McCain Can Only Offer More of the Same

Many years ago, John McCain served his country honorably. If he is to maintain his reputation, he should think clearly about what he is offering the American people. If all he can offer is more of the same, such as more tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, that is not what Americans need. If all he can offer is fear and smear, that too is not what Americans need. If all he can offer is a short temper and erratic behavior, that too is not what America needs. If all he can offer are distortions of the truth and misleading statements and all of the above, Americans have not only grown weary of that since that's exactly what we've gotten from Bush for eight long years but McCain's honor will become a whisper of the past.

After all is said and done, McCain should keep his honor intact and not go down a dishonorable road.

There's a sad truth. McCain does not measure up to the problems we are facing. Think of it: if McCain gets elected and runs the White House the way he has run his campaign, our nation will be in for four more years of failure. It's time to move on this November 4th. Our nation has work to do.

McCain's Fearmongering Sure Sounds Like George W. Bush

McCain's desperation is sad to see. First, Sarah Palin is not a reassuring pick. She's John Bircher material. If you don't remember the John Birchers, they were big fans of Joseph McCarthy and had radical right-wing ideas about how the country should be run. Palin may not be an official member of the John Birchers but if it walks like a duck and talks like duck, it must be a right wing quack.

Second, John McCain has an anger problem. You could see it in the first debate. You could see it when he was talking to the folks at the Des Moines Register, a paper about as Main Street as you can get. Like Bush, McCain thinks he knows all the answers and doesn't have to ask questions and doesn't like to be asked questions either. Bush's credibility is already shot, and McCain's credibility is fast sinking.

McCain calls himself a maverick, someone who can reach across the aisle. Remember when George W. Bush claimed he would do that? But Bush turned out to be more of a friend to Wall Street than Main Street. Six weeks before the election, McCain suddenly discovered Main Street after thirty years being a buddy of Wall Street. I've lost count of how many lobbyists are currently working for McCain.

We need change in Washington. The nation took the first step in 2006 by electing Democrats to Congress. But with Bush threatening to veto no-brainer bills like extending unemployment benefits, and Republicans refusing to help override Bush's vetoes, it's difficult getting work done that will help the economy and help average Americans. McCain says he gives Americans straight talk but he can't even acknowledge his role in the current economic crisis. McCain is a deregulator, just like George W. Bush. Deregulation means not minding the store. It means looking the other way as crooks destroy the economy while grabbing millions for themselves. That's not presidential behavior.

It's time to send McCain and his fellow Republicans home. Change can't come soon enough.

Campaign Reality 2008: McCain Is Clueless

That's McCain walking down his "Hall of Fame" at one of his large residences. He seems to have left a little room for future mementos from the White House which just might be about the only reason he's running: another trophy. That hall smacks of a big ego. It smacks of a man who has little in common with ordinary Americans. And little understanding. At a campaign event, McCain said immigrants were necessary because they were willing to pick lettuce for $50 a hour. Most Americans, he said, wouldn't work for that. McCain has no clue about prevailing wages. The man, needless to say, is clueless.

There are rich people who know what ordinary Americans go through and there are rich people who don't. McCain is one of the rich ones who doesn't get it; not long ago, McCain had to ask a staffer what kind of car he owns which once more says he's a man who's out of touch. He wants to stay in Iraq for a hundred years but this year the Iraqis have made it clear that they want a timetable and Bush is going along with it. Like I said, McCain is clueless and barely notices that the world is changing.

These days when McCain makes blunders he has a new excuse: he was a POW. Howard Fineman explains the problem (via Crooks and Liars):

“I think they are going to it way too many times. It’s the original story that defined John McCain, that still when you read it in his book ‘Faith of my Fathers,’ when you read about it in ‘The Nightingale’s Song,’ you can’t help but have admiration and respect for the guy. And I think he wisely for many years stayed away from it as a political tool, he really did. But now it not only defines him, it’s become a crutch in the campaign..."

