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Toil and Trouble
McCain NewsLadder


by addiestan, The Media Consortium: Sat., Nov 1, 2008
Filed under: NewsLadder • Presidential campaign 2008 • John McCain • Religious right • Economy

NOTE: After you click a link, click the title of the item to get the full text or video.

This week finds our war hero, on Old Hallow’s Eve, having finished yet another very difficult stretch of his presidential campaign, as it draws to a close. As if it wasn’t tough enough to find himself having to defend his home state of Arizona from that one’s blithely effortless incursion onto desert turf — never mind the continuing parade of defectors and detractors among high-powered Republicans — G.O.P. presidential nominee Sen. John McCain learned, via the press, that his senior advisers think his vice presidential pick, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, a “diva” and “a wack job” who was bent not just on “going rogue,” but going even “more rogue” than her campaign has already gone. Which would be pretty far, since her remarks this week indicated that she may have already set her sights on 2012 presidential race, reportedly having written off the top-of-the-ticket’s chances in 2008.

Not just a river in Egypt

In a Halloween morning interview on ABC’s “Good Morning America”, McCain called his running mate, Sarah Palin, the new face of the G.O.P., adding, “She’s united the party.” Which left The Nation’s Ari Berman scratching his head:

Um, tell that to Colin Powell, Christopher Buckley or Ken Adelman, all lifelong Republicans who’ve cited the Palin pick as a chief reason they’ve endorsed Obama. Or to conservatives like David Brooks, David Frum, Kathleen Parker, Ross Douthat–all past or present McCain supporters–who’ve strongly criticized Palin.

Or, TAPPED’s Tim Fernholz reminds us, former Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger, who served under Bush 41, — or former Reagan chief of staff, Ken Duberstein. Not to mention that hard-core conservative, Stephen Colbert.

All about her

Palin kicked up a bit of dust earlier this week when, in an interview with ABC’s Elizabeth Vargas, she challenged Vargas’ suggestion that she might want to go back to Alaska for good if McCain lost the presidential race to Barack Obama. “Absolutely not,” Palin replied. “I think that, if I were to give up and wave a white flag of surrender against some of the political shots that we’ve taken, that … that would … bring this whole … I’m not doin’ this for naught.”

Then CNN’s Dana Bash rather breathlessly reported that when she read Palin’s comments back to a senior McCain aide, the aide was “speechless.”

Coming on the heels of her rogue comments last weekend in Iowa, touting the beauties of ethanol — anathema to John McCain’s anti-earmark crusade but dear to the hearts of Iowans, who set the course in their caucuses for the presidential primaries to follow — it’s not surprising that Palin’s comments to Vargas were seen and evidence that she had thrown McCain under the wheels of the Hate Talk Express. Notes The Nation’s Ari Melber, in the third presidential debate, McCain condemned ethanol subsidies as market distorters, wagging his finger at Obama for supporting them. But by the time I caught up with Palin at a Halloween Day rally in York, Penn. (having hitched a ride with The American Prospect’s Sarah Posner), Palin was back on message. Asked if she was running for president in 2012, she responded to my shouted question by walking over to where I was standing behind a barricade, , saying, “I’ll be campaigning for John McCain’s re-election in 2012.”I’ll be campaigning for John McCain’s re-election in 2012.”

From Posner’s TAPPED report on the Halloween Day York, Penn., Sarah Palin rally.
photo (c) 2008 Sarah Posner

The Colorado Independent looked at what it calls the fight for the soul of the Republican Party, which many believe are evident in the fissures exposed by the Palin pick. Writes Jeff Bridges:

Palin’s popularity with [a conservative] group meeting in Virginia [the day after the election], though, does signal the strategy Republicans will likely pursue following what looks to be the second consecutive election with strong Democratic gains. The Politico story argues the party will not pursue a moderate agenda, but instead return to the core conservative values of “small government, a robust national security and unapologetic social conservatism.”

This could lead to a colossal struggle within the Republican Party between the moderate wing and conservatives. Tuesday the Colorado Independent broke a story on former Colorado Republican U.S. Rep. Scott McInnis’ blaming his party’s move to the right for their expected losses in November. “Most of the races we’ve lost in the last six years are two reasons: one, money, and two, the candidates we put up,” McInnis said. “Generally, people in Colorado don’t like somebody who’s radically to the right or radically to the left.”

While she has no doubt that conservatives are looking to their moment in 2012, The American Prospect’s Sarah Posner is less than certain that Sarah Palin will become the right’s standard bearer, at least within the G.O.P.’s ranks:

According to a recent Newsweek poll, only 20 percent of Republicans favored Palin as their party’s nominee in 2012, if McCain loses next week, with 35 percent favoring Romney and 26 percent favoring Huckabee. Among “traditional” (taxes, economy, national security) Republicans, Palin, and Huckabee’s numbers were worse (19 percent for Palin, 23 percent for Huckabee) than Romney’s (42 percent), but among what the poll termed “social issue” (abortion, immigration, guns, and “family values”) Republicans, Palin drew 23 percent, Romney 30 percent, and Huckabee 31 percent.

The invisible man in that poll is Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, who next month is headlining the Iowa Family Policy Center’s big fundraising dinner, widely seen as his first step in building a base of religious-right support for the 2012 Iowa caucuses.

