The End of Rovian Politics?

ABC News / Washington Post poll, among likely voters:

On Ayers: 60% say Obama’s connection to him is not a legitimate issue.

On Palin: 52% say McCain’s choice of her for veep weakens their confidence in his judgment.

More challenges for John McCain: Likely voters overwhelmingly reject his effort to make an issue of Barack Obama’s association with 1960s radical William Ayers. Fallout continues from McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin for vice president, with 52 percent saying it weakens their confidence in his judgment. And on optimism, it’s Obama by 2-1.

He Knew It Would Happen

Yes We Can! H O P E !

What McCain Is Doing

Sullivan sums it up well. I am getting more scared, angry, frustrated, and disgusted every minute:

There was always going to be a point of revolt and panic for a core group of Americans who believe that Obama simply cannotbe president – because he’s black or liberal or young or relatively new. This is that point. As the polls suggest a strong victory, the Hannity-Limbaugh-Steyn-O’Reilly base are going into shock and extreme rage. McCain and Palin have decided to stoke this rage, to foment it, to encourage paranoid notions that somehow Obama is a “secret” terrorist or Islamist or foreigner. These are base emotions in both sense of the word.

But they are also very very dangerous. This is a moment of maximal physical danger for the young Democratic nominee. And McCain is playing with fire. If he really wants to put country first, he will attack Obama on his policies – not on these inflammatory, personal, creepy grounds. This is getting close to the atmosphere stoked by the Israeli far right before the assassination of Rabin.

For God’s sake, McCain, stop it. For once in this campaign, put your country first.

Cindy McCain and The Hateful, Dishonest Campaign

Cindy McCain’s speech provoked a lot of discussion here at GOPWTF. In particular this quote,

“My son…has served on the front lines,” she told the crowd, with her husband and Palin standing behind her. “Let me tell you, the day Senator Obama decided to cast a vote not to fund my son when he was serving…sent a cold chill through my body, let me tell you. I suggest that Senator Obama change shoes with me for just one day and see what it means to have a loved one serving in the armed forces, and, more importantly, serving in harm’s way.”

We were all outraged, and for different reasons. Her speech was so hateful, dishonest and divisive that it was hard for us to really focus on what about it made us so mad. I think it boils down to several points

1. Barack Obama did vote to fund the troops, as he has done many times. He simply voted for a different bill than John McCain. The bill that Barack Obama voted for included a timeline for the withdrawal of troops. The bill that John McCain voted for had no deadline for withdrawal. One can easily point to legislation that John McCain opposed like the expansion of the GI bill. You tell me who cares about the troops more.
2. To use your son’s service for political gain is despicable. To say that Barack Obama voting for a funding bill that was competing with yours sent chills down your spine because of your son’s service is manipulative. Not to mention that she implied her son was in Iraq at the time of the vote, in an attempt to provoke a greater emotional response. Using the fact the your child is in harms way in a manipulative manner is disturbing to me as a parent. And as a parent, the vote that would have sent chills down my spine was when John McCain voted against a bill to bring my child home sooner.
3. It implies that anyone who doesn’t have a child serving in Iraq is not qualified to be President. That would limit the talent pool drastically, and it underestimates the scope of the the job the President has.
4. The hateful speech coming out of the McCain campaign recently is on the verge of inciting riots. This is were they drift into dangerous territory. When you look at an Obama rally, he quiets the boos. The McCain camp incites rage, and hate speech. Rather than calm the crowd they revel in this. A hostile crowd at a recent Palin rally even turned on the press.

Clearly the strategy is that if you tell a lie enough times to enough people, they will start to believe it. Ultimately, I think we are all outraged at someone who will do anything to win. Compromise anything, step on any principle to get what they want. This is a not a leader. This is not a leader.

People Who Live In Glass Houses… Hey Sarah, What About The AIP

My government is my worst enemy. I’m going to fight them with any means at hand. -Joe Vogler, Founder of the Alaska Independence Party

Lately Sarah Palin has been trying to tie Barack Obama to terrorism by trying to link him to William Ayers. Salon has an interesting piece on Sarah and Todd Palin’s association with the secessionist Alaska Independence Party.

