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The McCain-Palin Rift
Tweet Share on Facebook October 28, 2008 Comment (33)The election's a week away, and the McCain campaign is burying itself before the electorate has a chance to do so. Could McCain's bid turn out to be the worst-run campaign in American presidential history?
It's certainly gunning for the honor. Read on, dear reader, George Stephanopoulos's take:
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John McCain Pre-Postmortem: The Maverick Couldn't Hack It as a Party Man
Tweet Share on Facebook October 28, 2008 Comment (7)If you haven't seen it, check out Rich Lowry's excellent pre-mortem of John McCain on NRO:
This is the McCain paradox: No other Republican candidate had a character and background—as a courageously independent spirit—better suited to making the presidential campaign competitive this year. But perhaps no Republican candidate was so poorly suited to the task of running a presidential race.
He goes on, pretty well dissecting the decline and fall of his Maverick-ness (due to said quality).
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Sarah Palin's Intelligence (or Lack Thereof)
Tweet Share on Facebook October 28, 2008 Comment (22)I had never heard of Elaine Lafferty before yesterday, but apparently she's a recovering left-wing journalist now consulting for the McCain campaign as an adviser to McCain's running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. She took me on for questioning Governor Palin's intelligence:
It's difficult not to froth when one reads, as I did again and again this week, doubts about Sarah Palin's "intelligence," coming especially from women such as PBS's Bonnie Erbe, who, as near as I recall, has not herself heretofore been burdened with the Susan Sontag of journalism moniker. As Fred Barnes—God help me, I'm agreeing with Fred Barnes—suggests in the Weekly Standard, these high-toned and authoritative dismissals come from people who have never met or spoken with Sarah Palin. Those who know her—love her or hate her—offer no such criticism. They know what I know, and I learned it from spending just a little time traveling on the cramped campaign plane this week: Sarah Palin is very smart.
The "Susan Sontag of journalism moniker?" Inapt, inept, and poorly written. While Lafferty seems to think that Sontag, an influential essayist and writer, should be my role model, she's way off base. Sontag is perhaps most famous for writing: "The white race is the cancer of human history." (Partisan Review, Winter 1967, p. 57.)
This is not a philosophy with which I concur, nor is it one with which I should like to be associated. It's as racist, overwrought, and incorrect as any rash generalization about race could possibly be.
I find high irony in the coincidence that as this former editor of Ms. magazine and self-proclaimed Democrat dissed me, I was simultaneously E-mailed by a PR firm (Gehrung Associates), offering up an interview with a former high school acquaintance of Governor Palin that read as follows:
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Ted Stevens's Convictions: Good News for Conservatives With Conviction
Tweet Share on Facebook October 28, 2008 Comment (6)There's been precious little good news for conservatives lately, but Monday brought a hint of sunshine. Sen. Ted Stevens, the top Republican on the Appropriations Committee, was found guilty on all seven counts of corruption by a Washington, D.C., jury.
The longtime pol failed to disclose that he received things of value—notably, construction work on what he calls his "chalet"—from an Alaskan company to which he steered contracts, and for that, he is legally guilty. But in a broader sense, he is also morally guilty for turning the public coffers into a candy jar and corrupting his nominal party.
My old boss Robert Novak is fond of saying that there are three parties on Capitol Hill: the Republicans, the Democrats, and the Appropriators. And while Stevens's conviction will no doubt play to the GOP's disadvantage in the coming week, his exit can serve as a useful and necessary reminder to Republican lawmakers that, in the words of Barry Goldwater, they have worshiped false idols.
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Barack Obama's Race Is a Lingering Factor for Some Ohio Voters, According to Focus Group
Tweet Share on Facebook October 27, 2008 Comment (11)Maybe Peter Hart is one of those Democrats who, like Chicago Cubs fans, have gotten to within a few games...outs...strikes of victory so often, only to have it cruelly denied, that they take a gloomy disposition into any favorable circumstance.
