Year: 2008

The New York Times has just published a story claiming that John McCain’s relationship with a lobbyist, Vicki Iseman, eight years ago so concerned his 2000 campaign staff that they blocked her access to him.
Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access.
MSNBC is wall to wall with the story tonight, because everyone inside the Beltway has known about it since December 20. It was then, two weeks exactly before the Iowa caucuses, that McCain operatives convinced the Times to delay the story in order to protect McCain’s candidacy. If there have been subsequent attempts to get the story spiked, they failed today:

A female lobbyist had been turning up with him at fund-raisers, in his offices and aboard a client’s corporate jet. Convinced the relationship had become romantic, some of his top advisers intervened to protect the candidate from himself — instructing staff members to block the woman’s access, privately warning her away and repeatedly confronting him, several people involved in the campaign said on the condition of anonymity.

The alleged sin here is hypocrisy, since McCain presents himself as being pure of the taint of lobbyist influence. There is also a hint of the of sin of adultery, but both parties have denied that their relationship was personal.

These charges are very thin. Pending more to come, the Times may well have given McCain what he needs most: the opportunity to play the rightwing victim card, “See! The liberal media is out to get me.” Thus giving McCain’s conservative critics cause to rally around him.

On the other hand, if the story does have legs, it may explain why Romney suspended, not ended, his campaign a few weeks ago. It also could also explain why Mike Huckabee has not dropped out.

Conservatives are trying to blame the leaking of this story on Democrats, but the original timing of its release (in December when the Dems were focused on each other and McCain was not the frontrunner in any polls) and sourcing ( Republican operatives who worked on the 2000 McCain race) both suggest it came from within the Grand Old Party.

Update: Best guess on the source of the leak to the Times: Team Romney.

After 10 straight wins, including last night’s trouncing of Hillary Clinton in Wisconsin (where Republicans could vote for Dem candidates) and Hawaii, his native state, Sen. Barack Obama is now the putative Democratic nominee for president.

Let’s hope his surrogates are better prepared than this guy from now on:

State Sen. Kirk Watson (D-Texas) learned a lesson in preparedness Tuesday night when he was humiliated on MSNBC. Watson was on to talk about his support of Sen. Obama alongside Rep. Stephanie Tubbs (D-Ohio), who backs Sen. Clinton. Watson has endorsed Obama and writes glowingly of all the things Obama will do for the country, if elected.

But he was unable to answer Chris Matthews most basic demand: “Name some of his legislative accomplishments… name any…” A fantastically awkward mix of dead air, stuttering, laughter and repetition ensued, as Watson could not name a single one. Matthews laid off part way through, it seems at the demand of his producers, but came back around to lay a final blow at the end.

Watch what must be the most awkward clip of the night’s coverage.

It is a fundamental rule of politics: If you don’t define yourself, you will be defined by your opponent. Barack Obama’s charisma and inspirational message may have his supporters fainting in the aisles but his bio and voting records are a blank slate for Republicans to fill, if Obama gets the nomination, which appears increasingly likely.
Norquist trotted out a lie that worked well against John Kerry in 2004 — that Obama’s Senate voting record was more liberal than, say, Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist Independent or the liberal Democrats Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer.
Republicans noise-machiners met recently to develop lines of attacks against Obama. In yesterday’s London Sunday Times, Grover Norquist, who once compared the U.S. government to something he’d like to drown in a bathtub, previewed other lines of attack:

Grover Norquist, an influential conservative tax reform lobbyist, said: “Barack Obama has been able to create his own image and introduce himself to voters, but the swing voters in a general election are not paying attention yet. He is open to being defined as a leftwing, corrupt Chicago politician.”

And then Norquist trotted out a lie that worked well against John Kerry in 2004 — that Obama has the “most liberal” voting record in the Senate, putting him to the left of, say, Bernie Sanders, the Vermont socialist Independent or the liberal Democrats Ted Kennedy and Barbara Boxer:

Obama has the voting record of a “hard-left” socialist, according to Norquist, from his time in the Illinois state legislature to the US Senate. He was recently judged by the nonpartisan National Journal to have the most liberal voting record in 2007 of any senator.

“It will be easy to portray him as even harder-left than Hillary,” said Norquist. “Hillary could lose the election, but Obama could collapse. People already know Hillary and she is not popular, but the disadvantage for Obama is that Republicans can teach people who don’t know him who he is.”

Roger Stone, a Republican operative with ties to Reagan era — and who was fired last year by N.Y State Senate Republicans after he left threatening messages on the phone of Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s elderly father — trotted out more of the attacks developed at the strategy meeting on MSNBC’s “Tucker” show yesterday.

He used the word “liberal” repeatedly, of course, and focused on Obama’s unequivocal support for issuing driver’s licenses to undocumented aliens. The MSNBC transcript is unavailable at this hour, but here’s how Stone framed the issue on his website, stonezone.com:

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