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McCain TV Ad I'd Like To See , #2

[EXTERIOR medium shot: Barack Obama plays with a Golden Retriever. The dog runs around him and fetches a red rubber ball for him.]

[EXTERIOR close shot: Barack smiles broadly kneels and the dog jumps up, placing its paws on both of his shoulders.]

[EXTERIOR close up: The dog licks Barack's face and Barack winces. His smile tightens, but does not fade.]

VOICE OVER (announcer): Barack Obama, pallin' around with a dog who probably peed on your eucalyptus bush.

[EXTERIOR long shot: John McCain, standing on a Victorian filligreed porch, lit golden by a setting sun.]

JOHN McCAIN: Keep your dang dog off my lawn!

[EXTERIOR medium shots: the same porch. A screen store swings open and Cindy McCain steps through with a plate loaded with cookies and a glass of milk. The camera follows her as she offers the cookies and milk to John.]

CINDY McCAIN: Calm down, dear. Your heart.

VOICE OVER (John McCain): I'm John McCain and I approved this message.

McCain TV Ad I'd Like To See , #1

[EXTERIOR montage: Barack Obama plays with his daughters on a public playground on a cool Fall day. One girl runs around laughing. Another, also laughing, plays in a swing. Barack smiles contendedly.]

VOICE OVER (announcer): Barack Obama, pallin' around with kids who probably ran across your yard.

[EXTERIOR long shot: John McCain, standing on a Victorian filligreed porch, lit golden by a setting sun.]

JOHN McCAIN: You kids get off my lawn!

[EXTERIOR medium shots: the same porch. A screen store swings open and Cindy McCain steps through with a plate loaded with cookies and a glass of milk. The camera follows her as she offers the cookies and milk to John.]

CINDY McCAIN: Calm down, dear. Your heart.

VOICE OVER (John McCain): I'm John McCain and I approved this message.

ACORN speaks in its own defense

I have not generally quoted extensively from the material of others, but I'm making an exception in this post because I believe it's important that this group should have an opportunity to answer the perennially misleading charges being leveled against it.

The following comes from a memo from the leaders of the the voter-registration group ACORN to its supporters:

Fact: ACORN has implemented the most sophisticated quality-control system in the voter engagement field, but in almost every state we are required to turn in ALL completed applications, even the ones we know to be problematic.

Fact: ACORN flags incomplete, problem, or suspicious cards when we turn them in, but these warnings are often ignored by election officials. Often these same officials then come back weeks or months later and accuse us of deliberately turning in phony cards.

Fact: Our canvassers are paid by the hour, not by the card, so there is NO incentive for them to falsify cards. ACORN has a zero-tolerance policy for deliberately falsifying registrations, and in the relatively rare cases where our internal quality controls have identified this happening we have fired the workers involved and turned them in to election officials and law-enforcement.

Fact: No charges have ever been brought against ACORN itself. Convictions against individual former ACORN workers have been accomplished with our full cooperation, using the evidence obtained through our quality control and verification processes.

Fact: Voter fraud by individuals is extremely rare, and incredibly difficult. There has never been a single proven case of anyone, anywhere, casting an illegal vote as a result of a phony voter registration. Even if someone wanted to influence the election this way, it would not work.

Fact: Most election officials have recognized ACORN's good work and praised our quality control systems. Even in the cities where election officials have complained about ACORN, the applications in question represent less than 1% of the thousands and thousands of registrations ACORN has collected.

Fact: Our accusers not only fail to provide any evidence, they fail to suggest a motive: there is virtually no chance anyone would be able to vote fraudulently, so there is no reason to deliberately submit phony registrations. ACORN is committed to ensuring that the greatest possible numbers of people are registered and allowed to vote, so there is also NO incentive to "disrupt the system" with phony cards.

Fact: Similar accusations were made, and attacks launched, against ACORN and other voter registration organizations in 2004 and 2006. These attacks were not only groundless, they have since been exposed as part of the U.S. Attorneygate scandal and revealed to be part of a systematic partisan agenda of voter suppression.

You can find the full text at The Atlantic in a blog by Marc Ambinder dated 9 October 2008.

Given the likelihood that GOP operatives will use their wildly inaccurate accusations against ACORN to justify their (so far) seriously under-publicized voter suppression drives, I suggest the facts shown above be shared with anyone and everyone who is likely to be exposed to the libel.

