Tag: McCain

Do Angry Clinton Women Love McCain?

Seth Anderson0 comment

Frank Rich is positively giddy in his Sunday column1:

You’d never guess that Mr. McCain is a fierce foe of abortion rights or that he voted to terminate the federal family-planning program that provides breast-cancer screenings. You’d never know that his new campaign blogger, recruited from The Weekly Standard, had shown his genuine affection for Mrs. Clinton earlier this year by portraying her as a liar and whiner and by piling on with a locker-room jeer after she’d been called a monster. “Tell us something we don’t know,” he wrote.

But while the McCain campaign apparently believes that women are easy marks for its latent feminist cross-dressing, a reality check suggests that most women can instantly identify any man who’s hitting on them for selfish ends. New polls show Mr. Obama opening up a huge lead among female voters — beating Mr. McCain by 13 percentage points in the Gallup and Rasmussen polls and by 19 points in the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News survey.

How huge is a 13- to 19-percentage-point lead? John Kerry won women by only 3 points, Al Gore by 11.

The real question is how Mr. McCain and his press enablers could seriously assert that he will pick up disaffected female voters in the aftermath of the brutal Obama-Clinton nomination battle. Even among Democrats, Mr. Obama lost only the oldest female voters to Mrs. Clinton.

But as we know from our Groundhog Days of 2008, a fictional campaign narrative, once set in the concrete of Beltway bloviation, must be recited incessantly, especially on cable television, no matter what facts stand in the way. Only an earthquake — the Iowa results, for instance — could shatter such previously immutable story lines as the Clinton campaign’s invincibility and the innate hostility of white voters to a black candidate.

[Click here to read more of Frank Rich – Do Angry Clinton Women Love McCain? – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

If you ignore the chattering class in the Washington DC media (which you should for your own health anyway), and concentrate on the real numbers, McCain looks a lot like Bob Dole in 1996, or even Walter Mondale in 1984. That is to say, President Obama is looking good, CC.

One more snippet:

Yet the myth of Democratic disarray is so pervasive that when “NBC Nightly News” andThe Wall Street Journal presented their new poll results last week (Obama, 47 percent; McCain, 41 percent) they ignored their own survey’s findings to stick to the clichéd script. Both news organizations (and NBC’s sibling, MSNBC) dwelled darkly on Mr. Obama’s “problems with two key groups” (as NBC put it): white men, where he is behind 20 percentage points to Mr. McCain, and white suburban women, where he is behind 6 points.

Since that poll gives Mr. Obama not just a 19-point lead among all women but also a 7-point lead among white women, a 6-point deficit in one sliver of the female pie is hardly a heart-stopper. Nor is Mr. Obama’s showing among white men shocking news. No Democratic presidential candidate, including Bill Clinton, has won a majority of that declining demographic since 1964. Mr. Kerry lost white men by 25 points, and Mr. Gore did by 24 points (even as he won the popular vote).

“NBC Nightly News” was so focused on these supposedly devastating Obama shortfalls that there was no mention that the Democrat beat Mr. McCain (and outperformed Mr. Kerry) in every other group that had been in doubt: independents, Catholics, blue-collar workers and Hispanics. Indeed, the evidence that pro-Clinton Hispanics are flocking to Mr. McCain is as nonexistent as the evidence of a female stampede. Mr. Obama swamps Mr. McCain by 62 percent to 28 percent — a disastrous G.O.P. setback, given that President Bush took 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, according to exit polls. No wonder the McCain campaign no longer lists its candidate’s home state of Arizona as safe this fall.

There are many ways that Mr. Obama can lose this election. But his 6-percentage-point lead in the Journal-NBC poll is higher than Mr. Bush’s biggest lead (4 points) over Mr. Kerry at any point in that same poll in 2004. So far, despite all the chatter to the contrary, Mr. Obama is not only holding on to Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic constituencies but expanding others (like African-Americans). The same cannot be said of Mr. McCain and the G.O.P. base.