Along the campaign trail, however, Salon’s Rebecca Traister found conservative women entralled with Palin:

“I’m a strong woman, and I really relate to strong women,” explained 67-year-old Gloria Stere, who wore a bright blue Palin Power T-shirt. Stere said she had just retired from running her own sewing machine business, and though a “dyed-in-the-wool Republican,” she had considered — just thought about — voting for Hillary Clinton. But, she was quick to add, “Palin is the one that absolutely made my mind up about supporting John McCain. I took one look at her, heard her speak, and thought, ‘Oh my god,’ she is the one.”

Pro-American parts of the Constitution

In weeks past, Palin wowed politicos with her expansive view of the powers of the office of the vice presidency, as she contends it is laid out in the U.S. Constitution. This week saw another novel constitutional interpretation, this time of the First Amendment, whose 45 words guarantee freedom of speech, religion and peaceable assembly. In her complaint about media coverage of her remarks and campaign, Palin alleged that her First Amendment rights were being abridged, ostensibly by media criticism. At Salon’s War Room, Alex Koppelman reported Palin’s comments from a Friday morning radio interview:

“If [the media] convince enough voters that that is negative campaigning, for me to call Barack Obama out on his associations,” Palin said, “then I don’t know what the future of our country would be in terms of First Amendment rights and our ability to ask questions without fear of attacks by the mainstream media.”

In a commentary on his radio program, the Hightower Lowdown, Jim Hightower takes on Palin’s remarks about who lives in the “pro-American parts of America” and who doesn’t:

It hurts me deeply to say this, but here goes: I’m not a real American.

Oh, I’m proud to live in America and grateful for all the opportunities I’ve been given in this great country. Also, I would probably seem pretty American to you: I was born and raised in Texas, I came up through public schools, I drive a made-in-America 1997 Ford, I own a modest house, I have a small business, I pay taxes and meet a payroll, I work hard, I’m a beer drinker, I love baseball… and so on.

But here’s where I fall down: I don’t live in a place that Sarah Palin likes.

Rachel Maddow, writing with Jill McDonnough for the Women’s Media Center, examines the provenance of some Palin’s remarks, in particular a quote from Ronald Reagan used by Palin in her debate with Democratic rival Sen. Joe Biden that turns out to have a purpose far less noble than its burnished glow might suggest:

“It was Ronald Reagan who said that freedom is always just one generation away from extinction. We don’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. We have to fight for it and protect it and then hand it to them, so that they shall do the same, or we’re going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free.”

…It could be talking about loose nukes, or civil liberties, or national defense or some competing ideology seeking global dominance. Except this was Reagan–so of course the creepy truth is that he was predicting what would happen if we got Medicare.

The issues

Like Ronald Reagan, John McCain is apparently no fan of Medicare, having concocted a health care plan the relies on cutting Medicare and Medicaid funding. According to the Economists’ Policy Group for Women’s Issues, he doesn’t do so well on other family-friendly and women-friendly policies either. Writes Amie Newman at RH Reality Check:

Today, the Economists’ Policy Group for Women’s Issues (EPGWI)…released a report card for each of the presidential candidates, evaluating them on ten key, critical areas of concern for women and with an overall grade of “D”, Senator McCain barely passed. Senator Obama received an overall grade of “B.”

Speaking of economists, you’d be hard-pressed, according to economist Matthew Rothschild, writing in The Progressive, to find one who thinks that McCain’s proposed capital gains tax cut is a good idea in this ailing economy. In fact, he says, it will as to the economy, for every dollar spent a mere 37 cents. Best returns on the dollar come from ideas McCain opposes or fails to consider:

Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Economy.com, has put out a chart showing that the biggest bang for the buck would be to boost food stamps. For every $1 the government spends on this, $1.73 returns to the economy as the benefits ripple through the economy.

Next best is extending unemployment benefits, which returns $1.64 for every dollar spent.

Next is spending on infrastructure, which returns $1.59.

And aid to states is right behind, returning $1.36.

But McCain is not advocating any of these.

AlterNet’s Joshua Holland finds irony in the McCain campaign’s description of Barack Obama as the candidate scarily seeking to redistribute wealth, when McCain’s redistributionist tendencies, as he sees it, are far more radical:

McCain … takes money from poor people and sends it upward.

[He] is a firm believer in a philosophy of governance that’s been responsible for the most dramatic redistribution of American income and wealth since the New Deal. For the past 30 years, the conservative movement has focused relentlessly on redistributing income, but always upward, toward the top. It’s a great irony of the 2008 campaign: Nobody is more dedicated to redistributing wealth than adherents of the ideology that McCain represents.

And yet, writes Mother Jones‘ David Corn, during the 2000 presidential campaign, it was McCain who was seen as the champion of regular people when it came to taxes:

[E]ight years ago, in January and February 2000, McCain was on the receiving end of similar criticism, as conservatives and Republicans accused him of engaging in class warfare by opposing tax breaks for the rich while advocating tax cuts for middle- and low-income Americans. That is, McCain was denounced in much the same way as he is now denouncing Obama.

The numbers

Polling numbers in what should be McCain strongholds continue to afflict him — like, for instance, his home state of Arizona. There, he’s resorting to a fear-mongering robo-call, writes Greg Sargent at TPM Election Central. Here’s part of the script:

If Democrats win full control of government, they will want to give civil rights to terrorists and talk unconditionally to dictators and state sponsors of terror. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the experience and judgment to lead America. This call was paid for by the Republican National Committee and authorized by McCain-Palin 2008.

