Year: 2008

McCain Campaign Suspension: Is It Really About Canceling VP Debate because Palin Is Not Ready?

Jon Ponder

Is the real intent of the suspension of the McCain campaign yesterday a ploy to delay or even cancel Sarah Palin’s vice presidential debate with Joe Biden next week? Why else would the campaign suddenly start negotiating the debate schedule, which has been set for months, by asserting that McCain will unilaterally cancel the first presidential debate tomorrow unless Congress and the Bush administration reach a deal on the Wall Street bailout plan?
If Palin is not ready to debate Joe Biden now, how can she be ready to be vice president in 40 days?
Late yesterday, after John McCain announced he was suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to work on a deal to resolve the Wall Street crisis — despite the fact that he’d been absent from Congress for the 10 days or so since the crisis broke, and despite the fact that Capitol Hill negotiators were close to working out a deal without his input — his campaign operatives announced that McCain would skip the debate with Barack Obama tomorrow night if a deal had not been reached on the bailout plan.

Within hours, if not minutes, McCain aides then floated the idea of re-scheduling the debates around their own artificial delay by postponing the vice presidential debates, which had been scheduled for a week from today:

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Borowitz: McCain Supports Bailing Out of Debates

Trish

I knew there was a great joke in all this McCain stuff somewhere.

“As of today, I am officially bailing out of the debate,” Sen. McCain told reporters in Washington today. “And I invite Sen. Obama to join me in this bailout effort.”

Sen. McCain said he would be putting together what he called “a comprehensive debate bailout package,” which could include bailing out of the other two scheduled debates as well…

GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin said that she would join in her running mate’s bailout effort by bailing out of her debate with Delaware senator Joseph Biden.

In a campaign stop in Michigan, Gov. Palin detailed a series of bold initiatives, including building a twenty-foot-high fence between her and the press.

Panicked over Economic Crisis, McCain Suspends Campaign, Wants to Weasel out of Debate

Jon Ponder

Cancels ‘Letterman’ Appearance Tonight – Things Must Be Bad!

Failure of leadership: Telegraphing panic over the economic crisis to his fear-addicted followers, John McCain has announced he is suspending his campaign and that he wants to delay the debate Friday night:
If John McCain can’t juggle a debate with Barack Obama while simultaneously working on these economic issues, how can he possibly handle the multiple world crises that inevitably come with the presidency?

Republican presidential nominee John McCain this afternoon said he would suspend his presidential campaign tomorrow to return to Washington and help reach agreement on a plan to solve the financial crisis on Wall Street, and called for a delay of Friday night’s presidential debate.

“It has become clear that no consensus has developed to support the Administration’s proposal,” McCain said in a brief statement to reporters. “I do not believe that the plan on the table will pass as it currently stands, and we are running out of time.”

It’s not as if John McCain has announced any sort of definitive measure to resolve the crisis that he needs to be in Washington to push — or that he has a record of providing leadership on the economy in the past. (Quite the opposite, in fact. He was an advocate of the deregulation that underlies the failures.)

More importantly, if John McCain can’t juggle a debate with Barack Obama while simultaneously working on these economic issues, how can he possibly handle the multiple world crises that inevitably come with the presidency?

It’s likely that what’s really going on here is that the campaign has seen some dire polling numbers and they want to push the debate forward, with the hope that the issues that are dragging him down have turned around.

Let’s hope the Obama campaign pushes back hard on this one.

With Job Approval at 19%, Bush to Address Nation on Economy

Jon Ponder

With his approval rating as low as 19 percent, and with the exception of Dick Cheney, George Bush is the person least likely to reassure the nation about the current economic crisis.He will nonetheless address the nation tonight about the crisis, but it is questionable how yet another stumbling, incoherent poorly read lecture from him is useful just now:

White House officials said Bush’s speech would dwell on the financial crisis. Press secretary Dana Perino said the president wants to tell the American people how the crisis affects them and help them understand the depth of the problem.

Those of us on the West Coast are lucky that his address will be live at 6 p.m. here, so that it won’t preempt anything really important — like “America’s Got Talent” on NBC, “90210” on Fox or, especially, and aptly, “David Blaine Dive of Death” on ABC.

Besides, the content of the address is so predictable that there’s no need to tune in. In a nutshell, here is what he’ll say: “It’s not my fault. In fact, it’s everyone’s fault but mine, especially including you ‘borrowers.'” No doubt, he’ll even throw his base — fatcat CEOs overboard — since he’s not running again and no longer needs them.

What a farce.

Poll: The Early Line for 9/24

Buck Banks

Diageo/Hotline Tracking Poll

Obama/Biden 48%
McCain/Palin 42%
Undec 8%

– Obama/Biden’s 6% lead is their largest in the Diageo/Hotline tracking poll yet.

– Obama/Biden are moving ahead among white women. The Dems now hold a 1% edge, 46-45%; in the poll completed one week earlier (on 9/16), McCain/Palin led 53-37%.

– Among the 56% of RVs who say the economy is their #1 issue, Obama/Biden are up 51-39%. Last week they led the group, which at the time only represented two-fifths of RVs, 49-40%. Among all RVs, 45% say Obama can best handle the economy, while 39% say McCain; Obama held just a 1% lead the previous two surveys.

Poll: Obama Is Tied with McCain in NC – Without Support of 20% of Tar Heel Dems

Jon Ponder

As an expatriated North Carolinian, this is both heartening and discouraging — in other words, normal for Tar Heel politics:
If Obama gained support of just 6% of these North Carolina Dems, he would be leading in current state polls.

