Category: Politics 2008

*As Glenn Reynolds would say, they told me that if George W. Bush was re-elected, billionaires would have a veto over political speech…you really should watch that SNL skit if you can before it is deep-sixed permanently. It’s so rare for late-night comedy to take on the Democrats’ policies, rather than just gingerly needling their personalities.
*Via Ace, we have Patterico on the track of an LA Times report that simultaneously refused to report McCain’s criticisms of Obama on the economic crisis while accusing McCain of being afraid to talk about the economic crisis. I heard a radio report last night on WINS that did exactly the same thing – it quoted McCain and Palin’s lines about Obama’s integrity but not McCain’s specific factual charges about Obama and the economy, accused them of “dredging up dirt” and then pivoted to Obama talking about the economy…you could not make this stuff up. It’s why McCain needs to do his own dirty work tonight.
*On the other hand, thumbs up to CNN for this, which calls out Obama’s untruths about Bill Ayers, and includes new reporting quoting Alice Palmer, the leftist state senator who Obama succeeded in office:

The Obama camp and its media allies have used a couple of rhetorical strategies to deal with this. One is to talk solely about occasional meetings; believe nothing you hear from anyone who refuses to address Stanley Kurtz’s reporting (which CNN actually reveals here) on Obama steering millions of dollars to Ayers’ left-wing “educational” programs. Another is to claim that Ayers and Dohrn were somehow obscure figures (who just happened to be profiled periodically by national newspapers) and that Obama had no reason to know they were terrorists…of course, even aside from the fact that their background was well known in Hyde Park, Erick at RedState notes the extensive publicity about the Weather Underground at the time of the 1996 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and there’s also the fact that Obama was living in New York attending Columbia University in October 1981 during the Brink’s heist, which was huge front-page news in New York for months. The Brink’s case is why I immediately knew who these people were when Obama’s ties to them surfaced, and I’m ten years younger than Obama. One of the defendants in that case was Kathy Boudin; when Obama dealt with Ayers & Dohrn, Boudin and her husband were in prison and Ayers and Dohrn were raising her son as their own. I may not think much of Obama but even I don’t think he was obtuse enough not to have known who these people were.
(Note to Obama supporters insistent on denying that this story means anything: please first have the decency to admit Obama’s lying about it).
UPDATE: Want another piece of the puzzle? Kathy Boudin’s brother Michael was a lecturer at Harvard Law School when Obama was there (in fact, he was my antitrust professor). Did Obama take his class? Michael Boudin is, of course, an infinitely more respectable figure than his sister – he’d served in the Reagan Justice Department and in 1992, shortly after Obama graduated, Judge Boudin was appointed to the federal appellate bench by George H.W. Bush – but his family ties were the sort of thing one would routinely discuss about a member of the Law School faculty.
*Ross Douthat argues that Republican appeals to social issues, or even ads that were accused of being racially divisive, have tended to be effective only when they were grounded in concrete economic or safety concerns. Meanwhile, when it’s racist to criticize Barney Frank, well, the word has lost its meaning. One liberating feature of this campaign is that Republicans have been accused of being racist for pretty much every single thing that has been said or done, or at least every thing that was even remotely effective…after a while even the most timid of Republicans have to accept that the charge will get made no matter what means that it should not act as any sort of a restraint or deterrent on political dialogue. I mean, if it’s racist to criticize Barney Frank and Bill Ayers, if it’s racist to connect Obama to a multimillionaire CEO and former Cabinet official, if it’s racist just to show video of Obama in front of backdrops he himself chose, well, the word is apt to lose all its meaning.

From today’s Best of the Web, one of the classic examples of replacement-level, conventional wisdom-spouting liberal punditry makes a complete fool of himself in his rush to pronounce himself superior to Sarah Palin:

Continue reading In a Just World, This Would Be The End of EJ Dionne

McCain, after two weeks of unwisely pulling his punches while Congress worked on the bailout package and his opponent made partisan hay instead of phone calls, is now going for the jugular. Quite possibly too late, but really, when there is one overwhelming issue in an election, and you were right about it and your opponent was wrong, and he was in bed with the people who had an interest in him being wrong, it is advisable to point that out. Let’s hope he pounds this theme home tomorrow night.
I’m sure the response will be the usual chorus of claims that Obama’s time in the U.S. Senate was a long time ago, doesn’t matter, etc., etc., etc.
Oh, and by the way: this is just hilariously off-message.
PS: What are the two biggest decisions of Obama’s short Senate career? This and the surge in Iraq. He was wrong on both, and McCain was right on both.
UPDATE: Video below the fold. After all his delay, McCain is relishing this line of attack:

Continue reading It Is Brung

We should not be surprised, exactly, that when the NY Times finally deals with the Bill Ayers story, it tells it entirely from the Obama campaign’s preferred point of view…Stanley Kurtz looks at what is left out. Sample:

Continue reading Whitewashing Ayers

Q&A on last night’s highly-anticipated Vice Presidential debate:
(1) Is Sarah Palin a Blithering Moron?
Why no, in fact; amazingly, it turns out that a politician who has won six elections, served in public office for 13 years, participated in more than a dozen debates for statewide office two years ago and is the most popular Governor in the nation is actually perfectly capable of handling herself on her feet. But thanks anyway to those of you who worked so hard to make that the question everyone was asking and to reset expectations to exactly where they were entering her convention speech. The Left didn’t see that they were marching into a trap in 2004, but then they keep making the same mistake year after year after year even when we are telling them to their faces what they are doing.
Palin had one hit-and-miss interview with Charlie Gibson and a bad one with Katie Couric, but very few presidential candidates, even successful ones, have avoided having those kinds of days (Obama, for example, has often been tongue-tied and stammering in interviews; his debate performance Friday was well above his usual standards). That said, the gaps in her knowledge of national politics is an object lesson in why Governors, often elected to the Presidency, are rarely elected Vice President (Spiro Agnew is the only one since Coolidge).
Palin wasn’t quite the masterful populist she is on the stump or was at the Convention, but she was close. There were a few moments of fractured grammar (“What I want to argue about is, how are we going to get there to positively affect the impacts?”), a few episodes of falling back on generalities, and of course more than a few missed opportunities, but overall her performance was quite good indeed, and got back to the roots of why she’s such an effective politician. Some of that is mannerism – Biden talked to the moderator, Palin to the camera, and Palin was confident and bouyant, even on one occasion winking at the audience – some is her down-to-earth persona and ability to handle hot-button issues with a low-key, conciliatory tone, and some is simply the willingness to keep returning to hammer home a core theme, which in this case first and foremost was Obama’s plans to jack up taxes in the teeth of an oncoming recession (ironically, Biden pretty much fatally undermined the fiscal plausibility of his ticket’s tax hike strategy by repeatedly reasserting how few people it would be aimed at. That’s exactly why nobody who is remotely familiar with Democratic politicians or with Obama’s spending plans expects the lower limits on the tax plan to hold). There were no awkward pauses, no gaffes, nowhere she looked unprepared – she changed the subject on a number of occasions, but like McCain in the first debate, it had the effect of forcing Biden (who like Obama has a lawyer’s inability to resist responding to everything) to play on her turf.
Of course, Palin’s tendency to use generalities will come in for fire from the people who spent months swooning whenever Barack Obama read the words “hope” and “change” off his TelePrompter, but that can’t be helped.
Some of Palin’s best moments, despite the less than perfect syntax, came on things like global warming and same-sex marriage, where she was able to articulate positions that have one foot firmly planted in the conservative camp but with a nod to moderate positions as well. And of course, she again resisted efforts to take Henry Kissinger’s name in vain – it’s hilarious to me that Kissinger, of all people, is still an issue in multiple presidential debates 32 years after leaving office (then again, Biden brought up Mike Mansfield). And she handled pretty much all of the foreign policy questions flawlessly, threw some good shots at Biden over his past criticisms of Obama (unfortunately we didn’t get to hear him put on the spot about his nutty plan to cut Iraq into three separate countries). She was very effective in arguing that Biden is running against Bush instead of the actual ticket (“there you go again pointing backwards again. You preferenced your whole comment with the Bush administration. Now doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future.”) The one trap she generally avoided being baited into was testing the depth of her knowledge of McCain’s 26-year legislative voting record.
The lowlight of Palin’s performance for me, at least, was when she kept saying that “there was greed and there is corruption on Wall Street. And we need to stop that.” Threatening to punish Wall Street after the events of the past month is like threatening to punish the Branch Davidians after Waco. Another discordant note, but an example of how Palin was more liberated last night, was on education, where her answer was all about teacher salaries, more funding and loosening the standards of No Child Left Behind – in contrast to McCain’s platform, laid out in detail in his Convention speech but basically ignored since then, of school choice, standards and accountability.
Palin benefits, of course, from being the running mate, so she doesn’t have to carry as much of the argumentative, persuasive load. But she did a good job last night.
(2) Was Joe Biden…Joe Biden?
Surprisingly no, and in ways that were both good and bad for him. Stylistically, Biden seemed old, tired and grumpy; Biden can be quite charming and very much the happy warrior himself, and there was little of that in evidence. The mike picked him up emitting Al Gore-style exasperated sighs while Palin was talking on one or two occasions. Like McCain on Friday, he warmed up (or more properly, thawed out) as the evening went along. On the upside, while Biden had some moments that were amusing to knowledgeable viewers, he didn’t really produce any of the gasp-inducing gaffes that have been his signature for so many years, and of course, like McCain, he wore the mantle of his long experience effortlessly.
Although this debate was, like the first one, quite lively, it was also considerably more detatched from the truth, and Biden was mainly at fault for that – hammering John McCain inaccurately for being anti-regulation; falsely claiming that Obama’s Iraq plan was the “same plan that Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq and George Bush are now negotiating,” when Obama’s plan called for complete withdrawal by March 2008; confusing a windfall profits tax with a severance tax; claiming, absurdly, that McCain was voting to cut off funding for the Iraq War when he voted against an amendment to a funding bill. And when Biden said, “[t]hat’s the fundamental change Barack Obama and I will be bring to this party, not questioning other people’s motives,” well, he must not have read Obama’s 2002 war speech, in which Obama did just that as the centerpiece of his argument:

What I am opposed to is the cynical attempt by Richard Perle and Paul Wolfowitz and other arm-chair, weekend warriors in this Administration to shove their own ideological agendas down our throats, irrespective of the costs in lives lost and in hardships borne.
What I am opposed to is the attempt by political hacks like Karl Rove to distract us from a rise in the uninsured, a rise in the poverty rate, a drop in the median income – to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.

Biden also probably went a bit too far in suggesting that Obama needed him as training wheels:

Barack Obama indicated to me he wanted me with him to help him govern. So every major decision he’ll be making, I’ll be sitting in the room to give my best advice.

One of the more jarring moments, and maybe people at home didn’t pick this up, was when Biden suggested that we should have repeated Reagan’s greatest mistake (one McCain made a point of noting his 1983 opposition to) and sent troops into Lebanon:

When we kicked — along with France, we kicked Hezbollah out of Lebanon, I said and Barack said, “Move NATO forces in there. Fill the vacuum, because if you don’t know — if you don’t, Hezbollah will control it.”

And I think Biden overreached in his assumption that Americans are opposed to all of Bush’s foreign policy; I suspect even among people who don’t like the Iraq War you’d find a fair amount of support for his approach to Iran, Israel, Pakistan, etc. That said, if I was the McCain campaign, the commercial I’d want to cut of Biden was this line about foreign policy: “Talk. Talk. Talk.” Well, there’s your Obama foreign policy in a nutshell.
(3) Was Gwen Ifill Biased?
Ifill wasn’t a terrible moderator the way Chris Matthews was during the primaries, nor had I expected her to be based on the Cheney-Edwards debate four years ago. Still, you would not have had a ton of difficulty figuring out whose side her sympathies lay with. Biden got the last word in and overran his time finishing a sentence an astounding number of times, whereas she cut Palin off at the knees in mid-sentence when Palin was on a roll reciting examples of McCain’s push for more regulations: “Look at the tobacco industry. Look at campaign finance reform….” Or when she sneered at Palin, “Governor, are you interested in defending Sen. McCain’s health care plan?” And she did ask one truly awful question:

Governor, you mentioned a moment ago the constitution might give the vice president more power than it has in the past. Do you believe as Vice President Cheney does, that the Executive Branch does not hold complete sway over the office of the vice presidency, that it it is also a member of the Legislative Branch?

