Month: September 2008

Nate Silver says dropping Palin doesn’t make electoral sense for McCain:

Not only would this hurt McCain, but it would also harm downballot candidates; the odds of Democrats finishing with 60+ Senate seats or 260+ House seats would increase markedly.

If he drops her or she quits, it’s devastating. Why? Because it’s all about his judgment and executive skills. He did no vetting and made his pick in an instant of insanity. This was his first serious presidential-level decision. It makes Bush’s decision-making look Solomonic. If McCain is forced to acknowledge this, his own campaign is over too. So they cannot give in; they have to double-down; they will train her to do something crazy and polarizing in the debate. They will pray that Biden is sexist or condescending and, given Biden, that may not be too big a gamble. There will be more fireworks and more gambits and more nuttiness: just to prevent Americans from thinking through the real decision before them.

But Americans will still have to ask themselves: could we trust Palin as leader of the free world at a moment’s notice? And: why did McCain present us with this option? Unlike the pundits, the voters have to check reality. And the Palin reality is objectively horrifying.

I know Obama surrogates are paid to say this sort of thing, but still:

“She’s very skilled and she’ll be well-prepared,” said Barack Obama’s chief strategist David Axelrod Sunday night, flying with Biden back to Delaware to help him get ready…

Taking it one step farther, Biden spokesman David Wade later added, “He’s going in here to debate a leviathan of forensics, who has debated five times and she’s undefeated.”

My colleague, Jeffrey Goldberg, a reality-based fan of McCain, draws the line:

The issue here is not that Palin didn’t know the answer. There are many possible answers to this question, some of which are right and some of which are wrong. The issue here is that she didn’t know the question. Because she was apparently ignorant of the subject, she endorsed Hamas’ victory, and, in essence, called for the U.S. to "protect" Islamists who seek to use democratic elections to lever themselves into power. And, of course, Ahmadinejad came to power in a more-or-less democratic election. Palin’s answer was truly remarkable. A person who could be President of the United States has shown herself to be completely ignorant of one of the most vexing and important foreign policy questions of the day. Freshman congressmen know how to answer this question…

I want to wait and see Palin on Thursday night in her debate with Joe Biden; perhaps her performance in the Couric interview was abnormally bad. But I have a terrible feeling that John McCain has placed this country – and, of lesser importance, his campaign – in an untenable position.

I’m posting this because none of the direct, indisputably proven, factual untruths that Palin has uttered has yet to be retracted by this candidate or her running mate. When you have a leading politician running on a record of outright lies, and those lies are deemed irrelevant, you have a problem. Each one has been fact-checked to near-death. They are not the usual political lie – hyperbole, parsing, exaggeration, spin. They are factual, checkable, indisputable untruths.

Palin could not have asked her girls for permission to accept McCain’s veep offer if she also says she accepted the offer unblinkingly and right away. Palin did fire a police chief even as she insisted to a reporter she hadn’t. She did violate the confidential medical records of Mike Wooten. She hasn’t met with any trade missions from Russia. She does not have any gay friends that anyone can find. She did not oppose the Bridge to Nowhere. She did not sell that plane on eBay. Her Teleprompter did not fail in her convention speech. Alaska’s state scientists did not conclude that polar bears were in no danger. She did deny publicly that humans had anything to do with climate change.

Alaska does not provide "nearly 20 percent of the U.S. domestic supply of energy," as she claimed. The gas pipeline she touts as her major "mission accomplished" has not broken ground and may never do so. She did not take a pay-cut as mayor of Wasilla. And on and on. Anyone with Google can check all of these out. Including reporters.

These are all documented, bald-faced factually irrefutable lies. More to the point: she refuses to cop to them or be held accountable for them or take questions about them. Until she does, we can rightly infer there is no reason to believe anything she says, and that includes her recent medical history. A liar like this cannot be taken on trust. We have to verify it all.

Release the medical records and tax returns now.

It seems to me that how the next president tackles Iran should now be a bigger issue even than how he (or potentially, God save us all, she) manages Iraq. Two new stories bring that home: Gary Milhollin’s op-ed in the NYT today that details Iran’s presumed inexorable progress toward a nuclear capacity and Robert Baer’s chillingly persuasive piece in the Daily News. Personally, I see no way that we are now going to be able to stop Iran’s nuclear military capacity. The question now is how we manage it: deterrence or pe-emptive war? Baer argues:

I myself think a deal can be cut with Iran. During the last 30 years, Iran has gone from a terrorist, revolutionary power to far more rational, calculating regional hegemon. Its belligerence today has more to do with a weakened United States and Israel than with any plans to start World War III.