Ohio is also looking bad for McCain, though Democrats may which to touch wood before uttering those words, given the results of the 2004 election, in which the late polls — after reports of widespread voting irregularties — from Ohio ultimately gave the race to Bush.

The numbers are looking good, too, for Obama’s 30-minute advertisement, which ran on seven networks — including the broadcast networks CBS, NBC and FOX — on Wednesday. Writes Ernest Luning of the Colorado Independent, but McCain campaign officials were not amused:

One in five Denver households watching TV tuned in the half-hour Barack Obama campaign commercial broadcast Wednesday night on seven networks, according to overnight Nielsen ratings, slightly below the nationwide average…”As anyone who has bought anything from an infomercial knows, the sales-job is always better than the product,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement. “Buyer beware.”

As a sort of counterpoint, Air America Radio’s “Maron v. Seder” show offers a satire of what the writers read as the subtext of the McCain message, which they offer in the form of a mock ad.

And in the context of that subtext, there’s more bad news for McCain, according to Chris Rabb of Afro-Netizen: lots and lots of African-Americans are voting early:

Hat tip to the addictive FiveThirtyEight.com for numbers-jockeys, political addicts and graph-whores.

This graph shows how highly correlated early voting rates this year are tied to states with large populations of Blackfolk.

No doubt, the RNC and Fox News will contend that these aren’t genuine people, but fictitious voters brought to life by the magic ink of crafty ACORN workers.

The Vietnam legacy

Like John Kerry, John McCain intially wrapped his campaign around his personal story of heroism in the Vietnam war. Unlike John Kerry in 2004, John McCain has endured virtually no scrutiny of his personal account of his life in the military, and in Vietnam. While no credible critic contests the fact that McCain suffered terribly in his captivity at the hands of the North Vietnamese, official accounts of some of McCain’s military history differ from his own. Why, wonders historian Mary Hershberger at the Women’ Media Center, do most mainstream media shy from examining discrepancies in the McCain story, when they seemed all too eager to air the largely false claims of the so-called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth:

McCain’s war record is a legitimate topic of investigation precisely because he cites it as evidence that he should be president, as proof that he is tested and ready to lead from day one. As such, it ought to be more thoroughly examined than anything else. The few investigations that have been carried out are not reassuring.

On the single issue of his plane crashes, for example, the Los Angeles Times has concluded that “though standards were looser and crashes more frequent in the 1960s, McCain’s record stands out.” A pilot whose performance included two plane crashes and a collision with power lines usually underwent official review to determine his fitness to fly. McCain refuses to allow his military records to be released so that the voting public can see whether his record matches his claims.

At AlterNet, Norman Stockwell examines the story of McCain’s plane crash in Hanoi — the one that landed him in captivity — and tracks down the tale of McCain’s rescuer, Mai Van On, with whom McCain was reunited in 1996, but who McCain failed to mention in his 1999 book, Faith of My Fathers. Mai Van On, Stockwell learned, not only pulled McCain out of the lake while the pilot was sinking to the bottom, but also intervened when the crowd on the shore began beating McCain, who was badly injured by his ejection from the plane.

One bright spot for McCain, writes Andrew Lam of New America Media, is the support McCain enjoys in the U.S. Vietnamese community:

If Ho Chi Minh, the father of Vietnamese communism, is idolized in Hanoi and hated in Little Saigon, Orange County, it is to be expected. Hanoi, the stronghold of the Vietnamese Communist Party, and Little Saigon, formed by those it forced into exile, have never seen eye to eye on any modern political figure or issue.

That is, until now. As the U.S. presidential election date draws near, both sides have suddenly found common ground and enthusiasm in one man: Sen. John McCain.

The 2008 National Asian American Survey recently found that among Asian groups, Vietnamese Americans are by far the most conservative: two out of three said they would vote for McCain.

[…]

In 2001 and 2004 [John Kerry and John McCain] collaborated to block the Vietnam Human Rights Act in the Senate, though in 2004 it passed 410-to-1 in the House. The bill, had it become law, would have tied U.S. humanitarian aid to Vietnam’s human rights record. For his efforts, John Kerry, who fought to defend South Vietnam from communism, became a hated man in Little Saigon, and they showed it in the 2004 election by voting overwhelmingly for Bush, who managed to avoid the Vietnam War by serving in the National Guard. Oddly enough, John McCain remained their hero.

Osama who?

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo had a warm and fuzzy feeling on Wednesday. He wrote: “My favorite campaign moment of the day: Wolf Blitzer asking Ed Rollins whether McCain needs an assist from Laden to win on Tuesday …”

At The American Prospect Online, Paul Waldman considers the likely result of just such an “assist”:

[T]he American people may just be getting the picture. The sight of Osama bin Laden could make them rush to George Bush’s arms four years ago, but would it have the same effect today? Would voters react to a new bin Laden tape — or even a terrorist attack — by saying, “We need someone who’ll get tough on terrorism”? Or might they say, “Why the hell haven’t we caught this guy yet? What are we doing wrong?”

More McCainiacs

Prof. Todd Gitlin of Columbia University recently encountered a media-neglected category of McCainiac: the occasional pro-Israel suburban Jew who’s convinced that Obama means death to Israel. Gitlin writes at TPM Cafe of his encounter with a McCain partisan during a talk the professor gave at at Temple Emmanuel in Great Neck, on Long Island:

During the Q-and-A, a man halfway back in the audience started shouting: “You have no business here! Shut up! Get out! Obama hates Israel! You hate Israel! You’re anti-American! You’re a Communist!” And so on. (I think there was something about terrorists, too, though I’m not sure, the acoustics not having been designed for enraged disruptions.) The shouter had to be, as they say, escorted away. Among the one-fifth or one-quarter of American Jews who’ll vote for McCain are a number — a small number, but small numbers make history — who have worked themselves into an apocalyptic furor. They know that the devil stalks the gate to the temple. This won’t be the first time that the prospect of a Democratic president drives their sort around the bend. They’ll be back.

