john mccain

McCain: He’s More Than a Character in Top Gun

Some people are making fun of John McCain for claiming that he never considered himself a maverick. Little do they know that de-mavericking yourself is the ultimate maverick move. The maverick is back!

McCain is playing 3D maverick chess while his opponents are playing checkers. At least, he would if he played 3D chess, but he doesn’t, cause chess has rules and mavericks don’t play by the rules. So if you do play chess with McCain, there’s a good chance he’s going to flip the board over five minutes in the game and yell something along the line of “I’m a maverick! I don’t play by the rules! Includeing grammar rules! Crazy I pants am not wearing boo-yah!”

Maverick!

What I Love About The Campaign

1. All of the Internet videos. Baracky. Barackula. The Wassup video. The Obama\McCain dance off. (This MC Yogi video is good too). 

2. That Obama and McCain are insulting each other by comparing each other to President Bush. It is especially hilarious when McCain does it. “I’m not like Bush. You’re like Bush.” President Bush can’t even do public appearances anymore in fear that he’ll hurt Republicans’ chances. It’s like he has cooties.

Today, Cheney endorsed McCain, and it was the Obama campaign who was forwarding the video to the press. Today, Obama ribbed McCain about the endorsement in a speech. The McCain campaign’s response?

“Barack Obama and Dick Cheney aren’t just cousins, they’ve shared support for the Bush energy policy and the out-of-control spending that John McCain has fought to oppose.” (ABC News)

President Bush doesn’t realize the power of his suckiness. Bush sucks so much that he could probably tip the election to McCain by endorsing Obama. Follow Obama around to all his events. Wiggle past security and try to give him a bear hug. Yell “WHY DID YOU STOP CALLING?” during speeches. (Update: The Obama campaign just made a national ad featuring Cheney’s endorsement. HA HA HA HA.)

3. That every time McCain starts to get his hopes up, one of three things happen. He shoots himself in the foot (“The fundamentals of the economy is strong”, picking Palin, suspending his campaign). Obama does something to squish his momentim (the Powell endorsement, Obama’s infomerical). The world conspires to ensure he won’t be President (the financial crisis blowing up in September). This campaign is making me question my atheism.

4.  Having a candidate that I can back 100%. I feel like we’re sneaking in an egghead into office, someone who’s smart, pragmatic, and cares about good policy. The type of candidate that usually doesn’t even make it out of the primary, much less have a good shot to win the general election.

5. That my vote counted for something in the primary, even in DC. The proportional delegate system meant that win margins counted, and Clinton and Obama were still neck and neck by the Potomac Primary on Feb. 12.  It was the string of blowout victories in February that put Obama ahead for good in the delegate count. Clinton never expected the race to go that long, and got out-organized.

6. John McCain. Seriously. That man needs to be a TV executive. Think of what he has brought to the campaign. Plot twists. Drama. Surprise guests. If it were up to “No Drama” Obama, we’d be bored stiff by now.

I don’t want McCain to be President, but I want the old man to run again in 2012, 2016, and 2020. If he’s this much fun now, think of how crazy he’ll be when he’s senile? He’s going to be sticking an American flag in his poop and throwing it at his running mate by 2016. If we’re lucky, poop with an American flag in it will be his running mate.

7. That Obama is in the lead. Feels good for once.

Move over, Edward Murrow

The View and David Letterman: asking the tough questions professional reporters are afraid to raise.

No, I am unfortunately not being sarcastic.

Debate #3: Non-live live blogging

I watched the debate. General thoughts first:

1. It felt like a draw to me, which helps Obama. McCain was more aggressive in this debate than the past two, but Obama did a great job rebutting him. I won’t argue with anyone who gives McCain or Obama a slight edge tactically, but focusing on tactics exclusively misses the point.

For most of this election, the McCain campaign has been overly focused on tactics, things like winning the daily news cycle and scoring debate points. The Obama campaign has been focused on strategy, long term issues such as repeating a consistent message, appearing presidential and reassuring swing voters that he is a sound choice.

It is frustrating for Obama fans who want him to attack McCain during these debates, but things like being courteous while disagreeing, and occasionally saying “I agree with John on that point” helps Obama in the long term. It makes him look calm and self-confident, traits people look for in leaders.

McCain interrupted Obama several times during the debate, and even the moderator once. Did it make McCain look tough by interrupting so often? Perhaps. But it didn’t make him look presidential.

