Palinpalooza a Diversion from Deeper Problems?
McCain NewsLadder

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The hard times continue for Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, who today pulled up his stakes in Michigan, a state his campaign once thought worth contesting.

In the progressive cyberspace, we find McCain ever-so-slightly better off than the week began, on account of the fact that his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, failed to fulfill the dreams of liberals, a dream that would have had her imploding on the podium in a torrent of stammers, a potentiality foreshadowed by her supernova performance in a multi-part interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric.

In March, McCain changed his mind on waterboarding, voting to sustain President Bush’s veto of a bill that would have banned U.S. interrogators from the practice; he seemed to be rewarded this week with a metaphorical version of a more traditional water torture, as steady drip, drip, drip of mortifying Palin responses to Couric’s questions leaked daily out of CBS over the course of a week. Palin couldn’t name the newspapers she read, the Supreme Court decisions she opposed (excepting Roe), explain why Alaskan proximity to Russia made her a foreign policy expert, or give more than one narrow example of John McCain’s support for regulation of the financial sector.

Last night, facing off with Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden, Palin lived to fight another day, playing the game by her own rules, declaring to Biden that she “may not answer the questions the way you or the moderator want me to.” Indeed, observed many progressive bloggers, she answered the questions she wanted to be asked, whether they were asked of her or not.

Earlier in the week, the McCain campaign began making noise about the fact that moderator Gwen Ifill, host of PBS’s “Washington Week in Review” and an African-American, was the author of a forthcoming book about race and the Obama campaign. The inference by McCain campaign operatives was one of a lurking bias toward the Obama camp, even though McCain himself said he had no problem with Ifill moderating the debate. But, wrote Greg Sargent of TMP Election Central, the merits of the argument are beside the point.

At bottom, though, debating whether there’s any merit in the attack on Ifill is beside the point, because as this is really just a transparent game, of course. The criticism is about trying to spook the moderators into going easy on Palin — a “time-honored form of pre-debate spin,” as [the Politico’s] Ben Smith put it.

And, indeed, some commentators suggested that Ifill tossed softballs at Palin most of the night, and rarely challenged either candidate when they strayed from her questions.

Some feared that the novelty of Palin’s gender posed perils for Joe Biden and commentators alike.

Before the debate began, famed feminist Robin Morgan, writing at the Women’s Media Center site, offered this helpful guide to those covering Palin:

Do investigate Palin’s opposition to listing polar bears and other animals as endangered. Do not call her one: no chick, bird, kitten, bitch, hen, cow. Also no produce: tomato, peach, etc.

Morgan also reports that, like Palin, both of John McCain’s wives were beauty queens.

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In truth, Palinpalooza proved to be a mere sideshow to what appears to be chaos and confusion in the McCain camp. Last week saw McCain claiming to suspend his campaign to return to Washington to broker a deal on a financial bailout bill for which a deal appeared to have been reached before McCain showed up. Once he was on the ground the deal fell apart when a majority of House Republicans balked at what was on the table.

At first, wrote Ben Craw on Sept. 30 at Talking Points Memo, McCain pointed the finger at his opponent, then said he didn’t:

To review: yesterday John McCain said in consecutive sentences, “Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process. Now is not the time to fix the blame”…

In a new interview with ABC News’s Ron Claiborne however, McCain says he never blamed nobody…

According to Mark Schmitt, editor of The American Prospect, the House Republicans’ rebuke of McCain and the first version of the bailout package is symptomatic of a problem much bigger for Republicans than any immediate concern:

Republican strategist Ed Rollins gave the game away on CNN: “At the end of the day, there’s a lot of people thinking about how to rebuild this party, and do we want to rebuild it with John McCain, who’s always kind of questionable on the basic facts of fiscal control, all the rest of it, immigration…”

[…]

The Republican coalition since at least Reagan has been a miraculous alliance of Wall Street and Main Street. Populist politics, such as the attack on “elites” now embodied by the enthusiasm for Gov. Sarah Palin, were the vehicle for Wall Street policies, the very policies that led to the crash. The alliance always seemed unsustainable.

Trying to straddle the factions of that “miraculous alliance” may well have proved the undoing of John McCain, according to Edward McClelland, writing at Salon:

McCain has run for the presidency twice, as two completely different candidates. His campaigns and his image have been shaped by the nasty partisanship of the late 20th and early 21st century, an era that may be remembered as the Late Culture Wars.

[…]

Writers loved McCain during his first run for the presidency, in 2000. But eight years later, they think he’s a flip-flopping hack.

McClelland’s essay comes to us in the form of a review of four books about John McCain, authored, respectively, by David Foster Wallace, Paul Begala, Cliff Schecter and Matthew Welch — and argues for occasional forays by news junkies into the erudite realm of book reviews.

Addressing more immediate matters, Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones and Tim Fernholz of TAPPED give us the low-down on two conference calls with reporters by the McCain camp.

On Wednesday, Stein detected something of a ringer on a press call with McCain surrogate Rudy Giuliani:

The second question was from someone named Chuck Pardee. Pardee asserted that Tina Fey and many reporters make their living “embellishing the facts.” After criticizing the press for treating Sarah Palin unfairly, Pardee concluded*:

“Do you think embellishing the facts is actually what the concerned voter is after? And specifically, Joe Biden seems to embellish and forget facts just to kind of impress people but when you take Sarah Palin she seems to impress others with her quick study without embellishing the facts. In other words do you think people want a straight shooter or do they want the stuff and fluff?”

[…]

Pardee, by the way, is the “founder and president” of Newsbull.com. He has donated the maximum $2,300 to McCain.

TAPPED’s Fernholz, on the next day’s called, reported a new “aggressiveness” on the part of the campaign:

But McCain political director Mike Duhaime and senior adviser Greg Strimple aren’t worried, because they’re aggressive — in fact, everyone’s aggressive. The word came up about 50 times in the call, used to describe everything from Obama’s liberalism to President Bush! (Amateur psychologists, make of it what you will.) They also promised an aggressive last 30 days, which is no surprise as conventional wisdom is beginning to coalesce around the idea that the McCain camp needs to/will go negative to win.

That’s because the polls continue to bode ill for McCain.

Also boding ill for McCain was an ad by Brave New PAC and Democracy for America that was airing on MSNBC, before Fox’s Bill O’Reilly started slamming the rival network about it. The ad raises questions on the state of McCain’s health, which some viewers found offensive.

In other health-related campaign news, Doug Cunningham of Workers Independent News reports that the AFL-CIO is targeting voters in battleground states with a leafletting campaign challenging McCain’s health plan.

And so concludes another wild week in campaignland.

–Adele M. Stan

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This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting
about John McCain. Visit JohnMccain.NewsLadder.net
for a complete list of articles on McCain. And for the best progressive reporting on two
critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.

JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and CommonSense NMS. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

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Palinpalooza a Diversion from Deeper Problems?
McCain NewsLadder

The hard times continue for Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, who today pulled up his stakes in Michigan, a state his campaign once thought worth contesting.

In the progressive cyberspace, we find McCain ever-so-slightly better off than the week began, on account of the fact that his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, failed to fulfill the dreams of liberals, a dream that would have had her imploding on the podium in a torrent of stammers, a potentiality foreshadowed by her supernova performance in a multi-part interview with CBS News anchor Katie Couric.