According to Josh Marshall, a McCainiac mob appeared to be reading from a similar script, minus the stuff about Israel, when they surrounded two Obama supporters who entered a McCain rally wearing Obama tee shirts and holding Obama signs:

McCain mob surrounds two Cuban-American Obama supporters in Miami before police intervene to hustle the two away to safety. “People were screaming, ‘Terrorist!’ ‘Communist!’ ‘Socialist!’”, said Raul Sorando, [one] of the two Obama supporters. “I had a guy tell me he was gonna kill me.”

At an Obama rally in Raleigh, North Carolina, McCain supporter Charles David Ficken arrived with a 10-foot tall picture of Barack Obama in East African attire, shouting the United States doesn’t need a “Muslim-leaning” person for president, according to the American News Project’s Davin Hutchins, who has the video.

Speaking of McCainiacs and video, you won’t want to miss the latest music video, “Hounds,” from our own Max and the Marginalized.

Now, don’t forget to vote, y’all. And before you do, check out Yes! magazine’s Checklist for a Fair Election: 12 Ways to Safeguard Your Vote.

–Adele M. Stan

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 created by NewsLadder. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

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Palin Wows ‘Em in PA


by addiestan, The Media Consortium: Fri., Oct 31, 2008
Filed under: NewsLadder • Presidential campaign 2008 • John McCain

cross posted from The Huffington Post

YORK, PENN.–It’s easy to make fun of a vice presidential candidate who can’t seem to tell you what periodicals she reads, what Supreme Court cases she disagrees with, or who thinks the First Amendment to the Constitution assures her the right to not be criticized. But today, after seeing Sarah Palin address a rally in famously conservative York, Pennsylvania, I’m not laughing.

Palin was completely impressive, even when calling Obama a socialist.

At the end of the event, she spent at least a half hour shaking hands, walking the rope line. I asked her whether she’d be running for president in 2012.

She smiled sweetly and said, “I’ll be campaigning for John McCain’s re-election in 2012.”

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Cranking Up the Slime Machine
McCain NewsLadder


by addiestan, The Media Consortium: Sat., Oct 11, 2008
Filed under: NewsLadder • Presidential campaign 2008 • John McCain

Just days before the second face-to-face, nationally televised meeting of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain came a torrent of accusations and innuendo against Obama, the Democrat, by McCain, the Republican, and his GOP surrogates — especially his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. By week’s end, Palin would be standing with egg on her face, chided by the Alaska state legislature for abuse of power in violation of the state Ethics Act., and revealed to have relationships with a couple of anti-government (as in anti-United States Government) types in her home state.

Before the week officially began, accusations against Obama that had months earlier failed to make a splash were urgently regurgitated by McCain and Palin — most especially an inference that Obama’s acquaintance with a Chicago figure who was active in the Weather Underground in the 1960s proves a disregard for his own country by the Democratic candidate.

As the McCain campaign tried to link Obama to former Weatherman William Ayers, respectable news organizations, Truthdig reports, questioned the claims as racially charged and misleading:

“Americans need to ask themselves if they’ve ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist,” says McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. The AP called similar remarks by running mate Sarah Palin “racially tinged” and Time said the claim was “simply wrong,” but the McCain campaign shows no signs of backing down from its new strategy.

Though the campaign — especially Palin — pushed the theme throughout the week, it was mysteriously absent from Tuesday’s town hall meeting in Nashville, leading Obama himself to throw down with a dare to McCain during an interview with ABC’s Charlie Gibson, stating that if McCain had an accusation to make, he should make it when they’re both in the same place. “…I guess we’ve got one last debate,” Obama told Gibson. “So presumably, if he ends up feeling that he needs to, he will raise it during the debate.”

Steve Benen of the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal put it this way:

One almost gets the sense that Barack Obama wants John McCain to confront him directly with some of these guilt-by-association attacks…He’s practically questioning McCain’s fortitude, calling him out for using sleazy tactics behind Obama’s back, but not to his face.

That didn’t stop the McCain camp from putting out another ad that leads with Ayers, and somehow mixes in the subprime mortgage meltown, somehow trying to lay that mess of deregulatory debauchery at Obama’s feet. Salon’s Alex Koppelman reports that the ad is lated to run “nationally”. [Video included at link.]

But it won’t work, says Republican strategist Ed Rollins, who engineered Ronald Reagan’s1984 victory. He’s a guy who knows from landslides (Reagan in ‘84 won every state except Minnesota and the District of Columbia), and he’s predicting one for Obama. Writes Ari Melber at The Nation:

So it means something when an old hand like Ed Rollins unloads on John McCain, as he just did, declaring that the race is over, “no one cares” about McCain’s Ayers attacks, and the GOP nominee must think about the fundamental question, “how do you want to end your career?”

