinton is credited with putting 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling of the U.S. presidency, but she isn’t ready to credit Republican Sarah Palin for finishing the job. “Really, no one will shatter that ceiling until we have a woman serving as president or vice president,” Clinton told CNN. And though it’s exciting to see a woman on the GOP ticket, she said, “I would like to see the very first woman in the White House who I agree with and who I think has policies that would really fulfill the goals that I have for our country.”
Sarah Palin said that recent descriptions of her by unnamed McCain aides as a “diva” and a “whack job” who alienates campaign staff were untrue – and she wants to meet with anyone who might feel that way. “I have never met any of those who I have heard to have written something or say something negative,” Palin said. “I would love to meet these people, have a conversation instead of them superficially making a statement like that.” Palin also is optimistic about the election. “I truly believe that the wisdom of the people will be rebuilt on (Election Day),” she said. “As they enter that voting booth, they will understand the stark contrast between the two tickets.”
