Tag Archives: McCain

it’s all in the past

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I’m inclined to accept this critique of a recent Obama ad alleging that McCain is surrounded by lobbyists. Here’s the ad.

The critique appears in today’s Washington Post, but it isn’t signed and it should be. Not only does the tone of the critique require that its author take responsibility for it, but the piece is written in the first person singular. If verb tenses matter, so does point of view.

And I’m wondering why Ms. Anonymous doesn’t take on this ad, which is far more devastating than the one she reviews.

Of course the second ad meets the usage test, past tense and all. I’m thinking this may be one of those reporterly suggestions of equivalence, even though McCain’s folks only severed their ties with lobbyists in March (if then, as some skeptics point out in the comment thread for this article), and as recently as February (as Anonymous points out) were carrying on the business of their clients from McCain’s Straight Talk Express bus. Still, Anonymous argues as follows:

The McCain campaign has taken a lot of heat from the fact-checking community over the last week for deceptive, at times dishonest, campaign ads. But the Obama campaign is hardly immune from criticism about misleading advertising. A good example: a couple of ads that slam the Republican nominee for employing lobbyists while insisting that “it’s over” for the special interests.

Notice that Anonymous mentions “a couple of ads” but discusses only one specifically. Where’s the other one, I wonder? I think the Obama campaign should correct the verb tenses in the offending ad. It would lose no punch for that. But I also think there’s no equivalence between that ad, or the Obama ad that misstated some facts about McCain’s record on education, and the constant barrage of lies coming out of the McCain campaign.

behind those Tina Fey glasses

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Since this clip has now disappeared from YouTube, the victim of a take-down order from NBC, it’s worth knowing that you can still watch it here (where NBC would have liked you to watch it in the first place).

The video has already gone viral, as they say, and given rise to speculation as to the role of Fey in the McCain/Palin campaign (not to mention future SNL episodes). It hardly seems worth crediting that NBC would offer some pale Fey imitation as Palin, but given McCain/Palin’s penchant for bamboozlement, one never knows. Indeed, since Fey has a day job, as the AP reports:

For the long term, “SNL” executive producer Lorne Michaels reportedly has an as-yet-undisclosed “Plan B” and “Plan C” for a Palin impersonator, in lieu of Fey.

If Governor Palin makes a future debut as Tina Fey inpersonating her, remember — you read it here first.

brushing up my Shakespeare

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It would be a good idea, I think, if the Democrats would get unified behind my guy’s candidacy instead of running around in circles like so many chickens, in a panic. Everybody, it seems, has some advice for the young Senator from Illinois, including me. Even Politico is piling on, with John Harris’s column today, filled with advice for Obama supposedly from Bill Clinton. Maybe we should all shut up.

In the wake of the first Palin interview, I’m thinking that the Governor of Alaska is already becoming old news, and that the more she talks the more she will tie herself to the tired old ideas of the Bush administration. I’m also thinking that the reason I got excited about my guy in the first place, back when I was a Clinton supporter, was that he reminded me of the excellence of my country at its best. Without appealing to chauvinism or nativism, without preaching American exceptionalism, he reminded us all of the America we can take pride in honestly. Right now John McCain is reminding us all on every hand of America at its worst, of patriotism that really is the last refuge of scoundrels.

I’m also thinking maybe Obama should apologize to Bill Clinton, as John Harris suggests. It might help unify democrats.

Simply put, Clinton will never be fully at peace with Obama until the Democratic nominee makes clear—in emphatic words, in public—that Clinton is not in any way racist, and did not try to “play the race card” during the Democratic nomination contest, as some commentators have suggested.

There’s no question that Clinton was impolitic in comparing Obama’s victory in South Carolina to Jesse Jackson’s victory 20 years earlier. But Clinton is understandably outraged that people would argue this remark negated a career-long commitment to racial equality—and that Obama stood by mute while such charges were made.

Clinton swallowed his medicine with his speech for Obama in Denver. Obama has still not fully swallowed his by making a public defense of Clinton on race.

I have criticized both Clintons for attacking Obama in ways that may have countenanced racism, but perhaps Harris’s advice is good no matter what may be the long truth about that issue. Obama could achieve a lot by putting his arms around Bill Clinton. Aside from anything else, the gesture would grab a lot of headlines and, again, be a reminder of America at its best.

And speaking of America at its best, an honest politician (and I believe that Obama has striven to be such) should put his own ad writers on notice that they are not to stretch the truth, not even a little. FactCheck.org find some occasional Obama stretchers in the media mix. They don’t help, it seems to me.

Well, there’s more advice, and I just offered to shut up. My guy is unveiling new ads and campaign emphases today. David Plouffe maintains the campaign is on course and will stick to its long term plan and also “that the attention being paid by national news media outlets to events like Obama’s lipstick comment was not mirrored in local news coverage.” Maybe we all need to quit obsessing about the lies coming out of the the Republican campaign. Maybe in the long run they will only hurt McCain. So at the end of the week I’m remembering those optimistic words of Shakespeare’s Earl of Kent, as he sits overnight in the stocks in king Lear.

Fortune, good night, smile once more; turn thy wheel!

McCain is not amused

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Whether Sarah Palin thinks Barack called her a pig remains unknown, but “her campaign advisers and those blushing violets around the uber-sensitive John McCain are more offended than nuns in a nudist romp,” according to Matt Frei of the BBC. Indeed, “[t]he governor of Alaska has become a kind of campaign superhero who can morph like liquid mercury,” while Joe Biden “has clearly been swallowed up by the witness protection programme,” as Frei puts it.

The McCain campaign combines utterly shameless lies and false claims with a posture of victimization towards the Obama camp’s attempts to fight back. The logic of McCain’s attacks seems to have nothing to do with expecting that anyone will believe the lies and distortions. They are now so shameless that FactCheck.org has objected to McCain’s use of its information and language. But the point seems to be to rattle Obama, to keep him on the defensive, and above all to avoid an honest debate about issues.

It will be interesting to see what happens as McCain again campaigns by himself, without his running mate by his side playing the adoring little woman. I may be a sexist, but I think Palin’s chief virtue for McCain is that she is a cipher. I think the McCain campaign will strive to maintain this situation, to avoid allowing her to individualize herself very much. The danger in her talking to the press except in a tightly controlled situation is not that she might appear ignorant or foolish but that she might begin to look like her own person, a situation that would immediately diminish her value to McCain, first as the adoring cheerleader for America’s great hero, and second as a person who can be played off against countless female stereotypes to McCain’s advantage. The Washington Post, on today’s editorial page, delivers a serious reproof to McCain over his pretended feminist outrage.

No matter that Mr. McCain used the lipstick-on-a-pig phrase himself, referring to (female) Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health-care plan, or that (female) former McCain aide Torie Clarke wrote a book with that title. In the heat of a campaign, operatives will pounce on any misstep and play to the referees over any arguable foul. We understand that, and certainly the Obama campaign has not been above such tactics. But this cynical use of the gender card is unusually silly.

The lies in McCain’s current “Original Maverick” video, now the lead at The Official John Mccain YouTube Channel, are also silly.

The Washington Post editorial writers still think McCain is a serious man, but a man who chose his running mate entirely as a political calculation, and a disreputable one at that, a man who comes to believe in his own inflated campaign image and who again and again stands behind lies and distortions regarding his opponent is not a serious man; no more serious, indeed, than a woman who allowed herself to be represented on the cover of Newsweek with a shotgun slung over her shoulder. I didn’t realize until today that the Newsweek cover is likely a deconstruction of this. O tempora, o mores!