A year ago, John McCain was sinking in the polls. He was overtaken by people like Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Mick Huckabee who themselves eventually tanked while McCain picked up the pieces because he was simply a familiar name. But he was sinking for a reason. In Baghdad, he said it was safe to walk through a market but neglected to mention that he was surround by over a hundred soldiers and helicopters in the sky. He was also wearing a bulletproof vest. It was a very Bush-like photo op: phony to the core. McCain has had a long series of blunders for the last year and despite the fact that such blunders can hardly be called presidential, most of the press keeps covering for him.

Randi Rhodes spent her whole show today listing and discussing the lobbyists and former lobbyists working for John McCain. These lobbyists don't work for average Americans; they work for millionaires and big biz. Some of McCain's people even work for foreign governments. But when the camera's on them, they wave the American flag. That's what crooks do: just wave the flag and hope no one notices. The worst of the bunch is Phil Gramm and his wife who have sneaked in laws and regulations making it easier for corporations to pull off scams. Their biggest scam led to the collapse of Enron. Phil Gramm is McCain's economic adviser.

We all want heros and, in his day, John McCain really was one. But that was a long time ago and McCain is still fighting battles from thirty to forty years ago. We need someone in the White House who knows what century we're in and how to move forward, and not backward.

100 Years? 50 Years? The Price We Are Paying

The war in Afghanistan is now in its seventh year. The terrorists who attacked us on 9/11 have a name, al Qaida, and they came from Osama bin Laden's organization in Afghanistan. The Afghan government refused to turn over the terrorists and it made sense to go after this specific group for the specific action they had taken.

But Afghanistan was a winnable war that got put on the back burner so Bush and the neocons could give our nation a war we did not need. And now we don't quite have the resources to finish either war and we have a president and a Republican candidate who wish to turn both wars into political footballs instead of giving our nation a sensible exit strategy. John McCain and George W. Bush find it convenient to see terrorists everywhere. The term 'terrorist' is in danger of meaning whatever these two characters want it to mean.

John McCain has gone a step further by calling anybody who supposedly is a terrorist a member of al Qaida. It's gibberish of course (when McCain speaks of the 'League of Nations' and a '100 years of war,' we know he isn't the sharp man that he once was). The reality is that the neocons and right wing Republicans are still fighting the Vietnam War, the Cold War and, maybe for John McCain, the Korean War and World War II.

Soldiers are dying for the delusions of right wing Republicans. Soldiers are dying because many otherwise decent Americans have stopped paying attention to how often they have been lied to by George W. Bush and John McCain. The McCain/Bush wars are dragging our nation down. You can't spend $100 billion a year and keep letting our soldiers get killed because powerful people don't want to admit they made a horrible mistake.

Icasualties.org has been keeping track of the number of Americans killed and wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan for some time now. Their statistics go back to the beginning of the war and those statistics are grim. Our soldiers are doing their best to serve honorably but they have been misled by the Bush Administration and many members of Congress.

Fifty-Two Americans died in Iraq last month. That's lower than the number killed in April of last year; in fact, the deaths for last month are half of what they were a year ago. But Bush's war in Iraq—or the occupation as some now call it—has been going on for over five years. Last month was better than most months since we invaded Iraq. But there are no good months for the families of those who have been killed. And there are no good months for the Iraqis whether they are pro-American, anti-American or just want everybody to go home and leave them be.

Click on icasualties.org and look at the numbers. The numbers are painful to look at but they are nothing compared to the loss of losing a son or a husband or a father. But look at the numbers. We have the full numbers for sixty-two months. Forty-one of those months have been worse or right at 52 deaths. Forty-one months is almost three and a half years. Twenty-one of the sixty-two months have had fewer fatalities than we had in April. Twenty-one months is almost two years. Almost. By the time a new president sits in the White House, we will have been in Iraq almost six years with no end in sight. Wars are not supposed to go on this long.

