Month: August 2008

At least two candidates on the national tickets will have sons serving in Iraq.

Bretton Woods, New Hampshire, 2 pm.

Everyone knows that John McCain loves Hollywood and the movies and celebrities. So this should come as no surprise, right:

When John McCain appears on "The Tonight Show with Jay Leno" on Monday, he’ll also make a sweep through L.A.’s fund-raising circles before public financing kicks in. Angie Harmon, David Zucker, Jon Cryer, Lionel Chetwynd, Craig T. Nelson, Jon Voight, Craig Haffner and Robert Duvall are among the names expected to attend the Beverly Hilton event, coinciding with the first night of the Democratic National Convention in Denver. Tickets start at $500. McCain’s Hollywood supporters are looking to mount a more high profile presence, with a contingent of stars going to the Republican National Convention expected to be announced soon.

Eric Zorn of the Chicago Tribune has compiled what seems to be an exhaustive chronology.

His new ad has some teeth:

To which the McCain campaign responds:

William Ayers, William Ayers, William Ayers. When Obama goes negative he usually goes after state issues; like this new ad playing in Nevada about nuclear waste or this ad about DHL job losses in Ohio. McCain, on the other hand, mostly deploys blanket negative statements: Obama is a celebrity, Obama isn’t ready to lead, Obama doesn’t care about the troops. One seems to be aiming for the national polls, the other for the electoral college.

Obama in Time:

I was always suspicious of dogma, and the excesses of the left and the right. One of my greatest criticisms of the Republican Party over the last 20 years is that it’s not particularly conservative. I can read conservatives from an earlier era—a George Will or a Peggy Noonan—and recognize wisdom, because it has much more to do with respect for tradition and the past and I think skepticism about being able to just take apart a society and put it back together. Because I do think that communities and nations and families aren’t subject to that kind of mechanical approach to change. But when I look at Tom DeLay or some of the commentators on Fox these days, there’s nothing particularly conservative about them.

This is interesting. Part of the McCain Celebrity, as packaged for the evangelical base, is the rescue of two Bangladeshi girls at the behest of Mother Theresa, one of whom, Bridget, they subsequently adopted. During my live-blogging of Saddleback, I described the McCain adoption story as "peerless." And it is indeed an admirable, selfless thing – and a completely legitimate aspect of a candidate’s life to be part of his campaign message. The story of how Mother Teresa talked them into it makes it all the more poignant.

The only trouble is: it’s not true:

The story about Mother Teresa “convincing” Mrs. McCain to bring home two children from an orphanage in Bangladesh has been retold many times. Initially, the “About Cindy McCain” page on the McCain campaign website read: “Mother Teresa convinced Cindy to take two babies in need of medical attention to the United States. One of those babies is now their adopted daughter, 16-year-old Bridget McCain.”

The media picked up the theme. A story earlier this year on ABC’s “Good Morning America” stated, “With Mother Teresa’s encouragement she brought her fourth child, Bridget, home.” An April 2008 Wall Street Journal profile states that Mother Teresa “implored” Cindy to bring the girls to the United States. Other articles say Cindy did it “at the behest” of Mother Teresa.

But a source who was with McCain on that 1991 trip, and who asked that his name not be used because of prior legal dealings with the McCain family, says that Mother Teresa was not at the orphanage when Cindy decided to bring the two girls home.

A 1991 article in the Arizona Star at the time of the adoption only mentions that the children were from an orphanage that was started by Mother Teresa. It does not mention a meeting with Mother Teresa or her asking McCain to bring the girls to the US.

This is the pattern:

A story that shows the McCains’ genuine compassion and faith is embellished over the years to make the story a little more perfect, a little more salient, a little better as a narrative. It’s especially important to add these embellishments when your goal is to appeal to a fundamentalist base, when your own prickly, personal and private faith isn’t very marketable. And when your adopted daughter is Bangladeshi, and when that fact has been disgracefully used against you by the Bush machine in 2000, and when some fringes of your base get queasy about multi-racial families, what better way to describe the adoption than as something Mother Teresa herself "implored" you to do? More interesting: the first actual reports of this event do not mention this fact. They are added later.

I note that this false story was on the McCain website and has since been corrected. Now, the question is whether and when Cindy McCain met with Mother Teresa:

A McCain source acknowledged that Cindy McCain did not meet Mother Teresa during the 1991 trip to Bangladesh but said McCain did meet her later on, although the source could not say when or where. The campaign has since reworded the reference to the adoption on its website.

Can we nail down the date of that meeting? Or are these questions no one should dare ask of a POW war hero?

(Photo: Doug Collier/Getty.)

Weigel nails the current campaign dynamic:

Not only are McCain’s attacks all about character and weakness; Obama’s responses basically validate them. That guy says I’ve got ladyparts and I hate America and want to raise taxes: In fact, I want to cut some taxes and raise others! Obama, accused of being a wimp, waves his calculator.

What could Obama do, though? There’s a character case to make against McCain, whose shifting issue positions and bloated sense of self-importance are almost Obama-like. But every attack on McCain’s character comes up against the iron wall of his POW days.

This is the irony of that weird meme of a few weeks back that Obama "couldn’t take a joke" (after that New Yorker cartoon portraying him as a terrorist): It’s McCain who can’t be mocked without holy hell unleashing. When the host of one of the Sunday shows accusing a guest of "questioning McCain’s integrity" for pointing out that he’s changed positions, you’ve got a problem. The Clintons are/were better aggressive campaigners, but how would the sleaze and naked ambition of that family be matching up against this? The only hope the Democrats ever had of making this easy was a Mitt Romney nomination. That guy made Thomas Beatie look like John Holmes.

Ambers’ take:

[T]hink of this development as simply a beachhead growing a few inches taller against a very powerful wave.  Eight years of Republicans and President Bush. A Democratic advantage on the economy — an economy which is not improving. A Democratic GOTV advantage. A Democratic enthusiasm advantage. A Democratic down-ballot advantage. And McCain was always, inevitably going to grow stronger as partisanship set in.

The polls will be worth looking at again a week after the GOP convention. All we know for sure right now is: it’s close. The two candidates are both very formidable ones, big characters, with big bios, and differing appeals in a complicated time.

Not a great exchange as the dominant theme in the election turns to economic distress and foreclosures:

Senator John McCain said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife, Cindy, own. "I think — I’ll have my staff get to you," McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. "It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you."

The correct answer is at least four, located in Arizona, California and Virginia, according to his staff. Newsweek estimated this summer that the couple owns at least seven properties.