That story is minimized or ignored in part because an unshakable McCain fan club lingers in some press quarters and in part because it’s an embarrassing refutation of the Democrats-in-meltdown narrative that so many have invested in. Understating the splintering of the Republican base also keeps hope alive for a tight race. As the Clinton-Obama marathon proved conclusively, a photo finish is essential to the dramatic and Nielsen imperatives of 24/7 television coverage.

Footnotes:
  1. in the New York Times. So glad they opened up the TimesSelect to everyone – saves me having to quote the whole damn thing. Though I got more site traffic [↩]

McCain and Obama Tax Plans

Seth Anderson0 comment

Paul Krugman points to

the sad case of John McCain, part of whose lingering image as a maverick rests on his early opposition to the Bush tax cuts, which he declared excessive and too tilted toward the rich.

Since then the budget surpluses of the Clinton years have given way to persistent deficits, and income inequality has risen to new heights, vindicating his opposition.

But instead of pointing this out, Mr. McCain now promises to make those tax cuts permanent — and proposes further cuts that are, if anything, tilted even more toward the wealthy. And how is the loss of revenue to be made up? Mr. McCain hasn’t offered a realistic answer.

You can explain though not excuse Mr. McCain’s behavior by his need to shore up relations with the Republican base, which suspects him of being a closet moderate. But he’s not the only one seemingly trapped by the Bush fiscal legacy.

Barack Obama’s tax plan is more responsible than Mr. McCain’s: relative to current policy, the Tax Policy Center estimates, the Obama plan would raise revenue by $700 billion over the next decade, compared with a $600 billion loss for Mr. McCain.

The Obama plan is also far more progressive, sharply reducing after-tax incomes for the richest 1 percent of Americans while raising incomes for the bottom 80 percent.

[Click to read more of Paul Krugman – Fiscal Poison Pill – Bush’s Tax Cuts and the McCain and Obama Plans – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

But the die-hard Republicans, even the ones making less than $250,000, still believe that somehow Obama is going to find out their bank password, and rob their accounts at night, or otherwise steal money by ‘raising taxes’. Doesn’t matter what the facts are, doesn’t even matter what the candidates say, the viewers of Faux News think when a Democrat gets into power, all is ruin.

No, Johnny, No

Seth Anderson2 Comments

Chuck Berry is Cool

Chuck Berry is cool, as we’ve opined before.

For a US presidential candidate, there is nothing better than a rocking anthem to pump up the crowds and project the sort of imagery that could help win the keys to the White House.

The Republican hopeful John McCain may be pushing 72, but his “town hall” events can be as noisy as the stadiums where Barack Obama appears on stage to the strains of U2’s “Beautiful Day.” But the McCain camp is having trouble settling on a suitable campaign anthem. After searching for months, it finally picked “Johnny B Goode” – Chuck Berry’s rock ‘n’ roll classic from 1958. The high-power guitar licks and “Go, Johnny, go” chorus put a spring in Mr McCain’s step. When asked why he chose it, he quipped: “It might be because it is the only one [the artist] hasn’t complained about us using.”

Berry, 81, may not have complained about his song being appropriated by Mr McCain, but he has made it clear he would prefer Barack Obama in the White House. “America has finally come to this point where you can pick a man of colour and that not be a drawback,” Berry said. “It’s no question, myself being a man of colour. I mean, you have to feel good about it.”

The anointment of Mr Obama as the Democratic presidential candidate was, he added, “definitely a proud and successful moment for all the people of this country – not just black people, but Americans in general”.

Berry, known as the “father of rock ‘n’ roll”, recounted: “In the Fifties there were certain places we couldn’t ride on the bus, and now there is a possibility of a black man being in White House.” “Free at last, free at last, thank God Almighty, free at last,” he added, quoting Martin Luther King.

There was a groan at McCain headquarters as it suffered yet another musical derailment. An attempt to use Abba’s “Take A Chance On Me” also bombed. “We played it a couple times and it’s my understanding [Abba] went berserk,” Mr McCain said.