For more and continuing coverage on the Republican voter suppression drive, see the Brad Blog. Brad Friedman is a multi-talented writer, actor, director who has taken a personal and on-going interest in preserving democracy.

Troopergate findings released. She did it.

The independent investigation of Gov. Sarah Palin's crusade against her ex-brother-in-law has found that the governor (and Republican candidate for vice president of the United States) "knowingly permitted a situation to continue where impermissible pressure was placed on several subordinates in order to advance a personal agenda, to wit: to get Trooper Michael Wooten fired."

Wooten is the governor's former brother-in-law, having separated from her sister in an acrimonious divorce in 2006.

The Anchorage Daily News reported the findings at 0419 11 October 2008. The findings were released 10 October "by a 12-0 vote of the Legislative Council (of the Alaska Legislature), with eight Republicans and four Democrats voting," according to ADN. The newspaper reported that some Republican members of the committee disagreed with the findings, but never-the-less voted for their release.

The investigation reported four findings, in all:

1. The governor knowingly abused the powers and resources of her office "to advance a personal agenda."
2. Her firing of the state's public saftey commissioner Walt Monegan was "a lawful exercise of her powers," according to ADN, but was clearly motivated at least in part by "Monegan's refusal to fire Wooten."
3. Harbor Adjustment Service, a company handling insurace claims for the state, acted correctly in approving and providing Trooper Wooten's worker's compensation claim. (After Wooten injured his back on the job, the governor's husband sought to have the claim rejected.)
4. And Alsaka's state attorney general's office had "failed to substantially comply" with the investigation's request to see e-mails related to the case.

The Palins have maintained that Wooten is a bad cop whom they regard as a dangerous person and that they have acted only to protect themselves from him.

Steve Branchflower, the lead investigator, concluded that "such claims of fear were not bona fide and were offered to provide cover for the Palins' real motivation: to get Trooper Wooten fired for personal family related reasons."

In addition to unsuccessfully seeking Wooten's dismissal, one of her aides successfully sought to have removed from a volunteer duty assignment to dress as "Safety Bear" at the 2007 Alaska State Fair. (New York Times, 10 October 2008).

Who will rid them of this troublesome priest?

Governor Sarah Palin's attacks on Sen. Barack Obama over this past weekend (4-5 Oct) have been justly criticised by a writer for the Associated Press as "unsubstantiated and carr[ying] a racially tinged subtext." That's not surprising ... or, unfortunately, new. The McCain campaign has been playing the so-called race card for weeks, as has been previously noted in these posts.

What is surprising -- and new -- is that her rallies since then have featured press-taunting mobs shouting racist comments and chanting: "Kill Him" (Washington Post, 7 Oct).

One of these rallies was kicked off by a local sheriff who invoked Sen. Obama's middle name (Hussein) and was followed to the podium by a local talk show host who told the crowd the senator "hangs out with terrorists" (CBS 6 Oct).

Sen. John "That One" McCain and Palin may not be winning over independents, but they are certainly energizing their base -- in a style reminiscent of Henry the Young King of England.

That ended badly.

Someone please tell the McCain camp ...

We get it. We know John McCain was joking when he sang, "Bomb bomb bomb. Bomb bomb Iran."

That's what makes it so scary.

He was joking ... about bombing another country.

Circumstances may sometimes require a commander in chief to send our soldiers, sailors and Marines into battle. Our president may be required to shed blood.

But circumstances always require that American leaders refrain from joking about the possibility.

 

Busting Abramoff

There are a lot of differences between the McCain gang and the Abramhoff crew. For one thing, McCain's influence peddlars charge less. For another, when they take money from casino-operating American Indian tribes, they deliver.

Sunday's New York Times (28 SEP 08) reports that "McCain’s inner circle played a behind-the-scenes role in bringing Mr. Abramoff’s misdeeds to Mr. McCain’s attention -- and then cashed in on the resulting investigation."

It also reports "For senior McCain advisers, the [Abramoff] inquiry allowed them to collect fees from the very Indians that Mr. Abramoff had ripped off. And ... enabled Mr. McCain to confront political enemies who helped defeat him in his 2000 presidential run while polishing his maverick image."

You see, "two of Mr. Abramoff's closest associates, Grover Norquist, who runs the nonprofit Americans for Tax Reform, and Ralph Reed, the former director of the Christian Coalition, ran a blistering campaign questioning Mr. McCain’s conservative credentials." So, while he now uses his assault on Abramhoff to bolster his maverick reformer credentials, at the time, he may have been motivated by the opportunity for revenge.

