Why Not John McCain #4 - Would You Like A Flop With That Flip?

An article in today's Washington Post looks at some problems McCain has been having with defining his campaign:

...they are trying to walk this tightrope between creating distance from Bush and not angering the base," said a Michigan Republican operative who described himself as nervous about McCain's chances of victory in that swing state...Another Republican strategist, who worked for a rival GOP campaign during the primary and has ties to Bush's political team, said the McCain team has "not really figured out" how to present McCain to voters: as an experienced conservative leader or a reformer who wants change..."who John McCain is and what he stands for -- it's a little hard to connect all the dots."

It has indeed become difficult to understand what John McCain stands for:

- He fought the Bush administration on torture, and stated he wanted to close Guantanamo Bay, yet he voted AGAINST banning waterboarding, and called the recent Supreme Court decision establishing limited habeas corpus rights to detainess one of the worst decisions in the America's history (yes, worse than the ones that called slaves property, or that upheld segregation).

- He spoke out for years against the reckless Bush tax cuts, but now wholeheartedly endorses them as the bedrock of his economic plan.

- He was against offshore oil drilling before he was for it.

- He now states that he would not even vote for his own immigration plan, probably because he found that it was not supported by his conservative base.

- He speaks out against lobbyists and "pork" but has turned out to have a staff full of lobbyists. Just one recent instance: McCain had a large role in killing a wasteful government deal with Boeing to develop new planes for refueling. But it has recently been revealed that McCain is also being closely advised by lobbyists for the Boeing competitor that instead received the contract.

And perhaps most importantly, Frank Rich recalls some of McCain's biggest changes in judgment about Iraq:

Mr. McCain’s sorest Achilles’ heel, of course, is his role in facilitating the fiasco in the first place. Someone in his campaign has figured this out. Go to JohnMcCain.com and, hilariously enough, you’ll find a “McCain on Iraq Timeline” that conveniently begins in August 2003, months after “Mission Accomplished.” Vanished into the memory hole are such earlier examples of the McCain Iraq wisdom as “the end is very much in sight” (April 9, 2003) and “there’s not a history of clashes that are violent between Sunnis and Shiites” (later that same month).

To finesse this embarrassing record, Mr. McCain asks us to believe that the only judgment that matters is who was “right” about the surge, not who was right about our reckless plunge into war. That’s like saying he deserves credit for tossing life preservers to the survivors after encouraging the captain of the Titanic to plow full speed ahead into the iceberg.

Anyhow these are just some flip-flops in what will likely be an ever expanding list. Or as this clip from MSNBC states "McCain Flip Flops on Everything":
Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Not Buying It

I'm not an expert on campaign finance reform, but I do understand the basics: the idea behind public funding of campaigns is to equalize the playing field so that donors with more money do not have outsized influence over campaigns.

Now Obama, despite having stated repeatedly he was considering public financing for his campaign has decided to forestall public financing and instead stay with his unprecedentedly successful fund raising, with over 1.5 million donors, most contributing less that $100 on the internet. His campaign claims having this many individual small donors is in itself a grassroots form of public financing. (Not to mention it allows him to raise money beyond public financing limits).

The McCain campaign has been harping on this in the hope they can use it to brand Obama as a candidate who will go back on his word, who "flip flops" based on the needs of the moment. This being unlike McCain - who's evolving positions on the Iraq War, offshore oil drilling, or George Bush's tax cuts (to just choose a few) - aren't position changes based on political expediency, they are principled leadership. They are "shocked, shocked!" that Obama is willing to do what is necessary to win.

Nice try. The decision may perhaps not be a pretty one, but it is a pragmatic one. And as Chuck Todd and MSNBC's "First Read" state:

...the decision was a no-brainer. As one very smart political observer told us yesterday, if Obama had stayed in the system -- bypassing the opportunity to raise about three times amount what the system offers -- then he’d question Obama’s judgment and ability to be president. Simply put, it would have been a dumb move.

Andrew Sullivan says

"[I]...see no reason why public financing is somehow morally superior to hundreds of thousands of small donors. But if you want to see a Democrat prepared to take a short-term hit in order to score a real long-term advantage over his opponent, Obama's your man."

