Subscribe“Honoring the pre-debate tradition, Barack Obama's campaign is out with a memo on Wednesday raising the expectations for John McCain to ungodly heights. But in addition to setting the stage for tonight's affair, the Illinois Democrat did something peculiar: he allowed a peek into internal strategy.
Spokesman Bill Burton lays out -- in no small measure -- how he believes the debate will proceed.
‘Just this weekend, John McCain vowed to 'whip Obama's you-know-what' at the debate,’ he writes, ‘and he's indicated that he'll use Bill Ayers to attack Barack Obama... Senator Obama is going to use the debate to discuss his plan for the economy. That's what he's been doing this entire campaign.’
Such a prediction may appear, at once, over-simplistic and optimistic. But the Obama campaign has seemingly been engineering this scenario for the past week. Indeed, if John McCain brings up Ayers in tonight it may be because he was goaded into doing so.
Following the candidate's second debate, both Obama and Joe Biden chided the Republican nominee for not making the personal character attacks he made on the stump to Obama's face. Since then, however, polling data has shown voters recoiling from McCain's use of Bill Ayers in political attacks. The Arizona Republican is left in a quandary: don't bring up the former '60s radical and risk being seen as squirmy and afraid; or bring him up and get bashed by Obama for not talking about the economy.
As Burton writes: ‘But after two debates in which John McCain didn't mention the middle class once -- and after his campaign declared openly that they want to turn the page on talking about the economy -- the real question is not how many attacks McCain can land in the debate, but whether he can finally communicate a vision to turn this economy around.’”
54 year-old white male, voted Kerry '04, Bush '00, Dole '96, hunter, NASCAR fan...hard for Obama said: "I'm gonna hate him the minute I vote for him. He's gonna be a bad president. But I won't ever vote for another god-damn Republican. I want the government to take over all of Wall Street and bankers and the car companies and Wal-Mart run this county like we used to when Reagan was President."
The next was a woman, late 50s, Democrat but strongly pro-life. Loved B. and H. Clinton, loved Bush in 2000. "Well, I don't know much about this terrorist group Barack used to be in with that Weather guy but I'm sick of paying for health insurance at work and that's why I'm supporting Barack."
McCain's Transition Chief Lobbied for Saddam Hussein
The person charged with planning the McCain administration, William Timmons, lobbied for Saddam Hussein in an effort to get the international community off his back. Obama challenged McCain to talk about William Ayers to his face at the debate tonight and McCain accepted the challenge. What was Obama thinking? Maybe he will bring up Timmons and point that he (Obama) was 8 years old and living in Indonesia when Ayers was planting crude bombs but McCain knowingly chose Saddam Hussein's lobbyist for an important job in his campaign. There could be fireworks if Obama brings this up.
Start from day 1 blaming Obama and the dems for anything and everything that goes wrong, from a drop in the DOW to a hangnail.
Just look at the picture and be terrified of an Obama presidency!
The only difference between Obama and Osama is BS.
Lee Atwater: "By 1968 you can't say '[n-word]'-- that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states' rights and all that stuff. You're getting so abstract now [that] you're talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you're talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.
''And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I'm not saying that. But I'm saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me -- because obviously sitting around saying, 'We want to cut this,' is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than [n-word]'"
The outside groups arrayed against Obama have not exactly been models of competence and effectiveness this year. When it comes to assembling the dirt, John Boehner is no Newt Gingrich or Tom DeLay. Among all the insinuations that Obama might be a terrorist, furthermore, is a healthy does of red-baiting that is more silly than frightening ... And just as the increasingly hateful tone of the crowds at John McCain's rallies (especially when Sarah Palin is there to egg on the thugs) is turning off moderate voters, the anti-Obama forces' worst enemy will be their own craziness. As Garrett Epps wrote in the Prospect in 2002, Bill Clinton didn't destroy his enemies; he drove them insane, and they destroyed themselves.This is important to remember - they can and probably will launch a mean-spirited opposition to anything President Obama tries to do, but we're not exactly dealing with political game masters here. Where Gingrich was Axis & Allies, Boehner is Risk.