And, of course it doesn't hurt that some of his friends have been able to step in and replace Abramoff as "consultants" on the subject of how best to "communicate" with legislators with huge influence over laws and agencies governing the establishment and operation of Indian owned casinos.

The senator should be grateful the financial markets went into the tank to take the attention off this piece of investigative reporting.

There was a time when I thought this guy would be better than Bush. Hmm.

What Would Hypocritical Look Like in the Pictionary?

This morning's New York Times (24 SEP 08) reports that Rick Davis's "consulting" firm Davis Manafort has been paid $15,000 per month by Freddie Mac, the troubled (to put it mildly) mortgage lender, "from the end of 2005 through last month."

Rick Davis is Senator John McCain's campaign manager. Until this week, both he and his candidate had been acting as if being associated with either Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae was a bad thing. As in: 

The campaign released a video September 18 that graphically suggested (without directly saying) that Franklin Raines, former CEO of the bankrupt mortgage giant, was an economic advisor to Senator Obama. The Washington Post said the video was "clearly exaggerating wildly." Other observers, like those wild and crazy gonzo journalists (not) at Time magazine, found the video to be an indirect, but "hardly subtle," appeal to racism.

But, getting back to the McCain campaign's own unexagerrated association with Freddie, The Times didn't do the math for you, so I will. (Isn't that what you pay me for? Oh. Wait.) Assuming "end of 2005" means very end, December, and "last month" means August. That's, um, 33 months. Times $15,000: $495,000, so less than half a million bucks.

According to the article, "two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement" told the Times that "they did not recall Mr. Davis's doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than to speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections."

"Mr. Davis's firm, Davis Manafort, had been kept on the payroll," they said, "because of his close ties to Mr. McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, who by 2006 was widely expected to run again for the White House."

The point here is not that having worked for Freddie or Fannie should automatically disqualify anyone from working anywhere else. The point is, you appear to be hypocritical when you claim that someone else is unqualified for the office of the presidency if they have so much as talked to anyone who has worked for Freddie or Fannie when you yourself have worked for Freddie.

Quoting the New York Times article: 

Several top McCain campaign officials have ties to either Freddie Mac or Fannie Mae. So do at least two McCain advisers outside the campaign. The lobbying firm of William E. Timmons Sr., the Republican whom Mr. McCain has enlisted to plan his transition to the White House, earned nearly $3 million from Freddie Mac from 2000 until its seizure, federal lobbying records show. Mr. Timmons is the founder of Timmons & Company, one of Washington’s best-known lobbying shops. 

So, there you have it. If a guy is telling you to not vote for one candidate because that candidate may have sought advice from a couple of Freddie and Fannie employees, yet that guy was working for Freddie himself, and has hired several more former Freddie and Fannie employees to work for his candidate, and his candidate has "enlisted" still another Freddie employee to work for him if he wins; can we not conclude that this guy is saying even more strongly "and don't vote for my candidate either."

That, or maybe he's a hypocrite who'll say anything, no matter how dishonest, employ any tactic, no matter how despicable, to win.

Could be either, I suppose.

 

Fool Me Twice. Please!

I am not quite persuaded on this whole $700 billion Bail Out thang just yet.

I need just a little persuasion.

I need Condolezza Rice to go on CNN and tell Wolf Blitzer, "We don't want the smoking gun to be a complete melt down of the world finanicial system."

I need Colin Powel to go to the United Nations and point to some giant blown up aerial photographs of armored cars that he is convinced are loaded with insoluable assets clogging the financial arteries of the world.

I need Dick Cheney to go on Meet The Press and reassure me that American taxpayers will be greeted on Wall Street as liberators, not taken for suckers.

And I need George W. Bush to tell a joint session of congress that all those emails we've been getting from Nigeria for the past decade and a half -- marked urgent, imploring immediate replies and offering to deposit millions of dollars in oil revenues, construction funds and unclaimed inheritances in our personal bank accounts if only we can quickly respond with our bank account routing numbers -- are the REAL DEAL.

That should do it.

Tax Plans Compared

McCain appeared on CNN's American Morning this morning (16 Sep) and again misrepresented his opponent's tax plan as a plan to "raise taxes."

