Desperate Times Call for a Desperate Man
Well isn't this fun. McSame the numerically-challenged suddenly finds some numbers so compelling that his instinct for service - well actually, histrionics and mock-heroics - is triggered almost like Pavlovian saliva. Deep inside, I suspect he is praying "someone" will take him prisoner and torture him with cotton swabs until mid-November. Paging Sarah! This would give him both an excuse for having his ass kicked and another plastic veneer of "heroic survivor" to add to his inflated self-image. We'll cue up Polythene Pam and Plastic Fantastic Lover.
Somewhere in the course of events though (this senility is a bitch) he got crossed up. We know it is his plummeting poll numbers that have him agitated. He has said repeatedly that he doesn't do finance and economics. And he of course either in person or through his financial "advisor" Gramm has been a central player for years in the deregulation and suspension of even playground rules that largely produced this mess.
I hope you are fortunate enough to be oblivious to the "phenomenon" of "Dancing with the Stars." We have a fan here, so start of new season this week is unavoidably an event. Interestingly, one of the contestants is Cloris Leachman, I would guess the oldest participant to date (probably by almost a decade). Reports are that she has been "entertaining," draping boobs on counter, walking through her "dances," and generally I gather exploiting op to play gritty, meanspirited comic. Rumor has it she bullied her way onto the show. And more than a few viewers are incensed that she survived the first cut.
Very low intrinsic interest/merit to this. But it occurs to me it is a danged good metaphor for McSame's presidential campaign. You read it here first.
But back to McShameful - the clodhoppered way in which his campaign does these things is increasingly being noticed. For starters, Joan Walsh climbs out of sickbed to post this:
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So I've been home with a fever watching television these last two days, and boy, this latest John McCain gambit -- calling on Obama to cancel Friday's debate -- seems crazy to me. Now, I'll admit, the last McCain decision that seemed crazy to me was his selection of Sarah Palin, and the short-term Palin bounce seemed to prove me wrong; I still believe I'll be right in the long term, and Palin's climbing negatives give me reason for optimism on that score.
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, despite his lying about it. Now, I trust Obama to be smart enough to tie the current financial crisis to foreign policy -- fairly, not as a stretch, given the global dimensions of the turmoil. But it would have also 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.
McCain campaign czar Steve Schmidt apparently thinks calling on Obama to cancel the debate is another big game-changing gambit, à la the Palin choice, but I think Americans will see it for what it is, a political stunt. It makes McCain look cowardly, like he's not ready to mix it up with Obama, and like he's hiding from the perilous economic developments of the last few weeks. (I'd probably hide, too, if I'd been insisting until recently that the economy is fundamentally strong.) It looks especially bad since it comes on the heels of Obama reaching out to McCain to suggest that they collaborate on a joint proposal for principles to guide the bailout. McCain seemed to agree -- but then went out and proposed they cancel the Friday debate.
Talking to the media a few minutes ago, Obama disagreed. "It's my belief that this is exactly the time when Americans need to hear from the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsible for dealing with this mess," Obama said. "It will be part of the president's job to deal with more things at once. In my mind, actually, it's more important than ever that we present ourselves to the American people." That's presidential.
I'd say the numbers McCain is looking at have nothing to do with the stock market or the dimensions of the bailout proposal. The numbers motivating McCain are polling numbers, and Obama's rise this week clearly has the Republican nominee on the ropes. Obama's up by 9 points in today's ABC News/Washington Post poll, an 11-point swing in just a week. Just-released CNN polls show Obama up by 4 in Colorado, 5 in Michigan, 9 in Pennsylvania. Candidates start to do desperate things at times like this, and McCain's trying to duck the Friday debate is one of them. He will regret it.
Now, as set-up for next link, a few personal confessions on the difficulty of balancing extracurricular and work obligations. Last year I was signed up for car visit to prospective new client requiring early arrival in office on Monday morning. Who does that? It being mid-Winter, even in Seattle as it happens we get snow, in this case ever-so-inconveniently beginning in the wee hours. By alarm time, there were several inches on the ground, school closures, reports of traffic tie-ups in every direction, i.e., commute chaos. My local bus did not even appear, and there were other snafus along the way, resulting in probably a pedestrian mile or more in multiple segments. I am cell-phone-intolerant, and this was situation they are made for. The net was that I inconvenienced several co-workers, perhaps irritated eventual client, and suffered intense but brief chastising from manager. But we worked through it.
Tale two, in the "I was a lot younger then" category (or maybe "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now"!). I had red-eye flight to Texas for field-test of computerized control system on Sunday night and had painfully shoehorned-in weekend in the mountains. In those long-ago days it was possible to show up 30 minutes before flight departure with carry-ons. We had we thought a fairly modest goal for weekend, but, as it turned out, not so much. We did make summit, but approach route was plagued with downed timber, and all-in-all, I arrived home something like two hours before flight departure. Somehow I scraped off big chunks and/or showered and made flight. Demands on me at start of meeting were probably pretty modest. But then I suspect adrenaline or increasing muscle revolt might have been enough to empower me.