Call it a war. Call it an occupation. Call it the Bush empire or colony project. Five years and there are still no honest answers from the White House. And John McCain promises more of the same. We have problems at home and the politicians aren't paying attention. We have problems abroad but we are so tied down in Iraq and Afghanistan, we're getting nowhere. Bush and McCain have talked of attacking Iran. They have both lied about the reasons. They both have tried to repeat the false talking points that led us into war in Iraq in the first place. They lied. The war in Iraq was not necessary. More war is not good for America.

We need to change course. The American people have a choice. It's up to the American people to start thinking about the future. It's time to turn our backs on the Republican way of doing business and rediscover who we are as a people and as a democracy. It's time to bring our soldiers home, retrain them for the difficult years ahead and resume our real role as leaders of the free world and a people who want to leave the world a better place for our children and grandchildren.

McCain Slipping in Polls Against Edwards and Obama

As Americans increasingly realize that McCain isn't the man we thought he was, his numbers continue to fall. Here's the story from the Argus Reid Global Monitor concerning the results of the poll by Rasmussen Reports, a polling firm frequently cited in the past by Republicans:

Republican John McCain trails two prospective Democratic presidential nominees in the United States, according to a poll by Rasmussen Reports. 47 per cent of respondents would vote for Illinois senator Barack Obama in 2008, while 44 per cent would support the Arizona senator.

In a contest pitting McCain against former North Carolina senator John Edwards, the Democrat holds a three-point advantage. In December, McCain held leads over both Obama and Edwards in presidential trials.

The poll has John Edwards at 46% and McCain at 43%. Here's the politics link to Rasmussen Reports.

Joe Biden's Strength: Foreign Policy

Of the Democrats running for president, only former Governor Bill Richardson of New Mexico is close to Joe Biden's expertise in foreign policy (though Wesley Clark, if he runs, would be up there with Biden and Richardson). I don't always agree with Senator Biden but I very much respect what he has to say when he talks about Iraq and the Middle East and he provides a sharp contrast to a president who either doesn't know much about the Middle East or who chooses to mislead the American public (since Bush's fellow Republicans often follow the president's lead, it appears politics, 'story-telling' and ideology rather than a respect for the facts dominate right wing commentary these days).

The New York Times carries an article by Jonathan Broder of the Congressional Quarterly on Joe Biden:

When Joseph R. Biden Jr. first came to the Senate in January 1973, the consuming issue of the day was the Vietnam War, and its most influential opponent was the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, J. William Fulbright.

The 30-year-old Biden looked to the urbane Arkansan as a mentor after joining the committee as a freshman.

(snip)

“The lesson I leaned from Sen. Fulbright is that, if you inform the American public, they’re pretty smart,” Biden said in an interview. “They can form their own opinions.”

(snip)

Unlike many lawmakers who can’t tell the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite, Biden is a man who not only knows the difference, but also can speak knowledgeably about the allegiances of different Iraqi tribes, the shifting demographics in the northern city of Kirkuk, and the finer points of the Iraq constitution.

In his quest for his party’s 2008 presidential nomination, Biden is banking that his facility with foreign policy will be his principal calling card — or at least set him apart from the perceived front-runners.

Whether Biden wins the nomination or not, and whether many of us even agree with some of his positions are not, he is already playing a valuable role by bringing his expertise to a discussion about Iraq, Iran and foreign policy in general. Biden is reminding us that we can't afford another incurious neophyte like George W. Bush, let alone an ideologue who would continue the nonsense and deceptions of the neocons. It's not clear that any of the Republican hopefuls have distanced themselves that much from Bush's failures yet, except Chuck Hagel who has become very critical of Bush's policies—and it's not certain that Hagel will run.

In the meantime, McCain is an example of a Republican who already is playing fast and loose with his statements over the last five years and is pretending that his position has been x, y and z all along when in fact it was a, b and c. In recent statements, McCain has been hedging his support of Bush by saying more troops are needed than what Bush is sending, but McCain fails to note that the troops he would send simply do not exist.