This was a terrible question because it’s so inside-baseball, relating to an arcane legal dispute nobody much follows who isn’t an obsessive political junkie. If she wanted to ask a more open-ended question about Cheney’s view of executive power and secrecy, that might have been enlightening. As it was, it was Biden who got his answer all wrong – besides asserting incorrectly that the executive power is set forth in Article I of the Constitution (maybe Biden needs 36 more years in the Senate to get up to speed on that one) and that the VP may “preside over the Senate, only in a time when in fact there’s a tie vote.” That’s not quite as bad as former UN Ambassador Bill Richardson not knowing the permanent members of the UN Security Council, but it’s staggering that a guy who has been in the Senate that long and spent years heading the Judiciary Committee and grilling Supreme Court nominees would blow such basic concepts of constitutional law.
(4) Will It Matter?
Let’s be frank here: McCain is now behind in all the important polls, and has lost significant ground since his high point around September 12-14. The overwhelming reason for this has been the credit crisis that has been the financial equivalent of the Madrid train bombing, working naturally against the party in power in the White House pretty much regardless of all other facts and circumstances, and pretty much sweeping consideration of every other issue out of the spotlight. The drawing out of the bailout debate has only worked to the Democrats’ advantage. With a month to go in the race and a fair amount of additional things that could happen, it’s premature to declare that this is the end of the line, but it does mean that McCain needs game-changing events; the ticket just scoring two more narrow debate victories like the first two won’t be enough unless we get another external shock to the system and/or Obama does something really stupid. Of course, that was really never possible with this debate, since there was no realistic way to mortally wound Obama’s ticket by something Biden did; the best Republicans could hope for was to reestablish Gov. Palin, and that worked out pretty much as well as one could have hoped. Which leaves to McCain the job of taking out Obama.

I have previously discussed at length the extent to which the public mood has focused on the issue of integrity in this presidential election. If anything, the recent credit crisis has heightened that concern – frankly, the public doesn’t understand the crisis and isn’t convinced the candidates do, either, but wants reassurance that the next President will be above outside influence in dealing with its aftermath and preventing similar economic crises in the future.
Now, you may not be interested in the integrity issue, or at any rate may be voting primarily on other issues; certainly I have other things much higher on my priority list. But if this is truly an election about who has the independence to bring about change in Washington, this is an issue the campaigns cannot ignore.
One of the most basic ways in which a candidate can demonstrate the integrity voters are looking for is to build a record of standing up to corruption and waste – and doing so even when it appears in his or her own party, or on the part of his or her own allies or backers. This is not just a matter of honesty and prudence, but of toughness and courage. Let me offer a contrast between the two tickets on this issue – an Integrity Gap that Obama simply can’t surmount and can only hope to obscure. If you look at the record of the McCain-Palin ticket and compare it to the Obama-Biden record in this regard, it really is no contest. I will start with the junior members of the two tickets. Governor Sarah Palin, in her short career, has fought many battles against her own party’s entrenched interests; Senator Barack Obama, in a career of similar length and scope, has consistently looked the other way, and worse. Sen. Obama simply lacks the courage and the record of accomplishment of Gov. Palin. Today I will look at Gov. Palin’s record; in Part II I will deal with Sen. Obama. Part III will deal with the senior members of the two tickets, Senator John McCain and Senator Joe Biden.

Continue reading The Integrity Gap, Part I of III: Gov. Sarah Palin

A number of conservatives, led by Michelle Malkin, are up in arms now about the fact that the moderator of the vice presidential debate, Gwen Ifill, has a book coming out January 20, 2009 – Inauguration Day – entitled “Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama.” You can read Malkin’s post for the full details of why this clearly gives Ifill a financial interest in there being an “Age of Obama” commencing January 20, to say nothing of her sympathies for her subject.
Moe Lane and Beldar are completely right here: this doesn’t mean Ifill should be replaced at the last minute, likely with some other liberal journalist, and it doesn’t mean Gov. Palin should be forced to eat into her precious debate time pointing the conflict out – but ethically, Ifill really must disclose to the national audience her book, its title and subject and release date at the outset of the debate, and let the viewing public decide if that tells them anything about the moderator.

Beldar, who really has been just far and away the best source on all things Palin, has a long, maps-and-pictures-filled post up looking at, yes, Alaska’s proximity to Russia and what Gov. Palin’s experience says about her as a potential Commander-in-Chief. I agree with this:

[N]o state governor has executive experience on these matters comparable to that which must be exercised by the POTUS. State governors are, however, executives, with experience running large organizations of a sort that mere legislators at any level – including U.S. Congressmen and Senators – don’t acquire. That’s part of the explanation for why America has so often elected state chief executive officers (governors) to become the federal chief executive officer (POTUS), often with salutary results

That goes to my longstanding point: no President is prepared for the entire job, but you have to have a base in one of the major parts of the job to avoid being overwhelmed by the learning curve, and in Gov. Palin’s case, it’s one of the two big ones (executive experience, the other being national security experience; Obama lacks both). Now, obviously Palin doesn’t bring to the table the years of national leadership on national security and foreign policy issues that Reagan did, and one can fairly argue that governors with experience more comparable to Palin’s – Woodrow Wilson had an almost identical resume when elected – were not smashing successes in the foreign policy/national security arena (these would include George W. Bush, Clinton, Carter, FDR, Coolidge, Wilson, Teddy Roosevelt, and McKinley, of whom only the Roosevelts and McKinley had some relevant foreign policy/national security experience). On the other hand, unlike Obama, Palin is highly likely to have many months and probably years before she’d be called on to take the reins, and would I be concerned if Palin became the president in, say, the fall of 2010? Of course not, since the best possible training for the presidency is the vice presidency.
The Palin-Obama comparison also reminds me of a silly Dahlia Lithwick column comparing Palin to Clarence Thomas in light of Justice Thomas’ views on affirmative action:

Like Thomas, Palin has been blasted for inexperience, and she has fought back with claims that she is not being judged on her merits, but on her gender, just as he felt he was inevitably judged on his race. While it’s possible to assert that Sarah Palin is the most qualified person in America for the vice presidency, only approximately nine people have done so with a straight face. That’s because Palin was not chosen because she was the second-best person to run America but to promote diversity on the ticket, even the political playing field, and to shatter (in her words) some glass ceilings.

What is amusingly naive, or would be if it wasn’t so disingenuous, is the suggestion that running mates are chosen because they are actually the second-most-qualified potential president in their party, regardless of political considerations. This was arguably true of Dick Cheney, whose only political benefit was precisely the fact that he could very seriously have been argued to be the second-most-qualified potential president in the GOP. (And if McCain were choosing today on solely that basis, Cheney would still be the top choice). Other than maybe LBJ, who was in any event chosen for nakedly political causes, though, one is hard-pressed to find running mates who fit that description. Palin does, in fact, bring a good deal more to the ticket than just gender, ranging from things McCain doesn’t have (executive experience, rock-solid social conservative credentials, being from far outside the Beltway and from a small town, and having lived most of her adult life in what is basically a blue-collar household, albeit one that by now is quite financially successful) as well as personal charisma (she’s a natural at retail politics) and harmony with McCain’s basic reformist drive and willingness to take on their own side. Add in the list of reasons why various other people were out of the running, and it’s obvious that Palin was a more than plausible choice, which is one reason why the right side of the blogosphere was buzzing about her as a running mate for months before McCain made his choice.
(Another argument I sometimes hear is the issue of whether she was the most qualified woman in the GOP…there’s a longer answer when you walk through particular candidates, but the easy answer to that one is this question: how many pro-life female governors are there in the GOP right now? I’m pretty certain the answer to that question is “one,” and really the only pro-life female Senator is Elizabeth Dole, and the last thing we need is another Dole on a national ticket.)
Anyway, where Lithwick’s column becomes openly contemptible is that she never even breathes the name Barack Obama. I can’t imagine there’s anybody over the age of 25 who seriously thinks Obama’s the person in the Democratic Party most qualified to do the job, and certainly his campaign has never been shy about leaning on his identity as a substitute for things like experience, accomplishment, and leadership ability. Lithwick may have some hidden rationalization why the dynamic she describes doesn’t apply to Obama, but she dares not advance it.
Obama has one and only one advantage over Palin: he’s been on the campaign trail longer, and thus had more training by now in how to finesse questions he doesn’t have a good answer to. That’s it.

I kinda hate writing up debates, given the extent to which posts get pored over for any sign of conceding that my side did anything but slaughter the opposition. That said, let’s take on a few points about tonight’s debate.
(1) This was a great debate. Fiesty, back and forth – there was too much crosstalk, but this was not just a stilted debate of the type that, frankly, you get when George W. Bush is involved. Jim Lehrer sounded old and wheezy but did manage to get the candidates to go after each other.
(2) If I had to use a word to describe Obama tonight, it would be “lawyerly” – he interrupted McCain repeatedly, he let nothing pass without a response. He was well prepared, didn’t stammer as much as in past debates and had clearly worked on smiling rather than staring at his shoes when criticized. It was, in fact, a stronger presentation than his past debate performances, although as usual he had no memorable lines. Obviously there were a number of things he said that didn’t hold water, but I’m not feeling energetic enough to wade into all that just yet.
(3) The upside for McCain is that he was highly energetic, and probably went a long way to dispelling concerns about his age. His effortless mastery of foreign policy and repeated and pointed dismissals of Obama’s naivete were brilliant (Obama really doesn’t know the difference between a tactic and a strategy), although on a number of occasions you could see that – betraying the fact that he was winging it – he was rushing to cover vast swathes of ground in a single answer without a prepared spiel. I suppose it was inevitable that he’d refuse to get sucked into the endless debate about the decision to go to war in Iraq. He eventually got good shots in on the surge but never quite cleanly explained how Obama was willing to lose the war. Probably the highlight for McCain was mocking Obama’s idea that you could just disavow things said by Ahmedinejad once you’ve agreed to meet with him. McCain did start building the case that Obama’s too far to the left to work across the aisle, but needs to ratchet that case up with specifics in the future.
(4) In general, I suspect this debate comes as a positive for both candidates, but isn’t the game-changer the past 10 days of polling sugests McCain needs. Probably my biggest disappointment, among a couple of places where McCain let Obama off the hook, was failing to lay into him as he did in the speech here for Obama’s obstruction of reforms McCain had pushed to head off a key element of the credit crisis two years ago. When Obama started to say anything at all about how we got into the credit crisis, the response should have been a “how dare you” moment, and McCain just let him slide. He may live to regret that.