In March, McCain changed his mind on waterboarding, voting to sustain President Bush’s veto of a bill that would have banned U.S. interrogators from the practice; he seemed to be rewarded this week with a metaphorical version of a more traditional water torture, as steady drip, drip, drip of mortifying Palin responses to Couric’s questions leaked daily out of CBS over the course of a week. Palin couldn’t name the newspapers she read, the Supreme Court decisions she opposed (excepting Roe), explain why Alaskan proximity to Russia made her a foreign policy expert, or give more than one narrow example of John McCain’s support for regulation of the financial sector.

Last night, facing off with Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Joe Biden, Palin lived to fight another day, playing the game by her own rules, declaring to Biden that she “may not answer the questions the way you or the moderator want me to.” Indeed, observed many progressive bloggers, she answered the questions she wanted to be asked, whether they were asked of her or not.

Earlier in the week, the McCain campaign began making noise about the fact that moderator Gwen Ifill, host of PBS’s “Washington Week in Review” and an African-American, was the author of a forthcoming book about race and the Obama campaign. The inference by McCain campaign operatives was one of a lurking bias toward the Obama camp, even though McCain himself said he had no problem with Ifill moderating the debate. But, wrote Greg Sargent of TMP Election Central, the merits of the argument are beside the point.

At bottom, though, debating whether there’s any merit in the attack on Ifill is beside the point, because as this is really just a transparent game, of course. The criticism is about trying to spook the moderators into going easy on Palin — a “time-honored form of pre-debate spin,” as [the Politico’s] Ben Smith put it.

And, indeed, some commentators suggested that Ifill tossed softballs at Palin most of the night, and rarely challenged either candidate when they strayed from her questions.

Some feared that the novelty of Palin’s gender posed perils for Joe Biden and commentators alike.

Before the debate began, famed feminist Robin Morgan, writing at the Women’s Media Center site, offered this helpful guide to those covering Palin:

Do investigate Palin’s opposition to listing polar bears and other animals as endangered. Do not call her one: no chick, bird, kitten, bitch, hen, cow. Also no produce: tomato, peach, etc.

Morgan also reports that, like Palin, both of John McCain’s wives were beauty queens.

In truth, Palinpalooza proved to be a mere sideshow to what appears to be chaos and confusion in the McCain camp. Last week saw McCain claiming to suspend his campaign to return to Washington to broker a deal on a financial bailout bill for which a deal appeared to have been reached before McCain showed up. Once he was on the ground the deal fell apart when a majority of House Republicans balked at what was on the table.

At first, wrote Ben Craw on Sept. 30 at Talking Points Memo, McCain pointed the finger at his opponent, then said he didn’t:

To review: yesterday John McCain said in consecutive sentences, “Senator Obama and his allies in Congress infused unnecessary partisanship into the process. Now is not the time to fix the blame”…

In a new interview with ABC News’s Ron Claiborne however, McCain says he never blamed nobody…

According to Mark Schmitt, editor of The American Prospect, the House Republicans’ rebuke of McCain and the first version of the bailout package is symptomatic of a problem much bigger for Republicans than any immediate concern:

Republican strategist Ed Rollins gave the game away on CNN: “At the end of the day, there’s a lot of people thinking about how to rebuild this party, and do we want to rebuild it with John McCain, who’s always kind of questionable on the basic facts of fiscal control, all the rest of it, immigration…”

[…]

The Republican coalition since at least Reagan has been a miraculous alliance of Wall Street and Main Street. Populist politics, such as the attack on “elites” now embodied by the enthusiasm for Gov. Sarah Palin, were the vehicle for Wall Street policies, the very policies that led to the crash. The alliance always seemed unsustainable.

Trying to straddle the factions of that “miraculous alliance” may well have proved the undoing of John McCain, according to Edward McClelland, writing at Salon:

McCain has run for the presidency twice, as two completely different candidates. His campaigns and his image have been shaped by the nasty partisanship of the late 20th and early 21st century, an era that may be remembered as the Late Culture Wars.

[…]

Writers loved McCain during his first run for the presidency, in 2000. But eight years later, they think he’s a flip-flopping hack.

McClelland’s essay comes to us in the form of a review of four books about John McCain, authored, respectively, by David Foster Wallace, Paul Begala, Cliff Schecter and Matthew Welch — and argues for occasional forays by news junkies into the erudite realm of book reviews.

Addressing more immediate matters, Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones and Tim Fernholz of TAPPED give us the low-down on two conference calls with reporters by the McCain camp.

On Wednesday, Stein detected something of a ringer on a press call with McCain surrogate Rudy Giuliani:

The second question was from someone named Chuck Pardee. Pardee asserted that Tina Fey and many reporters make their living “embellishing the facts.” After criticizing the press for treating Sarah Palin unfairly, Pardee concluded*:

“Do you think embellishing the facts is actually what the concerned voter is after? And specifically, Joe Biden seems to embellish and forget facts just to kind of impress people but when you take Sarah Palin she seems to impress others with her quick study without embellishing the facts. In other words do you think people want a straight shooter or do they want the stuff and fluff?”

[…]

Pardee, by the way, is the “founder and president” of Newsbull.com. He has donated the maximum $2,300 to McCain.

TAPPED’s Fernholz, on the next day’s called, reported a new “aggressiveness” on the part of the campaign:

But McCain political director Mike Duhaime and senior adviser Greg Strimple aren’t worried, because they’re aggressive — in fact, everyone’s aggressive. The word came up about 50 times in the call, used to describe everything from Obama’s liberalism to President Bush! (Amateur psychologists, make of it what you will.) They also promised an aggressive last 30 days, which is no surprise as conventional wisdom is beginning to coalesce around the idea that the McCain camp needs to/will go negative to win.

That’s because the polls continue to bode ill for McCain.

Also boding ill for McCain was an ad by Brave New PAC and Democracy for America that was airing on MSNBC, before Fox’s Bill O’Reilly started slamming the rival network about it. The ad raises questions on the state of McCain’s health, which some viewers found offensive.

In other health-related campaign news, Doug Cunningham of Workers Independent News reports that the AFL-CIO is targeting voters in battleground states with a leafletting campaign challenging McCain’s health plan.

And so concludes another wild week in campaignland.

–Adele M. Stan

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting
about John McCain. Visit JohnMccain.NewsLadder.net
for a complete list of articles on McCain. And for the best progressive reporting on two
critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.

JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and CommonSense NMS. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

See more tagged with: A. Serwer, Barack Obama, David Corn, Don Hazen, Grist, Gwen Ifill, Joe Biden, John McCain, Jonathan Stein, Mark Schmitt, Mother Jones, Political Animal, Robin Morgan, Salon, Sarah Palin, Steve Benen, TAPPED, The American Prospect, Tim Fernholz, vice presidential debate and Washington Monthly

Palin Stays Alive; Biden Exhibits Command of Issues
McCain NewsLadder

Special Debate Edition

So Gov. Sarah Palin didn’t fall on her face in last night’s debate with Sen. Joseph Biden, her rival for the vice presidency, as so many thought that she might. And Biden, who should find himself encouraged by the snap polls that followed, avoided putting his foot in his mouth, as is occasionally his habit. This morning likely finds both John McCain and Barack Obama breathing sighs of relief. Around the liberal and progressive blogosphere, reactions were both cautious and mixed.