I think it's worth mentioning, by the way, that Biden's counterpart on the Foreign Relations Committee is not Senator McCain but Senator Lugar, a loyal, capable but somewhat low-key Republican who has not been happy with Bush's foreign policy and amateurism for some time. If Biden is not exactly out in front of other Democrats on Iraq, it's partly because he still believes in bipartisanship and Senator Lugar is part of the reason Biden continues to follow that path. And there may eventually be dividends though I suspect the time could possible be getting short. Lugar is patient but he should not underestimate Bush's recklessness. If Republicans wait too long to rein in Bush, Biden's efforts on the Foreign Relations Committee could come up short and affect his run for the president.

McCain Losing Support Among Independents

The illusion that John McCain is still an independent maverick is evaporating as he continues to court the far right. The 2008 election is more than 21 months away and much can change in that period. But America's biggest problems are not going away and there's no sign that John McCain or more than a handful of other Republican politicians truly understand what's going on. In fact, since John McCain is calling for more troops in Iraq than Bush, there's a growing sense that he's taking a cynical position since no such troops exist for Iraq and about the only way he can get them is to call for a draft, something McCain is highly unlikely to do.

Here's a story from Brett Arends of the Boston Herald about McCain's falling numbers (via The Huffington Post):

As Mitt, Hillary, Barack and a dozen others jump into the presidential stampede, something interesting is happening in New Hampshire.
For seven years, conventional wisdom has said that the state’s pivotal independent voters would line up behind maverick Sen. John McCain, as they did so famously in the 2000 GOP primary. But new polling data, to be released later this week, will suggest that might no longer be the case.
Manchester, N.H.-based American Research Group finds that McCain’s popularity among New Hampshire’s independent voters has collapsed.

“John McCain is tanking,” says ARG president Dick Bennett. “That’s the big thing [we’re finding]. In New Hampshire a year ago he got 49 percent among independent voters. That number’s way down, to 29 percent now.”

(snip)

Bennett says ARG is finding a similar trend in other states polled, including early primary battlegrounds like Iowa and Nevada. ...

I wonder how long it will take the mainstream media to notice that John McCain isn't the maverick that we once thought he was and that a growing number of Americans have become disillusioned with him.

Most Americans still consider bipartisanship to be an important goal to have in Washington but bipartisanship requires that there be two parties that care about the American people. The Republican Party has so radicalized itself that it has no interest in working with other Americans. It was perhaps thought at one time that John McCain could be the one who could restore balance to the Republican Party and lead the way to a more bipartisan atmosphere in American politics. But those days are gone. If there's to be a new Republican Party, it's people like Chuck Hagel and Olympia Snowe who may provide the beginnings of reform.

Think Progress offers another example of McCain's fall from grace as he pursues his presidential ambitions and backs away from lobbying reform:

In Dec. 2005, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) announced that he was introducing The Lobbying Transparency and Accountability Act of 2005. ...

(snip)

McCain has engaged in a pattern of flip-flopping on lobbying reform. Prior to his most recent reversal, ThinkProgress reported McCain has been soliciting contributions from K Street lobbying firms while talking tough against lobbyists, and he has been trying to scuttle the lobbying reform effort by adding a “poison pill” to the bill.

John McCain was for good government before he was against good government. I strongly suspect that McCain, if he continues on his present course, will not be the nominee in 2008 for the Republicans.

The real question for the Republican Party is whether it can reform itself in time for 2008 or whether its eventual rebuilding will start in elections after that. A big problem for Republicans is that they are still dominated by members on the far right in safe districts who are still relatively young and have no intention of leaving politics any time soon. In the end, it's the American people who will have to reform the Republicans. But it may take time.

McCain's Moral Compass on Tilt

John McCain hired the man who did the cheap ad against Harold Ford where a woman, perhaps a hooker, says 'call me' to the camera. Now he's working the Karl Rove side of the street some more; Matt Stoller of MyDD has the story:

McCain keeps hiring smart staffers (hat tip Bluejersey):

Jill Hazelbaker, battle tested in New Jersey this year as Tom Kean Jr.'s Communications Director, is headed to John McCain's presidential campaign. She will serve as Communications Director for McCain's campaign in New Hampshire.