I had thought out in advance a week ago or more what John McCain needed to do tonight. But for better or for worse (in a macro sense, for McCain, probably worse) the financial crisis and McCain’s decision to double down on getting a deal done in DC, followed by his unsuccessful game of chicken aimed at getting Obama to postpone the debate, has totally scrambled the situation and thrown everything into chaos. These kinds of structured Q&A debates aren’t really either candidate’s strong suit – Obama’s better at staged speeches, McCain at wide-open forums – but in McCain’s case, the advantage he has is that this is head to head, so he can have some effect on his opponent’s performance.
Since he’s had a bad two weeks in the polls, he has a greater need to move the needle than Obama does; the stakes are high. Beyond the general need to avoid major gaffes and serious no-nos (for McCain, having a ‘senior moment’ or doing something people see as racially insensitive, for Obama, hitting McCain for his war-related disabilities again or otherwise giving McCain a good reason to play the war hero card), here is what McCain needs to do.
(1) McCain needs to sell what he has been doing this week.
Foreign policy debate or no, the elephant in the room is the credit crisis, the negotiations in Washington, and McCain’s brief suspension of his campaign. He needs to address, not necessarily at length but squarely, that he’s been hard at work in DC and that a bipartisan deal will get done and will justify his decisions. (Implicitly it reminds people that McCain’s been too busy to prepare for this debate, he’s going in cold because he knows his stuff). If no deal gets done, this race is over, and McCain and everyone else know it.
Relatedly, McCain needs to be on the offensive in getting economic issues, including energy security and free trade, into this debate. One of the risks he’s faced all campaign is that he’d be seen as a foreign policy guy with no real interest in domestic bread-and-butter issues; with those issues dominating the week’s news, he needs to communicate that they are very much on his mind.
(2) McCain needs to punch Obama in the face.
Rhetorically, of course. Given the seriousness of this week’s events it may be a bit riskier to do it tonight, but he needs to start and to do it in each of the debates. From McCain’s perspective, you usually worry about coming off as mean, but people generally don’t think John McCain is a nice man; they like and/or respect him because he’s a scrapper who is willing to throw a punch and gets up off the mat when you hit him. And especially in the national security area, one of the largest concerns about Obama is his toughness; McCain wants the viewer at home wondering how Obama will stand toe to toe with Ahmadenijad or Putin.
Going after Obama very directly is good as well for the body language; Obama tends to stare at his shoes and look sheepish when he’s criticized, and he’s extremely thin-skinned and reacts badly to being directly criticized or called out on untruths. For example, Obama will claim that Bush and Maliki are following his plan for withdrawals from Iraq by mid-2010; McCain needs to hammer home that Obama’s plan in fact called for complete withdrawal by March 2008.
(3) McCain needs to keep Obama off balance.
This much, he’s already done; Obama has had his schedule and focus seriously disrupted this week. McCain thrives on chaos and crisis; Obama does not. McCain needs to keep rattling Obama, keep him out of his comfort zone of gauzy generalities, and force him to answer questions he hasn’t thought through.
(4) McCain needs to raise doubts about Obama’s staying power in Afghanistan.
The Democrats for some time now have followed a strategy of balancing dovish policies on wherever the U.S. is engaged in a hot or cold war with tough talk about other enemies we aren’t confronting at the moment – hence, Democrats talked tough on Iraq in 1998 but not in 2002, or on Iran in 2004, but less so in later years as an actual confrontation became a possibility. But Obama’s extended the tough talk to Afghanistan, where we are actually at war.
But once withdrawals from Iraq accelerate and Bush is gone, the anti-war movement’s focus will inevitably shift to Afghanistan. If the fight there gets tougher, will Obama have the guts to take the position McCain did with Iraq in 2007-08 and double down for victory, or will he do what Obama did in that period? McCain has to draw that connection to show how Obama’s faux-hawkishness will melt under pressure.
(5) McCain needs to start identifying Obama as an arch-liberal.
This is more an issue for the domestic policy debates but it needs to start tonight. At the end of the day, America is a slightly center-right country. McCain is a center-right candidate, the candidate for people who are a step to the left of George W. Bush; Obama is a far-left candidate, the candidate for people who are a step to the left of Hillary Clinton. Yet much of Obama’s appeal is the fiction he started building in 2004 that he was some sort of centrist unity candidate. McCain has to shatter the remains of that illusion.
The face to face debates are the best time to drive that point home, both explicitly and through the issues. He can, for example, remind people that this time last year, Obama was promising liberal groups he would “slow our development of future combat systems.” In 2004, simply by repeatedly calling John Kerry a liberal in the second debate, President Bush drove up by 6 points in one night the number of people who identified Kerry as a liberal.
Also, one bit of advice for Obama:
Obama needs to ignore Palin
Obama has a lot of trouble letting things go, and has shown a particular problem handling the prominence of McCain’s running mate, which leads to lowering Obama’s stature by reminding people that McCain’s far more experienced and prepared than the two of them put together. Obama should deal solely with McCain.

Gregory: “Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?”
Holmes: “To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.”
Gregory: “The dog did nothing in the night-time.”
Holmes: “That was the curious incident.”

In politics, actions speak louder than words, and inaction sometimes speaks even louder. With John McCain leaving the campaign trail to go to Washington to join the negotiations over the Paulson bailout bill, there’s a fair debate about exactly how important his presence there is, as I will discuss below. But judging by the actions of everyone involved, there’s no doubt that even his own Democratic colleagues recognize that Barack Obama is completely irrelevant to the process.

Continue reading The Curious Incident of Reid and Pelosi In A Crisis

Like a lot of conservatives I was gnashing my teeth on two levels at the initial interview clip yesterday of Governor Palin, in response to a question from Katie Couric, not being able to name any examples of John McCain pushing for more regulation in his 26-year career – that’s like if somebody running with Joe Lieberman couldn’t name examples of him bucking his party. McCain may not be the knee-jerk hyper-regulator that many Democrats are, but he’s built an extensive track record of pushing for more regulation in numerous different areas (e.g., campaign finance, health care), much too often in fact for my taste, and while you’d expect Palin to have focused more on boning up on policy than on her running mate’s lengthy legislative record, it’s not that hard a question.
If you watch the full(er) clip, though (and from the choppy editing it’s still hard to tell how much ended up on the cutting room floor), you can see that what happened was that Palin was talking about a specific example of McCain pushing for more regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and Couric pressed her for other examples from McCain’s legislative record specifically dealing with securities regulation:

H/T. Now as it happens, if you do your homework on this, it’s not hard to find such examples; McCain voted for Sarbanes-Oxley, and voted against the 1995 Private Securities Litigation Reform Act (one of only four Republicans to do so) and the 1998 Securities Litigation Uniform Standards Act (which passed 79-21), for example, and joined with Carl Levin to propose that if companies “don’t account for their stock options as a cost in earnings reports, then they cannot claim them later as tax deductions.” Of course, I can tell you those things because I’m a securities lawyer and I have access to Google; I’m not sure McCain would have all those examples at his fingertips offhand, much less Palin (indeed, I often find that people even in my business are surprised to hear that he voted against the PSLRA, and obviously Couric couldn’t find them or she wouldn’t have falsely stated as fact that McCain “almost always sided with the, less regulation, not more”). In that context, it’s not much of a “gotcha” moment to demonstrate that Palin doesn’t know chapter and verse on one of the more arcane corners of McCain’s lengthy career. (Unlike, say, the time Barack Obama had to admit to a voter that he didn’t know anything about the Hanford Nuclear site, the largest nuclear waste dump in the Western Hemisphere and a decades-long ongoing controversy). That said, she does need to get better at the essential skill of how to not answer a question she doesn’t know the answer to.
Of course, most conservatives would challenge Couric’s assumption that piling regulation on regulation is always a good thing, but Palin’s not the top of the ticket here; McCain is, and you don’t want to get off his message (the opposite problem bedeviled Mark Sanford earlier this summer when he got stumped trying to name ways in which McCain’s economic plan differs from Bush – I’m sure Sanford could think of examples but he was unable to name any without highlighting the fact that they’d be things Sanford opposes).
Finally, note that as edited, Couric opens with a question about money paid by Freddie Mac to the former employer of McCain campaign strategist Rick Davis, in which he may arguably still have some financial interest. This might be a reasonable line of inquiry if she explained why this matters, i.e., McCain’s much more extensive bill of particulars against Obama himself on this issue, but instead Couric presents the story as if the only issue is Rick Davis. (Video of McCain taking on Obama on this is below the fold; the McCain camp’s full and formal response on the Davis story is here). Which is pretty much the argument in a nutshell for why people like Couric are not worth talking to at all.

Continue reading Stump The Veep

Here’s the state of play as I write. Bush and Capitol Hill Democrats are hammering out an agreement to, in essence, bail out financial institutions and possibly other companies that hold bad debt, mainly mortgage-backed securities. Pretty much everybody on all sides agrees that the bailout proposal stinks to high heaven and is a fundamental violation of everything conservatives believe in and everything liberals believe in, is likely to be hugely unpopular with the public, and in the short term at least will put a big crimp on federal finances. But lots of people on all sides believe that the markets will be stabilized by the deal and will really implode without it, wrecking the rest of the economy. Since markets are all about perception, that could end up being the case, which makes the deal or something very like it necessary. McCain proposed a plan of his own which is not too dissimilar; Obama hasn’t proposed anything. So there aren’t really a lot of alternatives on the table, and no good ones.
Given the general rule that nothing this bad happens in Washington if it’s not bipartisan, the Democrats in the majority are deathly – and justifiably – afraid that if they agree to the deal, McCain and Congressional Republicans will run against it and crucify them. Republicans seem mostly resigned to support the deal in large numbers as long as the Democrats don’t try to hang too many wish-list items on it and turn it into the Mother of All Pork Barrels. And of course, McCain has long experience being the last holdout in the middle whose views dictate the direction of a bipartisan deal. So Bush, Paulson, Reid, Pelosi & Co. actually seem to need McCain in Washington to do what he’s done so often before, get in the middle of things and influence how a deal gets worked out that is just minimally acceptable enough for everyone to sign it. Obama’s presence, by contrast, is mostly superfluous, since nobody really thinks he’s a factor in what goes on in DC, and hot air is never in short supply anyway.
On the campaign trail, by contrast, Obama is benefitting in recent polls from the general sense that bad things are happening and somebody new might have better ideas; he clearly knows better than to spoil that by actually doing anything or having any ideas. Whereas McCain hasn’t been able to get traction from the outside looking in, and doesn’t really seem comfortable blowing the deal up, knowing the consequences. Accordingly, what McCain did today was announce that he’s suspending his campaign over the next several days to come to DC to get a deal done before markets open on Monday, and call on Obama to do the same and to reschedule Friday night’s debate in Oxford, Mississippi, the first one scheduled, focusing on foreign policy/national security. Obama has refused on both counts.
Which has led to the question of the day. McCain is needed in Washington; Obama’s not – and neither is McCain’s running mate, Gov. Palin, who obviously is not a Senator. Should McCain send her to appear on his behalf and debate Obama on Friday night?

Continue reading Should McCain Send Palin To Oxford?

In response to Stanley Kurtz’s detailed story on Barack Obama’s role in working with unrepentant terrorist and left-wing radical Bill Ayers to arrange the financing for a project that “poured more than $100 million into the hands of community organizers and radical education activists” under Ayers’ dubious theory of treating left-wing political activism as “education” (a story I discussed at length here), Marc Aimbinder wants more details:

What “radical” ideas did Obama and Bill Ayres come up with to foist on the Chicago school system?
What specific projects — “radical” projects — did Obama work on with Ayres? Is there evidence that they collaborated and schemed to … do anything “radical” together? Ever?

These are fair enough factual questions, although I think in this case Kurtz has already laid out a powerful case as it is that (1) Ayers is not a person who should be trusted to design this sort of project, (2) Ayers’ theoretical approach to education pretty much guaranteed that he’d be pusing left-wing politics, and (3) the people who got the money were left-wing groups whose agendas most Americans would find to be outside the political mainstream.
But the mindset in Aimbinder asking them is deeply revealing of the contrast between how the media has approached the vetting of Sen. Obama and the vetting of Gov. Palin.

Continue reading A Tale of Two Vettings

I know what you are thinking: that can’t be possible! My opinion of Ralph Nader cannot go any lower! But behold:

H/T. I thought the highlight of this ad was the fact that Nader stares at the floor the whole time instead of the camera, or the fact that he thinks voters want a President who sits alone in a room talking to his parrot.
But that was before the part about the sex with the panda.