The question is what price Iran would exact for a settlement. Or more to the point: Would we prefer to take our chances with an Israeli surprise?

I’m increasingly of the view that the United States should think twice before giving Israel a green light to destroy Iran’s nascent nuclear capacity.

Such an act in today’s context would immediately pour gasoline on the Islamist fire, uniting Shia and Sunni in anti-Israel and anti-Semitic and anti-Western fervor. It would recruit a generation of Islamist terrorists. It would risk a new and empowered alliance between Iran and Russia which has the nuclear know-how to give to Iran if it wants to. It might precipitate an Islamist take-over in Pakistan, which would give us an Islamist nuclear state overnight.

This is not to say that a nuclear Iran is not a horrifying prospect. But I don’t believe that Iran’s leadership truly wants to annihilate its entire population in a stand-off with the Zionists. Nuking Jerusalem is not something devout Islamists would easily countenance. But using the nuclear leverage to empower Hezbollah and Hamas is certainly a likely gambit. Finding a way to help defend Israel conventionally, using the brink of disaster to try to leverage a saner leadership in Tehran, and trying to pacify Iraq and Pakistan in the middle: this is the awful task that awaits the next president. To my mind, the job needs delicacy, calm, authority and patience. Above all: steadiness. The choice seems obvious to me.

Obama is still struggling to get them in Ohio, and Michigan, as First Read notes, even as he’s coming on strong in high-growth states like Virginia, Colorado, Nevada and Florida. This piece in the NYT helps explain the problem:

Union canvassers are also confronting an unprecedented factor in this election — Mr. Obama’s race — making the effects of their door-to-door appeals less predictable. MacDavis Slade, a political activist with the painters’ union, said that was why “some people are having a hard time seeing things for what they are or hearing what he has to say.”

“I think race is playing a major part,” Mr. Slade said. “I think that’s why some people say, ‘Isn’t he a Muslim?’” Other union leaders said that some members had acknowledged opposing Mr. Obama because he is black, and that canvassers had heard racial slurs against him.

The whole point of the Muslim rumor is to provide racist voters with something non-racist to hang their hat on.

But race is too crude a moniker to describe what’s going on here. It is about race and age: Obama represents the future of America – multi-racial, pragmatic, meritocratic, global. This is naturally unnerving to those who recall the old America – racially segregated, more socially conservative – especially when they don’t feel the new America has much to offer them. Maybe the financial crisis will get to these natural Democrats. Maybe McCain and Palin can put out enough cultural red meat to keep them on board. I don’t know. But I sense these voters are important, just no longer vital.

A reader writes:

As a student of Indiana political history, I immediately noted a striking historical analogue to McCain’s selection of Palin as his Vice Presidential running mate.

Back in 1944, Franklin Roosevelt was running for his last term as President, and had decided to replace Henry Wallace (his second of three Vice Presidents) on the ticket. Roosevelt asked Indiana Governor Henry Schricker, a popular first-term Governor, and strong partner in the New Deal era, to be his running mate.

Schricker was a popular, honest, and capable politician, who went on to become the first Governor to serve two terms in Indiana.  However, Schricker – unlike Palin – had humility.  He famously declined the offer by telling Roosevelt "a man ought to know his own limitations."

History went on to famously catapult Harry Truman (a similarly modest, hardworking Midwesterner) into the job as the nation’s 33rd President, and Henry Schricker remains a footnote to the era.

I think Schricker would have served admirably as Vice President or President, but his display of humility in the face of serious obligation serves to contrast the hubris with which Palin has treated her own candidacy.

Kansas City, Missouri, 7 pm.

The McCain camp leans on the press again in the prep for Thursday’s debate. I think Gwen is actually a perfect moderator.

McCain campaign flack Howard Kurtz says that "sources say CBS has two more [Palin] responses on tape that will likely prove embarrassing." Why have they not been released? We have next to no press interaction with this person and yet a news organization is withholding interview footage they actually have? WTF?

Show us the tapes!