Hank Kalet

McCain’s obscured ‘View’

Pam Spaulding of Pam’s House Blend alerted me to this bit of nuttiness, noted on The Huffington Post:

The ladies of “The View” confronted John McCain today for lying in recent attack ads, pressed him on abortion and questioned his choice of Sarah Palin.

In arguably his toughest interview yet, co-host Joy Behar asked McCain, “There are ads running from your campaign… Now we know that those two ads are untrue, they are lies. And yet, you at the end of it say you approve these messages. Do you really approve these?”

And the serious media — and latenight comedians — make fun of this show (That includes me, to be honest)? I’m hoping that Charles Gibson, Brian Williams and the rest were watching and take note.

Bravo to the hosts.

A vent and a rant

I received this e-mail today from my friend Bill, a committed Obama supporter:

Need to vent …..You and I have seen the Rove machine in action before, but I want to shove my head through a wall. Apparently Johnny Mac can say anything on his commercials with no relation to the truth, and just rely on this public perception of him being an honorable man. Even though I’ve seen a few good (AP, CNN) stories debunking his lies, his campaign keeps spewing them out there. From Barack raising taxes (warm up act), to ‘his’ sex education to minors (main course) to his ‘disrespectful’ (for desert, and it sounds a lot like uppity to me), I’m in the panic camp. Barack needs to change the game, just pointing out the tactics isn’t going to get him any ground, and pushing out his commercials pointing out McCain’s hypocrisy I can’t see gaining any ground as well. The media just reports this stuff as ‘he said, he said’, he needs something that will hit the news cycle like the faux pig/lipstick outrage. Have some of his military supporters cut a commercial talking about Mc’s ‘loss of honor’, have a mother & child (ala Move On) talking about how the bill protected her child from sexual predators. I’m really in full panic, he needs something big. Once the ‘meme’ is set, it’s hard to shake it off. I see now where ‘outraged’ Repubs are now using shorthand (He called her a pig), Hannity throws ranting and merging Wright and Ayers, saying how Barack was ‘involved’ with them for 20 years. I see Obama putting the fight on more than Kerry and Gore, but that still wont’ be enough, it’s very disheartening to watch.

I feel his pain. Here is my response:

I agree with Rachel Maddow. It is time to call a lie a lie and stop pussyfooting around.

The thing about all of this is that we are only one week out of the conventions and the Palin Effect remains an unknown. I suspect the campaign is just starting to figure out what needs to be done. I would probably do a few things:

1. Go hard after McCain and show that his views are outside the mainstream (abortion, tax cuts) and that he appears willing to say and do almost anything to win. Remind people that McCain announced his candidacy on Leno. Remind people that McCain essentially has been running for president since 2000, that his “put country first” has not been true of McCain since he entered the Senate.

2. Use the Gibson interview to demonstrate that Palin not only has no experience in foreign affairs but seems to have not been paying attention to foreign affairs at all during her political lifetime. Run the clip where she essentially endorses war with Russia over Georgia — and remind people that her view is actually consistent with McCain’s. Run an ad that shows smiling high school kids and ask the public if they are truly willing to put their adolescents’ lives in the hands of candidates who seem all too willing to send the troops in.

3. Remember Clinton. This election is about the economy. Hammer the economic message. Go after McCain for his healthcare tax — he wants to tax nonwage benefits at a time when most of us are underinsured — and tie it to his plan to extend the Bush tax cuts and the Obama plan to cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans. Run ads showing how unserious McCain is — “Bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran,” the off-color jokes — and ask whether he has the temperament to be president.

4. Connect with voters. Obama seems to have forgotten what got him to the nomination in the first place, having been knocked off-balance by Hillary Clinton. He needs to resume the big events and talk about what he envisions government’s role to be in people’s lives and contrast it with the last eight years. And he needs to steal Reagan’s line and ask if we are better off now than we were in 2000 and whether anyone in their right mind thinks we will be better off in 2012 if we do not break with the Bush playbook — which, based on what McCain is actually talking about doing, can only be accomplished by electing Obama.

I do think the media has been better, but it still avoids calling a lie a lie and it still follows what Paul Begala on Maddow’s radio show yesterday calls the big four: scandal, gaffes, polls and ads. If the media is going to focus on those four things, then the Obama campaign needs to craft its message and its response to McCain to fit the paradigm.

What does anyone else think?

The reviews of Sarah Palin’s interview with Charlie Gibson are mixed and I’m not sure why. The parts I’ve seen showed her to be out of her element, uncomfortable answering questions that any presidential or vice-presidential candidate should have no problem addressing.

I think Juan Cole sums up best how she did:

Sarah Palin revealed herself in the Charlie Gibson interview on ABC to be nervous, uninformed, green and generally not ready for prime time. The interview was full of stock phrases she was made to memorize, and which she repeated over and over again when stumped. She knows nothing about how Iran is run, or about Pakistan, or about al-Qaeda, and even is ignorant of the Bush doctrine of preemptive warfare. It was a shockingly bad performance.

She had the hubris to suggest that her lack of knowledge and experience is a virtue. Why Americans, practical people, would fall for this line is beyond me. Would you want your car to be worked on by an inexperienced and ignorant mechanic? Would you want a plumber messing around with your pipes who did not know his way around wrenches?

I’m tired of her trumpeting being from a small town as if that is qualification for high office. It isn’t where you are from that matters. My parents are from Star Tannery, Va. and Winchester, Va., respectively, and I was born in Albuquerque, NM (not then a big city) and grew up mostly on army bases or in small places like Fuquay Springs, NC (near Ft. Bragg). These were not exactly Manhattan. We did not have a lot of money when I was growing up and I went to Northwestern on a scholarship. My background isn’t so different from hers. But Palin futzed around at this campus and that, at one point switching from the University of Hawaii because the campus was on the rainy side of Oahu. How frivolous! She isn’t well educated and doesn’t appear to have thought it was important to become so. She has never shown any interest in the world at large, which she now wants to run. She is clearly ambitious, but nothing is more dangerous than ambition with no qualifications.

Quite true. But what he found most appalling, however, was her willingness to BS her way through a discussion of the Bush Doctrine — the president’s declaration that we have the unilateral right to act prevent the possibility of an attack even before an imminent threat is likely.

She not only had no idea what the Bush doctrine was, she tried to BS her way through the question instead of being honest about not having heard of it. It is one thing to be ignorant about something, another not to be willing to admit it. The whole interview is painful for the narrow-minded and ill-informed view of the world it displays, but this is the nadir. And remember, McCain could have chosen Kay Bailey Hutchison if he wanted a woman on the ticket.

James Fallows adds this:

What Sarah Palin revealed is that she has not been interested enough in world affairs to become minimally conversant with the issues. Many people in our great land might have difficulty defining the “Bush Doctrine” exactly. But not to recognize the name, as obviously was the case for Palin, indicates not a failure of last-minute cramming but a lack of attention to any foreign-policy discussion whatsoever in the last seven years.

Runner’s diary, Friday

I finished up a five-day running week today with another four-mile run through the streets of South Brunswick and Plainsboro. My legs were tight, but I muddled though — and finished with some weight work focused on my legs. I’m thinking that walking might be difficult tomorrow.

iPod: podcast of Fresh Air interview with Andrew J. Bacevich

The liberal media — finally

There’s a good review of the new “Rachel Maddow Show” in Slate, but I think this short blog item from Matthew Yglesias (by way of Andrew Golis) sums up why Rachel hosting a show on MSNBC matters:

As of last week, had a liberal journalist like Ari Berman broken a news story like this it would have been published on The Nation, picked up in some blogs, and then it would have died.