2. Bob Schieffer did a better job than I expected. Not as good as Jim Lehrer, but better than Brokaw and Ifill.

3. I took a lot of notes the first half-hour, some the second half, and almost no notes the third half. I wonder if people’s interest level followed mine.

9:02 Oooh! Chairs. What a twist.

9:03 McCain: Which person in the hospital should I mention this debate? Dick Cheney? Too unpopular. Ted Kennedy? Already mentioned him. Oh, I know: Nancy Reagan!

9:04 McCain: People are angry. I understand that. And here is the source of all your troubles: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

9:04 Shorter McCain: I’m going to repeat what Obama said in the 1st and 2nd debates because it seemed to work for him.

9:05 Shorter Obama: I’m going to repeat what I said in the 1st and 2nd debates because it seemed to work for me.

9:09 Obama: I call your plumber, and raise you a firefighter, nurse, and a teacher.

9:11 Note to McCain: “Joe the Plumber” is not a magic mantra that automatically convinces people you care about the middle class.

9:13 McCain has interrupted Obama a couple of times. He is coming off as rude.

9:17 McCain: I’m going to use a hatched, then a scalpel. John, do you know what a hatchet is?

9:23 Obama: “Even FOX News disputes it.” HA!

9:24 McCain: President Bush? I hate President Bush. If I weren’t against torture, I would personally waterboard him.

9:26 Part of McCain strategy is to toss out 10 lies in one response, knowing Obama only has time to swat five of them down in his response.

9:35 I have NO idea what McCain is talking about. He’s stumbling on some of his words and rambling a bit.

9:39 McCain: My campaign is about the economy.
Obama: [laughs]

9:59 John McCain LOVES Joe the Plumber.

10:01 Obama’s response was so good that McCain looked like he was about to cry.

10:03 Joe the Plumber is feeling very self-conscious right about now from McCain’s attention. He better hope he doesn’t have a hot wife.

10:15 McCain: I will adopt all unwanted children in America. I have eight houses. I have the room.

Last Debate…

1. A lot of pundits are saying McCain needs to handily beat Obama tonight to change the race around. McCain dones’t need to beat Obama to change the race. He needs to eat Obama. Literally (to quote Joe Biden). He needs to enter into a Hulk-like rage and then take a page from the Norse hero Sigurd and eat Obama’s heart.

2. I have low expectations for the debate moderator, Bob Schieffer. I saw him speak at the Library of Congress Book Fair a few weeks ago, and he had a “Golly gee, isn’t this race amazing?” attitude about the Presidential race that makes me doubt he will ask tough follow-up questions or press either of the candidates.

3. When McCain’s Intrade number was around 23, I suggested buying his stock because it couldn’t go any lower and Presidential races usually tighten up in the last week or two. While the latter is still true, his stock is at 18 now. What made prediction markets interesting in the past is that each candidate’s final stock price roughly coincided with his final vote percentage. Wisdom of the crowds. It may have been off by a few points, but it was close.

McCain could die today and still get more than 18% fo the vote. In fact, at this point, the Republican party would be better off running a dead body. At least the dead body would be consistent. My point is that the usual rule of prediction markets being a barometer of results is out the window. That’s how far McCain is in public perception at the moment.

Which is why he literally needs to eat Barack Obama.

Debate Video Released Early

It turns out John McCain and Barack Obama already had the debate earlier today. Here is a clip (found at TPM).

Mob Update

Just as the media backlash was gaining steam, McCain made a few attempts to settle down his crowds.

I don’t know if this is a sincere change of direction or if he is just trying to distance himself from the attacks while letting Palin and his surrogates make them.  I suspect it’s the latter. His campaign spokesman defended the attacks the same day McCain challenged a few of his supporters on them.  It’s better than nothing though.

“Get him. He’s bad for our country.”

The anger at McCain’s rallies is starting to worry me.

His new tact to link Obama to William Ayers and focus on Obama’s “otherness” has ratched up the anger and frustration of his supporters. The new intensity is starting to be picked up by media outlets, such as Politico and The Washington Post.

Anger is a destructive, uncontrollalble force. McCain and Palin are playing with fire when they accuse Obama of being friends with terrorists, and remain silent while the speakers at their rallies call him Barack “Hussein” Obama and their supporters yell for his downfall.

This is different from previous campaigns. This isn’t “You’re a flip-flopper” or “You’re unintelligent”. It is bordering the incitement of violence. It doesn’t take much to get a crazy person to think he can save the country by assassinating a leader. Especially if that’s leader’s opponent helped demonize him.

(Update: This is a good overview of the situation.)