[From No, Johnny, No: Chuck Berry joins chorus of musicians snubbing McCain’s campaign – Americas, World – The Independent]

Probably because Republicans and artists don’t mix well. I’m hard pressed to think of a prominent rock musician who is a die-hard Republican.

Via Gordon@Alternate Brain

Coveted Bob Dylan Endorsement of Barack Obama

Seth Anderson0 comment

Exit, Zimmerman

Whew. Glad that’s on record – there’s bound to be a McCain supporter or two who will change their vote now that His Bobness has spoken.

Bob Dylan – who could justifiably claim to be the architect of Barack Obama’s ‘change’ catchphrase – has backed the Illinois senator to do for modern America what the generation before did in the 1960s.

In an exclusive interview with The Times, published today, Dylan gives a ringing endorsement to Mr Obama, the first ever black presidential candidate, claiming he is “redefining the nature of politics from the ground up”.

Dylan, 67, made the comments when being interviewed in Denmark, where he stopped over in a hotel during a tour of Scandinavia.

Asked about his views on American politics, he said: “Well, you know right now America is in a state of upheaval. Poverty is demoralising. You can’t expect people to have the virtue of purity when they are poor.

“But we’ve got this guy out there now who is redefining the nature of politics from the ground up…Barack Obama.

“He’s redefining what a politician is, so we’ll have to see how things play out. Am I hopeful? Yes, I’m hopeful that things might change. Some things are going to have to.”

He added: “You should always take the best from the past, leave the worst back there and go forward into the future.”

[From Bob Dylan says Barack Obama is ‘changin’ America – Times Online ]

In all seriousness, if McCain wins, I might move to Denmark. Luckily, I don’t think he stands a chance, unless something weird happens.

The Bob Dylan exhibit sounds interesting. I wish I could take a week or so off and go to England.

The haphazard process leading to the London show began nearly 20 years ago when he was approached by an editor at the American publishing company Random House. “They’d seen some of my sketches somewhere and asked if I’d like to do a whole book. Why not, you know? There was no predetermined brief. ‘Just deal with the material to hand, whatever that is. And do it however you want. You can be fussy, you can be slam-bang, it doesn’t matter.’ Then they gave me a drawing book, I took it away with me and turned it back in again, full three years later.”

Published in 1994 under the abbreviated title Drawn Blank, the resultant images had been executed both on the hoof while he was touring and in a more structured way in studios, using models (“Just anyone who’d be open to doing it”) and lights. What was going on in his life during that three-year period to inform or provide a back story to the work? “Just the usual,” Dylan shrugs, fixed in the hunkered-forward, hands-clasped position he will maintain for most of our time together. “I try to live as simply as is possible and was just drawing whatever I felt like drawing, whenever I felt like doing it. The idea was always to do it without affectation or self-reference, to provide some kind of panoramic view of the world as I was seeing it.”

Built up of work that is often contemplative, sometimes exuberant but consistently technically accomplished and engaging, that view is of train halts, diners and dockyards, barflies, dandies and uniformed drivers glimpsed in New Orleans or New York, Stockholm or South Dakota. And of women. We’re left in no doubt that Dylan likes women. “They weren’t actually there at the same time,” he notes quickly, pointing, when his page-turning reveals the painting Two Sisters, its subjects lounging, one clothed, the other naked but for her bra. “They posed separately and I put them together afterwards.”

[snip]

The method used to turn them into the paintings about to go on exhibition in London involved making digital scans of the original drawings and enlarging and then transferring them on to heavy paper ready for reworking. Dylan then experimented with treating individual images with a variety of colours. “And doing so subverted the light. Every picture spoke a different language to me as the various colours were applied.”

Fundraising: Obama vs McCain

swanksalot0 comment

Garfield Pond with fish

Obama would seem to have an edge in fundraising, unless the economy tanks so much that the under $200-donation crowd can’t afford to contribute anymore.

