Month: September 2008

Patrick Ruffini admonishes the Dems:

The most important thing about a good attack is not the attack itself. It’s baiting your opponent to respond the way you want him to respond, because only the things that come out of his mouth will ultimately stick.

Obama seems to be falling into the trap of response-centrism. If only they could respond the right way, they figure, all will be well. But it won’t be. Because the game they are playing is reactive. Instead of changing the subject off Palin by launching some explosive new attack on McCain, all they do is respond, respond, respond. And the story, day after day, is Democratic Presidential nominee responds to Republican Vice Presidential nominee. The optics of that stink for them.

Unless, in fact, this election is about Palin. And it has to be. She – along with the Iraq war – is the embodiment of McCain’s claim to presidential judgment and experience. If she is a fraud, and has been proven a demonstrable liar in ways that a competent campaign would have vetted six months ago, McCain’s campaign is over, and deserves to be over. As is the election. I don’t see how we can know anything until she has answered a series of obvious, factual questions from the press corps about the truthfulness of her various statements in the public record.

Besides, Obama needs to respond to the insane and desperate lies being lobbed at him. He’s not Dukakis. And he should also keep reminding voters that, unlike the McCain camp, who don’t want to discuss the issues in this campaign, he does.

Look: we seem to be on the verge of a financial crisis of potentially severe proportions, we have a nuclear-armed rogue state with a leadership in flux in North Korea, we have a direct war between the United States and the Taliban in Pakistani territory – and John McCain wants to talk about "lipstick on a pig" and a woman who didn’t know the difference between a Shiite and Sunni two weeks ago. (I’m sure they’ve programmed her now).

They cannot be serious. I don’t believe the McCain campaign is serious about anything any more, except bullying the press and running out the clock. This is the most shambolic campaign I have ever witnessed in a general election. If he runs his campaign this badly, how would he run the country?

Still no word on Palin in days from Derb and Frum and (substantively) Ponnuru or Brookhiser. The Corner is beginning to read like a teenage girl’s diary, confessing her various crushes. Weird.

A reader writes:

You’re right, Moynihan is wrong. Protecting Palin in a bubble is just an extension of the concept of "free speech zones" where protestors are herded in small areas far from whoever is speaking. I recall the quote from someone surprised about this: "What? I thought the whole United States was free speech zone." Not under Bush, and McCain will increase the distancing and marginalization of the ruled from the rulers.

I am not a great fan of our self-important and self-infatuated media and its mindless pack mentality focus on drivel, but the McCain campaign’s tactics are a new low. The Bush Administration has demonstrated contempt for the courts and argued that its members are not answerable to Congress, McCain is implicitly arguing that his won’t be answerable to the 4th Estate. Maybe it’s not  Putin yet, but it sure as hell is not the representative government that I grew up with.

What we are witnessing is something we should genuinely fear. That the press is complicit is an appalling dereliction of duty. Duty.

A reader writes:

Clearly, the key for Obama in this election is linking McCain to the disastrous policies of Bush. But they’re going about it completely the wrong way. The biggest problem with the Bush administration was not any particular policy or mistake. The biggest problem was its untrustworthiness – its deception, lies and with-us-or-against-us attitude. This manifested itself in the Iraq war, the endorsement of torture and almost all of what Obama rightly rails against.

I do think it’s helpful to think of the Palin pick in the context of the Iraq war. McCain was for both. And with the same degree of prior vetting.

Those two decisions should be first and foremost in our judgment of him. He just winged it in Iraq as he is winging it with Palin. And when things suddenly went wrong in Iraq, when the facts on the ground seemed to conflict with the marketing message, the response of the Rovians was to mount a propaganda campaign, even at the cost of getting Scooter Libby thrown into jail.

This is what they know how to do: They intimidate and bamboozle and bully and scare the supine national press corps. They move swiftly from outright denial of any obvious facts to demonization of the critics to media control to fear-mongering and bile. But in Iraq, as we now know, they couldn’t escape the reality in the end. In the end, there were WMDS or there were no WMDs. That fact still endures, whatever their rhetoric.

The question now is whether the Palin product we are being sold is real. We don’t know. We cannot know until she is available for free and open questioning on any topic. From what we already know, she is an unserious choice.  She has a record of fiscal irresponsibility, pork-barrel spending, unethical abuse of power, and a proven ability to lie in public. But until I see her answer questions – real, open questions about everything in the public domain – I am unable to be dissuaded. No one should be.

Put it another way: The Iraq war was a great idea on paper. I know. I bought it. So is Sarah Palin. This time, I’m waiting to see what the reality – not the concept – is.