Kiran Chetry reminded the senator that "the non-partisan Tax Policy Center [has] calculated the middle class would actually save significantly more under Barack Obama's tax plan than yours." Then she asked him: "How will your tax cuts, as it breaks down on income level, benefit the working class and the middle class?"

The honest answer would have been to say they won't.

But McCain responded that "Senator Obama wants to raise taxes."

Then he clumsily changed the subject to his health care plan, which, he said, is in effect, really a tax cut.

He said, "I'm not going to raise anybody's taxes and the fact is, that with my health care plan where people receive a $5,000 refundable tax credit, that will have a huge impact."

As it happens, this was also the day that a study published in the journal Health Affairs concluded that his health care plan would actually increase the number of uninsured Americans over the long term.

"After a short-term reduction of 1 million in the number of people without coverage, the number of uninsured would increase by 5 million after five years, the authors predict," according to a summary of the article found at The Caucus.

So, it's a good thing that his "health care" plan is really more of a "tax cut" plan, because a health care plan that actually increases the number of uninsured would really suck.

There's only one problem with this as a tax cut plan, however: To take advantage of it, you have to be able to afford health insurance. And that's kind of a weak spot with anything McCain offers in the way of tax cuts. You have to be making pretty good money to afford them

Getting back to the question the Senator was actually asked: "How will your tax cuts, as it breaks down on income level, benefit the working class and the middle class?"

Three graphic comparisons of the two tax plans are available at today's New York Times Freakonomics site. One graphic, from the Washington Post, illustrates what salary ranges get the largest percentage change in taxes: from McCain's plan, those earning $2.87 million and above; from Obama's, those earning less than $19,000.

Another, from chartjunk, shows how the tax breaks spread across number of people by income and the third illustrates the shift in tax burden by income. All three charts tell different, but compelling stories; and all three still manage to honestly represent the tax plans of each candidate.

But the really really short version: You have to have an income in excess of  $226,982 a year or higher to not get a tax cut under the Obama plan. You have to earn more than $603,403 a year to get a tax increase under the Obama plan. You have to earn more than $66,355 a year to get a tax cut of more than one percent under the McCain plan.

Do the math.

Stop Me If You've Heard This One

This is not about the governor of Alaska. This is about the senior senator from Arizona who would be president of the United States.

Are we all clear on that?

To emphasize this, I will not use the governor's name in this posting. The only things you will need to know about the governor to follow along with this argument are these: The governor is an outspoken supporter of cultural conservativism and all that entails. And the governor is a (comparatively) young, (comparatively) attractive white female, the mother of at least four children. As conservative commentator Geroge Will put it on last week's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, "guns, god and babies, hot damn!"

Now, back to the senator.

The senator chose the governor as his running mate in his bid for the presidency. He had every right to do so.

He considered other options, and at least one of these was vetted pretty rigorously, another governor, Bob Crist of Florida.

The governor who was actually selected, however, was not.

The McCain staff didn't even bother to read the news archive of her hometown newspaper until after her selection was announced.

The McCain staff complained vigorously that she was in fact fully vetted, but these claims proved to be false, as many claims from the McCain staff have proven to be false.

Vetting means "to appraise, verify, or check for accuracy, authenticity, validity, etc.: An expert vetted the manuscript before publication."

Although the term is closely associated with veterinary practice, it is not insulting or demeaning to the object of the vetting process. The use of the term does not suggest that the vetted person is, in fact, a non-human or domesticated animal. The term has been used in this way for a long, long time.

So, point number one about the senator from Arizona who would be president: He chose someone as his running mate about whom he knew very little. Her credentials as described above were apparently sufficient qualifications, in his view, to run for vice president and perhaps president of the United States. I say run for, not serve, because we do not have sufficient evidence to determine that he gave much thought in his selection to anything beyond how well this choice would work during the election.

This matters because, regardless of whether this was a qualified-to-serve-as or a suitable-to-run-for sort of decision, we have to credit the senator with recognizing that it was an important decision. That means that it is reasonable to examine this decision for insights into how he will make other important decisions later in his life, perhaps as president of the United States.

One detractor saw in the senator's "speed-dating" of the governor a "decision-making process [that] is impetuous and, in its Bush-like preference for gut instinct over facts, potentially reckless."

But his friends in the press (and contrary to the constant whining of his staff, he has many, and he and his staff know it) saw in that same preference for "gut instinct over fact" new proof of his rediscovered maverick self. See NBC's Norah O'Donnell and Newsweek's Howard Fineman on the Chris Matthews Show (31 Aug), Andrea Mitchell on NBC's Meet the Press (31 Aug) or staff writer Dan Balz of The Washington Post (29 Aug).