But to top it all off, harping on this issue cleverly obscures the fact that McCain himself is currently openly violating campaign LAW, after opting in to public financing to save his campaign, then spending beyond the agreed limits. Josh Marshall at TPM (tries to) explain "McCain Breaking the Law in Plain Sight":



People thing supporters of Obama are somehow going to be surprised to realize he's also a POLITICIAN. Well no shit. I think the these mindless zealots who believe he is some sort of messianic figure largely exists only in the minds of his detractors. (And to me, his FISA position is much more problematic than this one). The fact is he is liberal and a pragmatist, or as David Brooks states:

"This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside."

That's why I'm glad he's on my side.

Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Meet the new Boss, same as the old....you know the rest

John McCain has been trying to put a lot of distance between himself and our ever-unpopular current president, while Democrats have been trying to proclaim that John McCain's election would mean Bush's third term. Well the New York Times takes a look today at where John is "McSame" and where he differs from Bush's policies. Take a look at their chart here.

One thing you might notice immediately: The "same" column is substantially longer than the "different column." And as I explored in an earlier post, some of the differences on foreign policy are quite troubling. The Times also has an accompanying article in which they state:

A look at Mr. McCain’s 25-year record in the House and Senate, his 2008 campaign positions and his major speeches over the last three months indicates that on big-ticket issues — the economy, support for continuing the Iraq war, health care — his stances are indeed similar to Mr. Bush’s brand of conservatism. Mr. McCain’s positions are nearly identical to the president’s on abortion and the types of judges he says he would appoint to the courts...while it would be hard to categorize him as a doctrinaire Republican or conservative, Mr. McCain appears to have ceded some of his carefully cultivated reputation as a maverick.

And regarding how McCain's contradictory energy policy strains to seem "different" than Bush, check out this clip (more on this later):



Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Gore-dorsement

I keep finding a lot of established Dems giving some of their best speeches endorsing Obama (see: Bill Richardson)



And here is the rest of it. Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Why Not McCain #3: Foreign Policy - Diplomacy, and lack thereof

One of the few actual diplomatic achievements of the Bush administration was to negotiate a solution to the North Korea's nuclear weapon program. After an initial hard line stance, It was one of the only times they showed the willingness to engage, rather than saber rattle or threaten military action. (Yes, I just threw half a bone to the Bush administration).

John McCain wants to put a stop to that. Seriously. The one single time this administration actually had a diplomatic solution to a problem, and McCain doesn't like it, he thinks they're being soft. 

Its just another aspect of McCain's perverse view of international relations, shaped as it by the scary neoconservative philosophy (which I explored in this earlier post). In fact, this and other policies serve to not only distance us from North Korea, but also threaten to push us away from more powerful players like China and Russia: McCain proposes a "League of Democracies" to bypass Russia and China's role in United Nations activities, alienating them and putting them in a much more adversarial relationship to us. He proposes expelling Russia from the G8 group of world powers, again, isolating them. His policies on nuclear deterrence could potentially lead to more nuclear build up in China and Russia, and to greater nuclear proliferation.

As Fareed Zakaria explores in his article "McCain's Schizophrenic Foreign Policy" in Newsweek:

What McCain has announced is momentous—that the United States should adopt a policy of active exclusion and hostility toward two major global powers. It would reverse a decades-old bipartisan American policy of integrating these two countries into the global order, a policy that began under Richard Nixon (with Beijing) and continued under Ronald Reagan (with Moscow). It is a policy that would alienate many countries in Europe and Asia who would see it as an attempt by Washington to begin a new cold war...The neoconservative vision within the speech is essentially an affirmation of ideology. Not only does it declare war on Russia and China, it places the United States in active opposition to all nondemocracies. It proposes a League of Democracies, which would presumably play the role that the United Nations now does, except that all nondemocracies would be cast outside the pale. The approach lacks any strategic framework. What would be the gain from so alienating two great powers?

Irrational, and frightening, stuff.

Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Why Not McCain #2: Foreign Policy - More Wars!

McCain's supposed strength is his foreign policy experience. But only a little investigation reveals his foreign policy as not only a continuation of some of the Bush administration's reckless policies, but even charting a more disastrous course.  So I will dedicated several of these "Why Not McCain" entries to take a more extensive look at some of these foreign policy issues. This, the first, will focus on McCain's overall problematic foreign policy, as explored in several important articles.