David Corn of Mother Jones heralded the end of “the Sarah Palin Reality TV show”:

For the past few weeks, it’s seemed as if Sarah Palin has been a contestant in the ultimate version of the reality show America’s Toughest Jobs. She passed the first challenge: give a Big Speech. She did fine on the next one: hit the campaign trail. She royally screwed up the third challenge: give a Big Interview. Then came the most difficult one: hold your own in a Big Debate. And she did.

At the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, Steve Benen was unimpressed either way:

My initial reaction was that this debate will probably make no difference whatsoever. Biden was obviously sharper and more knowledgeable. Palin had obviously memorized a series of talking points she repeated over and over again.

Who won? For viewers who checked their heads at the door, I guess it was a toss-up. For anyone who cares about susbtance, it wasn’t close. Palin justkept repeating lies and nonsense, regardless of the question, and regardless of common sense. On point after point, Biden just out-classed her. The two really didn’t belong on the same stage.

Writing from Los Angeles for New America Media, Jasmyne A. Cannick argued that, in essence, they really weren’t on the same stage:

There were three debates going on tonight. The one Gwen Ifill was moderating and the one both Senator Joe Biden and Gov. Sarah Palin came to participate in.

I wish that for just once, when I take time out of my day, a day that is busy from the moment I wipe the crust out of my eyes to the minute I fall asleep at my desk and my snoring wakes me up, that when the candidates come together to debate each other and the moderator asks them a question…they just answered it. I know, a novel idea.

As Heather Gehlert observed at AlterNet, “Many politicians have mastered the art of dodging questions,” she wrote. “What struck me about this debate was that Sarah Palin has mastered the art of something else: making you forget the question.”

Kevin Drum, blogging for Mother Jones, put it this way:

I’ll be honest: I genuinely didn’t understand about 50% of what Sarah Palin said. She pretty overtly didn’t even pretend to address a lot of [moderator Gwen] Ifill’s questions — probably because she couldn’t — and a lot of her filibustering ended up sounding like random strings of phrases from the Hockey-Mom-o-Bot 3000. This was especially true as time wore on. If nothing else, this makes it almost impossible to judge the substance of what she believes, and despite the fact that she “connects” with ordinary people, I have a feeling that an awful lot of ordinary people weren’t impressed with this.

On the other hand, A. Serwer of The American Prospect’s TAPPED blog, wasn’t so keen on those questions. “Obviously, Gwen Ifill’s biggest problem is not bias, but really bad questions, Serwer wrote . As an example, he offers, “‘Which is worse? A nuclear Iran or an unstable Pakistan?’ I’m paraphrasing, but that question is roughly equivalent to ‘would you rather be stabbed or shot?’”

And about those ordinary people Drum spoke of, Salon’s Walter Shapiro watched the debate with a group of Republican-leaning voters in Green Bay, Wisc., and his observations would bear out Drum:

Watching a debate in an intensely partisan setting can be a through-the-looking-glass experience since the verdict has been determined before the trial. But what was telling Thursday night was that the mood of the volunteers was subdued. At times it seemed like the delivery of six pizzas was a more dramatic event than the most over-hyped vice-presidential debate in history. This emotional reticence was in no way a reflection on Palin, but rather a reaction to the overly scripted debate. As Stephanie Kundert, the 26-year-old campaign manager for state Rep. Karl Van Roy, said after blogging the debate for a conservative website, “In parts, it was boring.”

The Washington Independent’s Laura McGann filed from Peanut Farm Bar & Grill, a bar in Anchorage, mixing her debate-blogging with lots of local color:

This place looks ideal. We’ve got nine full-size projector screens with Fox News on and six flat screens also tuned into Fox.

I’d expect an interesting crowd, as Gov. Sarah Palin’s sister watched Palin give her famous Republican convention speech here…two people just sat down at the table next to me wearing T-shirts featuring Sarah Palin riding a polar bear in front of the Washington Capitol Building.

AlterNet’s Don Hazen filed from the other end of the world (or so it seems) — a room filled with artists in New York’s Chelsea neighborhood. There he found his compatriots about as reticent to claim a victory for Biden as the Green Bay Republicans were to declare one for Palin:

[T]here was a separate, contrary undercurrent in the room and in follow-up interviews. It was a disquiet, which I shared with half a dozen people I spoke with. Call us the working class sympathizers. Maybe because of our roots, or work as artists, we are more tuned in to the reality where form can often take precedence over substance.

One actress, who has been doing some speaking for Obama in Pennsylvania offered that Palin scared her: “She was slick, she had her role down; she is going to appeal to people more than we think.” An artist, with roots in working class Philly was clearly disturbed: “Pallin hung in there; it pissed me off. I think for some voters, it is not what she says, but how she says it, and she had the language thing down. People in this room may dismiss it, but to some people, she sounds real and authentic, and that will help her.”

Because of the ideosyncratic nature of this debate — no steering the candidates back to the questions they strayed from answering — much of the critique hung on style rather than substance: Palin stared at the camera, Biden addressed the moderator; Palin asked to call Biden by his first name, then never did; Biden cried when talking about caring for his sons when they were in critical condition. However, substance there was, such as when Palin let it drop that she thought the Constitution conferred upon the office of the Vice Presidency powers that have yet to be exercised, an assertion that even mainstream media commentators found somewhat astonishing. Liveblogging from Anchorage, McGann wrote: “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Which branch????”

Both candidates claimed to be great fans of Israel, and there was an exchange on whether the Global War on Terrorism was centered in Iraq or on the Afghan/Pakistan border.

TAPPED’s Serwer observed, “Palin’s best moment so far was calling Biden out on trying to have it both ways on the war. She’s absolutely right that he was engaging in Washington speak, not that platitudes topped by nonsense and gibberish are much better.”

At Grist, Kate Sheppard assessed the candidates’ response to questions on energy and the environment, and discovered some Biden doublespeak:

Biden made other remarks sure to perk up the ears of Grist readers, especially his assertion that “I have always supported [clean coal], and that’s a fact” — a much stronger pronouncement than his previous statements on the subject. He added, “By investing in clean coal and safe nuclear … we can create new jobs,” and later in the debate repeated, “My record for 25 years has been supporting clean coal.”

Even as recently last week, Biden said “We’re not supporting ‘clean coal.’” And last year, in an interview with Grist, he said, “I don’t think there’s much of a role for clean coal in energy independence.” He’s always said, however, that he thinks that “clean coal” technology should be exported to China, which he repeated tonight: “China is building one to three new coal-fired plants burning dirty coal per week. It’s polluting not only the atmosphere but the West Coast of the United States. We should export the technology by investing in clean coal technology.”

Blogging for The Nation, Ari Melber saw a bit more substance than some of his colleagues in the progressive blogosphere, but that didn’t stop him from culling video clips of some of the less substantive moments. “Thursday’s vice presidential debate was a serious and substantive affair,” he wrote. “With superb moderating by Gwen Ifill, the conversation stuck to policy-driven sparring, but the footage is already taking a different shape on YouTube.” Click here to see Melber’s spicey moments.

Greg Sargent of TPM Election Central was among the first to share with us the results of the CBS snap poll that showed Biden the clear winner of the debate:

The first round of snap polls give the debate to Joe Biden, by sizable margins.

CBS polled 473 uncommitted debate-watchers, and found that 46% say Biden won, 21% say Palin won, and 33% say it was a tie.