Those policy injections seem to be working:

Aides traveling with Ms. Palin have reported back to associates that she is a fast study — asking few questions of her policy briefers but quickly repeating back their main points — who already has considerable ease and experience before cameras.

Steven Taylor responds more politely than I am inclined to:

I know that all candidates, to one degree or another, go into interviews, debates and onto the stump with canned answers and that they do not have a deep understanding of all issues about which they speak. However, one does presume that they come to the campaign with a pool of existing knowledge and views which then have to be augmented. This may very well be the case with Governor Palin, but the fact that she hasn’t spoken in an uncontrolled environment for two weeks now, one does being [sic] to wonder. It also sounds like her preparation is akin to preparing for a forensics competition than anything else.

One begins to wonder? This is unprecedented. She is George W. Bush, without his upbringing.

This is beyond karma at this point. Here’s John McCain with one of his endlessly repeated, grandpa-at-Thanksgiving, punchline provided, anecdotes:

"We’re not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana," McCain said earlier this year, referring to a request from Montana for federal money to study the endangered grizzly bear. "I don’t know if it was a paternity issue or criminal, but it was a waste of money."

Here’s what Sarah Palin brought home to Alaska in pork:

According to a “summary of requests for federal appropriations” posted to her budget office’s website earlier this year, Palin requested millions of federal dollars for everything from improving recreational halibut fishing to studying the mating habits of crabs and the DNA of harbor seals.

Sure, he vetted her. But all this is only really instructive when you listen to Palin on the stump:

“In just three years our opponent has requested nearly one billion dollars in earmarks. That’s nearly a million dollars for every working day,” Palin told a crowd in Lebanon, Ohio, Tuesday. “So as we reform the abusive earmarks in our state our opponent was requesting nearly a billion dollars in earmarks as a senatorial privilege as I was vetoing half a billion as an executive responsibility.”

The DNA of seals?

A 1994 interview about The Bell Curve.

Just a word about the usual excrescence from Karl Rove this morning. Obama knows this lipstick thing is a cynical, knowingly dishonest attempt to push the news cycle one more day into triviality before Palin has to actually face real scrutiny, and we have our first chance to see whether she is who she says she is. It’s a desperate tactic to run out the clock or to find a way to navigate the now-tsunami of evidence that Sarah Palin is unfit for the vice-presidency on account of her total lack of knowledge or expertise in foreign affairs, the thinnness and extremism and recklessness of her public record as mayor and governor, and the obvious and most important fact that she clearly cannot be trusted to tell the truth.

Obama mustn’t let these schoolyard tactics unbalance him. He hasn’t in the slightest, so far, mind you, a feat of astonishing mental and psychological calm. My advice for what it’s worth: Hang in. The facts are on your side and the issues are overwhelmingly in your favor. They’re trying to force you to blink. Don’t. Hysteria will end at some point.

Patience and steel.

Patience and steel.

We all feel the same way. Either we were in total denial about this man’s character for years and years – and the national press corps never make errors of judgment like that, do we? – or the man now running for president is a pod-person controlled by Karl Rove from a remote. Take your pick. But what he is now is despicable.

Michael Moynihan takes issue with my comparing Palin not giving an interview to Putin’s Russia:

Sullivan should probably recognize that a press corps trying to wrangle an interview with an elusive V.P. candidate (and hamstrung by a McCain campaign petrified of a "General Whatshisname" moment) isn’t at all analogous to a state-run media run by an illiberal band of Putin lackeys. As I have previously written, throwing the word "fascist" around willy-nilly is intellectually lazy and, more often than not, historically illiterate. But so is accusing the American media of being no better than outlets controlled by the Kremlin, or those remaining independent journalists whose reporting is influenced by credible threats of violence.

Who is he kidding? We have someone who could be elected vice-president in less than two months and tomorrow it will be two weeks since she was anounced and still no-one in the press is allowed to even ask her a question in an uncontrolled setting.

This has never, ever happened before in modern American politics. Never.

Given the fact that she is a total unknown, given that the convention was very late historiclaly, given that we have less than two months to figure out who to vote for, the denial of access is both an outrage to transparency and democracy and also, deeply, deeply troubling about what it says about what the McCain camp believes is her competence level.

Yes, this is the spirit of Vladimir Putin. I wrote not that we were living in Putin’s Russia but that John McCain is giving us a "taste" of what that’s like. John McCain – the man who prided himself on access, on answering any question, on talking to the press, even when we’d grown a little bored of talking to him. What happened to that guy? Who kidnapped him and replaced him with this creepy, sealed off, bullying press management?

We, of course, have a First Amendment. It’s just that John McCain is treating it with contempt.