Jill Hazelbaker it seems has a little penchant for posting on liberal blogs and lying about it. Bluejersey is the site that caught her, and the New York Times had the story

(snip)

Ah, the last honest man hires the last honest press secretary.

Smart? Honest? Okay, Matt Stoller is being ironic in case anyone is wondering. Check Stoller's post for the details. But the point is that McCain's glowing press no longer matches the man he has become. I've never seen such a strange about-face by a politician. McCain's poll numbers are totally dependent on an image of integrity that no longer squares with a long series of decisions McCain has made in the last 32 months. He's becoming an illusion. Bush's numerous failures requires that the next president be someone who's real and who understand where we are.

Candidates in New Hampshire

A steady stream of Democratic and Republican presidential hopefuls have been heading to New Hampshire to do politicking at the retail level for 2008; the newspapers there have a ringside seat to what is happening as we hear from Sarah Liebowitz of the Concord Monitor:

Since his 2004 primary loss, Edwards "has vastly strengthened his ties to organized labor," joining picket lines in Connecticut and embarking on a four-city tour in support of hotel workers, Christensen said. After facing criticism that he was a foreign policy lightweight, Edwards has worked to beef up his credentials, traveling to Europe, Asia and the Middle East.

The majority of possible Democratic candidates fall into another category: The almost-definites.

New York Sen. Hillary Clinton advanced her campaign in recent weeks, hiring several high-profile strategists and contacting prominent Democrats in New Hampshire and Iowa. ...

(snip)

Arizona Sen. John McCain, who lost the Republican nomination to Bush in 2000, is preparing another campaign for president.

Last month, McCain created an exploratory committee, the formal step most candidates take before officially announcing. McCain has said that he will make a final decision over the holidays, but he has already snagged several prominent Republican strategists for his campaign. He has also bolstered his support among lawmakers across the nation: He conducted 346 events for other candidates in the run-up to the midterm elections, helping raise millions of dollars.

(snip)

Then there's Newt Gingrich, former House speaker and architect of the "Contract with America," which helped usher Republicans to congressional victories in 1994. Although Gingrich has visited New Hampshire and left the door open to a possible presidential run, he has said that he won't make an announcement until September.

I'm amazed that Edwards was regarded in 2004 as a foreign policy lightweight given George W. Bush's indifference to the subject when he became president; even today, there isn't much evidence that most Republican hopefuls understand why Bush's policies have been such a failure.

Actually I'm a little sorry former House Speaker Newt Gingrich hasn't jumped in, though he has mentioned, not all that modestly, that he's open to being drafted by the voters. He's about the only candidate who's virtually advocating World War Three; he could actually be very helpful in explaining to Americans how far to the right the Republican Party has drifted these days. Since many Republican events in this era are not open to the public, one has to wonder if some of the other Republican hopefuls are talking the same nonsense as Gingrich. Certainly Gingrich has been taking his cues from a number of neoconservative intellectuals who haven't learned much from the last four years.

Almost all the candidates are mentioned in the article but I noticed four absences: Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel and Joe Biden on the Democratic side and, although he may not run, Chuck Hagel on the Republican side.

Newsweek on Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama

According to Newsweek, Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are the only two Democrats who are running and it's not certain they can beat John McCain. Well, that's not entirely what the magazine says but the cover and the inside story seem to suggest that. The main story is eight pages long; here's a section that caught my eye:

The former president will campaign separately from his wife across the country, almost as if he's a vice presidential candidate. This will multiply their impact, but it also avoids the direct side-by-side comparison that hurts Hillary, as it did when both spoke at the funeral of Coretta Scott King. Friends predict she will take speaking lessons (as he did some years ago) so that her speeches are less like policy-wonk laundry lists. They also believe she needs to show her sense of humor more in public, but in a way that's self-deprecating, not the sometimes sarcastic wit she wields in private.

(snip)

... A recent Marist Poll showed that 47 percent of respondents nationwide "definitely will not consider" voting for her, a percentage that alarms some former aides to President Clinton. Those numbers will need to change for Democratic primary voters—now comfortable with assessing electability—to move her way.