Today’s must-read: after months of investigation, in which he had to weather all manner of stonewalling and intimidation by the Obama camp, Stanley Kurtz finally has the story, in today’s Wall Street Journal, of Barack Obama’s involvement in unrepentant former terrorist Bill Ayers’ project to spread left-wing politics under the guise of ‘education’ in Chicago schools. Here’s a flavor of Ayers’ project:

Continue reading The Obama-Ayers Education Story

…so I’m not linking to this to surprise you, if you were already quite sensibly expecting the Obama campaign and its chief strategist, David Axelrod, to peddle patently false, debunked smears directed at (who else?) Sarah Palin via purportedly independent outlets on the web that appear to have been designed to create deniability. I’m not pretending to be shocked because I’m not even slightly surprised.
Rusty has all the details, and is promising a followup with more.
Ace looks at the ensuing, immediate and wholly predictable coverup, and why it confirms Axelrod’s involvement, here and here. (H/T).
Why bother linking, then? Well, it never hurts to document these things. And to remind everyone who always claimed to be against such things but now support the Obama campaign…well, this is what they do; it’s who they are. This is Obama’s “new politics,” and really always was.

A lot of conservatives are up in arms about John McCain’s call for the firing of Chris Cox as SEC Chairman due to the collapse of numerous Wall Street firms on his watch. There is a more than fair argument against McCain’s position: that Cox is a smart, capable conservative and expert in the area who hasn’t really done anything wrong, or at least hadn’t until the recent move against short sellers (I don’t buy that Cox is above criticism, but I don’t think this mess is in any way his fault). But there is also a case to be made for the emerging McCain leadership style. As McCain explained today:

Dwight David Eisenhower, when he was commander and he was in charge of the largest military operation in history, the invasion of Normandy. He went to his quarters the night before the invasion and wrote out two letters. One of them sent a letter of congratulation, a messgae of congratulations to the brave Americans who landed in Normandy and made the most successful invasion and partly brought about the beginning of the end of World War II. The other letter he wrote out was his resignation from the United States army, taking full responsibility for the failure of that invasion.
My friends that kind of accountability and responsibility is missing in Washington today and that’s why I believe the chairman of the SEC should resign.

That’s McCain’s view in a nutshell: you produce results, or you step aside, regardless of how well you performed your duties. You own your watch. It’s a decidedly military outlook, as befits a man who spent so many years in the Navy. It’s perhaps an odd way for McCain to approach leadership – in his book Faith of My Fathers, McCain movingly recounts the bitterness he inherited over how his grandfather was scapegoated unfairly by Admiral Halsey for a mistake Halsey himself made in steering the fleet too close to a storm, mistreatment that McCain ascribes as a possible cause for the elder Admiral McCain’s fatal heart attack on his return from the war.
I don’t, personally, think that this unforgiving, only-results-matter management style is the best possible way to run an organization in terms of motivating people, and neither is it really a good or fair way to treat subordinates, but it’s one well-established leadership style, and it’s been successful for plenty of people in business, the military, politics and sports. Certainly it’s a sharp contrast to President Bush; while Bush has sacked a lot of people (including Harvey Pitt, his first SEC Chairman who was also just in the wrong place at the wrong time), he’s nonetheless frequently found himself in trouble for leaving loyal but incompetent subordinates in place too long after they became obvious political liabilities. McCain is sending a message: the likes of Mike Brown, Alberto Gonzales and Scott McClellan will not be left in their jobs in his White House. Loyalty will give way to accountability.
On a purely political level, in the real world of politics, there’s a case to be made about being unsentimental about letting people go when they represent a serious political liability. I wouldn’t blame Bush in the least, for example, if he sacked Cox regardless of the merits of his job performance. Political leaders fight for a cause, and that cause is bigger than any one man. A politician who errs on the side of scapegoating people who through no fault of their own preside over disasters is going to do better in the long run than one who fights till the last dog dies for friends he can no longer afford. It’s an ugly business but it must be played to win in the real world.
This is a management style that suits McCain, an old man who is likely to serve only one term and already has an impressive collection of enemies. It’s a style that’s also well-suited to McCain’s running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin. One of the recurring themes in Palin’s various jobs is that she fires a lot of people – people who don’t agree with her policy goals, people who don’t follow her orders, people who oppose her in public, people who are too close to corrupt interests or political foes. This is, again, a good way to make enemies who compile vendettas against you – it was her firing of an agency head who was publicly insubordinate that led to the ‘Tasergate’ investigation headed by a representative of the Obama campaign – but removing the people who are not 100% with you is the one best way to impose your will on an organization, a task that’s famously difficult in large public bureaucracies. That was how Rudy Giuliani ran New York, and why he delivered results as an agent of change. A McCain-Palin Administration may not be the friendliest workplace, but the one thing it won’t do is let the grass grown under its feet as far as holding subordinates accountable.

Yes, apparently Gov. Palin requested federal funding to upgrade an airport servicing…a military installation!
Clearly, not a matter of any interest to the federal government.

Over the last few weeks, in between devoting untold column-inches and airtime to anything and everything but actual issues, the mainstream media and liberal commentators (to the extent one can distinguish the two) have been complaining – as has the Obama campaign itself – that we have not had a discussion of “the issues” or “the real issues.” To understand why this is happening, we have to understand three things:
1. What they mean by “the issues”
2. How we got where we are in terms of the political climate
3. Why that climate, combined with the nature and strategies of the two candidates, dictated that head-to-head clashes on particular domestic policy issues were going to take a back seat in this campaign.
As you will see, the net result is that Barack Obama has been hoist by his own petard. Obama made a deliberate choice in light of the political environment to run a campaign of broad themes rather than one with an identifiable issues-based core, and it’s too late in the game for him to reverse that decision.

Continue reading Why Aren’t The Candidates Talking About “The Issues”?

Earlier today I discussed the Obama campaign’s ridiculous attack on John McCain as being ‘out of touch’ because he doesn’t send emails, despite McCain’s lengthy legislative record – as extensive as anyone in Congress – dealing with high-tech, telecom and internet issues.
The obvious and unconcealed subtext of the ad was an attack on McCain being old and uncool compared to the web-savvy younger generation – a risky line of argument given the large number of old people who vote, but perhaps driven by Obama’s need to raise money and enthusiasm among the young and the wired. (Leave aside what the use of email has to do with competence to be President).
But more than a few conservative bloggers immediately wondered whether there was perhaps a reason why McCain does not have a Blackberry or type out emails, and with a little Googling Jonah Goldberg and others have discovered the answer: McCain finds it too painful to type because of his war injuries.
You can read the details from Goldberg here and Allahpundit here, including the fact that McCain does dictate emails to his wife, he just can’t type them himself. I won’t repeat here Goldberg’s point, with which I agree completely, about what McCain’s wartime service does and doesn’t mean for his qualifications for the presidency; but no matter what it means in the abstract, the fact remains that the Obama people have now gone on record mocking him for things he can’t do because of injuries he sustained while being tortured in the service of his country. What imbeciles. And the greatest irony is that as they hit McCain for not being tech-savvy, they are the ones who didn’t bother to Google this stuff before firing off their ad.
Jacob Weisberg’s column from 2000 pithily ties together both reasons why this avenue of attack is nuts:

Continue reading Obama Walks Into A Minefield

Ah, what the heck: more campaign stuff, as well as a few random links:
*From the Colorado Senate race, which has tightened considerably from what had looked like a sure Udall win, an ad knocking Udall’s support for Dennis Kucinich’s “Department of Peace”:

As Moe Lane points out, this was a fun ad but probably not an especially damaging one until the Democrat flipped his lid over it, responding – I kid you not – by complaining that “there is nothing in the Department of Peace legislation that authorizes the purchase of a van or that says one of the activities of the Department will be smoking marijuana in a smoke filled van.”
Um, yeah. You run with that.
*Jake Tapper rips McCain over the education ad that accuses Obama of, among other things, supporting a bill in Illinois that would have required teaching explicit sex education to kindergardeners. Jim Geraghty defends the accuracy of the McCain ad here and here…typically the critics aren’t dealing with Geraghty’s points, but it’s not an ad I would have run; even if Geraghty is right that the bill was dropped in large part precisely because its literal language would have extended anti-HIV education down to the kindergarden level, there’s enough ambiguity in how that language interacts with the pre-existing statutory requirement of “age appropriate” instruction that it’s not really a clean shot at Obama, and probably more trouble than it’s worth once you get done walking through the language. My guess is that Obama, as is often true in these cases, was only working off a bill summary anyway and never bothered to read what the bill actually said, which is why he’s so indignant about it.
*The NYT notices that Joe Biden is a “human verbal wrecking crew,” collecting a number of Biden’s more notorious gaffes since Obama picked him as his running mate (there have been every bit as many as expected – Biden’s the most gaffe-prone politician I have ever seen, and that’s considering some extremely stiff competition). I’d feel bad for how Biden’s been the forgotten man in this campaign, but really, the guy’s ego could survive a nuclear explosion. Watch the video of him asking the guy in the wheelchair to stand up:

His saving grace is that he doesn’t stop talking after he pulls one of these – he reminds me of the old Bill James riff about Lonnie Smith, how other outfielders get flustered when they fall down in the outfield, whereas Lonnie does it so often he has a pop-up slide perfected for the occasion.
*Second poll in a week showing Republicans with an advantage on the “generic ballot” question (i.e., which party people prefer in the abstract). I honestly have trouble believing this – Republicans never lead in the generic ballot, at least not this far from Election Day, even in years when we are rolling to victory. The main thing is, we’re not getting killed on this anymore. Relatedly, Capitol Hill Democrats are now worried and sharing a “sense of doom” that Obama may drag down Democrats across the ballot.
*Revisiting a tactic that didn’t come off too well the first time when George Soros tried it, Obama is taking a shot at McCain as being too old to use email. Of course, unlike Obama, if you want to judge McCain’s views on technology, you can look at his record. McCain spent seven years as Chairman of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, during which he was continuously involved in debates, legislation and hearings on internet issues. In 1996, he blasted the Telecommunications Act as “nothing less than an elaborate influence-peddling scheme.” In the 2000 campaign, he touted his work on the Y2K Product Liability Reform Act and the Internet Tax Moratorium Act; he has continued to fight against taxation of internet commerce. Obama may think he invented internet fundraising, but in 2000 McCain’s primary campaign raised millions of dollars over the web, a fundraising surge that was essential to keeping his campaign afloat; at the time, he was on the cutting edge of such tactics. In 2002, McCain introduced the broad-ranging “Consumer Broadband Deregulation Act of 2002”, a comprehensive bill that “would prevent localities from doing anything to interfere with the provision of any consumer broadband service by limiting local governments- rights-of-way compensation to ‘direct and actual costs reasonably allocable to the administration of access to, or use of, public rights-of-way.'” McCain has continued to press for broadband access at high-tech forums during his presidential run, and chosen as chief economic advisers a pair of high-tech executives, Meg Whitman of eBay and Carly Fiorina of Hewlett Packard.
You can certainly raise issue with the substance of McCain’s views on high-tech, but to suggest that the man is unfamiliar with the tech lanscape is…well, like so many of Obama’s efforts to attack McCain, it depends on a certain suspension of disbelief.
*Tom Maguire: “Everything Barack Obama knows about public education he learned by working with an unrepentant terrorist and sending his kids to private school; Sarah Palin started in politics as a PTA mom.” Of course, I agree that private schools are probably the right choice for Obama’s kids. That just makes it all the harder for him to explain why they are not the right choice for other people’s.
*Obama and Gordon Brown ducking for cover at the idea that Brown endorsed Obama.
*Armando, of all people, tries to talk sense into hyperventilating lefty bloggers. It’s truly a bizarro world when Republicans read the words of guys like him and Jerome (Vis Numar) Armstrong and nod along, but I guess the primary left these guys a little too clear-eyed about Obama.
*Andrew McCarthy goes to Wikipedia to establish the one thing Wikipedia is actually probative of – what the average person thinks – on the term “Bush Doctrine.” Of course, I noted last night in the comments this 2003 post in which I distinguished the three different Bush Doctrines.
UPDATE: Josh Trevino looks at how the media has defined the term.
*If you are keeping score at home, Mary Katharine Ham is now at The Weekly Standard and Beldar is blogging at Hugh Hewitt’s place.
*“Do you read the New York Times?” This is hilarious – Taranto says the the NYT dispatch on this event was filed by…wait for it…Elisabeth Bumiller. The Times people’s fixation on Bill O’Reilly is positively comical.
*Unlikely defenses for Gov. Palin from Mike Gravel and Rod Blagojevich. You gotta listen to the Gravel one, in which he doggedly bats back every effort by left-wing radio hosts to get traction against her. And memo to Blago: Cornelius from Planet of the Apes called, he wants his hairdo back.
*September 24 trial date for Ted Stevens, so his case may well be wrapped up before the election.
*Not politics: a proposal for 2-year law school that’s long overdue. And really, words cannot do justice to this video.