While both candidates saw their images improve, 98% saw Biden as “knowledgeable” after the debate, while only 66% saw Palin as knowledgeable, an admittedly high number, given what folks thought of her before tonight.

[…]

It’s not wise to put too much stock in snap polls. But if this bears out, it’ll confirm our earlier argument: Palin’s disastrous interviews raised expectations for her tonight, in the sense that the pressure on her to prove she’s ready for the job was even higher than it otherwise might have been. And she didn’t prove it, at least according to these early numbers.

Writing at his eponymous blog, Ezra Klein of The American Prospect concluded:

At the end of the day, it wasn’t about expectations. Palin surpassed hers. Shattered them, in fact. The stumbling, tongue-tied, intellectually uncertain novice who withered before Katie Couric’s steady questioning was absent this evening. Palin was confident, on-message, and at times, sharp. But it didn’t matter. The polls were clear… Like McCain before her, Palin performed at the top of her game, and it wasn’t enough.

Whether or not that will matter, well, we’ll know in about a month.

–Adele M. Stan

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting
about John McCain. Visit JohnMccain.NewsLadder.net
for a complete list of articles on McCain. And for the best progressive reporting on two
critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.

JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and CommonSense NMS. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

See more tagged with: Barack Obama, Joe Biden, John McCain, Sarah Palin and vice presidential debate

The Debate: Nobody Wins Big
McCain NewsLadder

Special Debate Edition

Taking a glance at the liveblogging and instant analysis by progressive media outlets of the first presidential debate in Oxford, Miss., one thing stands out: none of our bloggers saw a knockout victory overall, though both Sen. John McCain and Sen. Barack Obama each individually scored points on specific questions.

As David Corn of Mother Jones explains it:

In talking policy, both men came across as knowledgeable. McCain truly perked up when he got the chance to discuss the strategic importance (as he sees it) of the Caucasus region. Obama demonstrated confidence in his ability to challenge McCain on the strategic importance of the Iraq war. But, indubitably, many viewers of the debate would score these exchanges in accordance with their preexisting opinions of the two candidates. As for those knotty undecideds, there was no specific assertion that an analyst could point to and say, “This is going to stir them.”

After a lengthy opening discussion of the economic meltdown, the debate stayed true, for the most part, to its stated focus, foreign policy, which brought Iraq back to the campaign stage. John Nichols of The Nation summed it up like this:

A blistering economic crisis may be the all-encompassing issue of the moment. But the war in Iraq still defines the difference between John McCain and Barack Obama.

The Washington Independent’s Ari Melber, writing from the scene, thought it played to Obama’s advantage:

Sen. Barack Obama laced directly into Sen. John McCain during the first presidential debate on Friday, repeatedly telling McCain “you were wrong” on the key foreign policy issues facing the U.S. Obama blasted McCain for supporting President Bush’s “failed” policies against Iraq and Al Qaeda, tweaked Republicans for failing to catch Osama bin Laden, and chastised McCain for saying the U.S. could “muddle through” in Afghanistan. Obama’s tone was mostly cool and wonkish, but his sparring was more aggressive than his performance during the Democratic primary debates.

Tim Fernholz of TAPPED begs to differ:

On Iraq, it seemed that McCain got the better of Obama because the Democratic nominee failed to present some of his best arguments about the future of Iraq, instead choosing to focus on his correct judgment call at the start of the war.

Among the points Obama should have raised, wrote Fernholz, was the fact that Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki supports Obama’s timetable for withdrawal.

In the debate’s second half, McCain claimed that prior to the coup d’etat executed by Pakistan’s former Gen. and President Pervez Musharraf, Pakistan was “a failed state.” That was a new one on a lot of commentators — unless what one means by “a failed state” is a democratically elected government prone to corruption, criteria one can now imagine our enemies employing to describe the U.S. as “failed” as well. Obama let this one slide.

At the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, Hilzoy found others:

Obama, I thought, missed a few opportunities. The most important, I thought, was when McCain said he would never repeat the mistake of abandoning Afghanistan. The response “But John, you did: back in 2003, when you voted to take our focus away from Afghanistan in order to wage a war of choice against a country that had not attacked us” was just begging and pleading to be made. He was also, I thought, a bit tense.

Ezra Klein, whose blog lives on the site of The American Prospect, thought Obama got in a good one when Obama challenged McCain on the latter’s comments, first reported on TPM, to a Miami radio interviewer, where McCain said he might not meet with Spain’s President Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, whose country is a NATO ally. Klein cites CNN commentator Bill Schneider saying that McCain simply misspoke during that interview, then reassesses:

Here’s McCain’s foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann: “The questioner asked several times about Senator McCain’s willingness to meet Zapatero (and id’d him in the question so there is no doubt Senator McCain knew exactly to whom the question referred). Senator McCain refused to commit to a White House meeting with President Zapatero in this interview.” I agree that McCain misspoke. But then his adviser turned his verbal slip into official policy. That’s actually worse.

Grist’s David Roberts and Kate Sheppard took on the task of fact-checking the candidates’ assertions about energy policy. Here’s Roberts:

McCain just nailed Obama on the 2005 energy bill, using it as an example of Obama’s support for excess pork spending.

Ouch. Thing is, McCain didn’t really vote against the bill because it had pork in it. But Obama did vote for it because of the pork for ethanol and renewable energy. It’s a legitimate point, and it drew blood.

Sheppard looked at their big-picture energy positions, writing, “Obama said that … ‘we can’t drill our way out of the problem.’”

Obama said that our plan should include “wind, solar, yes, nuclear, clean-coal” and hit on McCain for voting against renewables numerous times over his 26 years in office. He also noted that these energy sources “deal with the issue of climate change which is so important.”

[…]

McCain also argued that one of the solutions to energy concerns should be more drilling: “Offshore drilling is also something that’s very important, but it’s a bridge … it will help temporarily help relieve our energy problems.” But economists, the Energy Information Administration, and the American Petroleum Institute all say that any effects are at least 10 years out. That’s one long bridge.

Oh, yeah, and in case you haven’t heard, John McCain has not been elected Miss Congeniality in the Senate, he thinks Barack Obama doesn’t understand anything, he could not manage to look at Barack Obama once during the debate, and Barack Obama “absolutely agree[d] with John” a few times.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about John McCain. Visit JohnMccain.NewsLadder.net
for a complete list of articles on McCain. And for the best progressive reporting on two critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.

JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and CommonSense NMS. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

See more tagged with: John McCain, John McCain NewsLadder and NewsLadder

If You’re Losing the Game, Choose a Different Game
McCain NewsLadder

In another wild week in American politics, Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain began the week on the losing end of public opinion polls, unscripted comments by his surrogates, more reports of his links to lobbyists and a tanking economy branded, in voters’ minds, with the GOP logo. And looming not far in the background was the specter of tonight’s debate in Oxford, Miss., scheduled to be McCain’s first direct confrontation with Democratic nominee Sen. Barack Obama.

Examining a tide of factors moving against him, McCain did on Wednesday what he had done successfully the last time trends moved against him: he found a game-changer — not one to merely change the existing game, but rather to create a new game altogether into which he could drag his opponent. Claiming to suspend his campaign, he would ride into the Capitol Building on his white horse, save the nation from economic devastation and and sacrifice the opportunity to confront his opponent face to face in the first presidential debate, urging Democratic nominee to follow on.