Here's an overview from the "The Militarist" in the American Prospect:

Despite neoconservatism's close association in the public imagination with the Bush administration, and despite McCain's image as a moderate, a look at the record makes clear that McCain, not Bush, is the real neocon in the Republican Party. McCain was the neocons' candidate in 2000, McCain adhered to a truer version of the faith during the early years of hubris that followed September 11, and as president McCain would likely pursue policies that will make what we've seen from Bush look like a pale imitation of the real thing. McCain, after all, is the candidate of perpetual war in Iraq. The candidate who, despite his protestations in a March speech that he "hates war," not only stridently backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq but has spent years calling on the United States to depose every dictator in the world. He's the candidate of ratcheting-up action against North Korea and Iran, of new efforts to undermine the United Nations, and of new cold wars with Russia and China. Rather than hating war, he sees it as integral to the greatness of the nation, and military service as the highest calling imaginable. It is, in short, not Bush but McCain, who among practical politicians holds truest to the vision of a foreign policy dominated by militaristic unilateralism.

In an extensive profile in the New York Times Magazine, "The McCain Doctrines," Matt Bai comes to similar conclusions as he discusses with McCain potential military interventions in Burma or Zimbabwe.

McCain is known for being a gut thinker, averse to overarching doctrines or theory. But as we talked, I tried to draw out of him some template for knowing when military intervention made sense — an answer, essentially, to the question that has plagued policy makers confronting international crises for the last 20 years. McCain has said that the invasion of Iraq was justified, even absent the weapons of mass destruction he believed were there, because of Hussein’s affront to basic human values...Most American politicians, of course, would immediately dismiss the idea of sending the military into Zimbabwe or Myanmar as tangential to American interests and therefore impossible to justify. McCain didn’t make this argument. He seemed to start from a default position that moral reasons alone could justify the use of American force, and from there he considered the reasons it might not be feasible to do so. In other words, to paraphrase Robert Kennedy, while most politicians looked at injustice in a foreign land and asked, “Why intervene?” McCain seemed to look at that same injustice and ask himself, “Why not?”

In his article "McCain Foreign Policy: Bush Doctrine Plus" Spencer Ackerman finds that McCain's moral vision of war causes him to lump all of our enemies together in a problematic - and ultimately dangerous - way (as he did with his repeated Al Qaeda/Iran gaffe).

...the enemy described in his speech is an undifferentiated "radical Islamic terrorism." It is less an entity than a metaphysical concept -- existing everywhere and without distinction. McCain draws no distinction between the puny Al Qaeda in Iraq and the Qaeda senior leadership in Pakistan's lawless tribal areas. Interestingly, the U.S. military in Iraq does: it recently gave a briefing that described Al Qaeda in Iraq's foot soldiers as brainwashed twentysomethings rather than fanatical murderers. It should go without saying that an inability to even properly diagnose the enemy can only lead to counterproductive, astrategic overreaction.

Matt Yglesias, again from "The Militarist," sees a similar tendency:

While Bush has been criticized for advancing an unduly broad conception of the terrorism problem, allowing Iraq, Iran, Hamas, and Hezbollah to all be swept together with al-Qaeda, McCain sees a need to go even bigger. In a May 2007 speech to the Hoover Institution, McCain explained that the so-called war on terror is merely part of a "worldwide political, economic, and philosophical struggle between the future and the past, between progress and reaction, and between liberty and despotism." The despotism problem, in McCain's view, goes beyond the traditional axis of evil and requires us to not only "not put pressure on dictators in Iran, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Burma, and other pariah states" but also to fret that Russia and China have joined forces to block such pressure. At a time when the Bush administration has to some extent backed away from rogue-state rollback, McCain has decided to double down, concluding that the rogue-state problem can't be resolved until all autocratic powers are brought down.

McCain himself, basically promises "more wars":



If it wasn't so scary, we might be tempted to laugh:

Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Remove those smears with new, enhanced INFORMATION!

UPDATE: New official rumor debunking site www.fightthesmears.com !!!