Good grief.
I was more than happy to leave Obama’s “lipstick” comment be after yesterday – it was an amusing little example of Obama putting his foot in his mouth – other than to note that by calling it “swift boat politics” this morning he basically confirmed what I have been saying for years: “swift boating” means “accurately quoting a Democratic politician.” Frankly, it was foolish for Obama to even respond this morning unless he was going to offer some sort of apology – anything else just prolongs the agony. To say nothing of the fact that any time the story is Obama vs. McCain’s running mate, McCain wins.
But whether out of stubborn insistence on being right or a desire to keep those $5 donations pouring in from his activist base, Obama is not content to let the matter drop – he’s on David Letterman tonight digging himself in deeper:

“What I like about this scenario is because they – the Republicans – demanded an apology,” Letterman says, “so that means there had been a meeting at some point somewhere along the line (of) they got together and said, ‘You know what? He called our vice presidential candidate a pig.’ Well, that seems pretty unlikely, doesn’t it?”
“It does,” agrees Obama. “Keep in mind that, technically had I meant it this way – she would be the lipstick!”
The audience laughs, but Letterman is confused.
“You are way ahead of me,” says the late night host.
“The failed policies of John McCain would be the pig,” Obama says.

Now, as one of Vodkapundit’s commenters points out, this is really considerably more insulting than calling Palin a pig. The latter is nasty and juvenile, but the former is dismissive, and really puts Obama back where he was when he was calling her the “Mayor of Wasilly” and refusing to acknowledge that she is a Governor.
This is why you do not put a rookie on the top of the national ticket. All Republicans have to do now is sit back and laugh.

Back in February, Barack Obama sounded a familiar note in defending himself against charges that his campaign was “just words” – in fact, a note taken almost verbatim from Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, also a client of David Axelrod:

Patrick eventually tried to help by explaining that he had offered up his words to Obama to use.
In June, Obama tried a different inspiration on for size, swiping the structure of Mario Cuomo’s famous 1984 Convention speech:

Just yesterday, Obama’s “lipstick” remark came at the end of a riff he swiped from Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles. Obama has now admitted that he took the line from a friend but didn’t know where it had originally come from.
If you followed the John Edwards campaign, you may have heard this Edwards riff on education:

Edwards criticized . . . the 5-year-old [No Child Left Behind] law, calling it a bad measure of how much children are learning. Children don’t learn anything from taking tests, like those mandated by the law, he said.
“I borrowed this line from a friend of mine who’s from the South, but the way he says it is, ‘a hog doesn’t get fatter by weighing it,’ ” Edwards said.

Well, here’s what Obama said yesterday:

Obama made another porcine reference in Lebanon, Va., last night, speaking about education reform.
“You don’t fatten a hog by weighing it,” he said. “The same thing is true with children’s minds — you have to feed them with knowledge.”

Less pithy than Edwards’ usage, but I’m guessing that this wasn’t a phrase Obama picked up in Hawaii or Chicago, but rather from listening to John Edwards.
A few more examples here.

Continue reading Same Old Song

You know, for a guy whose chief asset is his mouth, Obama sure has a way of stepping in things he really should know better than to step in, in this case the inevitable kerfuffle over whether the “lipstick on a pig” line is intended to refer to Sarah Palin. Ben Smith notes that “The crowd apparently took the ‘lipstick’ line as a reference to Palin, who described the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull in a single word: ‘lipstick.'” To that extent, Ace’s comparison to Obama appearing to give Hillary the middle finger in an appearance in the spring is on point – the crowd gets the thrill of seeing Obama be “tough” in a decidedly immature way by appearing to get rudely personal against his opponent, but Obama gets to angrily deny that he actually did what his supporters just assumed he was doing.
Was it actually deliberate, or just an unfortunate choice of words that people are taking the wrong way? Certainly the “lipstick on a pig” line is a common one that any number of candidates, McCain and Obama included, have used before. I don’t see what in the “fish” reference is supposed to suggest that he was being deliberate. It’s not like he was in the middle of a riff about Palin specifically at the time – he was talking about McCain. So it’s possible he was just being stupid and not thinking through how some people would inevitably read the line. I don’t rule out George Allen levels of stupidity at all.
Then again, Ben Smith notes that this is the very same day that Congressman Russ Carnahan, appearing on behalf of Obama, took a direct shot at Palin’s record with the line “There’s no way you can dress up that record, even with a lot of lipstick,” which would appear to suggest that you have a concerted effort to make this one of today’s talking points.
Well, nobody ever said that Obama was a master of diplomacy, anyway.
UPDATE: Let me just put it this way, after thinking this through a little further. I’m frankly embarrassed to be arguing that Obama intended to call Palin a pig (although I think we can agree that if that was what he intended to do, it was damned ungentlemanly of him, to put it mildly). But really, if I was on the other side of this one, I’d be at least equally embarrassed that my candidate was that big a damn fool to go and say this, no matter what he meant, knowing full well the context – his own and his supporters’ hypersensitivity on matters of race, his ugly history with Hillary, the blowback that’s already gone down over attacks on Palin that were seen as sexist. I’d be throwing things at my TV screen. If we give Obama the benefit of the doubt here, he just comes off looking like that much bigger a fool.

One of the more popular fables retailed by the Democrats is that Republicans use social “wedge” issues that have nothing to do with the business of government to win elections, and Democrats do not. Now, I don’t deny that Republicans often run campaigns that deal with social issues and the values of the candidates, and I’m not going to get into a long debate here about the relative degree to which social issues like abortion, crime, immigration, the death penaly, same-sex marriage, racial preferences, etc. do or do not have anything to do with the powers of government as they exist in the real world. But the idea that Democrats don’t do this stuff, or that they don’t sometimes succeed in prying off voters on “values” issues, is utter nonsense. They complain about it largely for two reasons: (1) Republicans tend to win more votes than they lose in most fights over social/cultural issues and (2) members of the national media who share Democrats’ values like to believe that their positions on these issues are the only acceptable ones, and that it is only divisive to disagree with them, even if the people doing the disagreeing constitute a decisive majority.
The nomination of Sarah Palin as the Republican candidate for Vice President has produced a spate of efforts to drive a wedge between her and the voters on precisely these sorts of issues. In a few cases, there are fair arguments to be had: Palin is an uncompromising pro-lifer and supporter of gun rights, and obviously there are a lot of voters on each side of those issues. But several efforts to paint her as a social-issue extremist are, at best, seriously lacking in supporting evidence. Maybe something we don’t know will come out, but on a couple of these it seems pretty unlikely from what we do know. Let’s look at a few of those.
I. Book Banning
Democrats are claiming that Palin is some sort of fan of banning books. A list was circulated on the web purporting to show books she had had banned as Mayor of Wasilla, which even the Huffington Post described as “transparently fake” and Jesse Walker of Reason, also no fan of social conservatism, found to be basically a non-issue on the evidence we’ve seen. Taranto has a more comprehensive review today. The whole story amounts to Palin, when she first took office as Mayor in 1996, having had some abstract discussions about banning books with the librarian, who she later fired (one recurring theme in Palin’s tenure as Mayor and Governor: she fires a lot of people). She told the town paper even back then that the discussion had been purely “rhetorical.” (Here is the story written at the time – as an aside, notice how easy it is to find things said and done during Palin’s early career in Wasilla, compared to how hard it is to track down anything said – let’s not get into “done” – by Barack Obama between 1996 and his 2002 war speech?)
Let’s face it: an awful lot of social conservatives in this country have had that conversation about, say, banning pornography, and in many cases about things that may be offensive for other reasons. It’s one thing to have the idle conversation; it’s another to actually put state power behind banning particular books, even if the “ban” just means not spending taxpayer money on them and even if you could boil the list down to the most patently offensive. Accepting that distinction is, in fact, part of the process of maturing from a rookie politician (which Palin was 12 years ago) into a responsible administrator. Absent any evidence that Palin ever lifted a finger to get any books banned, this is at most a charge that Palin has concerns about the state of our culture and has wished at times that we could do something about it. Do the Democrats really want to run against even that wish in the abstract? Maybe they do. But the charge that Palin actively supports banning books has nothing to support it, and you should not believe anyone who repeats the charge if they can’t come up with evidence to support it.
II. Abstinence-Only Sex Education
A good many social conservatives, preferring not to surrender to the government the instruction of their children on matters of sexual morality, either don’t like public-school sex education or insist that governmental instruction on sex should be limited to encouraging teenagers to not have sex (a/k/a “abstinence-only” sex education).
Now, as Megan McArdle reminds us, the main reason why abstinence-only education is ineffective is because sex education in general is ineffective – a point that if anything supports social conservatives’ skepticism about the necessity of teaching sex in school:

Kids get pregnant because they have poor impulse control, hazy conceptions about the future, and possibly, parents who they are afraid will find birth control. None of these are problems that sex ed helps with.

In fact, as McArdle further notes, public behavioral education programs in general don’t famously work all that well (so much for Obama hectoring us to abstain from driving on underinflated tires):

Do you believe that drug education reduces drug use? If you’re reading this web site, I bet you don’t, and you’re right–the most famous program, D.A.R.E., has consistently failed to show any positive effects, something which is disguised by the program producers by constantly changing the curriculum so that whatever program just flunked a reality check isn’t the same as the awesome new program they’re using now.
Do you think that driver’s education reduces risky driving? If you do, it’s because you were home schooled and never met any teenagers. Teen fatalities have declined thanks to other laws, but not because we told ’em they might be killed. The future beyond next month is not very real to teenagers, which is surprising, since they’re immortal.
Indeed, as the proponents of comprehensive birth control education often readily comprehend in other contexts, such as smoking education and high drinking ages, telling kids that something is risky often makes them enjoy it more.

A lot of Palin’s critics jumped on her supposed support for abstinence-only programs like a starving man on a sandwich to justify their continuing interest in the pregnancy of her 17-year-old daughter. But they seem to have skipped the step of actually looking carefully at Gov. Palin’s position – again, this LA Times piece comes from Walker’s article at Reason:

In July of [2006], she completed a candidate questionnaire that asked, would she support funding for abstinence-until-marriage programs instead of “explicit sex-education programs, school-based clinics and the distribution of contraceptives in schools?”
Palin wrote, “Yes, the explicit sex-ed programs will not find my support.”
But in August of that year, Palin was asked during a KTOO radio debate if “explicit” programs include those that discuss condoms. Palin said no and called discussions of condoms “relatively benign.”
“Explicit means explicit,” she said. “No, I’m pro-contraception, and I think kids who may not hear about it at home should hear about it in other avenues. So I am not anti-contraception. But, yeah, abstinence is another alternative that should be discussed with kids. I don’t have a problem with that. That doesn’t scare me, so it’s something I would support also.”