And, if you leave out the "Bush-like" part of that description for the Arizona senator's style of decision-making, it doesn't sound so bad. In fact, it kind of works with what is becoming the new dividing line in this election: the line between those elitists who look down their noses at us plain folk (or we plain folk, for we call ourselves both) just because they know stuff and think about things while we, well, we don't have to do all that because we believe and feel.

And that, my fellow Americans, is really, really scary. Because our next War of Choice -- promoted, declared, planned and executed straight from the hip -- could be much, much worse than the current 4,100-lives-to-date, 30,182 wounded so far, $10 billion per month fiasco.

Now on to point number two.

Having failed to properly vet his choice of running mate, he and his staff now vigorously oppose any attempt by anyone else to do that which they neglected to do. To scrutinize her past now, they argue, is to attack her.

Yet many people have been doing just that! These people include journalists, whom the McCain campaign has described as "liberals." And others, the campaign tells us, have included actual advocates for his opponent in the presidential election, whom the McCain campaign has portrayed in a television ad as a pack of wolves.

"As Obama drops in the polls," the ad ominously explains, "he'll try to destroy her."

There are a couple of things worth noting about this ad:

(1) Like a lot of McCain campaign ads FactCheck.org has investigated, it is dishonest. But this ad is unique, so far, in that it claims FactCheck.Org as a source for one of its dishonest claims. As FactCheck describes it, "The ad strives to convey the message that FactCheck.org said 'completely false' attacks on [the governor who, as I promised, shall remain nameless] had come from Sen. Barack Obama. We said no such thing. We have yet to dispute any claim from the Obama campaign about [her]."

Now, to be fair, FactCheck.Org also has disputed some claims of the Obama campaign. Most recently, their analysis has concluded that an Obama campaign ad "played fast and loose with" Sen. McCain's voting record on education. The organization is nonpartisan and strives to provide balanced coverage of the election.

But it is pretty much stuck with the reality in which it finds itself. Of 12 falsehoods exposed on the organization's front page this evening (14 Sep), two are ascribed to Obama, one to independent internet rumor mongers and the rest to the McCain campaign. That would be, um, seven, since 2 September. Ahem.

Well, um, that's less than one a day.

Anyway, as it turned out, once again according to FactCheck.Org, the other salient fact in the ad also turned out to be ... hmmm, how best to put this, uh, well, not exactly a fact. Quoting the ad, now, "The [Wall Street] Journal reports Obama 'air-dropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers' into Alaska to dig dirt on [the governor who shall remain nameless]."

Not exactly. FactCheck.Org labelled this a "distortion." WSJ, the organization reported, "did not say that the Obama team was there to 'dig dirt.' It said they were there to 'dig into her record and background.'"

In other words, WSJ said they were there to do that which the McCain campaign failed to do prior to selecting his running mate and that which they would prefer no-one do at this late date: vet the candidate.

In an update to the FactCheck.Org report, it is noted: "Furthermore, the Obama campaign insists that no researchers have been sent to Alaska and that the Journal owes them a correction." We'll have to see how that turns out for them.

So that's pretty much it for point number one regarding the wolves in Alaska ad: Except for the part that is a "distortion," it is "less than honest." And that, sadly, is no longer news. This is a campaign that has earned a reputation for distorting facts, fabricating lies and misleading voters.

The second thing worth noting is considerably more disturbing.

(2) To hear the McCain campaign tell it, this election is no longer about the tumbling economy or the misbegotten war. It's not about access to health care or lost jobs or wounded veterans or homes in foreclosure. Hell, it's not even about competence. Because, if you question the senator's competence or judgement, that's just another way of attacking the governor, who, did we mention, is a white Christian woman with at least four children.

No, my friends, this election is about protecting her from [show us a picture of Obama looking as much like Willie Horton and Malcom X as photo shop can make him look] HIM. "He'll try to destroy her!"

Now maybe it is just an accident of history. Or maybe it is by design. But if you do not think that this new emphasis on the part of the McCain campaign is going to resonate with a certain part of the American electorate then either you are too naive, or I am too cynical and -- in the interest of full disclosure -- you should know, before placing your bet, that I have been chided for my rabid optimism far more often than I have been praised for my pessimism.

