McCain shows his true character and leadership

How unhinged was Newt Gingrich? He called McCain's campaign suspension gambit "the greatest single act of responsible leadership ever taken by a presidential candidate." Arianna Huffington

Saturday, September 27, 2008
The Invisible Man

At what point might people look at John McCain and say, okay, we admit it, we blew it, the guy has no business being president? I'm deadly serious. It's not like he's trying to hide it. What I'm talking about is the fact that he's entirely about shooting from the hip. And, of late, lying. After a while, it gets really disturbing. Calmness under fire, careful deliberation? Since when? Sarah Palin? Suspending his campaign? "We are all Georgians?" F-bombs, calling his wife a c*nt?

...

John McCain, it seems, took it all deeply to heart. A party boy, a poor student, he showed a reckless abandon from the start. Had he not been the son and grandson of admirals his career might have ended before it started; but I'd guess it endeared him to his fellow fliers. The archetype of the archetype. Tough guy, ****-you sort of a guy.


http://sidschwab.blogspot.com/2008/09/invisible-man.html

On strategy and tactics

James Fallows

27 Sep 2008 02:47 pm

The least self-aware moment for John McCain in last night's debate came at the half-way point, when he said, "I'm afraid Senator Obama doesn't understand the difference between a tactic and a strategy."

In a sense McCain was sticking to his battle plan in saying this -- the plan being on-message hammering-home of the "Obama doesn't understand" theme. In another sense, he lost his way, since he immediately segued not into a discussion of strategic matters in Iraq and Afghanistan but into an anecdote. But that kind of literal parsing of his answer -- tactical analysis, you might call it -- really misses the point.

There has been no greater contrast between the Obama and McCain campaigns than the tactical-vs-strategic difference, with McCain demonstrating the primacy of short-term tactics and Obama sticking to a more coherent long-term strategy. And McCain's dismissive comment suggests that he still does not realize this.

Some examples are so familiar as to need no explanation: McCain choosing the ten-day tactical "bounce" from the surprise choice of Sarah Palin, in exchange for the enormous strategic risk in choosing an un-vetted and now obviously unqualified running mate. Or McCain rolling the dice with his threat to boycott the debate -- and then, once on stage, appearing to be only mildly interested in the financial-bailout deal that 72 hours earlier was the stated reason for overturning all agreements about the debates .

But the personas that the two men chose to present in the debate indicated the difference in a profound way. The truths of debates are these:

On Thursday 9/25 McG wrote:

McCain feels he will be more useful to America in Washington D.C. meeting figuring out the hold up, weighing options and negotiating a deal. I don't know what Obama feels as no one seems to have a quote from him on beyond what I have posted.

Obama's supporters apparently feel Obama is a useless cog and should stay in Florida with his thumb up his ass while others actually try to resolve the problems.

McCain Confuses Me

So the bailout deal collapses and McCain is headed to ... Iowa?

I'm confused. I assumed the "country-first" move would be to suspend his campaign all over again and hunker down in Washington till we worked things out.

It wouldn't even be that hard. McCain can find more than half the votes we need among his home-state colleagues in the House, all of whom voted against the deal.

--Noam Scheiber

Quote:

McCain Confuses Me

So the bailout deal collapses and McCain is headed to ... Iowa?

I'm confused. I assumed the "country-first" move would be to suspend his campaign all over again and hunker down in Washington till we worked things out.

It wouldn't even be that hard. McCain can find more than half the votes we need among his home-state colleagues in the House, all of whom voted against the deal.

--Noam Scheiber

I'm confused. I assumed the "country-first" move would be to suspend his campaign all over again and hunker down in Washington till we worked things out.

A top aide to Senator John McCain said the Republican presidential candidate will not go to Capitol Hill Saturday afternoon, as negotiators meet to work out a deal on the financial bailout plan.

Senior adviser Mark Salter just told reporters outside McCain’s campaign headquarters in Arlington, VA that the Senator will instead continue to make calls to members of Congress.

Salter said he will not go because “he can effectively do what he needs to do by phone." "He’s calling members on both sides, talking to people in the administration, helping out as he can.’’ The campaign said it will release a list of people McCain spoke with later Saturday.

October 6, 2008 10:07
Embarracuda
Posted by Joe Klein

I'm of two minds about how to deal with the McCain campaign's further descent into ugliness. Their strategy is simple: you throw crap against a wall and then giggle as the media try to analyze the putresence in a way that conveys a sense of balance: "Well, it is bull-pucky, but the splatter pattern is interesting..." which, of course, only serves to get your perverse message out. I really don't want to be a part of that. But...every so often, we journalists have a duty to remind readers just how dingy the McCain campaign, and its right-wing acolytes in the media (I'm looking at you, Sean Hannity) have become--especially in their efforts to divert public attention from the economic crisis we're facing. And so inept at it: other campaigns have decided that their only shot is going negative, but usually they don't announce it, as several McCain aides have in recent days--there's no way we can win on the economy, so we're going to go sludge-diving.

But since we are dealing with manure here, I'll put the rest of this post below the fold.

