presidential election – Page 14

McCain’s not sublime; he’s ridiculous

It is truly amazing how quickly John McCain’s campaign has descended into absolute absurdity. Candidates often must live with being the targets of parody — think of the best of Saturday Night Live, of Dan Ackroyd’s Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon, Chevy Chase’s Gerald Ford, the various Reagan’s and Dana Carvey’s George HW Bush and Ross Perot. Priceless.

But the joke going around today among political junkies is pretty basic and all revolve around the basic premise offered here by Matt Stoller on Open Left in a headline to a post:

Shutting the Blog Down to Focus on the Economy

Eric Alterman updated his Facebook status with the same kind of joke, saying he “is suspending all Facebook activity to deal with the nation’s economic crisis….”

I’m not sure about anyone else, but this just doesn’t seem like the kind of humor any political candidate would want to generate. As Greg Saunders writes on Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World blog (where I got the neat little campaign decal above), the debate gambit does little to “reinforce his ‘Country First’ slogan” and, instead, “really just makes him look like an old man who can’t walk and chew gum at the same time.”

Chris Cillizza, who writes The Fix blog for The Washington Post, offers what is the conventional wisdom on McCain’s decision:

The move is an obvious attempt by McCain and his campaign to paint the Arizona senator as above politics, willing to put aside his campaign for the good of the country.

He maybe right — but consider that he filed this post at 5:15 p.m. Since then, this proposal has been floated:

A McCain aide told Politico Wednesday night that the campaign is proposing to the Presidential Debate Commission and the Obama camp that if there’s no bailout deal by Friday, the first presidential debate should take the place of the vice presidential debate, currently scheduled for October 2 in St. Louis.

Under this scenario, the vice presidential debate would be rescheduled for a date yet to be determined, and take place in Oxford, Miss., where the first presidential debate is currently slated to be held.

Jonathan Martin on Politico, after outlining the debate switch as reported by CNN, offers an alternative explanation, more as an aside than anything:

This would also buy Palin some more prep time.

And McCain, as The Nation’s Adam Howard writes, gets a way to make news while possibly avoiding a debate that he was in no way ready for:

McCain must have been thinking, “I have to do something! Something maverick-y!” He has proven to be a master of short term solutions. Whether it’s the surge, drilling to solve the gas price crisis, firing the SEC chairman or picking Sarah Palin–virtually every McCain decision is based on short term goals and satisfaction.

I know, I know, John McCain is a great American hero and incapable of making a decision like this for purely cynical, political reasons–but bear with me on this. It has been something of an open secret all week that McCain hasn’t really been spending all that much time preparing for this Friday’s debate where reportedly Obama’s aides are putting him through the wringer. Could it be that McCain was starting to get cold feet? Not to mention the fact that he and his campaign are under fire right now for his campaign manager Rick Davis’ ties to Fannie Mae. Turns out he was getting paid indirectly by the mortgage giant as recently as last month–a reality McCain recently emphatically denied.

Then again, the McCain campaign has been all about denying reality lately. That way they can say the New York Times, a newspaper that enthusiastically endorsed John McCain during the GOP primaries, is an arm of the Obama campaign, no different than the Huffington Post. McCain appears to be running a dartboard campaign. Just throw whatever you can up there and see what sticks. This move may just work, voters may think McCain has their best interests at heart…but then why did he wait until now to call for bipartisanship? As I write this he’s running ads accusing Obama of being MIA on the bailout debate (even though Obama submitted to a lengthy press conference on the subject just yesterday, while McCain and especially Palin have largely refused to be questioned at length about it.) It doesn’t make sense, but then again, McCain rarely does.

I think David Letterman might agree:

David Letterman was so unhappy that Mr. McCain canceled his scheduled appearance on his show Wednesday night that he spent much of the first segment assailing the senator’s decision and suggesting “something doesn’t smell right” about the Senator’s plan to go to Washington to work on the financial crisis.

Mr. Letterman told his audience that Senator McCain had called him directly on short notice Wednesday, to tell him he had to cancel his appearance. After expressing his admiration for Mr. McCain and his sacrifice as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, Mr. Letterman said, “When you all up at the last minute and cancel, that’s not the John McCain I know.” He repeated that “something smells right now” and he suggested “somebody must have put something in his Metamucil.”

A little later, according to The New York Times, he returned to the McCain cancelation:

His critique reached a high point when he learned that at the very moment Mr. McCain was supposed to be on the couch next to him being interviewed, the senator was at the CBS News center three blocks away in Manhattan, getting ready to be interviewed by the CBS News anchor, Katie Couric.

Mr. Letterman ordered his director to put on a live feed from that location, which showed Mr. McCain getting made up to go on with Ms. Couric. “He doesn’t seem to be racing to the airport,” Mr. Letterman observed.

