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Thursday, October 23, 2008
Assault alleged on McCain staffer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The report about a bizarre attack on a McCain volunteer in Pittsburgh is disturbing. If this happened as described, then the perpetrator ought to be caught and sent to prison for every day the law allows, and it ought to allow a lot.
But I’d be careful about jumping to conclusions too quickly. The Pittsburgh police certainly seem to be.
“This is what she’s telling police,” police spokeswoman Diane Richard said. “We can’t substantiate it at this time.”
Police are checking video footage from a bank surveillance camera. Let’s see how the investigation unfolds.
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Still not sure Georgia’s in play, but…
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Democracy Corps, a nonprofit run by James Carville and longtime Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg, just released a survey of 600 likely voters here in Georgia. Their finding?
“Barack Obama has no business winning in Georgia this year. Neither does U.S. Senate candidate Jim Martin. Yet both Democrats are within striking range in a state President Bush carried by 17 points in 2004, and where in the last six years Republicans replaced Democrats in both Senate seats, and won the governor’s office for the first time since Reconstruction. John McCain leads Barack Obama by just two points (44 - 46 percent) and Jim Martin trails incumbent Senator Saxby Chambliss by just 4 points, 44 - 48 percent.”
According to the poll, Martin has only a name identification of only 55 percent, suggesting a lot of potential upside. Only 39 percent rate Chambliss’ performance as good or excellent.
Their findings in the presidential race would be easier to dismiss without a recent spate of other polls that also show the contest tightening in Georgia. The last 10 polls taken here all put the margin in single digits. Here’s the aggregate poll trend as reflected by the folks at Pollster.com.
For some reason, the folks at Democracy Corps also asked whether voters would choose Roy Barnes or Karen Handel in a governor’s race come 2010 — Barnes wins 49 to 35 percent.
And the most popular political figure in Georgia? Who else but Zell Miller, followed closely by Sonny Perdue.
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GOP establishment needs to be defeated
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Republican Party is lashing back at its presidential nominee for his frankness about George W. Bush and congressional Republicans.
According to Mike Allen of Politico, “The Republican establishment is beginning to express long-suppressed exasperation with the McCain pirate ship. In an early-morning phone call to Playbook, one of the most senior Republican strategists in the land warns the McCain campaign after reading the WashTimes interview:
“Lashing out at past Republican Congresses instead of Pelosi and Reid, and echoing your opponent’s attacks on you instead of attacking your opponent, and spending 150,000 hard dollars on designer clothes when congressional Republicans are struggling for money, and when your senior campaign staff are blaming each other for the loss in The New York Times [Magazine] 10 days before the election, you’re not doing much to energize your supporters.
The fact is, when you’re the party standard-bearer, you have an obligation to fight to the finish. I think they can still win. But if they don’t think that, they need to look at how Bob Dole finished out his campaign in 1996 and not try to take down as many Republicans with them as they can. Instead of campaigning in Electoral College states, Dole was campaigning in places he knew he didn’t have a chance to beat Clinton, but where he could energize key House and Senate races. I think you’ll find these sentiments shared by MANY of my fellow Republican strategists.”
The Republican establishment, in other words, has not learned its lesson and still clings to the belief that its policies are wise and its ideology correct. They don’t want to change. They see no reason to change. They still believe they have the support of the American people. And that’s always been part of the problem with McCain’s candidacy.
To some degree, McCain does have maverick inclinations. To some degree, he does “get it” about the collapse of the GOP world view.
But if elected president, McCain would be a captive of the same party apparatus that created and protected Bush, a fact he has confirmed in the way he has run this campaign. He chose Sarah Palin not because she was most qualified or even qualified at all, but to placate the GOP base. He embraced the Bush tax cuts he once rejected as unfairly tilted toward the rich. He publicly kissed the ring of Jerry Falwell, the man he once described as an agent of intolerance. And the pool of Washington Republicans he would draw from to man his administration would be the same pool of Republicans that filled the Bush administration. Nothing would change.