It helps to remember what McCain faced on Monday: a New Washington Post/ABC News poll that showed Americans favored Obama over McCain by 14 points as best suited to deal with an economy that is, by nearly all estimates, teetering on the brink of catastrophe, thanks largely to the craze for deregulation led by Republicans in Congress over the course of the last eight years. In a series of articles, the New York Times outlined payments made by the disgraced mortgage enterprises FannieMae and Freddie Mac to the firm owned by McCain’s own campaign manager, Rick Davis.

By Wednesday, more bad news was on its way; an interview by CBS News anchor Katie Couric with Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain’s vice presidential nominee, had gone terribly wrong and video had surfaced of a prayer ceremony showing Palin receiving the hands-on blessing of a witch-hunting preacher during the Alaska gubernatorial race.

Palin’s performance on CBS was so appalling that it led Salon’s Glenn Greenwald to correct his own prediction of Palin’s formidability.

[S]he is either (a) completely ignorant about the most basic political issues — a vacant, ill-informed, incurious know-nothing, or (b) aggressively concealing her actual beliefs about these matters because she’s petrified of deviating from the simple-minded campaign talking points she’s been fed and/or because her actual beliefs are so politically unpalatable, even when taking into account the right-wing extremism that is permitted, even rewarded, in our mainstream. I’m not really sure which is worse, but it doesn’t really matter, because with 40 days left before the election, both options are heinous.

Late last week, The Nation’s John Nichols reported from Alaska that the Alaska state government seemed to have fallen into the hands of the McCain campaign, as campaign advisers sought to effectively shut down the legislature’s investigation of the scandal dubbed Troopergate — Palin’s firing of her chief public safety officer.

And, New America Media’s Earl Ofari Hutchinson reports word was leaking out of Alaska of an April meeting between Palin and 14 black leaders in Alaska at which, alleges Alaska African-American Historical Society President Gwen Alexander, Palin said that, as governor, she didn’t have to hire blacks, and had no plans to do so. Palin spokesperson Sharon Leighow disputed the charge, telling Hutchinson “that Palin did not hire staff persons based on color, but solely on talent and skill.” Hutchinson here quotes Leighgow directly: “Governor Palin is totally color-blind.”

Color-blind, protected from witches and stumped when quizzed on McCain’s record on regulation and her own on Russia, Palin was on the verge of being a two-time game-changer (good change, bad change) when McCain decided that game wasn’t working for him anymore. Though the debate was meant to focus on foreign policy — said to be McCain’s strong suit — questions about the economy were sure to arise. Time for a new game.

Before McCain set foot back in the nation’s capital, reports Greg Sargent of TPM Election Central, Senate Majority Leader asked him not to inject presidential politics into the negotiations under way for a deal to save a raft of financial institutions with hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. Early on Wednesday, the Democratic chairmen and Republican ranking members of the House Financial Services Committee and the Senate Banking Committee announced they had arrived at an agreement that boded well for a legislative deal. Then McCain arrived, and the deal was off when House Republicans suddenly balked.

Salon’s Joan Walsh questioned the wisdom of McCain’s tactics for the sake of his own campaign.

Clearly McCain’s gambit is political, but I think it’s bad politics. I actually think a foreign-policy debate was the only hope McCain had for taking back momentum after a week in which his lifelong devotion to corporate deregulation caught up with him… it would have…provided McCain with an opportunity to taunt Obama about his opposition to the so-called surge in Iraq, and to change the subject generally — and that could potentially be good news for McCain.

Perhaps McCain reads Walsh, because today came word that he was going back on his original word that he would not debate tonight unless there was a deal on the billions-bailout. (Word!) But that came only after McCain told the cameras after yesterday’s meeting at the White House with President Bush, Barack Obama, and a host of other luminaries that the package needed some work.

Or perhaps McCain never expected Obama to call his bluff, which the Democrat apparently did when, even in the absence of a deal, he flew to Mississippi today for the debate.

Unless he aces tonight’s debate, McCain may find he succeeded in creating only a momentary diversion from his troubles. More lobbyist questions have arisen. Despite McCain’s promise to deliver Washington from the clutches of lobbyists, the numbers of lobbyists associated with his campaign are legend. David Corn of Mother Jones this week broke the story of Wayne Berman and James Jay Baker, “two prominent [McCain campaign] supporters” who, according to Corn, “are lobbyists for the National Rifle Association” which “recently began airing harsh attack-ads against Barack Obama.” Their activities seem to break the McCain campaign’s own rules.

At the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog, Steve Benen comments that revelations of the relationship between McCain transition team leader William Timmons, Sr., and Freddie Mac — one of the companies whose near-failure sent markets spiraling downward — seems troublesome, at best. Timmons “earned more than a quarter of a million dollars this year representing Freddie Mac,” Benen writes.

John McCain personally spent most of last week railing against Barack Obama’s associations with former Fannie Mae officials were extremely important, worthy of attack ads and overheated speeches. At one point, about a week ago, McCain told CBS, “[T]he influence that Fannie and Freddie had in the inside-the-beltway, old-boy network, which led to this kind of corruption is unacceptable.”

As it turns out, though, Americans may not be as worried about the global financial meltdown as politicians seem to think. Mother Jones’s Jonathan Stein decided to see how the term “financial crisis” fared among terms on which people conducted Google searches. (See graph in Stein’s post.) “Turns out ‘wizards’, ‘cupcakes’, and ’sex toys’ retain their popularity in times of national emergency,” Stein writes. All outpaced the less alluring “financial crisis.”

Which means, the week could end up being a bust for McCain. If trends in his home state are any clue, he may not have much pull there, either. Writing in Salon, Mike Madden, conceding that McCain will win Arizona’s electoral college votes, writes:

Despite McCain, Democrats in Arizona are very much looking forward to the elections. Come November, McCain will almost certainly win his home state — but he may find he doesn’t bring a lot of Republicans to victory along with him. Instead, Democrats look likely to pick up a House seat, hold on to two others they won in 2006, and at least challenge — if not overturn — Republican control of the state Legislature.

This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about John McCain. Visit JohnMccain.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on McCain. And for the best progressive reporting on two critical issues, check out Immigration.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net.

JohnMcCain.NewsLadder.net is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and CommonSense NMS. Adele M. Stan is executive editor of The Media Consortium’s syndicated reporting project.

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John McCain’s Very Tough Week
McCain NewsLadder

It’s been a tough week for a lot of people, what with the global financial crisis and everything, and the Republican presidential nominee is feeling the heat.

The week kicked off with a New York Times/CBS News poll showing that the Democratic nominee had pulled ahead of Sen. John McCain for the first time since the latter had named the photogenic and iconoclastic Sarah Palin as his running mate. The margin claimed by Sen. Barack Obama may be small — 48 percent of registered voters saying they would vote for him, compared to McCain’s 43 percent — but the trend is in his favor.

Beginning with the news of the meltdown on Wall Street, the McCain campaign became a bit of a gaffe machine, with the presidential candidate telling the nation on Monday that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” — words that echoed those used by President Herbert Hoover to try to reassure a freaked-out public that was running on the banks in 1929. (Hoover’s denial about the economy led to the election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932.)