Or maybe the 2008 election ain't over 'til it's over.
Is there a Steve Bartman out there getting ready to lunge for a foul ball and deprive the Democrats of their triumph?
On a rainy and gloomy October day in Washington, the über-pollster Hart has conveyed an appropriately glum report for his fellow Democrats from a focus group he conducted in Ohio yesterday.
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Why John McCain Continues to Trail Barack Obama in Pennsylvania
Tweet Share on Facebook October 27, 2008 Comment (225)One of the mysteries of this campaign year has been why John McCain keeps campaigning in Pennsylvania when the polls show him far behind Barack Obama there—51 percent to 41 percent in the RealClearPolitics.com average of recent polls as I write. A clue comes from the most recent poll there by SurveyUSA, which helpfully provides a regional breakdown of results. SurveyUSA, as it has consistently done, shows McCain running within the margin of error in the southwest (metro Pittsburgh and surroundings) and in the Northeast (Scranton and the anthracite country), which historically are very Democratic areas. Joe Biden's Scranton roots and the support of Scranton-based Bob Casey don't seem to be doing Obama much good there. McCain carries the west-central and south-central areas, as most Republicans do. But he is incredibly weak—behind Obama 64 percent to 32 percent in the southeast, which includes about 40 percent of the state's voters. Most of this area is metropolitan Philadelphia, which George W. Bush lost in 2004 by a 62 percent to 37 percent margin; the remainder is presumably Lehigh, Northampton, Berks, and Lancaster counties, where Bush ran better. The regional breakdown in the most recent Quinnipiac poll tells exactly the same story.
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Pundits Predicting Election Should Pipe Down
Tweet Share on Facebook October 27, 2008 Comment (1)Veteran political commentator Charlie Cook has joined my Thomas Jefferson Street colleague Robert Schlesinger in calling this presidential race over before the polling booths have even opened.
Numbers gazers certainly find merit in the calls made by both men. But quite frankly, all this business of calling elections before they're over makes me nervous. I hope I won't be looking back at this post next week and thinking, "How foolish was I? Of course it was over." But two things come to mind when commentators call elections before the votes are tallied. The first is a presidential election that took place before I was born. The second was a presidential election in which I voted.
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Is John McCain Counting on the Bradley Effect in Pennsylvania?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 27, 2008 Comment (19)Is John McCain's presidential campaign depending on voting booth racism—the so-called Bradley effect—in Pennsylvania? How else to explain the campaign's focus on a state that virtually every poll says should be safely in the Obama column?
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Edmund Morris's Misuse of Teddy Roosevelt and History in the New York Times
Tweet Share on Facebook October 27, 2008 Comment (12)The historian Edmund Morris has an op-ed in today's New York Times in which, by cherry-picking quotes from Teddy Roosevelt, he attempts to make the case that America's 26th president would support Barack Obama.
Like those silly op-eds that are written in the open-letter style, this colloquy formula is nothing more than a crutch for someone too lazy or muddled to write a persuasive piece on his own. Morris's article, however, is detestable not just for its pedantic structure but for its perniciousness.
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Questions About Barack Obama's Online Fundraising Prowess
Tweet Share on Facebook October 27, 2008 Comment (8)The Washington Post had an interesting story Sunday looking at concerns raised by Barack Obama's absurd fundraising success. The story's good, but as Ed Morrissey points out over at Hot Air, it leaves a critical question unanswered:
What makes the Obama campaign different from online retail operations? After all, we have spent almost 15 years buying and selling products and services on the Internet, and retailers know how to protect themselves and their customers. They employ a system that compares the billing information on the order to the information in the credit-card system—and when they don't match, the sale gets denied. Credit-card companies have gone an extra step in recent years by adding a security code to protect against fraudulent use.
The McCain campaign apparently uses these systems to prevent fraud. Why doesn't Team Obama?
It's a fair—and disquieting—question.