Barack Obama is not a Muslim (not that there's anything wrong with that), as this blog has previously indicated, but some folks still haven't heard that fact, or think he's a Muslim in "secret" (why his entire staff would be complicit in covering this up is beyond me).

Now there are some easy links to refer people who have been receiving certain email smears (especially those living in say, Boca Raton):

IsBarackObamaMuslim.com
http://www.isbarackobamamuslim.com

The main site: this links to several articles and clips debunking the rumors and is the most thorough.

IsObamaMuslim.com
http://www.isobamamuslim.com

This link will also get you to one article or clip, and if you reload it will send you to a different one.

Keep Reading (if there's more)...

John McCain's Worst Enemy: John McCain

John McCain, Straight Talker



And here is the rest of it. Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Why Not McCain #1: The Supreme Court

Many democrats and left or moderate independents still remember the John McCain of 2000, the irascible rebellious Republican who was not frightened to say what he thought, even if it went against his own party. I liked him too. Two things:
1) He doesn't exist anymore - John McCain got close to being the presidential nominee in 2000 and made some big personal and moral compromises in order to ensure he had republican support to become the nominee in 2008 and
2) Even then, he still was VERY conservative on many core principles, and has become even moreso since. You might think you like him, but you might not be fully aware of where he stands on things, because you have the memory of that "maverick." (okay i used it, once, never again I swear!).

Many say to me "Well, McCain wouldn't be that bad, he'd be better than Bush." Firstly, I think this is setting the bar pretty damn low. But additionally, we can't afford another Republican term with NO major change in direction from the failed policies of the last 8 years.  So this will be the first in a series of posts looking at some of McCain's policies, beliefs, and history, to let you know why McCain WOULD be that bad, and why it is so important that the Democrats, and Barack Obama, win this election.

Reason #1: The Supreme Court. At least two justices could retire during the next president's term, with the possibility of tipping the balance of the court entirely to the conservative side - and McCain is for repealing Roe v. Wade. Jeffrey Toobin in the New Yorker takes a close look at the coded language in McCain's judiciary policy speech, and finds that he is using cloudy language to mask the bones he is throwing to the extreme right of his party.

The question, as always with McCain these days, is whether he means it. Might he really be a “maverick” when it comes to the Supreme Court? The answer, almost certainly, is no. The Senator has long touted his opposition to Roe, and has voted for every one of Bush’s judicial appointments; the rhetoric of his speech shows that he is getting his advice on the Court from the most extreme elements of the conservative movement...

And a reminder of what Bush's court has already wrought:

...in just three years the Roberts Court has crippled school-desegregation efforts (and hinted that affirmative action may be next); approved a federal law that bans a form of abortion; limited the reach of job-discrimination laws; and made it more difficult to challenge the mixing of church and state. It’s difficult to quarrel with Justice Stephen Breyer’s assessment of his new colleagues: “It is not often in the law that so few have so quickly changed so much.” And more change is likely to come. John Paul Stevens, the leader of the Court’s four embattled liberals, just celebrated his eighty-eighth birthday; Ruth Bader Ginsburg is seventy-five; David Souter is only sixty-eight but longs for his home in New Hampshire. For all the elisions in John McCain’s speech, one unmistakable truth emerged: that the stakes in the election, for the Supreme Court and all who live by its rulings, are very, very high.

Keep Reading (if there's more)...

Reminder: It's Yes WE Can

Here's some of what "Change" really means.

The Obama campaign has mobilized a grass roots group that is also part of his core message: he's not running the typical "campaign only in the few swings states you need" strategy we're so used to from recent elections. He plans on mobilizing as many people in all 50 states, so that he has a large and involved citizenry to help him keep on the pressure as president to get the reforms he's proposing through. The NY Times discusses his 50 state strategy today here.

This clip from shows Obama talking to a small group of Indianans about his views of government transparency and how his presidency would be more open and accountable: from continued town hall meetings, to outreach from the cabinet members, to posting all government activities on the internet to make it easy to monitor and get involved in causes you deem important.



And here's a recent clip where Obama rally's his campaign staff in their office following his winning the nomination reminding them that now that they've won the nomination, they HAVE to win the election, its too important (its longer, but worth watching the whole thing - the end is the best).

Keep Reading (if there's more)...