As mentioned, on the stump, the purveyor of the Ayers smear is none other than Sarah Palin, who appears to have some pretty interesting friends of her own, according to Max Blumenthal and David Neiwert writing at Salon. Take, for example, a guy called “Black Helicopter Steve” Stoll, “a John Birch Society activist,” according to Blumenthal and Neiwert, whom Palin tried to appoint to a vacant city council seat in Wasilla. Or Mark Chryson, the former chairman of the the secessionist, who showed the reporters the 9-millimeter Makarov PM pistol he keeps in the glove compartment of his truck, adding, “I’ve got enough weaponry to raise a small army in my basement.” Todd Palin belonged to the Alaska independence Party for seven years.

If that’s not enough to give one pause about the company Palin keeps, check out Michelle Goldberg’s piece in The Nation about the churches Palin attends, and their political pull.

It wasn’t until the 1990s that local churches like the Wasilla Assembly of God, which Palin grew up attending, became aggressively political. A few years before Palin became mayor, a group of preachers confronted the school board with questions about social issues that had never before surfaced in local politics, according to O’Hara, who wrote first for the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman and then for the Anchorage Daily News. “They started asking me, ‘Would you allow a homosexual to teach in schools?’ and ‘Do you favor abortion?’” she said. “At the time, I didn’t know what was coming. I said, ‘This is not a school board issue. We have overcrowding. We have funding problems.’” The last time O’Hara ran, conservative pastors mounted an effort to defeat her, saying she favored hiring homosexuals, but they failed. Nevertheless, in 1996, feeling increasingly alienated in a place she’d lived for twenty-five years, she quit the school board and moved to more liberal Anchorage.

The Obama campaign sought to offset McCain’s Project Ayers by reminding voters of the Republican’s very real links to Charles Keating, one of the key players in the collapse of many “savings & loan” lending institutions in the 1980s.

The Nation’s Ari Berman brought readers’ attention to a “breathtaking 1990 exposé” written for his magazine by Robert Sherrill, in which McCain’s role is featured. Berman links the McCain of the S&L scandal to the part he says McCain played in the current economic crisis:

A constant in both crises is John McCain. McCain and four other senators (dubbed the Keating Five) intervened to protect Keating from banking regulators. McCain was later rebuked by the Senate Ethics Committee for “poor judgment” and embarrassed by the $112,000 in campaign contributions, trips and gifts he had accepted from Keating. Cindy McCain and her father were also partners with Keating in a shopping mall development in Arizona. In his autobiography, McCain called the Keating episode “the worst mistake of my life.”

McCain eventually became a born-again crusader for campaign-finance reform. But he continued to surround himself with corporate lobbyists and push for greater deregulation of the finance industry, missing the greatest lesson from Sherrill’s story: “thievery is what unregulated capitalism is all about.”

Dan Schulman of Mother Jones looked at the two organizations to which McCain directed one of his questioners at Tuesday’s town hall forum with Obama. Theresa Finch asked the candidates, “”How can we trust either of you with our money when both parties got us into this global economic crisis?”

It’s not surprising that McCain directed Finch to Citizens Against Government Waste or the National Taxpayers Union. Both anti-spending organizations are ideologically aligned with the Arizona Senator and have ties to his presidential campaign….

CAGW…gives McCain its highest marks–100 percent–in its latest report, though Finch and other voters may want to consider the source before placing stock in the nonprofit’s congressional scorecard. CAGW was one of five nonprofits accused by Senate investigators of “laundering payments and then disbursing funds” at the direction of Jack Abramoff. Earlier this year the Washington Post reported that CAGW was actively helping McCain.

Ezra Klein of The American Prospect noted the concurrence of a drop in McCain’s poll numbers and the Dow Jones, treating readers to a chart from The State of the Union. Klein writes:

It’s a useful reminder that elections are heavily structural. McCain’s problems are, in large part, the product of actual world events that don’t favor Republicans. They’re not the result of some awesome new Obama ads, or Palin, or even McCain’s erratic and odd campaign style.

And it’s not just presidential candidates who are powerless over the whims of the moneymen, according to one author; presidents themselves fare little better. At The Real News Network, author and former CIA consultant Chalmers Johnson told Paul Jay that he’s skeptical about the claim to real power that any president has over the conduct of the US on the world stage. Johnson went on to critique the visions and advisory teams being unveiled by both Obama and McCain.

Speaking of the world stage, David Corn of Mother Jones examined Palin’s claim to have conducted trade missions with Russia and meetings with representatives of foreign governments. Writes Corn:

But the calendars tracking Palin’s official meetings during her tenure as governor contain not one listing indicating she ever met with a Russian official. In fact, the 562 pages of her daily schedules–obtained by Mother Jones under Alaska’s Open Records Act–indicate that Palin had few meetings at all with any foreign representatives and rarely dealt with any topic related to foreign policy. The schedules include about 20 meetings, events, or phone calls in which Palin interacted with foreign officials.

Then, of course, there’s Troopergate, in which the McCain running made stands accused of using the power of her office of governor to retaliate against a public servant who refused to fire somebody with whom she had a few issues. Writing from Anchorage for The Washington Independent, Laura McGann explained on Friday:

A report released today finds that as Alaska governor, Sarah Palin “abused her power,” a specific violation of state law.

Palin was accused of firing the head of the Alaska safety commission, Walt Monegan, for not intervening in what amounted to a personal family feud. Evidence in the report suggests that Palin and her husband, Todd, pressured Monegan to fire their former brother-in-law, the state trooper Mike Wooten.

