Tag Archives: Palin

markets (but not all) and McCain gone sour

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Financial markets may be in the tank, and luxury cars may be an embarrassment to hucksters, but capitalism is alive and well in niche markets where small-time entrepreneurs find ways to take advantage of fads du jour. Ben Smith today notes the following examples of campaign chic:

Maybe Jewish voters are warming up to Sarah Palin. For a mere $295 more than a John Edwards haircut, an Orthodox wigmaker is offering the “Sarah P.”

Meanwhile, a Park Slope hair salon is doing an “Updos for Obama” fundraiser.

But some sort of prize has to go to this one, for which I am grateful to my friend Dale Cannon. Dale sent me a video that I can’t now get to, but here’s another.

There are three versions of the Palin doll. Read all about them here. Too bad if you need one fast. Apparently they’re sold out.

Meanwhile, as Palin rallies continue to have all the charm of lynchings, McCain advisers are worried about their guy’s demeanor. All the negative campaigning is getting to him, some believe. He’s grumpy, seems angry all the time. Others are pooh-poohing the idea and urging that McCain reinvent himself as Ronald Reagan — ah that magical name — advising that the negative campaigning be left to Palin and the ad blitzes. One could almost feel sorry for McCain. Having run an increasingly filthy and dishonest campaign, he has put his reputation and his legacy as a public servant in jeopardy.

have we hit bottom yet?

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It’s a reasonable question, what with Sheriff Mike Scott of Lee County, Florida stroking the mob with this gem: “On Nov. 4, let’s leave Barack Hussein Obama wondering what happend! (sic)” The divine Sarah, when she arrived at this rally, would stroke the mob still further by evoking the ghosts of Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, claiming Obama’s associations with these men to be proof positive that her “opponent” is not a real American.

Of course. this tactic is designed to play into the racist hate campaign that has been waged against Obama on the Internet since the beginning of his rise to prominence, and there are apparently some voters who might still be persuaded. At least since the Nixon years, a substantial part of the Republican equation has required persuading some Americans to vote against their own economic and political interest. So, nobody should be surprised.

But I always am — surprised, that is. I wish that the Obama campaign had not felt it necessary to bring up the Keating Five. But I suppose that retaliation, or some other evocation of McCain’s complicated past, was required. What’s more interesting than that, though, is the way McCain seems to be trying to reinvent himself, sort of any which way he can. Here are some of Ben Smith’s thoughts about that.

I’d always thought McCain’s great strength in defending the Keating affair was that he’d acknolwedged making a huge mistake, and spent his career repenting by recasting himself as a reformer.

So when his campaign puts his lawyer on the line with reporters to contest the details of a congressional inquiry that, largely, let McCain off the hook, doesn’t that cloud the sin-confession-atonement dynamic a bit?

In Halperin’s account, McCain lawyer John Dowd described McCain’s “former relationship with Charles Keating as ‘social friends,'” and called the situation a “classic political smear job on John.”

Dowd also “thinks that the committee went too far in suggesting that McCain�s intervention with regulators was poor judgment,” Halperin writes.

But if so, what’s this giant mistake that transformed McCain into a reformer?

“Oh c’mon, do we have to?”

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Apparently Spunky Palin is not pleased with Maverick McCain’s decision to move campaign resources out of Michigan and has expressed her displeasure in a quick email. Spunky is also annoyed with Katie Couric, but Mav soldiers on. He is mostly annoyed with Barack Obama, it seems.

Meanwhile the House of Representatives have passed the Wall Street Bailout bill aka The Rescue. Here are a couple of background pieces on the financial crisis — best I’ve seen.

Sarah barracuda

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In the wake of last evening’s vice presidential debate there’s been a good deal of praise of Governor Sarah Palin. She exceeded expectations, no matter those expectations were monumentally low after her performances in televised interviews with Katie Couric. She put Joe Biden on the defensive, though perhaps she merely flabbergasted him as she did me with some of the nonsensical things she said. She returned from the wilderness of media savagery as the authentic Sarah Palin, defending the authentic maverick, John McCain, his vision, and his program of reform. What vision? What program of reform?

I heard nothing in last evening’s debate that convinced me that Palin possesses either intellect or compassion. Her ability to think on her feet seemed limited to a not very trustworthy sense of where she was out of her depth and needed to fall back on a memorized talking point. Sometimes she got the talking points wrong, particularly if there were any long sentences to negotiate, in which case she would immediately jump to the bottom line, or what I guess she took (or had been coached to take) as the bottom line.

To the extent that Palin’s debate discourse seemed informed by ideas, they were not ideas that she owns. In the one place during the debate where she had an opportunity to display some compassion, after Senator Biden displayed some emotion in speaking of his knowledge of single parenthood, Palin retreated to her talking points, picking up on the last phrase of Biden’s remarks; but instead of answering Gwen Ifill’s question about her Achilles heel (I guess she has none) or reacting with any authenticity to what had just occurred, she went back to the Maverick theme, which is about as meaningless a piece of junk rhetoric as there is in our present politics.

Here’s the exchange.

This video illustrates the entire Palin action in last evening’s debate, as I saw it: strategic retreat from the opportunity to utter an independent thought or express an honest emotion, mindless repetition of the talking points she had memorized together with shamelessly inauthentic expressions of loyalty to the McCain brand, and constant attack from her perspective as a putative outsider while flashing a cutesy smile and jazzing up her talk with fake enthusiasm, the pretended breathlessnes, the gee whiz, I’m just a poor country girl stuff. There’s about as much real intelligence there as we normally attribute to the fish that gave Palin her high-school nickname.