A sobering message for Obama is the example of Tennessee Rep. Harold Ford Jr. in the 2006 midterms. ...

... ...a second, lesser-known attack ad was more troubling to Ford and could be used someday against Obama, too. It showed Ford in a church as the narrator tags Ford as a hypocrite on religious values. Then there was Ford's decision to ambush Corker in a parking lot. It may be that black candidates seeking white votes have less room than other politicians to go on the attack. That could leave Obama trapped between his positive tone and the need to be tough. If he loses his temper in the process, it might prove fatal politically. The margin for error for a rookie is small.

John McCain is not quite the gentleman he once was and a growing number of Americans are beginning to understand how conservative he is; the new John McCain and other Republican hopefuls have seen how successful Bush-era Republican attack ads are against Democrats and are hiring the kind of people who can do their worst. Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and any of the other Democratic presidential candidates will have to convince voters in the primaries that they can handle the minefields.

John Kerry was a fine candidate and would have made an excellent president but he was slow to handle the Swiftboaters who were allowed to lie and smear Kerry for weeks. The voters are catching on to this kind of stuff and are beginning to understand that the Republican base currently favors right wing candidates, particularly at the national level, and these candidates happen to be out of touch with America and simply can't win without a nasty bag of tricks. Still, at the end of the day, a Democratic candidate needs to know how to handle the pressure and how to defuse Republican smear campaigns.

Come to think of it, if Americans want to be in charge of their democracy, they need to get better at understanding how wealthy Republicans often finance these smear campaigns; to put it plainly, voters must discount TV ads and such that carry such phony messages if they don't want our elections to be dominated by a wealthy Republican elite.

Republicans Will Have to Do Better Than McCain

I liked the John McCain that existed up until spring of 2004 when he once again got bit with the presidential ambition bug and decided to borrow a page or two from Bush's example. Senator McCain the maverick no longer exists.

Raw Story carries an article on one of the problems with Senator McCain presidential quest:

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), regarded as a top presidential candidate for the 2008 election, has lined up a controversial attack ad specialist to be his campaign manager, Raw Story has learned.

Chris Cillizza writes at The Washington Post's political blog, The Fix, that "according to a source close to the McCain operation, the candidate has lined up Terry Nelson to serve as campaign manager," once McCain's campaign becomes official.

Nelson, along with Karl Rove protegé Scott Howell, produced a controversial ad for Tennessee's 2006 U.S. Senate race between Democrat Harold Ford, Jr. and Republican Bob Corker, in which a white woman seductively invites an "off-camera" Ford to call her. Ford, an unmarried African-American, and Corker, the white former mayor of Chattanooga who eventually won the open Senate seat, both criticized the ad.

I'm not sure how much longer Americans are going to be prone to the kind of sleazy ads made famous by Lee Atwater and Karl Rove, but it is disappointing that McCain is steadily trading in his reputation for integrity by using people like Nelson. The man who coauthored some important campaign finance laws is also going to bypass his own legislation in his bid for the presidency.

I'm not sure what to make of McCain's judgment these days either. He recommends sending more troops which might have been a good reccommendation, say three years ago. Former Clinton official Robert Reich had this to say about a recent conversation:

I talked with John McCain Sunday morning in the green room just before “This Week.” I asked him why he continued to call for more troops for Iraq when he must know it's a political non-starter. He said he thought it important for the morale of the troops.

McCain gives every impression of meaning what he says, which is one of his greatest assets. But I simply can’t believe this one. What’s most important for the morale of the troops is knowing they’ll be coming home soon, not hearing some politician say we need more troops when there’s no possible chance of that happening.

What I detect from John McCain is a growing lack of seriousness when it comes to our nation's problem. He's been very critical of the Iraq Study Group and his criticisms suggests he has no understanding of the crisis we're in. Off and on, John McCain has been running for president for a very long time, but it's not clear anymore that he has fresh ideas to bring to the White House. As the failures of the current occupant of the presidency has made so abundantly clear, the voters have to take seriously who occupies the top job.