After Barack Obama's major economic address to 3,500 people in Toledo, the office several blocks away swelled to capacity with newly-fired up volunteers. One of the volunteers who'd come into Obama's office in recent weeks is Debrah's husband, such a staunch Republican that he'd long been donating monthly like clockwork. He'd even gone into the nearby Toledo McCain office, but when he visited it had been nearly empty. The explosive energy difference, Debrah told us, particularly in the past few weeks, made an impression on her husband, who planned to vote for Barack Obama.These are people whose own personal experiences mean that they now simply aren't going to believe fringe-y emails about Obama being a baby-killing Muslim. And they're not going to believe that hordes of nefarious community organizers stole the election when they, themselves, went into that booth and voted for Obama.
The Republican National Committee is halting presidential ads in Wisconsin and Maine, turning much of its attention to usually Republican states where GOP nominee John McCain shows signs of faltering.I don't know if McCain is aware of this, but generally, when you want to win in a state, you campaign there. What exactly is his strategy here? Is he stopping his campaign for the good of the economy again, only this time on a state-by-state basis?
The shift in advertising resources suggests that the RNC has decided to focus on defending reliably Republican-voting states against Obama's onslaught of advertising. Flush with money, Obama is outspending the joint efforts of the Republican Party and the McCain campaign by more than 2-1.
McCain has led Obama in ad spending only in Iowa and Minnesota. But television stations in Minneapolis-St. Paul said Wednesday that Obama is increasing his spending and is committed to run ads through Nov. 3.
CNN is now predicting Obama will win Virginia and the electoral college.
Yeah, turns out, he's now given up on both Wisconsin and Maine.
for all his money (well, his wife's)
A lot of the maps I've seen use 5% as their threshold. Less than that is scored as 'even'
[Wallace] said the senator from Arizona would focus tonight on what she called "the truth about Barack Obama's plan for raising taxes" and his pursuit of other "liberal" policies. "Barack Obama is measuring the drapes," she declared. "He and Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid are planning a liberal Democratic takeover of our economy." She referred to the speaker of the House and the Senate majority leader.Oh, God, this just keeps getting better. Obama's tax plan? Really? You mean the one where everyone making less than $250k gets a tax cut? Oh, yeah. I'm sure working families are going to hate hearing more about that.
DANTES assists eligible members of the armed forces to obtain certification or licensing as elementary school teachers, secondary school teachers, or vocational or technical teachers and to become highly qualified teachers. The program also helps these individuals find employment in high-need local education agencies (LEAs) or charter schools.McCain just described it incorrectly.
The single best moment of the debate, for me, was Obama's defence of labour organizers in Columbia. He didn't have to go there to make his case against the Columbia FTA, but it was the strongest, most moral argument to make, and he made it. Good for him for showing solidarity.The split screen of this is... err... interesting.
God how bad I want to see what they write on their notepads.One thing that I thought was weird in the debate before this one - the one with Brokaw, where the candidates had chairs but were wandering around a lot:
I'm gonna give you all a $50 off coupon toward K-12.
McCain's deer in the headlights moment.
The fact is that I have agreed with President Bush far more than I have disagreed. And on the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I've been totally in agreement and support of President Bush....I will argue my conservative record of voting with anyone's, and I will also submit that my support for President Bush has been active and very impassioned on issues that are important to the American people. And I'm particularly talking about the war on terror, the war in Iraq, national security, national defense, support of men and women in the military, fiscal discipline, a number of other issues. So I strongly disagree with any assertion that I've been more at odds with the president of the United States than I have been in agreement with him.
I have a theory on McCain's sharpie -- he uses a fat felt pen to take notes with because he doesn't want to wear reading glasses and it's the only way he can see his notes.