Debate #2

No live blogging or non-live debate blogging this time. I watched the debate in a bar and I was pretty drunk, so I’m short on insight. A few thoughts:

1. The first 15 minutes, McCain seemed to be moving around the debate hall like a Roomba.

2. I’m happy with how Obama did.  I think the debate was a draw at worst. I had low expectations for him because his debate performances in the primaries ran the gamut from “terrible” to “as good as Clinton”. But I’ve been pleasantly surprised so far in the past two debates. At the very least, he is holding his own, and I think you could make a non-biased case that he is doing better than McCain.

3. You can’t tell, but I’m still drunk and misspelling every other word. The amount of drunk editing and spell-checking going on in this post is beyond the comprehension of your average peon. And yes, I had to spell-check “peon”.

4. For a few of McCain’s responses, and this might just be the drunk filter talking, I thought he sounded like Sarah Palin. He had a few rambling, five topics in one statement responses that made it seem like he was covering for Palin (“See? I use ‘also” too.”)

5. Oh, and what was McCain writing before the debate started?  ”Don’t drool on self?” “Shopping list: vitamins, Metamucil, running mate who won’t embarass me…”

6. (Late update) There were a few times when McCain spoke first and I said to my friend, “McCain’s right on this one.” Then Obama said “I agree with McCain on this one” and then gave a more detailed response. This is one reason why I’m proud to support Obama.

Are People Still Buying This?

[rant]

“With the longer resume on foreign policy, McCain is expected to overtly raise doubts about Obama’s readiness to become president, arguing that his election would amount to a high-stakes gamble.” (Politico)

Seriously? After everything that has happened over the past two months, it’s Obama who’s the gamble?

You know what language I’ve heard describe McCain’s campaign in the past two months? Risk-taking. Impulsive. High-stakes gamble. And this is from his supporters. They talk about his “act first, figure it out later” brand of decision making as a good thing.

Back in January, I was rooting for McCain to win the Republican primary. Not because he was a weak candidate, but because I thought he was the best Republican in the field. My image of him was the moderate maverick of 2000, and I felt that our country was in such dire straits, we needed the best from both parties to fight it out.

What we ended up getting was someone fundamentally unserious about the business of running this country. The man is a fingernail away from death, and he picked a VP candidate so unqualified that even die-hard conservatives are questioning whether she should stay on the ticket.

He has gone out of his way to recreate fabricated controversies and consider truth as a matter of opinion. He introduced instability and uncertainty into what will probably be the most important decision Congress will make for the past 10 years–the financial bailout package–solely to grandstand, and at a time when what is needed most is calm and stability.

Think about his latest action for a bit. There is a lot of debate on what we should do to resolve the financial crisis–a Congressional bailout, investing money directly into banks, etc. But most economists agree that what we end up doing will determine whether we go into a bad rescission for a year or two or another Great Depression for several years.

What type of a person fucks around at a time like this?

A lot of political analysts focus on that fact that McCain is making big gambles and chat about if these gambles will work out. I have a different take. A person who takes high-stakes gambles is unfit to lead this country, regardless of whether those gambles turn out to work.

[/rant]

Bail in or Bail out?

To quote President Bush, a man second in elegance only to Winston Churchill, on the state of the Wall Street bailout: “If money isn’t loosened up, this sucker could go down.” (quote)

Indeed. But why is this sucker in threat of going down?

I think a lot of the problems at hand could have been avoided if Treasury Paulson called it “The Rainbow Unicorn Package! With Sprinkes!” rather than a “bailout.” You bail out screew-ups, and who wants to do that?

The real stumbling block though is uncertainty. What I find amazing is that not only are economists still debating the structure of the bailout, some of then are still debating whether we even need a bailout.

Take a look at The Washington Post today. On the front page is an article on how some economists are doubting the premises behind the bailout.

But I’ve also read many commentaries by analysts like Steven Pearlstein, someone whose opinion I respect a lot, summing up the current debate and making a sound argument on why we need to do something.

Political debates need engines to drive them. It could be the engine of expert opinion, of special interest groups, of public consensus, of ideology, of a strong leader, or more often, some mix. In this debate, a clear driving force has yet to bubble up.

Ideology hasn’t even helped define the debate. Conservative and liberals have crossed lines to both support federal intervention and argue for doing nothing.

Sec. Paulson, President Bush, and Senate leaders are the default engine, agreeing to a bailout in principle and negotiating the details. That’s where we were on Wednesday. The problem is that the negotiation is fragile and can’t withstand even a small challenge, which is why the plan got tabled when Senator McCain (representing House Republicans) injected himself into the process.

