Blue Mass Group

Reality-based commentary on politics.

McCain disaster roundup

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It’s getting hard to keep track of all the embarrassing things to happen to the McCain campaign.  Here are a few from today.

  • Joe McCain (John’s brother) agrees with Obama on bin Laden and Pakistan.  Here’s Joe, in the same mortifying appearance in which he referred to northern Virginia as “communist”:

    “I do know that if he finds out where Osama is and I think we probably know, although I don’t know personally — he’s just gonna go up to that country and say, `you have a murderer of thousands of Americans. I hope you help us get him. If not, just stand back, because we’re coming in after him.’ And that man will be brought to justice.”

    You’ll recall that McCain already had to disavow similar comments by Sarah Palin.

  • The lawyer deputized by Team McCain to handle the new focus on the Keating Five scandal, John Dowd, committed quite the gaffe on a conference call with reporters today.  He claimed that McCain knew nothing about the fact that his wife and her father had invested in a strip mall (Fountain Square) owned by Charles Keating.  Dowd today: “It was part of the inquiry, but it did not — John was unconnected to that and unaware of it at the time, and did not participate in it.”  But McCain himself testified otherwise at the time.  Here’s the video.  And, awkwardly, Mr. Dowd himself is the lawyer examining McCain.

  • This, by the way, is the same John Dowd who said in 2007 (in backing Fred Thompson):

    “I am very sorry to see what’s happened to John,” Dowd said in an interview. “I don’t think his campaign is being well run. It’s been over-managed. He blew through $8 1/2 million. It’s a difficult thing to leave a friend and go to another friend. But we lost the John McCain I knew.”

  • It’s also the same John Dowd who told reporters today that the whole Keating investigation was a “classic political smear-job” against McCain.  Even though McCain himself wrote in his 2002 memoir that the Keating business was “the worst mistake of my life.”  So, apparently, McCain was among those smearing McCain.  In other news, black is white and up is down.

  • Meanwhile, the polling gets worse and worse for McCain.  Today is the first day in which polls consist entirely of data taken post-VP debate.  They all show Obama’s lead continues to expand — and TPM’s composite shows that Obama has cracked 50%.

    • Gallup: Obama 50%, McCain 42%, with a ±2% margin of error, compared to a 50%-43% Obama lead yesterday.

    • Rasmussen: Obama 52%, McCain 44%, with a ±2% margin of error, compared to a 51%-44% Obama lead yesterday. This is Obama’s biggest lead ever in the Rasmussen poll.

    • Hotline/Diageo: Obama 47%, McCain 41%, with a ±3.2% margin of error, compared to a 47%-41% Obama lead yesterday.

    • Research 2000: Obama 52, McCain 40%, with a ±3% margin of error, unchanged from yesterday.

    Adding these polls together and weighting them by the square roots of their sample sizes, Obama is ahead 50.5%-42.1%.

  • And this is just funny:

    My opponent’s touchiness every time he is questioned about his record should make us only more concerned…. Who is the real Barack Obama? But ask such questions and all you get in response is another barrage of angry insults.

    Touchy?  Angry?  LOL!  Said Mr. Pot to Mr. Kettle!

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Comments

  2. One thing comes through on reading the Rolling Stone article by Dickinson is how many times McCain has screwed up and gotten through it:

    • Twice he was almost thrown out of school.
    • He was insubordinate more than once. (“I’m landing or I’m taking my field and going home.”)
    • He crashed three airplanes but was still allowed to fly in Vietnam.
    • He cut down a Spanish power line with his airplane.

    If one had a life story like that, one might expect future recklessness to go unpunished because past recklessness went unpunished.

    • the recklessness of his advocacy for the known lawbreaker Charles Keating that had a direct consequence of costing US taxpayers over $3 billion.

        • I realized after I hit “post” that I had neglected to make the connection between the recklessness from the military period and the recklessness of the campaign (Palin, sleazy attacks, delaying convention, suspending campaign, not investing in ground organization, etc.) Not only was the Keating thing reckless but his campaign’s response to it is reckless as well.

  3. A McCain operative in VA, Bobby May, wrote an newspaper column “joking” that

    [Obama] would hire the rapper Ludacris to paint the White House black (a reference to a pro-Obama song by Ludacris), and divert more foreign aid to Africa so “the Obama family there can skim enough to allow them to free their goats and live the American Dream.” He joked that Obama would replace the 50 stars o the U.S. flag “with a star and crescent logo,” an Islamic symbol, an that his policy on drugs would be to “raise taxes to pay for Obama’ inner-city political base.”

    The columnist, Bobby May, is also treasurer of the Buchanan Count Republican Party and was listed in a July news release as the county’ representative on McCain’s Virginia leadership team, though he said his column reflected his views alone, and he denied it was racist.

    The episode has been so embarrassing (racism is to be whispered, you macaca idiot!) that McCain was forced to repudiate his man in VA.  It doesn’t seem to have silenced Sarah Palin’s dog whistle, though.

    • For all the McCain campaign’s crowing about McCain’s executive experience, he has a remarkably undisciplined campaign with spokespeople who supposedly speak for the candidate saying things that the candidate must later denounce. I wonder whether Palin will tell the voters in Michigan that we she should make incursions into Pakistan, that we’re a nation of whiners.

  4. link

    Reporters weren’t permitted to talk to Palin’s audience in a Clearwater park, the St. Petersburg Times reported.

    When reporters tried to leave the designated press area and head to where the crowd was seated, an escort would dart out, confront him or her and turn the person around, Times staff writer Eileen Schulte wrote on the paper’s Web site. One escort, who would not give her name, told a reporter the press couldn’t mingle because negative things had been written in the past, Schulte reported.

  5. link

    [Palin] embarked on a discussion of Obama’s relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., which Republican presidential candidate John McCain had signaled he did not want to be a part of his campaign.

    In an interview with conservative The New York Times columnist William Kristol published Monday, the Alaska governor said there should be more discussion about Wright, Obama’s pastor of 20 years at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. The Democratic candidate denounced Wright and severed ties with the church last spring after videotapes surfaced showing Wright making anti-American and anti-Semitic comments from the pulpit.

    Wright had appeared to be off limits for the McCain campaign ever since McCain himself condemned the North Carolina Republican Party in April for an ad that called Obama “too extreme” because Wright was his pastor. He asked the party to take down the ad and said, “I’m making it very clear, as I have a couple of times in the past, that there’s no place for that kind of campaigning, and the American people don’t want it.”

    When Kristol pressed Palin about Wright, she replied, “I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country.”

    She continued, “To me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up.”

    When thinking of Palin, “run amok” is the phrase that comes to mind.

    • I’m starting to wonder if Palin thinks she can save McCain from himself.  She saw her early favorable numbers, then lost her debate no worse than McCain lost his, and now McCain is tanking.  Perhaps she’s just what his ticket needs, whether he knows it our not, you betcha.  First invading Pakistan, then campaigning in Michigan, now using Wright.  She’s already forgotten who’s supposedly on top of the ticket.

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