As if the week’s relations weren’t enough bad news for Camp McCain, the week ended with word that Christopher Buckley, the conservative son of William F. Buckley, founder of the modern conservative movement, has endorsed Barack Obama, prompting Kevin Drum to write at Mother Jones:

The modern GOP is the party of Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, George Bush, Dick Cheney, John McCain, and Sarah Palin. It’s not just off the rails. It doesn’t even know where the rails are anymore.

–Adele M. Stan

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 created by NewsLadder. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

See more tagged with: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and

Palinpalooza a Diversion from Deeper Problems?
McCain NewsLadder


by addiestan, The Media Consortium: Sat., Oct 4, 2008
Filed under: NewsLadder • Presidential campaign 2008 • John McCain

The hard times continue for Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, who today pulled up his stakes in Michigan, a state his campaign once thought worth contesting.

In the progressive cyberspace, we find McCain ever-so-slightly better off than the week began, on account of the fact that his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, failed to fulfill the dreams of liberals, a dream that would have had her imploding on the podium in a torrent of stammers, a potentiality foreshadowed by her supernova performance in a multi-part interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric.

In March, McCain changed his mind on waterboarding, voting to sustain President Bush’s veto of a bill that would have banned U.S. interrogators from the practice; he seemed to be rewarded this week with a metaphorical version of a more traditional water torture, as steady drip, drip, drip of mortifying Palin responses to Couric’s questions leaked daily out of CBS over the course of a week. Palin couldn’t name the newspapers she read, the Supreme Court decisions she opposed (excepting Roe), explain why Alaskan proximity to Russia made her a foreign policy expert, or give more than one narrow example of John McCain’s support for regulation of the financial sector.

Last night, facing off with Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden, Palin lived to fight another day, playing the game by her own rules, declaring to Biden that she “may not answer the questions the way you or the moderator want me to.” Indeed, observed many progressive bloggers, she answered the questions she wanted to be asked, whether they were asked of her or not.

Earlier in the week, the McCain campaign began making noise about the fact that moderator Gwen Ifill, host of PBS’s “Washington Week in Review” and an African-American, was the author of a forthcoming book about race and the Obama campaign. The inference by McCain campaign operatives was one of a lurking bias toward the Obama camp, even though McCain himself said he had no problem with Ifill moderating the debate. But, wrote Greg Sargent of TMP Election Central, the merits of the argument are beside the point.

At bottom, though, debating whether there’s any merit in the attack on Ifill is beside the point, because as this is really just a transparent game, of course. The criticism is about trying to spook the moderators into going easy on Palin — a “time-honored form of pre-debate spin,” as [the Politico’s] Ben Smith put it.

And, indeed, some commentators suggested that Ifill tossed softballs at Palin most of the night, and rarely challenged either candidate when they strayed from her questions.

Some feared that the novelty of Palin’s gender posed perils for Joe Biden and commentators alike.

Before the debate began, famed feminist Robin Morgan, writing at the Women’s Media Center site, offered this helpful guide to those covering Palin:

Do investigate Palin’s opposition to listing polar bears and other animals as endangered. Do not call her one: no chick, bird, kitten, bitch, hen, cow. Also no produce: tomato, peach, etc.

Morgan also reports that, like Palin, both of John McCain’s wives were beauty queens.

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.

–Adele M. Stan

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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Palin Stays Alive; Biden Exhibits Command of Issues
McCain NewsLadder


by addiestan, The Media Consortium: Fri., Oct 3, 2008
Filed under: Presidential campaign 2008 • John McCain

Special Debate Edition

So Gov. Sarah Palin didn’t fall on her face in last night’s debate with Sen. Joseph Biden, her rival for the vice presidency, as so many thought that she might. And Biden, who should find himself encouraged by the snap polls that followed, avoided putting his foot in his mouth, as is occasionally his habit. This morning likely finds both John McCain and Barack Obama breathing sighs of relief. Around the liberal and progressive blogosphere, reactions were both cautious and mixed.

David Corn of Mother Jones heralded the end of “the Sarah Palin Reality TV show”:

For the past few weeks, it’s seemed as if Sarah Palin has been a contestant in the ultimate version of the reality show America’s Toughest Jobs. She passed the first challenge: give a Big Speech. She did fine on the next one: hit the campaign trail. She royally screwed up the third challenge: give a Big Interview. Then came the most difficult one: hold your own in a Big Debate. And she did.

At the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, Steve Benen was unimpressed either way:

My initial reaction was that this debate will probably make no difference whatsoever. Biden was obviously sharper and more knowledgeable. Palin had obviously memorized a series of talking points she repeated over and over again.

Who won? For viewers who checked their heads at the door, I guess it was a toss-up. For anyone who cares about susbtance, it wasn’t close. Palin justkept repeating lies and nonsense, regardless of the question, and regardless of common sense. On point after point, Biden just out-classed her. The two really didn’t belong on the same stage.

Writing from Los Angeles for New America Media, Jasmyne A. Cannick argued that, in essence, they really weren’t on the same stage:

There were three debates going on tonight. The one Gwen Ifill was moderating and the one both Senator Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin came to participate in.

I wish that for just once, when I take time out of my day, a day that is busy from the moment I wipe the crust out of my eyes to the minute I fall asleep at my desk and my snoring wakes me up, that when the candidates come together to debate each other and the moderator asks them a question…they just answered it. I know, a novel idea.

As Heather Gehlert observed at AlterNet, “Many politicians have mastered the art of dodging questions,” she wrote. “What struck me about this debate was that Sarah Palin has mastered the art of something else: making you forget the question.”