Again: if the Democrats want to characterize this position as outside the mainstream, we have to wonder what “mainstream” they have been bathing in.
III. Evolution
Another issue on which there seem to be an awful lot of single-issue, litmus-test, nothing-else-matters voters on the left side of the spectrum is the teaching of “intelligent design” or other forms of “creationist” or quasi-creationist theories of the origin of species that refuse to accept the mostly-consensus scientific view of evolution. This tends to be a debate that leads off into a lot of linguistic dead ends (for example, modern evolutionary biology has moved on a good deal from Darwin), but as a general rule the debate tends to boil down to one of three positions: (1) ban the teaching of evolutionary biology – a position almost nobody supports anymore; (2) require the teaching of “intelligent design” alongside the teaching of standard evolutionary biology; or (3) ban the teaching of anything but standard evolutionary biology. I’ll leave aside for now the merits of that debate, because yet again there’s a bunch of smoke here with basically no fire.
Here’s the quote from Palin from a 2006 debate that is the reed on which most of the criticisms about her are based:

During a 2006 gubernatorial debate in Alaska, Palin was asked if she supported teaching an alternative to evolution.
“Teach both,” Palin said at the televised debate, according to a news story in the Anchorage Daily News. “You know, don’t be afraid of information. Healthy debate is so important, and it’s so valuable in our schools. I am a proponent of teaching both.”

But….

After the debate, Palin told the newspaper she would not push the state board of education to add evolution alternatives to the mandatory curriculum, nor would she base appointments to the board on the candidates’ views on the issue.

More:

Sarah Palin was questioned more closely about her views on creationism a couple of days after the debate. She then seemed to deny that she did want to introduce creationism into the school curriculum. Rather, she said that she didn’t “think there should be a prohibition against debate if it comes up in class,” but that it “doesn’t have to be part of the curriculum”. Religion was not “a litmus test”, she added. She was more interested in gas pipelines. In her answers to personal questions, a degree of ambiguity persisted. She did believe in a creator, but “I’m not going to pretend I know how all this came to be”. Her father had been a science teacher; they had had discussions when she was a child about “his theories” of evolution: “He would show us fossils and say, ‘How old do you think these are?’ “

As with the libraries issue, this wasn’t a years-later effort to conceal her position, such as we’ve seen from Barack Obama’s attempts to whitewash his votes and legislative proposals on guns or abortion; Palin was immediately making clear that this was basically just her personal view that she was not going to foist on anybody, and Palin has kept that promise. The bottom line is that Palin hasn’t actually spent much effort on social issues in office. In Washington, she won’t be able to avoid social issues, of course, and indeed her sincere convictions on issues like abortion are one of the major attractions of Palin’s candidacy. But the relevant point on intelligent design, as with book banning and abstinence education, is that in 10 years in executive office she hasn’t actually used state power to support any of the things she’s accused of supporting.
It’s usually not that hard to understand that distinction. Joe Biden can say that life begins at conception, but only an imbecile would call him “pro-life,” because he doesn’t want the government to do anything about it. For political purposes, the issue is how this all translates into public policy. And that’s exactly where Palin’s critics have come up empty.

Continue reading Wedges and Fables

One of the major themes in the reaction on the Left to the Republican convention – and we have seen this directly from the Obama campaign as well as from left-leaning bloggers – is to scream bloody murder at Mayor Giuliani and Governor Palin for mocking Sen. Obama’s experience as a “community organizer,” mainly for the three years between his college graduation and his entry into law school, although Obama’s subsequent career as a “civil rights lawyer” was largely a continuation of the same work, which really constitutes the entirety of his experience outside elected political office.
Now, when you launch a line of criticism in politics and the other side starts shrieking at you for having done it, one or more of three things is usually true:
1. You have done something genuinely outrageous, or at least something the other side genuinely views as outrageous.
2. You have hit a nerve and the other side is trying to delegitimize your argument rather than respond to it.
3. The other side misunderstands what you are talking about.
The Obama camp’s furious response (see the end of this post for full quotes from fundraising emails by Obama’s campaign) to the criticism levelled at Obama’s time as a community organizer strikes me as a prime example of #2, although there’s an element of #3 here as well. I suppose I understand why to some on the Left it feels like #1, but at the end of the day that’s an argument that fails the John Edwards test. Sen. Obama has brought this line of criticism on himself, and if his career reminds people a little too forcefully of people the average voter despises, well, maybe that’s something the Democrats should have considered before nominating him for President.

Continue reading The Organizer-Based Community

Last night was the fireworks at the GOP Convention, the high-wire triumph of Sarah Palin, the street fighting of Rudy. Tonight was the hard work: John McCain laying out his policy vision. So, what did I think?
John McCain is a great talker, but not a great speaker – he’s the polar opposite of Obama, who gives a tremendous speech but does not converse and answer questions so well. Those of us who have grown to know McCain’s speaking style well over the years did not have great expectations for this speech. This is his weak suit. He was inevitably going to be a bit of a letdown from Wednesday night.
Moreover, this was not the speech I would have written for McCain, were I advising him. He laid out his domestic policy vision, specifically in some cases (e.g., education, energy, trade, job training, business taxes), more vaguely in others (health care). But he didn’t walk issue by issue through the differences between his mainstream positions and Obama’s extreme positions. He explicitly distanced himself from the now-departed GOP Congressional majority, but he never explicitly explained the fact that he’s very different as well from President Bush, and he never told the voters that the Democrats now control Congress, despite polls indicating that a good many voters don’t even know that. He explained his support for the surge in Iraq, but he didn’t contrast it with Obama’s call for a complete withdrawal by March 2008. I don’t think tonight was the night to attack Obama, but it was the night to contrast McCain’s positions and record on the issues with Obama’s. He missed that opportunity, and may regret it.
But as the saying goes, you disserve the reader when you review a book or movie you didn’t see rather than the one that is actually in front of you. McCain’s speech tonight, on its own terms, was OK, if rather long and not all that exciting. This was old-style pre-1960s patriotism, and elevating himself above partisanship as McCain so loves to do. I did really like his explanation that hyper-partisanship (which I, of course, don’t disdain the way McCain does) isn’t the problem but a symptom of a self-interested political class.

Continue reading John McCain’s Night

It is, as I have said, so hard to be really objective about convention speeches – Republicans see one thing, Democrats another, and what really matters is the view of independent “swing” voters.
That said: man, was this a great night for Republicans. Could not possibly have gone better. I watched on CNN and the panel was just totally swept away, to the point where Campbell Brown was gushing about Gov. Palin and John King was anguishing over how CNN is harder on the Republicans than the Democrats. What a difference a day makes.
There were an awful lot of smiles tonight. Bill Clinton and maybe Brian Schweitzer were the only really happy warriors at the Democratic Convention; Obama’s speech was almost wholly joyless (did you see him smile once?)
We started with Mitt Romney. Romney was….Romney: smart, tough, technocratic (few convention speeches use words like “largesse” and “moribund”) and hard-hitting, but probably inspiring only to boardroom Republicans. Romney landed some punches, but I doubt many people watched him and thought “I really wish we’d nominated this guy.” A good start to the night, but just a start.
Then, Huck. I had really hoped that Huck’s mission in this convention would be to hit Obama, and hard, on his extremism on abortion. But I suppose with Palin on the ticket, they decided that that issue hardly even needed to be raised. Instead, we got a lot of Huck’s blue collar background and folksy stories. And Huck tells a great story.
PS – Yes, Huck still hates Mitt, as you could tell in several little ways.
Then, Rudy, and Rudy came to fight. You know, of course, that I love Rudy. There’s perhaps no more effective tool in political rhetoric than mockery, and there is much about Obama to mock; Rudy picked a few juicy targets and drilled them. The best riff was on Obama’s “present” votes in the State Senate – words can’t really capture Rudy’s facial expression in mimicking Obama finding it “too hard” to make decisions. I swear I have laughed less at many standup comics than Rudy’s takedown of Obama. And Rudy, who has always stressed the unique and important role of executives, emphasized over and over the superiority of Gov. Palin’s experience as a Governor and even a small-town Mayor compared to Obama’s time as a legislator. Rudy had the best nod to media-created rumors that the Republicans would dump Palin with his crack that Biden better have the VP job in writing.
Then, the star of the show: Sarah Palin. Yesterday’s storyline may have been whether McCain goofed by picking Palin, but after the speech the talk is shifting to whether she’s too tough on Obama. It was truly a tour de force of a speech, one that eliminates the notion that she’s the deer-in-the-headlights Dan Quayle in a skirt. It’s not the last test for Palin, but she passed the first test with flying colors.
Alaska Democrats have spent a good deal of the last week warning national Democrats not to underestimate the nation’s most popular Governor, who got that way for a reason – but did they listen? Nooooo. And now they know why. Palin started slowly, and I personally would not have dwelt on her family so long, but Rudy was such a ‘hot’ act to follow that she had to get the crowd eating out of her hand first. The crowd in the hall, of course, has gone wild over Palin and needed little prompting to get in her corner. Other writers can express better than I the emotional impact of Palin’s family. And then she moved in for the kill on Obama’s disdain for small-town America and his rhetoric and fancy props where he ought to have accomplishments.
What impressed me most about Palin as a speaker was her timing. She didn’t force things, didn’t step on her applause lines, let the speech and the crowd build and come to her. The set of her jaw actually reminded me a bit of Bush after delivering an applause line, but of course she has her own unique sort of flair that Bush never did – I was positively bursting with confidence after Bush’s convention speech in 2004, but I never have seen him control a crowd the way Palin did tonight. The McCain camp’s strategy of hyping up expectations of how well Palin would do in the speech was richly rewarded. And McCain came out for a well-deserved victory lap over his selection of Palin after the audience got to see her for themselves.
It was a good night, one that could not have gone better. We shall see tomorrow how McCain himself closes out the convention now that the spotlight finally shifts back to the man at the top of the ticket.