Obama’s campaign spent significant resources on physical offices in battleground states. But those efforts often came to follow the informal infrastructure that his supporters built ahead of time by finding each other through my.barackobama.com and coordinating off-line to campaign for their candidate.

The most obvious area in which it led was online fund-raising. Just under half its record-level of $265 million raised so far came from donations of $200 or less, much of which flowed to the campaign through the internet. The Clinton campaign ended up tweaking its fund-raising approach after Obama’s initial successes and began asking supporters for smaller amounts of money in online fund-raising drives following each primary victory.

In contrast to Obama’s campaign, presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain has raised only $90.5 million during the same 2007 and 2008 period. Just over a third of his donations came from the $200-and-under crowd. Forty-two percent of it came through contributions at the maximum $2,000 level. For Obama, just under a quarter of his donations came from $2,000-level donations.

[From Obama, Propelled by the Net, Wins Democratic Nomination – Wired Blogs]

Hopefully, for all our sakes, that doesn’t happen.

McCain to spy on Americans Secretly

swanksalot0 comment

Let there be light
[There could be a hidden microphone in this light fixture if John McCain has his way]

McCain flip-flops on whether civil liberties are important. Now he’s against them, just like his mentor, George Bush.

If elected president, Senator John McCain would reserve the right to run his own warrantless wiretapping program against Americans, based on the theory that the president’s wartime powers trump federal criminal statutes and court oversight, according to a statement released by his campaign Monday.

McCain’s new tack towards the Bush administration’s theory of executive power comes some 10 days after a McCain surrogate stated, incorrectly it seems, that the senator wanted hearings into telecom companies’ cooperation with President Bush’s warrantless wiretapping program, before he’d support giving those companies retroactive legal immunity.
As first reported by Threat Level, Chuck Fish, a full-time lawyer for the McCain campaign, also said McCain wanted stricter rules on how the nation’s telecoms work with U.S. spy agencies, and expected those companies to apologize for any lawbreaking before winning amnesty.

But Monday, McCain adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin, speaking for the campaign, disavowed those statements, and for the first time cast McCain’s views on warrantless wiretapping as identical to Bush’s.

[N]either the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001. […]

We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.

The Article II citation is key, since it refers to President Bush’s longstanding arguments that the president has nearly unlimited powers during a time of war. The administration’s analysis went so far as to say the Fourth Amendment did not apply inside the United States in the fight against terrorism, in one legal opinion from 2001.

[From McCain: I’d Spy on Americans Secretly, Too | Threat Level from Wired.com]

Constitution, begone, says McCain, if it was good enough for Stalin, it’s good enough for Republicans.

Infighting Among the Dems

Seth Anderson0 comment

Bob Herbert is irritated with the fractious Democratic Party, their goofy nomination process, and their self-centered campaigning.

Talk about self-inflicted wounds.

The Democrats may finally be stepping away from their circular firing squad. It took them long enough.

There are so many things that the Democrats need to do to have any chance of winning the White House in November, and it’s awfully late in the game to begin doing them.

Only now is the party starting to rally around Senator Barack Obama, who has been the likely nominee for the longest time. No one knows how long it will take to move beyond the fratricidal conflict that was made unnecessarily bitter by Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The cry of “McCain in ’08!” at the Democratic rules committee meeting in Washington over the weekend came from a supporter of Senator Hillary Clinton.

It reminded me of Bill Clinton’s comment that “it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.”

He was talking about Hillary Clinton and John McCain. The former president’s comment played right into the sustained effort by opponents of Barack Obama to portray the senator as some kind of alien figure, less than patriotic, not fully American, too strange by half to be handed the reins of government.

[Click to read more Bob Herbert – Infighting Among the Democratcs – Op-Ed – NYTimes.com]

If McCain wins the election, I wouldn’t be surprised to see rioting in the streets.

Lieberman and Graham, Conflicted

Seth Anderson0 comment

Random Colored Lights and Moon
[click to embiggen]

McCain supporters feign surprise that they are expected to follow the candidate’s public policy announcements. They thought they’d be able to continue being as corrupt as before, and nobody would pay attention. Notice – neither paragon of virtue, Lieberman nor Graham, decided to step down until after reporters asked uncomfortable questions.