Kevin Drum, blogging for Mother Jones, put it this way:

I’ll be honest: I genuinely didn’t understand about 50% of what Sarah Palin said. She pretty overtly didn’t even pretend to address a lot of [moderator Gwen] Ifill’s questions — probably because she couldn’t — and a lot of her filibustering ended up sounding like random strings of phrases from the Hockey-Mom-o-Bot 3000. This was especially true as time wore on. If nothing else, this makes it almost impossible to judge the substance of what she believes, and despite the fact that she “connects” with ordinary people, I have a feeling that an awful lot of ordinary people weren’t impressed with this.

On the other hand, A. Serwer of The American Prospect’s TAPPED blog, wasn’t so keen on those questions. “Obviously, Gwen Ifill’s biggest problem is not bias, but really bad questions, Serwer wrote . As an example, he offers, “‘Which is worse? A nuclear Iran or an unstable Pakistan?’ I’m paraphrasing, but that question is roughly equivalent to ‘would you rather be stabbed or shot?’”

And about those ordinary people Drum spoke of, Salon’s Walter Shapiro watched the debate with a group of Republican-leaning voters in Green Bay, Wisc., and his observations would bear out Drum:

Watching a debate in an intensely partisan setting can be a through-the-looking-glass experience since the verdict has been determined before the trial. But what was telling Thursday night was that the mood of the volunteers was subdued. At times it seemed like the delivery of six pizzas was a more dramatic event than the most over-hyped vice-presidential debate in history. This emotional reticence was in no way a reflection on Palin, but rather a reaction to the overly scripted debate. As Stephanie Kundert, the 26-year-old campaign manager for state Rep. Karl Van Roy, said after blogging the debate for a conservative website, “In parts, it was boring.”

The Washington Independent’s Laura McGann filed from Peanut Farm Bar & Grill, a bar in Anchorage, mixing her debate-blogging with lots of local color:

This place looks ideal. We’ve got nine full-size projector screens with Fox News on and six flat screens also tuned into Fox.

I’d expect an interesting crowd, as Gov. Sarah Palin’s sister watched Palin give her famous Republican convention speech here…two people just sat down at the table next to me wearing T-shirts featuring Sarah Palin riding a polar bear in front of the Washington Capitol Building.

AlterNet’s Don Hazen filed from the other end of the world (or so it seems) — a room filled with artists in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. There he found his compatriots about as reticent to claim a victory for Biden as the Green Bay Republicans were to declare one for Palin:

[T]here was a separate, contrary undercurrent in the room and in follow-up interviews. It was a disquiet, which I shared with half a dozen people I spoke with. Call us the working class sympathizers. Maybe because of our roots, or work as artists, we are more tuned in to the reality where form can often take precedence over substance.

One actress, who has been doing some speaking for Obama in Pennsylvania offered that Palin scared her: “She was slick, she had her role down; she is going to appeal to people more than we think.” An artist, with roots in working class Philly was clearly disturbed: “Pallin hung in there; it pissed me off. I think for some voters, it is not what she says, but how she says it, and she had the language thing down. People in this room may dismiss it, but to some people, she sounds real and authentic, and that will help her.”

Because of the ideosyncratic nature of this debate — no steering the candidates back to the questions they strayed from answering — much of the critique hung on style rather than substance: Palin stared at the camera, Biden addressed the moderator; Palin asked to call Biden by his first name, then never did; Biden cried when talking about caring for his sons when they were in critical condition. However, substance there was, such as when Palin let it drop that she thought the Constitution conferred upon the office of the Vice Presidency powers that have yet to be exercised, an assertion that even mainstream media commentators found somewhat astonishing. Liveblogging from Anchorage, McGann wrote: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Which branch????”

Both candidates claimed to be great fans of Israel, and there was an exchange on whether the Global War on Terrorism was centered in Iraq or on the Afghan/Pakistan border.

TAPPED’s Serwer observed, “Palin’s best moment so far was calling Biden out on trying to have it both ways on the war. She’s absolutely right that he was engaging in Washington speak, not that platitudes topped by nonsense and gibberish are much better.”

At Grist, Kate Sheppard assessed the candidates’ response to questions on energy and the environment, and discovered some Biden doublespeak:

Biden made other remarks sure to perk up the ears of Grist readers, especially his assertion that “I have always supported [clean coal], and that’s a fact” — a much stronger pronouncement than his previous statements on the subject. He added, “By investing in clean coal and safe nuclear … we can create new jobs,” and later in the debate repeated, “My record for 25 years has been supporting clean coal.”

Even as recently last week, Biden said “We’re not supporting ‘clean coal.’” And last year, in an interview with Grist, he said, “I don’t think there’s much of a role for clean coal in energy independence.” He’s always said, however, that he thinks that “clean coal” technology should be exported to China, which he repeated tonight: “China is building one to three new coal-fired plants burning dirty coal per week. It’s polluting not only the atmosphere but the West Coast of the United States. We should export the technology by investing in clean coal technology.”

Blogging for The Nation, Ari Melber saw a bit more substance than some of his colleagues in the progressive blogosphere, but that didn’t stop him from culling video clips of some of the less substantive moments. “Thursday’s vice presidential debate was a serious and substantive affair,” he wrote. “With superb moderating by Gwen Ifill, the conversation stuck to policy-driven sparring, but the footage is already taking a different shape on YouTube.” Click here to see Melber’s spicey moments.