In North Carolina, Public Policy has Obama pulling into a tie with McCain (they had McCain up 4 percent last week) while Rasmussen has McCain’s lead down to just 3 percent (they had McCain up 6 percent last month). Some figured that North Carolina was off the table once McCain picked Palin, but that is clearly not the case.

The Public Policy poll is the first one to show Obama tied in the state since April. Public Policy also has Bob Barr doing relatively well in North Carolina, getting 5percent of the vote. They are attributing Obama’s improvement in the state to economic concerns.

One major potential sign for concern for McCain is that both of these polls have Obama getting less than 80 percent of the Democratic vote. If he improves his support among Democrats by just 6 percent or so, he would be leading both of these polls. Obama has yet to lead in any North Carolina poll. This certainly explains why McCain is now shifting resources into North Carolina, as the state is very much in play.

A recent CNN poll suggested “that 40 percent of white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, including more than a third of white Democrats and independents. A small percentage of voters — 2.5 percent of those surveyed — said they may turn away from Obama because of his race.”

GOP Homophobes Take Note: McCain’s Chief of Staff Is Gay

Jon Ponder

John McCain can’t win without the homophobic base of the Republican Party, but it may come as surprise to many of these benighted souls that McCain knowingly employs a gay man to run his staff:
Buse is also one of 19 McCain advisers who lobbied for Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s chief of staff was outed Monday after radio host Michelangelo Signorile quoted additional sources to confirm the long-blogged-about rumors. Mark Buse, 44, previously served as a lobbyist for several large corporations including AT&T and ExxonMobil, the only Fortune 10 company without a nondiscrimination policy covering sexual orientation, according to the Human Rights Campaign.

Signorile said on his blog that he had previously been contacted by three sources, all wishing to remain anonymous, claiming Buse is gay. The radio host says he was then contacted by 46-year-old Brian Davis, who claims to have had a past intimate relationship with the McCain staffer.

Davis claims he first met Buse at a Phoenix bar called Connections in 1986, around the same time Buse started work as a McCain intern during the presidential hopeful’s tenure in the House of Representatives. Davis said Buse asked him to move to Washington, D.C., with him after a long-distance courtship taking place over several months. A year after moving to Washington, Buse left Davis for his current partner.

Buse is also one of 19 McCain advisers who lobbied for Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac.

Troopergate: Palin To Cooperate with Board That Reports to Her

Jon Ponder

Sarah Palin refused to cooperate with a Republican-dominated legislative panel investigating her allegedly improper firing of the Public Safety commissioner — even after it was revealed that she lied on the record about the matter — but now says she will meet with the Personnel Board, all of whom report to her:

Less than a week after balking at the Alaska Legislature’s investigation into her alleged abuse of power, Gov. Sarah Palin on Monday indicated she will cooperate with a separate probe run by people she can fire.

The State Personnel Board is “a three-member panel appointed by the governor. Panel members can be fired by the governor for cause. Two members are holdovers from the previous [Republican] governor and Palin reappointed the third.”

You can sure tell that Bush operatives are running Palin’s campaign.

Press Revolts When McCain Campaign Tries to Shield Palin at U.N.

Trish

Now remember, this is the woman McCain says is ready on Day One to be president.

What are they hiding? Here’s ABC’s Kate Snow on what happened when Gov. Sarah Palin hit the United Nations today.

The networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox… voted today to not use any video coming out of Palin’s meeting as a protest.

Palin is scheduled to meet with Afghan President Hamid Karzai shortly, followed by Colombian President Alvaro Uribe and then with McCain advisor, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger.

The networks had arranged for a “pool” camera- one camera to cover the first few seconds of the meetings, whose video would be pooled or shared with all networks.

Such arrangements are standard when dealing with intimate high-level meetings between leaders and candidates.

But typically, along with cameras, there is an editorial presence– at least one print reporter, one television reporter, and one radio reporter is standard.

However today the McCain campaign told media covering Palin’s trip to New York that they would allow only one editorial person inside.

Then the campaign scaled back further, saying it will only allow a camera and no editorial presence.

In other words, they allowed only a camera operator without anyone to make the raw footage into a news story.

But the press finally stood up on its hind legs and barked back, refusing to cover the story if McCain, Etc. wouldn’t let them cover the story.

The networks, including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and Fox fiercely objected to the McCain campaign’s apparent effort to try to shield Palin from questions. Networks voted today to not use any video coming out of Palin’s meeting as a protest.

Palin has not held a news conference since being selected as McCain’s running-mate, nor taken questions from her traveling press corps…

…the McCain campaign finally allowed one CNN pool camera and one pool producer into the meeting room.

As she arrived for her meeting with Karzai, Palin avoided reporters who were camped out at the main front entrance of the hotel, instead pulling up in a motorcade to a side entrance and quickly sneaking inside.

Palin’s dance with the press continued during her meeting with Karzai. After being told that an editorial presence would be permitted in Palin’s meetings, pool reporters were asked to leave after the first 30 seconds, according to the pool report. Print pool and wires were not permitted in.

“The decision was made for this to be a photo spray with still cameras and video cameras only,” Palin spokesperson Tracey Schmitt told reporters.

Reporters in the room for the brief period only heard Palin, who was accompanied by foreign policy advisers Steve Biegun and Randy Scheunemann, inquire about Karzai’s son.

The McCain-Palin campaign allowed a “full pool” into the meetings with Uribe and Kissinger but the sprays were even shorter, and reporters heard nothing more than pleasantries being exchanged.

The exchange of pleasantries was likely the most substantive part of the meetings. From there, Palin probably attempted to get Kissinger and Karzai to accept Jesus as their personal savior and filled in Uribe on the latest advances in the rhythm method.