My sense from the negotiations and what I’ve read is that some sort of bailout is needed, but no one wants to own the bailout because the political downside is great and the upside small. People won’t like you more if you support the bailout, but they will like you less. In an election year, that makes action in the House impossible unless both sides give each other cover by signing on to the plan.

Senator McCain did a lot of grandstanding by canceling-without-canceling his campaign and then ducking out of the debate peekaboo, I’m-back! Yet if the Republican leaders in the house are unwilling to get their members in line behind the bailout, then perhaps he has a useful role to play.  

Quick Thought

Is McCain making his decisions with a Ouija board at this point? Seriously. I wish to know if he and Cindy are sitting every night in a room lit by blood candles with a Ouija board in front of them. “Q…U…I…honey, are you feeling something from the ‘t’?”

And why does Gov.Palin have to cancel her events too? I mean, I know why, but what excuse are they giving? Does McCain have an electronic monitoring bracelet on her ankle? Is that why she blinks oddly? “H-E-L-P…S-O-S”? It would suck if she did because who knows Morse code nowadays? How are we even remembering that Morse code used to exist? It hasn’t been used in 50 years.

I’m no political consultant…

…but if I’m fighting stereotypes of being out of touch with the economic concerns of the poor and middle class and only focused on the interests of the rich, I’m not putting a “Golf Gear” tab on the front page of my web site.

Some sneaky liberals wrote fake user reviews for the McCain Father’s Day Golf Pack.

Update: The fake comments became too popular and were taken down. Someone archived the comments, which you can read here.

Picking a V.P.

Here’s what I think presidential candidates should look for when selecting a V.P., in order of importance:

* Able to handle the job of President.

I know it’s simplistic and almost naive, but shouldn’t that be a major factor?  I don’t want the first black guy nominated by a political party and a man so old he looks like Colonel Tigh without the makeup picking Gov. Yahoo from Shitslvania just because the governor will help bring in a few more working-class Hispanic Jewish white voters.

There’s a higher than usual chance that the next President of the United States will not serve a full term in office. Besides racism and age, a terrorist assassination is a real threat. If you wanted to damage the psyche and disrupt the political system of America in the worst way possible, and not even have to spend much money or resources to do so, what better option is there than assassinating a President?

I know security has increased since the days when a nut like John Hinckley could run up to a President and take a few shots, but do you really think it couldn’t be done? I’m a little surprised it hasn’t been tried yet.

* Loves campaigning.

With the long campaign season and amount of media coverage we’ve had so far, it’s easy for anyone watching the process half-closely to wonder how anyone could be unfamiliar with the candidates at this point. But there are plenty of people who aren’t paying much attention and won’t for months, if at all.  This is a particular problem for Obama, whose newness makes him unfamiliar to many voters.  Going from town to town and holding rallies and meetings to get undecided voters a few hundred at a time is part of what it takes to win, and you need a V.P. who is personable and enjoys the process.

As long as this campaign season has been, I think Obama is in a race against the clock. His biggest obstacle to the presidency is unfamiliarity, and sometimes you just have to meet with people personally to get them comfortable with you. It’s a slow process that takes lots of time, and he needs a V.P. who could double his efforts.

On a related note, the traditional V.P. role in recent campaigns has been of attack dog–making vicious attacks that the presidential candidate wants to be heard but not from his own mouth.

* Not a gaffe machine / no skeletons in the closet

Self-explanatory. The V.P. candidate shouldn’t interfere with the campaign’s message and be a distraction.

I don’t put any value in picking someone to win a state. When has that worked recently? Edwards couldn’t help Kerry win N.C. in 2004, and Gore lost his home state in 2000.

I don’t put a lot of value either in picking someone to counter a candidate’s perceived demographic (e.g. older voters) or political deficiencies (e.g. foreign policy).  Sure, that’s a nice bonus, but you could probably get as many votes picking someone that compliments a candidate’s strengths and getting higher turnout from your base.

George Bush picked Dick Cheney, someone the opposite of him in terms of age and foreign policy experience. Bill Clinton picked Al Gore, another young Southerner. They both won. What lesson can you draw from that?

I have no idea who Obama or McCain will pick. I’m surprised though how few people are mentioning John Edwards as a pick for V.P. I think he would make a good choice.

Update: As much as I hate the idea, by my own criteria, Hillary Clinton would be a good choice too.