Speech structural parameters of candidates fall within very narrow tolerances, suggesting high degree of wordsmithing and rehearsal. For example, noun/verb/adjective/adverb ratio is nearly identical, as is unique word count and noun phrase profile. Speech of Presidential candidates is more complex and less repetitive than that of their Vice-Presidential counterparts. Biden is the most repetitive speaker. The Obama/McCain debates began with balanced performance from both candidates but end with Obama verbally overpowering McCain with overwhelming superiority in concepts delivered.
The Irish betting company has paid betters prematurely in the past. On June 12, shortly before polls closed, Paddy Power said it would pay out 80,000 euros ($107,176) on bets that Irish voters would ratify the European Union's governing treaty, adding that the ballot was ``in the bag.''
Voters came out against the treaty by about 53 percent to 47 percent.
This country wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for an angry mob that decided it wanted a tax cut and threw English tea into Boston Harbor. Angry mobs once enforced local justice without interference from the meddlesome federal government in the Old West and in the south after Reconstruction, just as our Founding Fathers had envisioned in The Federalist Papers. And we would probably all be Muslims now if an angry mob hadn’t chosen Barabbas over Jesus 2,000 years ago.
The Republican Party certainly owes a lot to angry mobs. Angry mobs in Little Rock and Selma deeply concerned about the issue of state’s rights, angry mobs of parents in Boston who didn’t want their kids bussed across town and angry mobs of Chicago homeowners who didn’t want their property values to go down all helped give birth to the modern conservative movement.
Soon after McCain hit the ground in Hanoi, the code went out the window. "I'll give you military information if you will take me to the hospital," he later admitted pleading with his captors. McCain now insists the offer was a bluff, designed to fool the enemy into giving him medical treatment. In fact, his wounds were attended to only after the North Vietnamese discovered that his father was a Navy admiral. What has never been disclosed is the manner in which they found out: McCain told them. According to Dramesi, one of the few POWs who remained silent under years of torture, McCain tried to justify his behavior while they were still prisoners. "I had to tell them," he insisted to Dramesi, "or I would have died in bed."Read the Rolling Stone article. I know it's long and full of words, but you deserve to know the real story, not the fairy tale.
Dramesi says he has no desire to dishonor McCain's service, but he believes that celebrating the downed pilot's behavior as heroic — "he wasn't exceptional one way or the other" — has a corrosive effect on military discipline. "This business of my country before my life?" Dramesi says. "Well, he had that opportunity and failed miserably. If it really were country first, John McCain would probably be walking around without one or two arms or legs — or he'd be dead."
Once the Vietnamese realized they had captured the man they called the "crown prince," they had every motivation to keep McCain alive. His value as a propaganda tool and bargaining chip was far greater than any military intelligence he could provide, and McCain knew it. "It was hard not to see how pleased the Vietnamese were to have captured an admiral's son," he writes, "and I knew that my father's identity was directly related to my survival." But during the course of his medical treatment, McCain followed through on his offer of military information. Only two weeks after his capture, the North Vietnamese press issued a report — picked up by The New York Times — in which McCain was quoted as saying that the war was "moving to the advantage of North Vietnam and the United States appears to be isolated." He also provided the name of his ship, the number of raids he had flown, his squadron number and the target of his final raid.
McCain's implication that Obama was principally responsible for the negative tone of the campaign was simply not going to be credible to most voters. Certainly, the Obama campaign has been negative at times -- more often than either the Al Gore or John Kerry -- and on several occasions explictly misleading. But voters came into the debate thinking by 2:1 margins that McCain was running a negative campaign and Obama a positive one. To try and fight against that tide was a significant mistake.
"A Democratic researcher spent the evening counting the Arizona Republican's blinks, and tallied more than 3,000 during the night's affair -- three thousand blinks in a 90-minute time span. They even compressed a 30-second clip of those blinks into a nine second video."
Maybe I can forestall a political flamewar by making this into a grammar flamewar. Does this actually scan?
posted by GuyZero at 9:57 AM on October 15, 2008 [1 favorite]