When the Democratic nominee seized upon McCain’s remarks, the Republican found a novel way to dial back. “Senator, what economy are you talking about?” asked Obama, to which McCain replied that by “fundamentals” he meant American workers, and that by suggesting that the fundamentals of the economy were not strong, Obama must mean that American workers were weak. Yeah, believe that one, and I’ve got a bridge in Brooklyn I’d like to sell you — a Bridge to Nowheresville, formerly known as the financial district of downtown Manhattan.

And speaking of bridges to nowhere, McCain running mate Sarah Palin continued to insist
that she was a pork-fighting refusenik on that very project, even though the record shows
that she supported that multimillion-dollar boondoggle of the ethically challenged Sen.
Ted Stevens before she was against it. In fact, reports David Morris of AlterNet, Alaska is awash in government pork-barrel money:

And when it comes to government pork, Alaska is king. As USA Today noted back in March, Palin’s state ranks number one — no other state is even close. In 2007 Alaska received some 2.5 times as much as runner-up Hawaii and 15 times more than the national average.Alaska has by far the most state government employees per capita as any other state and about five times as many as Obama’s Illinois.

The gaffes continued when Palin seemed to place herself ahead of McCain on the GOP ticket, referring to a potential “Palin and McCain” administration. (The Raw Story has the video.)

However, the deflation of the Palin bubble as shown by the polls could have one upside for McCain: he may find himself less insulted by crowds who come to hear Palin and then split five minutes into McCain’s speech, prompting the Washington Monthly’s Steve Benen to ask, who’s the celebrity now?

But let’s not divert ourselves from the fun of gaffe laughs. What McCain operatives
surely expected to be one bright spot blew out the bulb. The defection of former Hillary
Clinton donor Lynn Forester de Rothschild (yes, of those Rothschilds) to the McCain camp, reported by John Byrne of The Raw Story, went terribly awry when she referred to embittered gun owners and religionists by an epithet, saying that Obama was an elitist because he dissed “[t]he people out, you know, who are the rednecks or whoever…” One imagines her playing long games of canasta off-camera with Carly Fiorina, the McCain campaign operative and former Hewlett-Packard CEO who said that neither John McCain nor Barack Obama was equipped to run a large company.

Midway through the week came word, via TPM Election Central, that McCain had given an interview to a Spanish-language radio outlet in Florida in which he appeared not to know that Spain was in the Western hemisphere. He also refused to say that he would welcome a meeting with Spanish Prime Minister José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who leads a nation that is an important NATO ally with a large economy.

Jonathan Stein of Mother Jones begs mercy on McCain’s behalf. The problem isn’t that McCain didn’t know who Zapatero is or the hemispheric location of Spain; it’s that he had a hard time understanding the interviewer because he’s old. I’m sure the McCain camp will pick up that line and run with it.

In truth, McCain did look a little cranky, especially when he called for the firing of Christopher Cox, chairman of the Security and Exchange Commission, blaming the former California congressman and fellow Republican for the Wall Street failures that set off Monday’s stock-market crash. Really, all Cox did was enforce the anti-regulatory policies of the Bush administration, which McCain was for until he turned against them — last week.

All the crankiness and confusion led Steve Benen to draw a comparison between Bob Dole as the 1996 GOP nominee, and John McCain:

The McCain campaign no doubt hopes to avoid the Dole comparisons, but the parallels are pretty obvious — both were quite old during their campaigns, both were seriously injured during service in a war, both ran for president more than once, both have well-known nasty streaks, both are long-time Washington insiders, and both launched campaigns because they thought it was “their turn” to be president. …if the Dole=McCain meme catches on, it would be very unhelpful to the Republican ticket.

To which one of Benen’s commenters replied: “It beats being compared to Hoover.”

Which may be why McCain has suddenly fallen in love with the New Deal, even though the
centerpiece of Roosevelt’s economic rescue plan was Social Security, which McCain has called a “national disgrace.” The Democratic National Committee responded to McCain’s sudden New Deal romance with a video hosted by James Roosevelt, Jr., grandson of Franklin and Eleanor, which Mother Jones‘ Josh Harkinson walks us through.

The revolution may not be televised, but the anti-change disinformation campaign surely is. This week found the McCain campaign defending two untrue charges: that Obama would raise taxes on “ordinary Americans” and that he used as an adviser the disgraced former chairman of Fannie Mae, Franklin Raines.

On the Time magazine blog, Swampland, Karen Tumulty calls the Raines charge a subtle form of race-baiting. Raines is African-American, and it’s in the McCain campaign’s interest to link Obama to figures who feed racial stereotypes.

Then there’s the taxes bugaboo. Despite consistent debunking of his ads that claim Barack Obama will raise your taxes, McCain continues to make that claim and, despite the absence of truth in it, it’s having an effect.

Lagan Sebert of the American News Project took his camera crew to Winchester, Virginia, a working-class town in a pivotal state, to talk to the locals about Obama and taxes. About half of the people he talked to insisted that Obama was out to raise their taxes, bearing out polls taken in other swing states, like this one in New Jersey. “Republicans seem to be scoring points with their attacks on the Obama tax plan,” said Clay F. Richards, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute.

It’s all in the messaging, says Joan Walsh of Salon.com:

So I was feeling like Obama had new wind at his back politically — until I saw the two ads Obama and McCain released on Wednesday. Wow. McCain, who has absolutely zero plans for solving this problem, depicts himself as a tough guy and a fighter who’ll vanquish the bad guy. It’s a 30-second spot, edited to make McCain look like an action figure. Obama, by contrast, produced a two-minute ad — when what he needs is a two-sentence ad.

Of course, the messaging is easier if you just don’t tell the truth. For instance, reports AlterNet’s Joshua Holland, despite McCain’s insistence that his health care plan will make coverage available to all Americas, the McCain plan will actually remove the regulatory limits that keep sick people from being priced of the market.

Between all the fibbing and flip-flopping, you’d think the McCain camp had enough going on to keep itself busy without taking on the running of an entire state. But that’s what The Nation’s John Nichols finds in Anchorage: the McCain campaign has all but taken over the running of the Alaska state government as the Troopergate investigation of Sarah Palin grinds to a halt, thanks to the refusal of First Dude Todd Palin, speaking through the McCain campaign, to comply with a subpoena to testify before the the Alaska state legislature. “[A]ides to the governor are no longer answering questions about state business,” Nichols reports. “They are directing calls to McCain campaign operatives, who have flooded into then state…,” prompting the Anchorage Daily News to headline an editorial, “Abdication by Palin: When did the McCain campaign take over the governor’s office?”

Seems the campaign has also gotten its hands into the government of yet another state: the hotly contested Wisconsin, where McCain campaign co-chair and Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen has filed a lawsuit demanding that “the state Government Accountability Board order election clerks to confirm the identities of potentially tens of thousands of voters — and possibly many more — who have registered since Jan. 1, 2006,” according to the AP. The work would have to be completed by Nov. 4 — a nearly impossible task. Should Van Hollen win, great numbers of voters could be left out in the cold. The Chelsea Green blog looks at this and similar election protection problems in other states. Starting next week, The Media Consortium’s Live From Main Street series will feature an investigation week focused on election protection.

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Race and the Religious Right: More Than Just Waffles

WASHINGTON, D.C. — At the annual gathering of the Christian right sponsored by the political arm of the Family Research Council, the Republican Party’s top emissaries have come in past years to bow before some 2000 right-wing foot-soldiers and the leaders who command them. However, this year’s Value Voter Summit, a bit light on GOP dignitaries, made less news in its speaker line-up than it did for the sale of a particular brand of breakfast food: Obama Waffles.