Nothing.
Libertarian Radley Balko, writing in Reason, reaches the same conclusion in a piece headlined “Why the Republicans Must Lose.”
“First, they had their shot at holding power, and they failed. They’ve failed in staying true to their principles of limited government and free markets. They’ve failed in preventing elected leaders of their party from becoming corrupted by the trappings of power, and they’ve failed to hold those leaders accountable after the fact. Congressional Republicans failed to rein in the Bush administration’s naked bid to vastly expand the power of the presidency (a failure they’re going to come to regret should Obama take office in January). They failed to apply due scrutiny and skepticism to the administration’s claims before undertaking Congress’ most solemn task—sending the nation to war. I could go on.
As for the Bush administration, the only consistent principle we’ve seen from the White House over the last eight years is that of elevating the American president (and, I guess, the vice president) to that of an elected dictator. That isn’t hyperbole. This administration believes that on any issue that can remotely be tied to foreign policy or national security (and on quite a few other issues as well), the president has boundless, limitless, unchecked power to do anything he wants. They believe that on these matters, neither Congress nor the courts can restrain him.
That’s the second reason the GOP needs to lose. American voters need to send a clear, convincing repudiation of these dangerous ideas….. Big-government conservatism has bloated the federal government, bogged us down in what will ultimately be a trillion-dollar war, and set us down the road to European-style socialism. It’s hard to think of how Obama could be worse. He’ll just be bad in different way.”
I’m struck by the fact that so many Republicans absolutely refuse to believe that the American people would elect Barack Obama as president. It is utterly inconceivable to them, and that disbelief is the source of much of the anger you see at McCain-Palin rallies. They have been fed a distorted, twisted idea of what this nation is all about, and only a resounding rejection of their approach at the voting booth can force them to “true up” their image of America with reality.
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Who’s your daddy, John?
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain says George Bush has been a disaster.
“Spending, the conduct of the war in Iraq for years, growth in the size of government, larger than any time since the Great Society, laying a $10 trillion debt on future generations of America, owing $500 billion to China, obviously, failure to both enforce and modernize the [financial] regulatory agencies that were designed for the 1930s and certainly not for the 21st century, failure to address the issue of climate change seriously,” Mr. McCain said in an interview with The Washington Times aboard his campaign plane en route from New Hampshire to Ohio.
“Those are just some of them,” he said with a laugh, chomping into a peanut butter sandwich as a few campaign aides in his midair office joined in the laughter….
In addition to the long list of failures he attributed to Mr. Bush, Mr. McCain blamed the president for supporting the Medicare prescription-drug bill, saying, “They didn’t pay for it.”
“They put a trillion-dollar debt on future generations of Americans, then allowed the liberals to expand it so they’re paying my — they’re paying for my prescription drugs. Why should the taxpayers pay for my prescription drugs?” he said with exasperation.
He rejected Mr. Bush’s use of issuing “signing statements” when he signs bills into law, in which the president has suggested that he would ignore elements of the bills, labeling them potentially unconstitutional….
The Republican also targeted his own party, saying they got drunk with power ….
“I think, frankly, the problem was, with a Republican Congress, that the president was told by the speaker and majority leaders and others, ‘Don’t veto these bills, we need this pork, we need this excess spending, we need to grow these bureaucracies.’ They all sponsor certain ones. And he didn’t do what Ronald Reagan used to and say, ‘No’; say, ‘No. We’re not going to do this.’”
OK, but where were you when it counted, John? Some of us have been pointing this out for years, years in which we were attacked as unAmerican and unpatriotic, as people so blinded by Bush hate that we could not see how wonderful and wise ol’ George really was as a leader. Years in which you and your colleagues continued to give Bush free rein to drive this country into the ground. On the rare occasion on which you challenged him, such as on signing statements, you quickly backed down out of obedience and political calculation.
But now you join the parade? Three months from the end of this eight-year reign of error? Thanks a heap, John. Country First.
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