This myth of the white woman in need of protection from the newly empowered black man was the foundational fairy tale of the Keltic Kirk Knights (KKK) and the primary plot line in both the literary and the cinematic treatments of its beginning during Reconstruction: Thomas Dixon's The Clansman and D. W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation. And, if we let them, the McCain campaign will make it the overarching issue of the coming election.

But the governor is not the issue here. Her running mate is the issue. And, to briefly recap: He demonstrated a flagrant disregard for rational decision-making in choosing her; and he continues to dishonorably and shamelessly broadcast things which he knows to be dishonest in an apparent attempt to shout down all proof to the contrary.

 

Quick Question: Iraq

"Victory is within sight" in Iraq, Sen. John McCain told the 109th convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in mid-August. And Gov. Sarah Palin told the Republican National Convention exactly the same thing in early September, wrapping the message in one of those charmingly mocking flourishes for which she has become so famous. (She may not be original, but at least she's sarcastic.) And both republican candidates have repeated the claim on the campaign trail.

But Gen. David Petraeus told the BBC this week that we still face a "long struggle" in Iraq and that he didn't know that he would use the world "vicotry" to describe the outcome there.

"This," he said "is not the sort of struggle where you take a hill, plant the flag and go home to a victory parade... it's not war with a simple slogan." (He can forgive us if we've gotten the wrong impression, I'm sure, given that all we've seen in the way of strategy from the current administration and from the McCain campaign is, well, for lack of a better phrase, "simple slogans.")

So tell us, Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin, given that you see victory where Gen. Petraeus does not, what exactly does this victory look like?

We'd like details. Really.

Feel free to give an expansive answer. I'm sure I'll have follow up questions.

There are 4,096 reported U. S. war dead in the Iraq campaign as I write this; 30,182 more wounded. I plan to take note of how many more we have of each between now and the arrival of this victory that you both see. I hope you'll do the same.

 

Beyond Pretense, Just Plain Lies

(Note to McCain campaign: the fourth word in the heading for this post is "plain" not Palin. I'm not saying that it wouldn't have been just as true had I fat-fingered the title. But the fact is, I did not. The headline is supposed to read as it does: "Just Plain Lies.")

The John McCain/ Sarah Palin ticket has gotten dinged repeatedly over the past several days for misleading advertisments and public statements and they seem to have developed a standard operating procedure for handling these situations: tell a new, more outrageous lie.

It's as if they're trying to make history as the first politicians ever to go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people. (And H. L. Mencken said it couldn't be done! Well, sort of.)

Last week we discovered that Gov. Palin never said "Thanks, but no thanks," to the "Bridge to Nowhere."

We discovered, in fact, that she had vigorously supported the project in her gubernatorial campaign, as has been reported by CBS, NPR and hundreds of bloggers. In the process, we also discovered that (1) it was the U. S. congress that, in fact, torpedoed the earmark for the bridge, (2) that Alaska got to keep the money, and (3) that in Palin's brief tenure as Alaska's governor, she had requested 31 other earmarks totaling $197 million, more per person than any other state.

But she keeps on saying it because it gets a good response. (H. L. Mencken, can you hear that?)

(Note to McCain campaign: "gubernatorial campaign," above, means her run for governor. It does not mean that I am calling her a "guber," which would be spelled differently in any case. But, if you'd like to pretend it does and send out some press releases about how deeply offended you are and how deeply wounded she is, please do. Be sure to include MSNBC and Fox; that'd be swell. The site could use the traffic.)

Also last week, the McCain campaign got called on an ad misrepresenting the Obama tax plan. Because this ad recycled claims already proven to be false in early August, this moved the Annenberg Public Policy Center's FactCheck project to accuse the campaign of engaging in a "pattern of deceit." (No kidding)

But the McCain campaign was barely getting started. This week began with a 60-second advertisement that "misstates the facts" on Sen. Obama's tax plan and his position regarding off-shore drilling. (For the record, he'll lower taxes on 80-plus percent of households, and he's said he'd consider off-shore drilling as part of a compromise to enact a more comprehensive energy plan.) Obama told crowds in Ohio that "you can't just make stuff up." But, apparently, the McCain campaign cannot only make it up, they can buy ads and get it on television

And the pattern continues with a "deliberately misleading accusation" in a 30-second tv spot that Sen. Obama, as a member of the Illinois legislature, had voted for "comprehensive sex eduacation for kindergartners." In fact, the senator had voted for age-appropriate education to help young children to recognize inappropriate touching and sexual predators. Time magazine's political commentator Joe Klein found this lie sleazy and cynical enough to reject Sen. McCain's (as yet unoffered) apology in advance.

