Day: March 20, 2008

McCain Camp Pulls Another ‘We Didn’t Mean to Send That’

Buck Banks

approved.jpgAn aide to Sen. John McCain’s campaign was suspended and supposedly reprimanded for distributing a video clip that questioned Barack Obama’s patriotism. Politico has the story:

Soren Dayton, who works in McCain’s political department, sent out the YouTube link of “Is Obama Wright?” on twitter at 12:31 today with the tag, “Good video on Obama and Wright.” It has since been taken down.

Twitter is an online device that allows users to send out short messages and links en masse through computers or PDAs.

McCain and his campaign have repeatedly said that they would stay away from personal attacks on Obama, but the temptation has increased as Wright’s words have dominated the race in recent days.

Last week, they included an op-ed that hammered Wright and Obama in their morning clip package emailed to reporters. The same day, a campaign aide they regretted doing so.

It’s an all-too-familiar pattern in this election — some “overzealous” staffer sends out a damaging byte of information and the campaign then says it’s sorry it didn’t mean to and that’s not the kind of campaign I am, honest.

It’s a convenient shield, this anthropomorphic campaign thingy. The campaign says things, does things, strives to behave in a civil manner, but always seems to backslide, for which it also is always ready to apologize and express remorse.

Meanwhile, the other guy’s campaign gets to act all hurt and self-righteous, while the girl’s campaign just sits back watching smugly as the boy campaigns tease each other.

Sounds kind of childish for a process of picking the most powerful leader in the world …

Running Mate Isn’t Likely to Increase McCain Support in Florida

Trish

Florida Republicans have been flattering themselves since we got rid of Jeb with claims of how much everyone loves Gov. Charlie Crist. Everyone, they mean, including Democrats. Speaking for all Florida Democrats, which of course I can’t but that’s never stopped me, we aren’t feeling it.

McCain is widely viewed as needing to balance his ticket with someone younger. That shouldn’t be hard, since most people are younger than McCain.

Yes, we’re glad (giddy!) that Jeb is no longer in Tallahassee, trying to ram taxpayer-funded vouchers for private schools down our throats; or privatizing state government by handing puffy, fluffy contracts to buddies, and in some cases, his brothers; or using standarized testing to remove the educational element from education. In fact, I pinch myself every now and then just to make sure I’m not dreaming.

And yes, we’re happy that Charlie says he cares about the environment, and how much we pay for homeowners insurance, and lots of other things that he has yet to do much about. He says the right words, and we like that.

But none of this means that if John McCain were to pick Charlie Crist as his running mate that we’d vote for them.

…a new Miami Herald poll shows that most Florida Democrats aren’t grabbing hold.

Eighty-one percent are unlikely to support the presumptive GOP nominee in November, according to the statewide survey of 600 Democrats.

An even larger majority — 87 percent — say their decision wouldn’t change even if McCain picked Republican Gov. Charlie Crist as his running mate.

McCain is widely viewed as needing to balance his ticket with someone younger. That shouldn’t be hard, since most people are younger than McCain.

“I know one thing about Gov. Crist and that is that he is a great governor and does a great job,” [McCain said.] I also know he committed to serve the state of Florida when he ran for governor of the state of Florida…He’s still a very young man.”

The shoddy treatment of Florida Democrats by the Howard Dean-led Democratic National Committee, not the choice of a running mate, is even more of a factor in this year’s election. Polls show that slightly more Florida Democrats are willing to vote for a Republican this time than they were in 2004, when Bush ran for re-election.

The 16 percent of Florida Democrats who say they might vote for McCain isn’t far off from the estimated 14 percent who supported Bush in 2004, when he won the state.

Obama: Wright Controversy Has ‘Shaken Me Up’

Jon Ponder

Barack Obama discussed the controversy over comments in sermons by his spiritual advisor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, with Anderson Cooper of CNN:

“In some ways this controversy has actually shaken me up a little bit and gotten me back into remembering that the odds of me getting elected have always been lower than some of the other conventional candidates”…

Obama declined to speculate on whether the controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons may damage him politically, but said his campaign does best when it doesn’t follow the “textbook.”

“If I was just running the textbook campaign — doing the conventional thing — I probably wasn’t going to win because Sen. [Hillary] Clinton was going to be much more capable of doing that than I would be,” he said.

But then Obama said this:

“We had tremendous success, and I think we were starting to get a little comfortable and conventional right before Texas and Ohio.”

Apparently no one told Obama that no one is allowed to criticize Obama.

Poll: Clinton Moves Ahead in Gallup’s Nationwide Survey – McCain Beats Obama, Is Tied Statistically with Clinton

Jon Ponder

These new numbers from Gallup are from March 14 to 18, and so may reflect negative reactions among Democrats to the controversial sermons of Barack Obama’s former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but not positive reactions to Obama’s speech on race and racism on March 18:
McCain leads Obama 47 percent to 43 percent and is statistically tied with Clinton 48 percent to 45 percent.

The [poll] gave Clinton, a New York senator, a 49 percent to 42 percent edge over Obama, an Illinois senator. The poll has an error margin of 3 percentage points.

Gallup said it was the first statistically significant lead for Clinton since a tracking poll conducted February 7-9, just after the Super Tuesday primaries.

McCain still comes out ahead of both Democrats in the national head-to-head:

[McCain is] leading Obama 47 percent to 43 percent in … the general election. The general election survey has an error margin of 2 percentage points. The Arizona senator also edged Clinton 48 percent to 45 percent but Gallup said the lead was not statistically significant.

As my colleague Trish reported yesterday, Obama’s national lead over Clinton had a double-digit drop in a Reuters/Zogby nationwide poll taken March 13 and 14, at the height of the Wright controversy and well ahead of Obama’s March 18 speech.

Cheney on Two-Thirds of Americans’ Opposition to Iraq Occupation: ‘So?”

Jon Ponder

From an interview yesterday with Dick Cheney by Martha Raddatz of ABC News:

Q: Two-thirds of Americans say it’s not worth fighting, and they’re looking at the value gain versus the cost in American lives, certainly, and Iraqi lives.

CHENEY (with smirk): So?

Q: So… You don’t care what the American people think?

CHENEY: No, I think you can’t be blown off course by the fluctuations in the public opinion polls.

Update: Video available at Raw Story.

Study: Immigration Not Linked to Crime

Buck Banks

immigration.jpgWell shuck my grits! The primary argument of all the wall-building, border-enforcing, round-’em-up-and-ship-’em-home anti-immigration wingnuts is wrong — immigrants, especially those from Mexico, are less likely than your teenager to commit a crime in the United States. That’s according to a new study by a Harvard sociology prof (note: not Yale, which graduated George W.) who also found that immigrants are dis-incentivized toward crime by a desire to work, ambition and a fear of being deported.

Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Tom Tancredo.

[Robert] Sampson also studied data from police records, the U.S Census and surveyed more than 8,000 Chicago residents. The study showed there was significant immigration growth, including illegal aliens-in the mid-1990s, peaking at the end of the decade.

But during that time the national homicide rate plunged. Crime also dropped in immigration hot spots, such as Los Angeles, where it fell 45 percent overall, San Jose, Dallas and Phoenix.

Sampson argues that public perception drives a large part of the debate so its easy for politicians to blame illegal immigration for driving up the crime rate. Although it is difficult to point to any data to substantiate it, not many people question it.

“There is a pretty powerful underlying current of belief in society that is pretty resistant, stubborn if you will to the facts,” Sampson said.

So much for one of the less pressing but more insidious “issues” of the current presidential campaign.