In the far corner of the exhibit hall at the Values Voter Summit two gonzo entrepreneurs hawked a product they described as “political satire”: a box of waffle mix emblazoned with a cartoon image of a bug-eyed, toothy, dark-lipped Barack Obama eyeing a plate of waffles. A pat of butter on the waffles is stamped “2008″. On the top flap, the Obama carton appears in a turban, next to an arrow printed with the text: “Point box toward Mecca for tastier waffles.” The box of mix is a crude send-up of Aunt Jemima’s Pancake Mix, which once featured a stereotyped image of a round-faced, turbaned black woman as its trademark.

Although FRC Action claimed in a statement to have demanded that the exhibitors dismantle their display “when the content of the materials was brought to the attention of FRC Action senior officials” on Saturday, the truth is that by the time Obama Waffles creators W. Mark Whitlock and Bob DeMoss began breaking down their display, the conference was winding down and most exhibitors in the hall had already pulled out of Dodge.

I made my way through a row of unstaffed and abandoned booths on Saturday afternoon, arriving just as Whitlock was packing up unsold product. Although, according to the FRC Action statement, Whitlock and DeMoss had already received the equivalent of cease-and-desist orders from conference organizers, Whitlock, dressed in a cook’s apron and hat, was happy to take my $10 and fork over a box.

Taking FRC Action at the word of its executive director, David Nammo, a trusting reader may accept that the organization’s leaders were unaware of what Whitlock and DeMoss were hawking for two and a half days before the exhibit was shut down. But Whitlock and DeMoss are hardly strangers to leaders of the religious right, and links to racists (and, indeed, the use of dog-whistle references for racists) are hardly new for Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a spin-off of James Dobson’s Focus on the Family empire.

According to a general letter of reference written by DeMoss on behalf of Whitlock (posted by nisperos, a savvy reader at the Denver Post’s Web site), the two men met when both met while working at Focus on the Family, which Whitlock’s resume dates at “1991 - 1992″, when he served as a producer on Dobson’s “Focus on the Family” daily radio program.

The two worked together again, some years later, at FamilyLife Publishers, an endeavor of the Campus Crusade for Christ — one of the very first religious-right organizations. Whitlock’s resume shows him having worked for FamilyLIfe from 1992 - 2004. During that time he served one year on the event team putting together the religious right’s Congress on the Urban Family, which perhaps explains where the author developed an apparent affection for hip-hop music, as evidenced by the bonus “recipe rap” that appears on the side of the Obama’s Waffles box:

Barry’s Bling Bling Waffle RingYo, B-rock here droppin’ waffle knowledge
Spellin’ it out, ’cause a graduated college
Some say I waffle so fast, Barry’s causin’ whiplash
Just doin’ my part, made wafflin’ a fine art
For a waffle wit style, like Chicago’s Magnificent Mile
Spray whipped crem around the edge
Shake it first like Sister Sledge
The say wit me, I can be as waffly as I wanna be!
(That goes out to my Ludacris posse)

Whitlock recently wrote a study guide to accompany the movie “Nim’s Island,” a production of FoxFaith, a division of Rupert Murdoch’s 20th Century Fox. (Hat tip: FireDogLake’s Julia.)

DeMoss, Whitlock’s partner in the OW venture, also has some friends in high places, having served as the co-author of four books with Tim LaHaye, best known at the multi-million-selling author of the Left Behind series of novels. With LaHaye, DeMoss penned four novels targeted at young adults that include a vetted GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin on the eve of the Republican National Convention. LaHaye’s wife, Beverly, is the founder of the influential Concerned Women for America, which was an early proponent of “gay recovery” therapy designed to make heterosexuals out of LGBT people.

It is perhaps not surprising that material as racist as that peddled by Whitlock and DeMoss at the Values Voter Summit failed to set off alarm bells among Family Research Council and FRC Action leaders until reporters began inquiring about the Obama Waffles stand. FRC President Tony Perkins spoke as recently as 2001 before the Council of Conservative Citizens, a well-documented white supremacist group, and directed the 1996 Louisiana congressional campaign of former Congressman Woody Jenkins from the campaign lists of former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke. Perkins paid Duke $82,000 for the lists. Jenkins served as the first executive director of the Council for National Policy, 1982-1985, and again in 1987.

More recently, while reporting for Church & State magazine, I saw Perkins address a crowd of hard-core Christian right believers in 2007 at the Coral Ridge Presbyterian Church of the late Rev. D. James Kennedy. In his speech before those assembled in the church sanctuary at the “Reclaiming America for Christ” conference, Perkins blew the white supremacist dog whistle known as the biblical story of Phineas. (In this instance, Perkins used the Phineas story to make the case against Muslims, urging the assembled Christians to “take action” in the way of Phineas.)

“I am here advocating for Christian citizenship,” Perkins said.Lest any of the assembled miss the point, Perkins offered up the story of Phineas, grandson of Moses’ brother Aaron, from Numbers 25. Phineas was rewarded by God with an “everlasting priesthood” for killing an Israelite and his Midian lover because God had forbidden the mixing of the men of Israel with the women of that tribe.

[…]

“We read that Phineas arose and he took action…,” Perkins said.

“Not only is prayer required…,” Perkins continued. “I warn you that if you begin to pray for our nation that, at some point in time, you’re gonna be prayin’ and you’re gonna feel a tap on your shoulder and hear, ‘Son, daughter, I’ve heard your prayer; now I want you to do something about it.’”

Just in case his message should be misconstrued, however, Perkins offered this caveat: “Now, let me be clear, in case the media’s here,” he said, “I’m not advocating you go home and get a pitchfork out of your storage shed and run into your neighbor’s house.” Phineas, the Bible tells us, used a javelin.

So maybe the FRC people, as their statement suggests, did simply get sloppy and miss the fact that a product to which they say they object for its “coarseness and bias” sat, essentially, on the shelves of the conference store, for a couple of days. Maybe the co-author of one of the religious right’s top honchos went unnoticed by FRC folks, mistaken for just another yahoo hawking an amateur attempt at humor. Maybe the leaders of the Values Voter Summit have a race problem anyway.

See more tagged with: 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama, Bob DeMoss, Campus Crusade for Christ, Council for National Policy, David Nammo, Family Research Council, FamilyLife Publishers, Muslim, Obamas Waffles, Phineas, Tim LaHaye, Tony Perkins, Values Voter Summit, W. Mark Whitlock and Woody Jenkins

Huckabee Hearts Music

It was one of those adorable, bipartisan, even international moments: a Democratic congressman from Queens a former governor from Arkansas in musical collaboration, celebrating the virtues of a 17-year-old girl in a song penned by two Brits. Yesterday, at the Center for American Progress, the liberal think tank, former Gov. Mike Huckabee (bass) and Rep. Joe Crowley (guitar and vocal) rocked the tank yesterday with their version of the Beatle’s “I Saw Her Standing There” to promote the Music National Service Initiative a new national service project that uses music as the means of transforming society.

Huckabee, embracing a position that seems designed to rile his fellow social conservatives, has long been a proponent of music and arts education in the public schools. During his term as governor, Huckabee pushed through the Arkansas legislature a bill that mandated music education for every student in the state’s public schools. It’s a cure he prescribes for all of the states.