And by Wednesday, Sen. McCain had moved on to take grave umbrage that Sen. Obama had disparaged the McCain platform as pretty much the same thing George W. Bush has been doing for eight years, embellished with the same old Karl Rove style of politics. "You can put lipstick on a pig," he said of McCain's platform, "but it's still a pig."

Apparently, this reminded Sen. McCain and his advisers of Gov. Palin. I do not know why. Perhaps it is because she said something about pit bulls wearing liptstick at the Republican National Convention. Or perhaps they think she looks like a pig, in which case they really need to think about going ahead with that cataract surgery.

Either way, their over-the-top reaction probably says more about how Sen. McCain intended his comments to be taken when he said something simiilar, of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's health care plan in Iowa last October than it does about Sen. Obama.

(Note to McCain campaign: I'll quit saying "lipstick," if you'll quit saying "change." The lipstick looks good on you. The change does not.) 

 

The Pretend Candidate

Five out of five talking heads agree: John McCain was a real maverick; and four out of five agree he might be again.

The only reason he has boasted of voting "with the President 90% of the time," these apocryphal four pundits agree, is because that's what he had to do to win the nomination and/or solidify/shore up/energize the "party base."

The apocryphal four agree that now, or perhaps shortly after he is elected, we will see the real/old/original McCain (for which the cover of this past week's Economist pined) again: the one who stands tall against his own party to reach across party lines to end partisanship and accomplish great unspecified things for America, etc., etc., etc.

This, these talking heads re-assure us, means that he is, in fact, entitled to the mantle of The Change Candidate.

We need not worry, I assume, that we have yet to see any suppporting evidence emerge regarding this larger strategy beyond repeated invocations of the word "change." It's hidden in his personality.

And as for the evidence to the contrary: His choice of a running mate who is more conservative than himself and as divisive as Karl Rove simply demonstrates how adept he is at solidifying/shoring up/energizing the "party base."

I'm not re-assured.

In fact, if what they're saying is true, it would mean that he is only pretending to be a party-line politician to trick conservatives. While I am more likely to agree with the policies these pundits suggest he secretly harbors than with the policies he publicly proclaims, I would much rather see the policies I support prevail honestly at the polls.

They're not the sort of things you can sneak into the White House. They would not endure as contraband.

And isn't there another way to describe pretending to be someone that you are not?

 

Change

I have this T-shirt I got from thinkgeek.com that's got "while ( ! ( succeed = try() ) )" across the front.

You could translate that, for a non-programmer, a couple of ways. One might be: If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Admirable. Another might be, if what you're doing now isn't working, keep doing it until you achieve a stack overflow error. Not so admirable.

Generally speaking, these are avoided in programming. They're bad.

Whatever activity the method try() is invoking is not accomplishing whatever state we have equated with success. Rather than continue to try(), we should alter the behavior invoked by try(). If we do not like the results we are getting, we should change the behavior that is producing those results.

Some people call doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result insanity. In programming its called an infinite loop.

But the point here is: Change does not occur because someone is different. It occurs because someone or something behaves differently.

You don't change something by being a maverick or a reformer or an (in)experienced senator or governor or a Black man or an ordinary guy or an old man or a hot chick. You don't change it by being anything. You change it by doing something differently.

So any candidate who seeks to be recognized as an agent of change needs, at the very least, to identify those things which he or she would do differently.

Browse the Obama/Biden website's "issues" section and you'll find a couple of dozen issues arrayed, each one with its own (usually bulleted) list of several to a dozen things things that they'd like to do differrently regarding that issue: everything from Civil Rights through Defense to the Economy and Energy & Environment and beyond, ending with Veterans and Women. Or you can download his "Blueprint for Change."

Browse the McCain website, you see fewer (exactly half as many) issues addressed and the solutions tending towards a combination of (a) doing what we're already doing more vigorously, (b) proclaiming that he believes lots of things that other people should do would help, and (c) repeat as necessary.

This may be because the McCain campaign believes, as its campaign manager Rick Davis told the editorial board of the Washington Post yesterday, "This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates." I guess "composite view" is a euphemism for "perception of personality."

But change is about behavior, and the new behavior we need will be driven by policies about issues. We've had enough of personality driven behavior.