Tonight’s speech at the Republican National Convention by vice presidential nominee Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin is probably the most important convention speech in memory by a vice presidential candidate. Gov. Palin made a smashingly good impression with her initial appearance on Friday, but her relative inexperience combined with a ferocious left-wing/media assault on her and her family has left a lot of the public up in the air as to what to make of her. Obviously, she’s enormously popular with Republican activists and hated by the cultural Left, and there is copious evidence that people in general and women in particular are upset at how she has been treated over the past several days (note: when Obama and his allies are turning off the likes of Lindsay Lohan, they are really playing with fire), but sympathy is one thing, and respect is entirely another. Tonight’s audience will be looking to Gov. Palin to show them why they should respect her.
With that in mind, a few thoughts about what tonight’s speech should look like. Gov. Palin has a lot of work to do to close the sale with voters who only first met her five days ago, whether they like her or not, and it’s not going to happen all in one speech. It’s important for a speech not to try to do too many things, lest it fail to accomplish any of them. For example, Barack Obama’s race speech back in the spring was a smashing success, at least temporarily, because it had just two goals: redirect attention away from Rev. Wright, and let Obama speak movingly about a subject he cares deeply about. By contrast, Obama’s convention speech really was not that impressive – Obama was trying to give out some of his patented rhetoric without looking too grandiose, he was trying to reassure people on national security, taxes and social issues, he was trying to prove he could get specific, he was trying to mend fences with Hillaryites…too many goals for one speech. Gov. Palin needs to focus on a few achievable goals.
1. Go light on the ‘girl power’ stuff. The key sound bites from her Friday speech, which most people who would be watching tonight have already seen on the news, were about the historic nature of her candidacy as a woman. That doesn’t need to be repeated at any length. Palin’s mere presence is enough to remind people of that history.
2. Go light on the mooses. It’s hard for any politician to establish a clear identity with the public, let alone in less than a week, but the media blitz around Palin has already hammered home the basic nutshell: mother of five, small town girl, “hockey mom,” pro-life and really means it, pro-gun, shoots moose. That’s actually quite a lot of brand identity already built in, and some of it can be reinforced by her introduction. Gov. Palin doesn’t need to sell people on why they should like a woman with that background (many will, some won’t); she needs to sell them on why they should believe that a likeable, relatable woman is also ready to be the Vice President and, if necessary, the Commander-in-Chief.
3. Guns and abortion are Obama’s problem. Relatedly, Palin’s “pro-life, pro-gun” credibility is not going to be questioned – she needs to expand that issue profile beyond social issues, not worry about proving her bona fides. If she does get into issues like abortion and guns, it should only be to attack Obama’s extremism on those issues. (I had assumed before the Palin nomination and the hurricane-shortened convention that Mike Huckabee would give the speech that tears into Obama’s positions on those issues, but it is unclear now if Huck will even get his speech shown by the cable networks).
4. Stick to the broad themes on foreign policy. Gov. Palin won’t prove herself an expert on national security in one prepared speech and shouldn’t try. Leave the thorny issues like South Ossetia, Waziristan, Iran’s nuclear program and the future of the Atlantic alliance to McCain, who has built decades of credibility on them. Gov. Palin can start the process of reassuring Republicans on her national security credibility by hitting a few marks on the most familiar questions – 9/11, terrorism, Iraq, Afghanistan – and leave for later the process of fleshing out her views.
5. Sell her record as Governor. Traditionally, Governors, whatever their foreign policy experience or lack thereof, have sold themselves to the public as serious people by running on their record of accomplishment and showing how they have grappled with the issues that have come accross their desks. In Gov. Palin’s case that means a heavy focus on energy policy, on which she is legitimately an expert from her time both as Governor and on the Oil and Gas Commission, and on battling corruption and wasteful spending. The Washington Post notes that “Palin is likely to emphasize her areas of policy expertise — particularly energy and political reform — rather than focusing on her biography or gender,” and that’s what it needs to be about. If Palin can convince voters that she is 100% ready on day one to deal with pocketbook issues, she is halfway home.
6. Show some steel. A convention speech is not the time or place to waste time rebutting the other side’s attacks, whether personal or poilitical. Gov. Palin can probably best deal with the personal stuff by sitting down with someone like Barbara Walters or even Oprah (anybody appropriate to the task is in the tank for Obama, so why not someone who is open about it?). But the message does need to be sent in more general terms that she is accustomed to the brickbats that come with standing up to the establishment, that she can – in Harry Truman’s words – take the heat in the kitchen, and that no matter what gets thrown at her, she won’t back off or back down and will keep doing the people’s business. Plus, a few well-timed Churchillian lines of that nature, ideally as the conclusion of the speech, will absolutely bring down the house in a convention packed with delegates who are just dying to put on a rousing show of support for a woman most Republicans feel is being unfairly slimed by a media that’s been all too reluctant to do the same thing to the other side’s presidential nominee.
That is her mission tonight.

Leon Wolf over at RedState has a hilarious and spot-on post about Obama’s (1) ridiculous claim that running for president qualifies him to be president and (2) insistence on comparing his record to Sarah Palin’s record as Mayor of Wasilla while refusing to acknowledge that the woman is Governor of Alaska. As Leon notes, using Obama’s own terms of comparison:

Interesting that you should claim that the total annual budget of your campaign is approximately $432 million a year, Mr. Former Harvard Law Student. The Alaska State Budget is roughly ten times that amount. Interesting that you should mention that your campaign employs 2500 individuals. The government of the State of Alaska (which Sarah Palin is Governor of – I hate to keep mentioning this, but you and your supporters keep forgetting it) has approximately six times that many. And, just in case you’re forgetting, she’s been doing it for longer than you’ve been running your campaign (which was not nearly always as large as it currently is).

Ed Morrissey makes a similar point.
Also on the campaign:
*David Brooks on why McCain likes Palin and the shortcomings of their combined ticket. Brooks is nothing if not a guy who knows McCain’s mind. An excellent read despite the horrifying implication that Brooks thinks Robert Gates should have been McCain’s running mate.
*Obama refuses to follow the lead of Bush, Kerry and Gore in releasing college transcripts. (H/T). Note that McCain also does not release his, although in his case there would not be much point, as he has freely admitted graduating in the bottom of his class. But Obama stands to be much more embarrassed if his grades do not match his reputation, or perhaps by his course selection.
*I cannot possibly offer you better advice on the Palin selection than to read Beldar, who is just way ahead of everyone else on this story, in part because he was an early advocate of a Palin selection and was doing his homework on her all summer. Among others, he explains the difference between a windfall profits tax and the oil company taxes Palin actually raised, which seem to deal more directly with the oil companies’ business directly with the government; tells you everything you need to know about Gov. Palin’s respect for her family’s privacy; tells us about Palin’s background as a debater; and revisits her role running the Alaska Oil & Gas Conservation Commission.
*I hope you watched Fred Thompson’s barn-burner of a speech tonight (Fred was in fine form, although in a few spots he could have used a pause to get a drink of water). Unfortunately, I gather that most of the networks skipped the speech, or at least the first half of it. Which stinks, given that the GOP already shaved the first night off its convention. Of course, a fair amount of what Fred covered is well-known enough to people who read blogs, but it was still very well done, and even I learned something – I had not known that McCain opposed President Reagan’s deployment of peacekeeping troops to Lebanon, a decision Reagan later described as the worst mistake of his presidency. (Lieberman’s speech was solid and more directly aimed at swing voters, but of course his delivery is famously dry).

The great question of the week, which I am unfortunately only now getting around to starting to answer, is what to make of John McCain’s selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running mate. Let’s hit some of the early points here, with more to follow.
I. Euphoria
I really was unprepared for how euphoric my reaction was to McCain’s choice, and there are really two reasons for that.
A. Strategery
The first, which I touched on Friday – it seems so long ago now – was the way the McCain campaign pulled this whole thing off. Whereas Obama had built up suspense on his pick while leaking a 3-man ‘short list’, promised his supporters they’d be the first to know via text message, and then had to deal with a late-evening leak that trumped the 3am text message and left his announcement of Biden over the other two finalists broken up over two news days, McCain managed to stun everyone Friday morning, picking a candidate whose name had never made the veepstakes lists except as a dark horse and favorite of the blogosphere. It was clear that many of the leaks made beforehand had been deliberate misdirection, including the floating of Tim Pawlenty, the long-time favorite, the night before. One way that McCain maintained operational security on this was by using Pawlenty, Romney, Lieberman, Ridge, Cantor, etc. as his surrogates and traveling companions, but not Palin. It also turns out that the McCain’s many houses came in handy in getting Palin in and out of Arizona for vetting unnoticed. The Democrats had been gearing up to attack a bunch of other candidates – Palin wasn’t even on that “Next Cheney” website, and even though she actually has a lot in common with Cheney in terms of her upbringing, her public image is very much the opposite of what the Democrats have been looking to run against – and they were caught utterly flat-footed and forced to serially revise their plan to attack her. Obama’s initial press release started by attacking her inexperience, the one place Obama can’t afford to go, and also ripped her as being a tool of Big Oil, thus proving they hadn’t even paid attention to her actual record in Alaska.
The sudden announcement of Palin swept Obama’s convention speech right off the front pages instantly – for four days now, Palin and not the presidential matchup, has dominated the news. The choice of Palin was vintage McCain, the bold stroke, and you can’t help but be impressed with how he carried it off; the man knows how to keep secrets and use timing to maximum effect. That kind of skill is very encouraging to watch.
B. Energy In The Executive
The second reason for the initial euphoria is that it’s been such a long time since Republicans and conservatives have had something really exciting to cheer for. At the beginning of February 2005, we held the commanding heights of politics – a President freshly re-elected with the first popular majority since 1988, the largest GOP Congressional majorities in a century, democracy on the move in Iraq, Lebanon, Ukraine and Georgia, the possibility seeming at hand of legislative progress at home and victory over our enemies abroad.
We can discuss at another time how all that unraveled, but while there have certainly been victories along the way – most notably the stunning turnaround in Iraq since early 2007 and the 2005-06 confirmations of Justices Roberts and Alito – and had our share of fun with the Democrats’ current leadership, nothing has come easily for Republicans and conservatives since early 2005. We’ve been engaged in a protracted rearguard action, a sort of political equivalent of the Chosin Resovoir, and chosen as our leader a man long mistrusted by the party. The mood on the Right for a long time now has been one of grim determination to ride out the storm and hold on for better days down the road. When it looked like Pawlenty, I spent most of Thursday night talking myself into the idea that it was wise for McCain to take the safe, don’t-make-waves choice who would basically get out of McCain’s way. But the selection of a VP nominee who is young, energetic, a fresh face from outside the Beltway, glamorous, and undeniably conservative on a fundamental cultural level is fun. McCain may be startlingly energetic for a man his age with his disabilities, but there’s a level of enthusiasm that Palin brings to the trail that’s already infectious. It really is difficult not to get swept up in that.
II. The X Factor
I have been thinking for a while that I wanted to see Palin on the national ticket in 2012, but as regular readers know, she wasn’t my first choice for VP – my long list of “don’ts” included a few strikes against her, and in the days before the rollout, I backed Eric Cantor and viewed Palin as too much of a rookie for the national ticket. Had Palin run in the GOP primaries, I would certainly have opposed her on grounds of being insufficiently experienced to head the national ticket, as I did with 1-term Governor Mitt Romney. So, what to make of her as McCain’s running mate?
I won’t say that I’m unconcerned by her inexperience on national security matters; we really do know precious little of her views on those issues. Her main national security responsibility is commanding the Alaska National Guard troops tasked with important functions in the missile defense system, and it’s a bit of a stretch to make that out as more than it is.
Palin will be inevitably compared to Barack Obama, given that so many of the criticisms leveled against Obama not only by Republicans but by fellow Democrats like Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden have focused on his inexperience. There are certainly some similarities between Palin and Obama (and more between Palin and Tim Kaine, one of the finalists for Obama’s running mate). But there are two very important distinctions between Palin and Obama.
A. Their #1 = Our #2
The first one is obvious: Obama is running for President, not Vice President. Given the vast gulf between McCain’s and Obama’s resumes, it’s clear that the issue of experience, accomplishment and qualification requires Obama to change the subject at every possible opportunity. And now he is changing it to compare himself to Sarah Palin.
Obama has now gotten himself sucked in to comparing the Democrats’ #1 to the Republicans’ #2:

“My understanding is that Gov. Palin’s town, Wassilla, has I think 50 employees. We’ve got 2500 in this campaign. I think their budget is maybe 12 million dollars a year – we have a budget of about three times that just for the month,” Obama responded.

In so doing, he is comparing apples to oranges comparing his campaign in 2008 to Palin’s record as Mayor of Wasilla in 1996-2002 back when Obama was just a State Senator, while completely ignoring her job as Governor. He is also, amusingly, claiming that he is qualified to be president based on…running for president. But even aside from that, the #1 vs #2 dynamic is precisely where McCain wants Obama:

“When they’re comparing our vice presidential candidate’s experience to their presidential candidate’s experience and John McCain is just flying above it all,” says one senior McCain adviser, “that’s a good place for us to be.”