Senators Joseph I. Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, prominent surrogates for Senator John McCain’s presidential campaign, stepped down Wednesday from their positions with an independent group that released a pair of Internet advertisements attacking Senator Barack Obama on Iraq.

Mr. Lieberman, independent of Connecticut, and Mr. Graham, Republican of South Carolina, were both on the policy advisory board to the organization, Vets for Freedom, which on Wednesday released its second Web advertisement in less than a week attacking Mr. Obama.

The senators’ positions with the group, which describes itself as a grass-roots advocacy organization pushing for victory in Iraq and Afghanistan, seemed to place them in contravention of new conflict-of-interest rules released by Mr. McCain’s campaign that specifically prohibit anyone “with a McCain campaign title or position” from participating in a “527 or other independent entity that makes public communications that support or oppose any presidential candidate.”

After inquiries from reporters, the senators released a joint letter to Vets for Freedom on Wednesday saying they had requested a leave from their positions to come into compliance with the new policy.

[From Lieberman and Graham, Senators for McCain, Leave Group After Ads Attacking Obama – NYTimes.com]

Remind me again why Holy Joe Lieberman is a Democratic Superdelegate? Didn’t the DNC strip Zell Miller of his status after Senator Miller fulminated in support of Bush? Shouldn’t Lieberman lose his chairmanships too? He obviously has little in common with the Democrats anymore. I wonder what Connecticut voters think of him now?

—
Ooops, my mistake, Lieberman has been stripped of his super delegate status.

Thanks to Zell Miller, there is a rule to deal with Joe Lieberman.

Lieberman’s endorsement of Republican John McCain disqualifies him as a super-delegate to the Democratic National Convention under what is informally known as the Zell Miller rule, according to Democratic State Chairwoman Nancy DiNardo.

Miller, then a Democratic senator from Georgia, not only endorsed Republican George Bush four years ago, but he delivered a vitriolic attack on Democrat John Kerry at the Republican National Convention.

The Democrats responded with a rule disqualifying any Democrat who crosses the aisle from being a super delegate. Lieberman will not be replaced, DiNardo said.

John McCain’s Arab-American problem

Seth Anderson0 comment

Something I never even thought about – Arab-Americans as a demographic group. 3,500,000 isn’t a tiny number, as these things go. Hope McCain’s lack of courage in the Ali Jawad matter costs him a few swing states, or more.

Not long ago, the John McCain campaign dropped a prominent Arab-American businessman from its Michigan state finance committee because of allegations that the man was an “agent” of Hezbollah. The charges, made by a right-wing blogger, were unsubstantiated, but fears of being associated with Arab terror caused Republican knees to jerk, and cost Ali Jawad his position. All politics, even national politics, is local, and Jawad’s abrupt dismissal may cost McCain many votes among Southeastern Michigan’s large Arab-American community. But more important, Arab-Americans across the country are looking for changes in domestic and international policy that McCain seems unwilling to pledge — and they are concentrated in swing states that he will need to win this fall. Does John McCain have a problem with Arab-American voters?

Recent polls show a tight race between either Democrat and McCain in Florida, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Ohio, all states where Arab-Americans account for an appreciable percentage of the vote. Such polls have limited utility with November so many months away, but that it will be a close election in those key states seems clear. In a tight election, the votes of a well-placed minority — Arab-American votes — can be crucial.

Arab-Americans are a highly diverse group of up to 3.5 million persons, according to Arab American Institute figures. About three-quarters of them are Christian and a quarter Muslim. Eighty percent are U.S. citizens. Many are from families that have been in the U.S. for decades or even a century. They come from all over the Arab world, from Morocco to Egypt and Iraq to Yemen, but the traditional core of the community is Lebanese and Palestinian.

[From John McCain’s Arab-American problem | Salon ]