Greg Sargent of TPM Election Central was among the first to share with us the results of the CBS snap poll that showed Biden the clear winner of the debate:

The first round of snap polls give the debate to Joe Biden, by sizable margins.

CBS polled 473 uncommitted debate-watchers, and found that 46% say Biden won, 21% say Palin won, and 33% say it was a tie.

While both candidates saw their images improve, 98% saw Biden as “knowledgeable” after the debate, while only 66% saw Palin as knowledgeable, an admittedly high number, given what folks thought of her before tonight.

[…]

It’s not wise to put too much stock in snap polls. But if this bears out, it’ll confirm our earlier argument: Palin’s disastrous interviews raised expectations for her tonight, in the sense that the pressure on her to prove she’s ready for the job was even higher than it otherwise might have been. And she didn’t prove it, at least according to these early numbers.

Writing at his eponymous blog, Ezra Klein of The American Prospect concluded:

At the end of the day, it wasn’t about expectations. Palin surpassed hers. Shattered them, in fact. The stumbling, tongue-tied, intellectually uncertain novice who withered before Katie Couric’s steady questioning was absent this evening. Palin was confident, on-message, and at times, sharp. But it didn’t matter. The polls were clear… Like McCain before her, Palin performed at the top of her game, and it wasn’t enough.

Whether or not that will matter, well, we’ll know in about a month.

–Adele M. Stan

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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Sarah Palin’s Party Loyalty


by addiestan, The Media Consortium: Tue., Sep 2, 2008
Filed under: Republican National Convention

UPDATE: For a comprehensive explanation of Constitution Party theology from a scholar of right-wing movements, check out Chip Berlet’s excellent article on Talk to Action.

Unless you live in a cave, you probably know that Sarah Palin, the presumptive Republican vice presidential nominee, has a pregnant teenage daughter, an ex-brother-in-law whose supervisor she tried to fire, and you may have heard that she once belonged to a political party, the Alaska Independence Party, which sports the occasional mission of establishing Alaska as its own country. (Though McCain camp denies that report by ABC News, the network is sticking by its story about Palin’s affiliation. In addition, voter rolls show, according to TPM Muckraker, that Palin’s husband claimed membership between 1995 - 2002.) More recently, Palin sent the party a video greeting for use at its convention.

Through it all, leaders of the G.O.P. and the religious right have vowed to stick with her. But what if she supported a third party that’s bent on smashing up the Republican Party? Or one with links to militia groups? Would she still look like your garden-variety church lady to the Republican Party pooh-bahs?

Indeed, it does seem to be the case that Sarah Palin is out there on the fringe. Fred Clarkson of Talk To Action today reported the connection between the Alaska Independence Party and the Constitution Party founded and led by Howard Phillips. Basically, the AIP is the Constitution Party — its Alaska state-level party. In 1996, Phillips tried to lure insurgent presidential candidate Pat Buchanan out of the G.O.P. for a run on the slate of his national party (then called the U.S. Taxpayers Party) and nearly succeeded in doing so.

I first became familiar with Howard Phillips in 1995, in the course of reporting a story on the religious right for Mother Jones. In a 45-minute telephone interview, Phillips laid out for me the strategy and rationale behind his party, whose ideological basis is found in the tenets of Christian Reconstructionism, a theology that calls for biblical law to be implemented as the law of the land. (Yes, that means death for adulterers and “homosexuals”.)

But he’s not an impractical man. Here’s how Phillips saw the fortunes of his party taking shape in 1996, per our conversation:

What I think is going to happen is that we’re probably not going to elect an independent president in ‘96, but ‘96 is going to reveal some fissures within support for the major parties, and I think we’ll have an independent president by the end of the decade. The reason I say that is that i see an enormous financial crisis coming. When you have a $5 trillion debt, every time interest rates go up by a single percentage point, the cost of debt service goes up by $15 billion. And we’ve been able to keep interest rates down for a long time — one of the reasons was that people wanted dollars. They don’t want dollars anymore…And that is going to lead, in my view, to an hyper-inflationary depression in the United States which is going to terminally undermine confidence in whomever controls the presidency when it hits — and, to a lesser extent, in the other party, as well. I think the whole purpose of ‘96 is to position for that crisis and to be able to pick up the pieces when it’s over.

The Constitution Party has long been linked to anti-abortion groups that threaten violence, such as Missionaries to the Pre-Born, a sort of militia organization. Randall Terry, the former leader of Operation Rescue, has organized for the party and run for Congress on its ticket. When I interviewed Phillips 13 years ago, I asked him about alleged links between his party and militia groups, which he denied.

“We are not involved in the killing business,” he said. “Planned Parenthood is Murder Incorporated…That’s not our schtick.”

Phillips’ anti-choice rhetoric is often harsh, and his position — which echoes that of the Constitution Party — is uncompromising: No abortions, no exceptions. Here is how he stated it at an Operation Rescue rally in San Diego in 1996: Exceptions for rape and incest, he said, mean it’s “okay to kill some babies if they’re born to the wrong parents — if their dad was a rapist or a close relative.”

If Palin makes it into the West Wing, would she be Howard Phillips’ ringer, awaiting that fateful day?

Okay, so that’s a bit much. But, as Max Blumenthal reports, leaders of the Council for National Policy, the secretive uber-right-wing umbrella group (of which Phillips is a member), went ga-ga for Palin, and may have pushed McCain to pick her in exchange for their support.

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