It is appropriate that the prime vessel for this assault is Sarah Palin, whose very presence on a national ticket is an insult to your intelligence. She now has "credibility," we are told, because she managed to read talking points off notecards in the debate last week with unwitting enthusiasm.

Over the weekend, she picked up on an article in The New York Times, which essentially says that Barack Obama and the former terrorist Bill Ayers have crossed paths in Chicago, served on a couple of charitable boards together, but aren't particularly close. To Palin--or her scriptwriters--this means that Obama has been "palling around" with terrorists. Now, I wish Ayers had done some serious jail time; he certainly needed to pay some penance for his youthful criminality--even if most people in Chicago, including the mayor, have decided that he has something of value to say about education. But I can also understand how Obama, who was a child when Ayers was cutting his idiot swath, would not quite understand the enormity of the professor's background. (I got to know Alger Hiss twenty years after the fact--he was a printing salesman then, a friend of my father's--and thought of him as a sweet old man, if a good deal more liberal than dad's other friends.)

In any case, this is rather rich coming from Palin, who is married to a man who belonged to a political party--the Alaskan Independence Party--that wanted to secede from the union. (I should add here that the Times may have been overreacting to the McCain campaign's attack on its fairness here: the Ayers story was a nothingburger, but it was placed prominently in the top left hand corner of page one--a position that would seem to indicate that it contained important news, which it didn't.)

Then we have the ever-reliable Bill Kristol, in today's New York Times, advising Palin to bring up the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Palin, of course, believes that's a darn good idea:

“To tell you the truth, Bill, I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country, and to have sat in the pews for 20 years and listened to that " with, I don’t know, a sense of condoning it, I guess, because he didn’t get up and leave " to me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

So then, I'd guess, it would be appropriate to bring up some of the nuttiness that passes for godliness in Palin's religious life. Leave aside the fact that The Embarracuda allowed herself to participate in a cermony that protected her from witchcraft, how about her presence--she didn't "get up and leave"-- at a sermon by the founder of Jews for Jesus, who argued that the Palestinian terrorist acts against Israel were God's "judgment" on the Jews because they hadn't accepted Jesus.

Speaking of Jews, the ever-execrable Sean Hannity has been having intercourse with a known Jew-hater named Andy Martin, who now wants to expose Barack Obama as a Muslim. According to the Washington Times:

In 1986, when Mr. Martin ran as a Democrat for Connecticut's 3rd Congressional District seat under the name "Anthony R. Martin-Trigona," his campaign committee filed papers saying its purpose was to "exterminate Jew power in America and impeach U.S. District Court of Appeals judges in New York City."

Calling all Podhoretzs! Where's the outrage? I mean, don't the hateful doings at Palin's church and Hannity's perfidy deserve a lengthy exegesis from Pete Wehner or Jennifer Rubin or one of the other empretzled ideologues over at Commentary?

As I said, I'm of two minds about this. I don't want to give currency to this sewage, so it will remain below the fold. And I'll try to devote the lion's share of my time to the issues--the war, the economic crisis, the fraying health insurance system, the environment--that should define this campaign. But what a desperate empty embarrassment the McCain campaign has become.

Obama Warns Against McCain 'Smear' Tactics
By Perry Bacon Jr.

ASHEVILLE, N.C. -- Sen. Barack Obama said today that, while his rival John McCain seeks to "distract you with smears" and "Swift Boat-style attacks" in the last weeks of the campaign, he would keep focused on economic issues and what he described as McCain's shortcomings.

"Senator McCain's campaign has announced that they plan to turn the page on the discussion about our economy and spend the final weeks of this campaign launching Swift Boat-style attacks on me," Obama told a crowd of thousands on the football field of Asheville High School. "Senator McCain and his operatives are gambling that he can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance. ... I want you to know that I'm going to keep on talking about issues that matter."

The Democratic nominee was reacting to reports of McCain's strategy telegraphed by his aides, as well as remarks Friday from Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin.

The Republican vice presidential nominee accused Obama of "palling around with terrorists," a reference to his association with William Ayers, who has confessed to domestic bombings as a member of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground. Ayers and Obama are not close and have not spoken in recent years, but they once served together on a nonprofit board that distributed educational grants in Chicago. Ayers hosted a gathering for Obama when he was running for the state Senate in Illinois a decade ago.

Obama did not refer specifically to Palin's remarks, nor did he detail exactly what the "smears" against him by McCain would be.

Tucker Bounds, a McCain spokesman, defended his campaign's strategy.

"Americans need to ask themselves if they've ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist or had a convicted felon help them buy their house, because those aren't smears. Those are true facts about Barack Obama," Bounds said, alluding to Ayers and Antoin Rezko, a real estate developer who was once a close ally of Obama and who bought property from the Illinois senator. Rezko was convicted earlier this year of several counts of bribery and other charges.

"Americans need to ask themselves if they've ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist or had a convicted felon help them buy their house, because those aren't smears. Those are true facts about Barack Obama," Bounds said, alluding to Ayers and Antoin Rezko, a real estate developer who was once a close ally of Obama and who bought property from the Illinois senator. Rezko was convicted earlier this year of several counts of bribery and other charges.