Day: March 8, 2008

Ken Mehlman, the closeted heterosexual former Bush campaign aide who recently headed the Republican National Committee, and Karl Rove, Bush’s unscrupulous former advisor, are helping out with strategy for John McCain, guaranteeing — as if a guarantee were needed — that the 2008 campaign will be the nastiest ever fought:

Ken Mehlman, who ran Bush’s 2004 campaign, is now serving as an unpaid, outside adviser to the Arizona Republican. Karl Rove, the president’s top political hand since his Texas days, recently gave money to McCain and soon after had a private conversation with the senator. A top McCain adviser said both Mehlman and Rove are now informally advising the campaign. Rove refused to detail his conversation with McCain…

Rove explained that he and McCain “got to know each other during the 2004 campaign.” In a separate interview, Mehlman noted that “McCain was completely loyal to the president in 2004 and worked incredibly hard to help him get elected.”

Flashback — CNN, June 23, 2000:
Bush was critical of Al Gore in the 2000 campaign for being part of “the administration that’s been in charge” while the “price of gasoline has gone steadily upward.”

Gas prices have soared this week to a national average of $1.64 a gallon, and to well over $2 a gallon in the Chicago and Milwaukee area, setting off a frenzy of finger-pointing involving the Clinton administration, Congress, oil companies and refineries, and the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries.

In 2000, the Republicans used the spike to $1.64 as a campaign issue to bash the Clinton administration and Democratic candidates in the election that year, especially Al Gore:

In June 2000, Republican politicians urged President Bill Clinton to fire his energy secretary, Bill Richardson. Richardson, Michigan Sen. Rod Grams explained, was presiding over an “energy disgrace.” Clinton, many conservative commentators urged, should be raked over hot coals for vetoing congressional measures that would have opened up much of the Alaskan wilderness to oil drilling.

Meanwhile anti-tax think tanks such as the rightwing Heritage Foundation, rushed into print with reports advocating massive rollbacks of federal and state gasoline taxes and clean air standards for gasoline. Finally, anti-environmentalists jumped into the fray, lambasting Vice President Al Gore for implicitly condoning an OPEC supply squeeze that would drive up oil prices and thus, the conspiracy theory went, force Americans to drive less — which Gore, with his wacky ideas about global warming, was apparently salivating at the mouth about.

And:

[…]

Obama Campaign First Denied a Similar Story But Then Admitted It Was True – Obama Said His People Acted ‘Naively’

A spokesperson for Stephen Harper, the conservative prime minister of Canada, has denied reports that his administration received back-channel communications from the Hillary Clinton campaign that soft-pedaled Clinton’s statements that, as president, she would re-negotiate NAFTA:
Mr. Harper’s communications director, Sandra Buckler, said yesterday that Ms. Clinton’s campaign did not brief Canadians on its NAFTA stand. “The answer is no, they did not,” she said.

Mr. Harper’s communications director, Sandra Buckler, said yesterday that Ms. Clinton’s campaign did not brief Canadians on its NAFTA stand. “The answer is no, they did not,” she said.

That will likely be a reassuring public response for Ms. Clinton’s campaign, which used the leaks to hobble Mr. Obama with charges that he attacked NAFTA on the hustings but reassured Canada in private.

The Clinton campaign suggested Obama’s attacks on NAFTA were merely political rhetoric intended to garner votes in the Ohio rust belt where NAFTA is blamed, in part, for wrecking the economy:

CTV, the well-regarded Canadian news network, reported this week that a top Obama adviser contacted the Canadian government to calm fears that the senator was serious about rewriting pro-corporate deals such as the North American Free Trade Agreement to benefit workers, farmers and the environment. According to CTV, the Obama adviser told the Canadians that “when Senator Obama talks about opting out of the free trade deal, the Canadian government shouldn’t worry. The operative said it was just campaign rhetoric not to be taken seriously.”

After that report aired on Wednesday, an Obama campaign spokesperson claimed in an interview with CTV that “no message was passed to the Canadian government that suggests that Obama does not mean what he says about opting out of NAFTA if it is not renegotiated.”

[…]