The Republican ticket is working hard this week to make Barack Obama’s tenuous connection to graying, ’60s revolutionary Bill Ayers a major campaign issue. But the Palins’ connection to anti-American extremism is much more central to their political biographies.

Imagine the uproar if Michelle Obama was revealed to have joined a black nationalist party whose founder preached armed secession from the United States and who enlisted the government of Iran in his cause? The Obama campaign would probably not have survived such an explosive revelation. Particularly if Barack Obama himself was videotaped giving the anti-American secessionists his wholehearted support just months ago.

Kick them when they’re down: GOP tries to disqualify foreclosed property owners.

Michigan Republicans are working to get people whose homes are in foreclosure disqualified to vote. So much for looking out for the little guy, and helping people hang on to their homes.

(Via Boing Boing)

Read the article here. Lose your house, lose your vote

The Obama campaign right now

Obama needs to regain control – of the media, of the campaign, of the facts. He is not fired up. The republican machine is winning. McCain is running the most dishonest campaign possible. They are kicking his fine butt all over the place. I think he has a very limited amount of time to do this. If next week is anything like this week. It may be too late.

A frustrating but honest interpretation of current events from E.J Dionne, Jr. And from the NYT.

A New Race

 Great piece from John Heilemann of New York Magazine.

Money quotes:  

Palin herself, of course, derided Obama’s experience in her speech, in particular his stint as a community organizer—which is no wonder, given that occupation’s urban (read black, read poor, read black poor) connotations. Yet for all of Palin’s comfort in playing the lipstick-wearing pit bull, her most important role in the campaign ahead will not be mauling Obama. It will be energizing the party’s base. As The Atlantic’s Marc Ambinder reported, the McCain scheduling squad is “filling a calendar that will find her deployed to places where McCain can’t go, places where McCain’s gone and fallen flat, and places where social conservatives need an enthusiasm boost.” The goal here is straightforward: increase Evangelical turnout to Bush-like levels, in order to more or less solidify the 2004 electoral map.

But by riling up and nailing down the base, Palin performs an even more valuable function for McCain: She allows him to ignore the wingnuts and sprint hard toward the center. To focus on issues where McCain’s positions appeal to moderate and independent voters. To spend the lion’s share of his time in the handful of states on which the election will turn: the traditional battlegrounds, such as Ohio; the new ones, such as Virginia and Colorado; and also one or two blue states, namely Michigan and Pennsylvania, that Schmidt thinks might be within McCain’s grasp. It was no coincidence that the day after the convention, the new Republican ticket headed to Macomb County, outside Detroit.

But there is a reason the Republicans keep falling back, again and again, on such hoary tropes. The reason is that, from the age of Nixon to the era of Lee Atwater to our current (yes, apparently, it’s not dead yet) epoch of Rove, they have all too often worked. Us versus them is a potent message—and one tailor-made to a candidate with the name Barack Hussein Obama. Who, need it really be pointed out, is plainly not like you.

“The dominatrix” from Salon.com

It is so thoroughly disappointing that a campaign that began on high ground is now back down in the Rovian mud.

The Republicans and McCain took the low road, acknowledging that the only chance they had to win was to “shake things up” and re-frame the debate. Barack is now out of the news and acting defensive.

I wanted a Obama-McCain general election because I thought it would be about the issues. McCain caved. He sold out. I am not surprised, but extremely disappointed.

Key passage:

“Republican strategists have made it clear that the GOP’s only chance to win is by reframing the election as a battle of images. And right now, Palin is the pinup queen in that war. She’s feisty, she’s a mom, she’s from a frontier state, she guns down wolves from the air, she’s a devout Evangelical, she poses as a reformer, and she insults the Washington elites.

And large numbers of Americans think she’s hot.

This latter point cannot be underestimated.”