After listening to some questions from Ms. Couric, Mr. Letterman said, “Hey, John, I’ve got a question: You need a lift to the airport?”

I’m not sure this is the impact that McCain was shooting for.

(As an aside here: A poll by SurveyUSA — yes, they’ve already done a poll on this, found that just one in 10 respondents agree with McCain that the debate should be postponed.)

Race and the race in New Jersey

This is a disturbing report from The Star-Ledger:

Some neighborhoods in Roxbury were blanketed over the weekend with campaign literature from a white-supremacist, anti-immigration group that bluntly raised the issue of race regarding presidential candidate Barack Obama, offending some recipients and angering Democratic leaders.

A flier left on driveways in a neatly packaged plastic envelope questioned, “Do You Want A Black President?” and stated, “Black Ruled Nations most unstable and violent in the world.”

The material was distributed by a group called the League of American Patriots, which has a Butler mailing address.

The black-and-white flier featured “unflattering photos of Obama, including a doctored one portraying him with a long beard and turban.”

“Why should we seal our fate by allowing a black ruler to destroy us?” said the flier, which also detailed what it contended were facts on unemployment, poverty, HIV and crime rates among African Americans, while pointing out woes of a couple of predominantly black-populated countries.

I’ve seen this kind of thing before — in Princeton, where an area hate group distributed anti-Semetic literature in the same manner — and my hope is that this kind of nonsense is ignored.

But given the kind of ugliness that arrives in my e-mail Inbox almost daily and the comments I’ve heard from otherwise sane and humane people at parties, I can’t say I’m all that optimistic that this kind of assault on reason will fall on deaf ears.

Dispatches: We are all ‘special interests’

Dispatches is up, a column that essentially questions the use of “special interests” as an automatic perjorative.

Refocusing debate

Here is a new organization that, hopefully, will turn a campaign about pigs, lipstick and small towns into one about the economy and health care (I’d add the war to the list, but no one seems to want to talk about it).

The bubble deflates

It’s been nearly two weeks since John McCain accepted the Republican nomination and a full two weeks since Sarah Palin was officially made his running mate and it appears that the polls are starting to stabilize.

Consider the poll released today by The New York Times:

Polls taken after the Republican convention suggested that Mr. McCain had enjoyed a surge of support — particularly among white women after his selection of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate — but the latest poll indicates “the Palin effect” was, at least so far, a limited burst of interest. The contest appeared to be roughly where it was before the two conventions and before the vice-presidential selections: Mr. Obama had the support of 48 percent of registered voters, compared with 43 percent for Mr. McCain, a difference within the poll’s margin of sampling error, and statistically unchanged from the tally in the last New York Times/CBS News Poll in mid-August.

Other polls show a similar shift. Gallup, Hotline and Reuters/Zogby show Barack Obama with a narrow lead after a couple of weeks when McCain was leading. Rasmussen still shows a narrow McCain lead.

I am not a huge believer in polls — it is too easy to game them and so much depends on the sample, the questions and the sequence of the questions. Plus, as Les Payne and Brooke Gladstone pointed out on Bill Moyers’ Journal last week, the polls tend to oversimplify the electorate.

BROOKE GLADSTONE:Right. Well, and, you know, there’s always going to be a number of, a large section of the public that feels that way. But as you know, if we want to talk about something that’s happening in this campaign that bears heavily on the media, it’s the role of polls. And the fact of the matter is because every poll asks the question “Who would you vote for if the election were today?” instead of “Who are you going to vote for in November?” the number of genuine undecideds is hugely reduced.

Because if there were 30 percent undecided as there may well be even in the electorate today, nobody would be interested in the polls. So they ask this other question, forcing them to present their slight lean as a decision, so, therefore, the undecideds go into the single digits because the question is “Who would you vote for now?” instead of “Who will you be voting for in November?”

There are a lot of people out there that can be affected by this information.

LES PAYNE:I think that media, and I use that term advisedly, too often go to ask the polling question as opposed to doing the reporting. We have to inform our readers first, as opposed to asking them what they think about something we have not told them about. So, to the question of if the election was held today, I mean, the answer is, ‘I would be very surprised because I thought it was in November.’

I would add that I have some questions about how the samples are developed: Are the pollsters taking into account the huge influx of newly registered Democrats? Are they balancing the two parties in their samples?

Thurman Hart, on Blue Jersey, offers some interesting insight into the polling process by putting into black and white numbers that indicate that early polling downplays the extent to which the New Jersey electorate breaks for Democrats. In nearly every statewide election since 2004, the 3-4 percent lead held by the poll leader became a 7-9 point win for the Democrats. That’s a remarkable number that, I think, pretty much encapsulates the flaws with polling.