Palinpalooza - Page 2
McCain NewsLadder
by addiestan, The Media Consortium: Sat., Oct 4, 2008
Filed under: NewsLadder • Presidential campaign 2008 • John McCain
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In truth, Palinpalooza proved to be a mere sideshow to what appears to be chaos and confusion in the McCain camp. Last week saw McCain claiming to suspend his campaign to return to Washington to broker a deal on a financial bailout bill for which a deal appeared to have been reached before McCain showed up. Once he was on the ground the deal fell apart when a majority of House Republicans balked at what was on the table.
At first, wrote Ben Craw on Sept. 30 at Talking Points Memo, McCain pointed the finger at his opponent, then said he didn’t:
To review: yesterday John McCain said in consecutive sentences, “Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process. Now is not the time to fix the blame”…
In a new interview with ABC News’s Ron Claiborne however, McCain says he never blamed nobody…
According to Mark Schmitt, editor of The American Prospect, the House Republicans’ rebuke of McCain and the first version of the bailout package is symptomatic of a problem much bigger for Republicans than any immediate concern:
Republican strategist Ed Rollins gave the game away on CNN: “At the end of the day, there’s a lot of people thinking about how to rebuild this party, and do we want to rebuild it with John McCain, who’s always kind of questionable on the basic facts of fiscal control, all the rest of it, immigration…”
[…]
The Republican coalition since at least Reagan has been a miraculous alliance of Wall Street and Main Street. Populist politics, such as the attack on “elites” now embodied by the enthusiasm for Gov. Sarah Palin, were the vehicle for Wall Street policies, the very policies that led to the crash. The alliance always seemed unsustainable.
Trying to straddle the factions of that “miraculous alliance” may well have proved the undoing of John McCain, according to Edward McClelland, writing at Salon:
McCain has run for the presidency twice, as two completely different candidates. His campaigns and his image have been shaped by the nasty partisanship of the late 20th and early 21st century, an era that may be remembered as the Late Culture Wars.
[…]
Writers loved McCain during his first run for the presidency, in 2000. But eight years later, they think he’s a flip-flopping hack.
McClelland’s essay comes to us in the form of a review of four books about John McCain, authored, respectively, by David Foster Wallace, Paul Begala, Cliff Schecter and Matthew Welch — and argues for occasional forays by news junkies into the erudite realm of book reviews.
Addressing more immediate matters, Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones and Tim Fernholz of TAPPED give us the low-down on two conference calls with reporters by the McCain camp.
On Wednesday, Stein detected something of a ringer on a press call with McCain surrogate Rudy Giuliani:
The second question was from someone named Chuck Pardee. Pardee asserted that Tina Fey and many reporters make their living “embellishing the facts.” After criticizing the press for treating Sarah Palin unfairly, Pardee concluded*:
“Do you think embellishing the facts is actually what the concerned voter is after? And specifically, Joe Biden seems to embellish and forget facts just to kind of impress people but when you take Sarah Palin she seems to impress others with her quick study without embellishing the facts. In other words do you think people want a straight shooter or do they want the stuff and fluff?”
[…]
Pardee, by the way, is the “founder and president” of Newsbull.com. He has donated the maximum $2,300 to McCain.
TAPPED’s Fernholz, on the next day’s called, reported a new “aggressiveness” on the part of the campaign:
But McCain political director Mike Duhaime and senior adviser Greg Strimple aren’t worried, because they’re aggressive — in fact, everyone’s aggressive. The word came up about 50 times in the call, used to describe everything from Obama’s liberalism to President Bush! (Amateur psychologists, make of it what you will.) They also promised an aggressive last 30 days, which is no surprise as conventional wisdom is beginning to coalesce around the idea that the McCain camp needs to/will go negative to win.
That’s because the polls continue to bode ill for McCain.
Also boding ill for McCain was an ad by Brave New PAC and Democracy for America that was airing on MSNBC, before Fox’s Bill O’Reilly started slamming the rival network about it. The ad raises questions on the state of McCain’s health, which some viewers found offensive.
In other health-related campaign news, Doug Cunningham of Workers Independent News reports that the AFL-CIO is targeting voters in battleground states with a leafletting campaign challenging McCain’s health plan.
And so concludes another wild week in campaignland.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting
about John McCain. Visit JohnMccain.NewsLadder.net
for a complete list of articles on McCain. And for the best progressive reporting on two
critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.
JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and CommonSense NMS. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.
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