“Now, it’s going to be rare that you hear a Republican talk about mandates,” Huckabee said, “but… if we don’t force it, we don’t fund it, because there’s too many competing interests. My experience was, once we mandated that music education take place with certified teachers, we started funding it — because we had to.”

While the appearance of the Republican presidential also-ran and Baptist preacher on the stage of a liberal institution may seem a head-scratcher, CAP President John Podesta told of how he and Huckabee got to know each other during a stressful patch of a humanitarian mission to Rwanda. “It’s amazing, I think, Mike,” Podesta said, “how being a plane on a tarmac in Kigali with an engine that’s blowing out on take-off can quickly cause two men to put policy differences aside, partisan differences aside, and become fast friends.”

Huckabee was quick to explain that his advocacy for music education sprang not from some sweet impulse to beautify the culture. It’s about the economy, stupid, he explained (without the stupid part).

“We’ve got to start helping people to understand that there is a direct correlation between the power of our own economy — the power of our own future survival — and the power of stimulating creativity,” Huckabee explained. Because where will we find energy independence? It will be in the creativity that comes from students who will who, maybe, were first artists — because most of the great thinkers and inventors and scientists of the world were first musicians and artists.”

As evidence, he cited Richard Florida’s trend-setting book, The Rise of the Creative Class (Basic 2002). Interesting, as Huckabee, hardly a friend to gay people, is touting a book that cites, as a major geographical indicator of creative-class economies, the number of LGBT residents.

Huckabee has a bone to pick with the “No Child Left Behind” bill passed by Congress in 2001, but it’s not the common complaint about the law’s incentive to make educators teach math and science “to the test” rather than in creative ways. Huckabee noted that while No Child Left Behind was often blamed for the collapse of music and arts programs in poorer school districts, the problem was not with the bill, but with local administrators. The law actually mandates arts education, Huckabee said, but “[s]chools and school districts were not held accountable for the results of music and music education and arts, many schools said, ‘If we’re going to be held accountable for it, we won’t care. If we’re only going to be held accountable for math and science and reading, that’s the only thing we’ll put money into.’” (Perhaps that’s why a music-teacher friend of mine in Washington, D.C., calls the bill “No Child Left a Dime”.)

Founded by Kiff Gallagher, a singer-songwriter “who served on the White house legislative team that created AmeriCorps,” according to his bio, MNSI has won the support of Huckabee and Crowley, especially for the non-profit organization’s MusicianCorps, described by Gallagher as “a musical Peace Corps” designed to bring music education to areas and school districts where access to music lessons is not available.

Crowley, who will co-chair a Congressional Musicians’ Caucus designed to support MusicianCorps, is embracing the program for more prosaic reasons, he said. “You never hear of anyone going to war over music,” he explained. “The worst of if is the battle of the bands.”

While Crowley went all peace, love and understanding, Huckabee couldn’t resist getting in a dig. “Republicans do like the arts,” he said, “and some of us believe that Republicans can rock, too — not just Democrats — even though when we play the music, sometimes the musicians get all mad about it and demand we quit. My band played a Boston tune; Tom Schultz went berserk and demanded that we quit and we reminded him, ‘Tom, you sold the music; we paid a license fee; get over it.’” Last week, Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart demanded that the McCain campaign stop using their hit “Barracuda” to promote Sarah Palin at campaign rallies.

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Sarah Palin’s Party Loyalty

UPDATE: For a comprehensive explanation of Constitution Party theology from a scholar of right-wing movements, check out Chip Berlet’s excellent article on Talk to Action.

Unless you live in a cave, you probably know that Sarah Palin, the presumptive Republican vice presidential nominee, has a pregnant teenage daughter, an ex-brother-in-law whose supervisor she tried to fire, and you may have heard that she once belonged to a political party, the Alaska Independence Party, which sports the occasional mission of establishing Alaska as its own country. (Though McCain camp denies that report by ABC News, the network is sticking by its story about Palin’s affiliation. In addition, voter rolls show, according to TPM Muckraker, that Palin’s husband claimed membership between 1995 - 2002.) More recently, Palin sent the party a video greeting for use at its convention.

Through it all, leaders of the G.O.P. and the religious right have vowed to stick with her. But what if she supported a third party that’s bent on smashing up the Republican Party? Or one with links to militia groups? Would she still look like your garden-variety church lady to the Republican Party pooh-bahs?

Indeed, it does seem to be the case that Sarah Palin is out there on the fringe. Fred Clarkson of Talk To Action today reported the connection between the Alaska Independence Party and the Constitution Party founded and led by Howard Phillips. Basically, the AIP is the Constitution Party — its Alaska state-level party. In 1996, Phillips tried to lure insurgent presidential candidate Pat Buchanan out of the G.O.P. for a run on the slate of his national party (then called the U.S. Taxpayers Party) and nearly succeeded in doing so.

I first became familiar with Howard Phillips in 1995, in the course of reporting a story on the religious right for Mother Jones. In a 45-minute telephone interview, Phillips laid out for me the strategy and rationale behind his party, whose ideological basis is found in the tenets of Christian Reconstructionism, a theology that calls for biblical law to be implemented as the law of the land. (Yes, that means death for adulterers and “homosexuals”.)

But he’s not an impractical man. Here’s how Phillips saw the fortunes of his party taking shape in 1996, per our conversation:

What I think is going to happen is that we’re probably not going to elect an independent president in ‘96, but ‘96 is going to reveal some fissures within support for the major parties, and I think we’ll have an independent president by the end of the decade. The reason I say that is that i see an enormous financial crisis coming. When you have a $5 trillion debt, every time interest rates go up by a single percentage point, the cost of debt service goes up by $15 billion. And we’ve been able to keep interest rates down for a long time — one of the reasons was that people wanted dollars. They don’t want dollars anymore…And that is going to lead, in my view, to an hyper-inflationary depression in the United States which is going to terminally undermine confidence in whomever controls the presidency when it hits — and, to a lesser extent, in the other party, as well. I think the whole purpose of ‘96 is to position for that crisis and to be able to pick up the pieces when it’s over.

The Constitution Party has long been linked to anti-abortion groups that threaten violence, such as Missionaries to the Pre-Born, a sort of militia organization. Randall Terry, the former leader of Operation Rescue, has organized for the party and run for Congress on its ticket. When I interviewed Phillips 13 years ago, I asked him about alleged links between his party and militia groups, which he denied.

“We are not involved in the killing business,” he said. “Planned Parenthood is Murder Incorporated…That’s not our schtick.”

Phillips’ anti-choice rhetoric is often harsh, and his position — which echoes that of the Constitution Party — is uncompromising: No abortions, no exceptions. Here is how he stated it at an Operation Rescue rally in San Diego in 1996: Exceptions for rape and incest, he said, mean it’s “okay to kill some babies if they’re born to the wrong parents — if their dad was a rapist or a close relative.”

If Palin makes it into the West Wing, would she be Howard Phillips’ ringer, awaiting that fateful day?

Okay, so that’s a bit much. But, as Max Blumenthal reports, leaders of the Council for National Policy, the secretive uber-right-wing umbrella group (of which Phillips is a member), went ga-ga for Palin, and may have pushed McCain to pick her in exchange for their support.

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