The old saying we have heard in many a campaign is that the presidency is no place for on the job training; the vice presidency, by contrast, consists of little else. None of that is a reason to gamble on a complete cipher for the job. But that brings us to the second point: Palin’s qualifications are clearly superior to Obama’s because she is an executive. The presidency is fundamentally an executive job – this is a major part of why I originally backed Rudy, and only by invoking both a very long (25 year) career in Congress and an equally long (27 year) career in the Navy was McCain able to overcome the usual presumption that the GOP would pick an executive like Romney, Rudy or Huckabee. Obama, by contrast, was blessed to run almost entirely against a field of other Senators – only Bill Richardson among the Democratic field had ever been a chief executive.
As I have explained before at length, there are five types of experience that are particularly useful in preparing for the presidency: executive experience, national security experience, political (especially political leadership) experience, military service, and private sector business experience. No one of these is essential, but national security and executive experience are the two most important, and if you can’t have anyone on the ticket who has done both, the next best thing is a ticket that combines an executive with a veteran national security hand – exactly what the GOP is running.
While Palin’s resume in major public office is, like Obama’s, relatively short, and her national security experience negligible at best, her experience is as a chief executive, the person to whom an entire state government reports, the person who gets the call when things go wrong, the person on whose desk the buck stops. The buck has never stopped with Barack Obama, or with Joe Biden for that matter. Obama has various bills he tries to take credit for (sometimes accurately), but he does not have the kind of record to run on that every governor has. We have had presidents before who were relatively short-tenured governors. Woodrow Wilson, for example, was elected with effectively the same resume as Palin – small-scale executive experience (his tenure as president of turn-of-the-century Princeton University is comparable to being mayor of a town of a few thousand people) followed by two years as a reformist, anti-machine governor. Wilson’s presidency may not be the best role model (I have noted before that the public had no way of knowing what kind of Commander-in-Chief Wilson would be) but he did turn out to be a highly effective leader both in domestic legislative battles and in commanding American troops; Wilson’s failings were more about his impractical ideas.
Obama’s lack of any of the kinds of relevant experience is really staggering, and not at all like Palin. Nobody with a resume like Obama’s has ever been elected president (Abe Lincoln, who had a relatively short resume as a legislator and to whom Al Gore audaciously compared Obama, had a good deal more private sector responsibility than Obama and had served in the military as a captain in the Black Hawk War. And Obama’s no Abe Lincoln).
That’s the difference between Palin as Governor and Obama as Senator. And the pattern repeats in their prior job experience. I regard Palin’s two three-year terms as Mayor of Wasilla, like Obama’s four two-year terms as State Senator from Hyde Park, as useful life experience (it helps to see how government interacts with the people at ground level) but not really a substitute for the necessary step of serving in major public office like being a Member of Congress or elected statewide as a Governor or Senator. But even then, Obama wasn’t the guy responsible for Hyde Park (he has since tried to make a point of his not having “clout” in the State Senate); he was never in a leadership position in his party and until his last term in the State Senate he was (just as in the first two years in the US Senate before he stopped showing up so he could run for President) a member of the minority party. If anything, Obama’s worked hard at avoiding being the guy who could be held responsible for anything that’s happened around him his entire career (his presidential campaign has involved a seemingly endless series events, up to and including this weekend’s barrage of attacks on Palin, in which Obama claims to have no responsibility for what his own subordinates do). Wasilla may be a small suburban town, but for two terms Sarah Palin was in charge of it.
III. Identity Politics
One obvious question about Palin is the gender issue: we she picked because she’s a woman?
Duh.
Look, Palin’s record in Alaska is such that even if she were a man, she’d certainly have already made a sufficient impression to be marked as a rising star in the GOP. But I don’t believe that McCain would have chosen her if she’d been male; he would have gone with a more veteran governor like Pawlenty or looked elsewhere. Republicans hate playing identity politics, but where elections are concerned, it’s the world we live in, and the game the Democrats have played in this election; if they are going to nominate the icon of a group that makes up 11% of the electorate and could not possibly be more solidly Democratic, we may as well go after a group that makes up a majority of the electorate and includes a lot of swing voters. And, again: that sort of ticket-balancing calculus has always been the province of the bottom half of the ticket, the difference being that in years gone by the attention was more to geographic rather than demographic balance.
Does 2008 sound the death knell of the two-white-guys ticket that has been the staple of presidential politics since 1789? Maybe, or at least it will probably be a rarity in the future. Depending on how things turn out this November, it seems likely that the next Democratic ticket will include Obama and/or Hillary, and the next Republican ticket will include Palin and/or Bobby Jindal.
Totally random thought: if McCain wins, will Palin’s idiosyncratic fashion – the glasses, the beehive hairdo – become a national trend? It has nothing to do with politics, just wondering.
IV. Be Careful What You Wish For
Finally, for now – I have to get separately to some of the other stories about Palin, many of which are being adequately covered over at RedState – I offer a word of caution to my fellow conservatives. Palin is undeniably an appealing person with bedrock cultural conservative credentials. She may well end up being the next great conservative leader. But once the initial flush of infatuation has worn off, we will be looking more closely at how she carries conservative policy goals into effect. And we have a long, long line of examples of public officials – Mike Huckabee, Condi Rice and Arnold Schwarzenegger come to mind – to remind us that an appealing personality and/or biography and the ability to sell some parts of the conservative message does not necessarily equate to someone who will build a record conservatives will be happy with.
V. The Secret Weapon
Finally, let’s remember that at the end of the day, politicians are not just paper credentials and position papers. And probably Palin’s greatest asset to the ticket is that she comes across as fundamentally a normal person. Of the four candidates on the national tickets this year, we are actually blessed not to have anyone of the Kerry/Gore variety – all four are to one extent or another likeable and/or charming people. But what you would not call the other three is normal – McCain is basically an action hero, a Jack Bauer/Han Solo/Indiana Jones figure, the kind of guy most Americans know more from the movies than from their day to day lives. Biden, for all his affability, is someone if you met him not knowing who he is, your first reaction would be “this guy must be a U.S. Senator.” Obama, when you get him away from his cultic acolytes, his TelePrompter and his branded logos and trappings of grandeur, is at heart an academic. All of them really did have ambitions of public glory from an early age. But Palin has the rare Reagan touch of having fallen into politics rather gradually and backwards, and even Reagan was always to some extent a performer; Palin is probably the most relatably normal person on a national ticket I can remember, and maybe the closest to a normal person on a national ticket since Harry Truman. Obviously that, too, is not without its downsides; she has to convince people that she is ultimately capable of managing the superhuman demands of the job of the Presidency if needed. But don’t underestimate what Palin’s personality will bring to this race.

I’m overdue to catch up on baseball blogging and still working on a piece on Sarah Palin…meanwhile, over the weekend we finished watching some of the Democratic Convention speeches I hadn’t seen live. Quick thoughts:
*I really thought people had been eggagerating the malice in Michelle Obama’s eyes when the Clintons were speaking, but they were not. Man, does she hate them, and she would not be a good poker player.
*Brian Schweitzer really is very good on the stump, and you could see that Bill Clinton, who knows political talent, was visibly impressed. Of course, the substance of Schweitzer’s speech was nonsense, but that’s beside the point. Frank Caliendo would not even need makeup to do a Schweitzer imitation. They could be twins.
*Bob Casey would have endorsed a grilled cheese sandwich if it was written on the TelePrompter. Talk about an empty suit.
*I suspect the Palin pick has the Democrats regretting all the “girl power” stuff surrounding Hillary’s appearance.
*Chelsea really sounds just like her mother (well, you can tell she’s younger, but that’s it).
*Both Bill and Hillary had great closings to their speeches….and just kept on going.
*That interview a few months back where McCain said that the fundamentals of the economy were solid but a lot of people were hurting? The Democrats just could not get enough of the first half, and only the first half, of that sentence. They wanted to take it home and marry it.
*I really could not watch Mark Warner. His speech wasn’t any livelier on paper. This line was priceless:

I spent 20 years in business. If you ran a company whose only strategy was to tear down the competition, it wouldn’t last long.

Yeah, and in the private sector if you collaborate with your competition, you go to jail.

My take on Obama’s speech last night, before it gets completely overshadowed by the McCain VP announcement (if it’s indeed Palin, now we know what John McCain wanted for his birthday: Barack Obama’s news cycle):
1. Yes, it’s hard for me to objectively evaluate a speech of this nature by a Democrat, but I can say this: it wasn’t a dud like Kerry in 2004 and wasn’t power-mad like Gore in 2000, but it also wasn’t full of “how can we possibly beat this guy” moments like one of Clinton’s speeches. Only in the MLK homage did his rhetoric really soar, and his “specifics” still seemed either vague, small-bore, shopworn or implausible in light of his record.
2. Obama said nothing at all that will be remembered a week from now – no Cross of Gold, no “extremism in defense of liberty is no vice,” no “kinder, gentler America,” no “Bridge to the 21st century.” If there was a unifying theme, it eluded me.
3. Probably Obama’s most effective claim – I lack the time to deal with this one today – was his promise to cut taxes. Also his promise to eliminate government programs. Neither bears any relationship whatsoever to his record or his campaign to date.
4. Almost certainly the flimsiest part of the speech was where Obama basically said “I know we disagree on abortion, guns, immigration and same-sex marriage, but surely we can all agree on some talking points on these issues that Democrats have been using for years.”
5. Someone should tell Obama to stop using the “my brother’s keeper line” as long as George Obama is living on $1 a month in a shanty in Kenya.
6. The set wound up being less pompous than billed, but still reminded me of Bill Maher’s old set:

UPDATE: I wrote too fast this morning and missed a crucial point I had wanted to make. A year ago, Democrats were full of woe about the future of Iraq. Last night, the worst Obama could think to say about the state of Iraq is that they are running a budget surplus.

Well, I will say this for John McCain: the man and his team can keep a secret. The leaks on his VP selection process have been self-evidently intentional and savvy, and here we are the morning of the announcement knowing no more for certain than ever before. Last night it seemed nearly 100% certain that he was taking Tim Pawlenty, and now Pawlenty says it’s not him and he won’t be in Dayton today. Conflicting reports on whether Mitt Romney will be in Dayton or not; I believe he’s still scheduled to be at the second stop of the day in Missouri, but Fox is reporting it’s not him. And word is suddenly out that Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has chartered a flight from Anchorage to Dayton, presumably not for the scenery…but at this point, I don’t even know what to believe.
PS – Quick take, now that it increasingly seems to be Palin: whether this is a success or not will depend very heavily on how well she holds up debating Biden on national security.

I missed a good deal of the first two nights of the Democratic Convention and only caught last night’s action on the radio after the Mets game ended (which conveniently was right before Biden went on) plus some TV highlights of Bill Clinton’s speech, so I can’t really speak to the growing sentiment from pundits on both sides of the aisle that the Convention is lacking in a coherent theme and unlikely to produce the kind of post-Convention polling bounce enjoyed by dynamic campaigns like the Dukakis campaign in 1988. I will say that Biden last night was fiesty, if scattered, although his alternative/revisionist history of the Iraq War, in which the success of the surge proved Obama right in opposing it and calling for a complete withdrawal by March 2008, was positively surreal. And the clips I saw of Bill Clinton suggest that the man still hasn’t lost his flair.
But if Obama was looking to come off more like a rock star than a potential Leader of the Free World with his (apparently) impromptu appearance to steal the scene from Biden last night, he certainly did a good job of it, barking that “If I’m not mistaken, Hillary Clinton rocked the house last night” and talking about moving the party elsewhere (specifically, “Mile High Stadium,” which no longer exists – the 72-year-old Obama must be borderline senile). While a certain ebullience and fire is of course to be expected on the campaign trail, it was not exactly presidential in the tone or tenor of Obama’s remarks. Also, he pointedly said that he was “proud to have Joe Biden and Jill Biden and Beau Biden and Mama Biden and the whole Biden family,” thus rather amusingly excluding only one member of that family, the Senator’s Washington lobbyist son.
Meanwhile, we shall see how well John McCain’s campaign tonight avoids what tripped up Obama in keeping a secret of his VP pick, scheduled for rollout Friday in Dayton Ohio – the need to move the candidate and his or her Secret Service detail into the location. Then again, (1) McCain hasn’t made a big deal of promising his supporters a text message in advance of media reports (McCain’s more interested in the voters who go to bed after the evening news) and (2) if word somehow leaks and steals some of the spotlight from Obama’s speech tonight, I’m sure the McCain camp won’t be heartbroken (ordinarily I’d consider that cheesy to step on Obama’s big day but with only one business day between the two Conventions, it’s a necessary evil).