Josh Marshall has some enjoyable tongue-in-cheek on excuses for not showing up:
Perhaps this will shine an unflattering light on my psyche. But, like many of you, I have a busy schedule, with lots of work obligations and meetings. I also end up doing a decent number of panel discussions and speeches, though I try hard to keep those to a minimum. And like everyone, sometimes I get tired or overwhelmed and I wish I could get out of this or that responsibility.
Occasionally in these moments, in a perverse kind of private entertainment, I've found myself imagining what would happen if I pawned off on someone just the ballsiest, most inane excuse for flaking on some commitment. And not something that people might buy -- nothing entertaining about that -- but just something completely off the wall and nonsensical. What would people's reaction be? Speechless, laughter, tearing me limb from limb? Would they ever speak to me again?
So, let's see, I can't moderate the panel because I've been called to Washington to give a special briefing on guerilla tactics to be used against the Taliban?
Or maybe, I want to be at the meeting, but as weird as this sounds, all the bridges and tunnels out of Manhattan have been shut for the day. Some counter-terrorism thing probably. I tried renting a helicopter but they're all booked by people at the UN.
Isn't this pretty much what John McCain tried to pull today? But actually really did it? And on a national stage? He wants to cancel the debate? And maybe also Palin's debate. Are you kidding? Why not cancel the election too? And because he has to go back to DC to solve the financial crisis? Really? The topic he knows nothing about and after he's shown up less in the senate in the last two years than anyone but Tim Johnson, the guy who had the stroke? Which of my employees is going to call from home tomorrow and say they can't come to work because of the financial crisis?
One of the advantages of running a presidential campaign is that roughly half the country is deeply committed to believing or at least saying that virtually anything you do or say makes sense. And so it is here. But, look, if you were living in the real world, if you were some hotshot young executive at a Fortune 500 company trying to rise in the ranks, and you pulled some whacked crap like this, it would probably get you blackballed permanently. People would think you were either deeply unreliable or maybe just had a screw loose. And yet here he is -- is he kidding? He can't debate Barack Obama because he's got to go to Washington and save the economy? It's like the biggest 'dog ate my homework' in history.
And as far as this martyrdom or "suspension" of his campaign, I suggest that we the media-inundated must watch closely for decline in McSame gaffe frequency - the only apparent available metric for a real suspension. Josh Marshall has a wrap-up as to what the "suspension" appears to involve:
As we've been reporting, John McCain's attack ads have remained up on the air across the country as late as this evening. And now it turns out that his campaign has instructed TV stations around the country to start airing them again starting on Saturday. In other words, McCain's ads may actually disappear from the air for a few hours on Friday.
At this point it looks like the only thing that got cancelled in McCain's much ballyhooed suspension of his campaign was the appearance on David Letterman.
I confess I have not explored that Letterman link. I hope it fully captures the DL wrath at having been stood-up by the arizonan wart-hog and all which even got play on NBC this AM. (I don't view these late-night shows, being either a-bed or here harrassing you.)
As far as the idea of cancelling tomorrow's (!) debate, the Talking Points have assembled a great assemblage of opinions. I promise you that link is worth your while.
Changing the subject only slightly, Glenn Greenwald as always is dogged when he gets a meaty subject, in this case Governor Palin. You will note his willingness to admit error. Also note he is not of the crowd fussing over what I might label people magazine/enquirer zingers, or even her lack of experience. He suspects her of having some serious cerebral capabilities. But the bottom line for Glenn is that she has been "pity-inducing," strong language, in the few cases where she has been allowed to talk without a McSame operative controlling her larynx. This is brief excerpt - please follow link and read it in toto:
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But Sarah Palin's performance in the tiny vignettes of unscripted dialogue in which we've been allowed to see her has been nothing short of frightening -- really, as I said, pity-inducing. And I say that as someone who has thought from the start that the criticisms of her abilities -- as opposed to her ideology -- were much too extreme. One of two things is absolutely clear at this point: she 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.
What seems most likely is that she's perfectly conversant in the exceedingly narrow and parochial range of issues she's concerned herself with as Wasilla Mayor and Alaska Governor -- oil drilling on the North Slope, specific local budget items, corruption issues inside the Alaskan State GOP, and evangelical and religious matters. She really doesn't seem to have any thoughts about anything outside of that -- or if she does, she is suppressing them -- and is thus capable of spouting little more than empty right-wing slogans. That's what makes all the issues raised by the excellent on-scene reporting by Salon's David Talbot more significant than it otherwise might be -- she could be a religious fanatic with an extremist agenda, or a power-crazed, vendetta-fueled, secrecy-obsessed Cheney-ite, or something else altogether. She may not even know what she is, and we're clearly not going to find out.
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Somewhere in the course of events though (this senility is a bitch) he got crossed up. We know it is his plummeting poll numbers that have him agitated. He has said repeatedly that he doesn't do finance and economics. And he of course either in person or through his financial "advisor" Gramm has been a central player for years in the deregulation and suspension of even playground rules that largely produced this mess.
I hope you are fortunate enough to be oblivious to the "phenomenon" of "Dancing with the Stars." We have a fan here, so start of new season this week is unavoidably an event. Interestingly, one of the contestants is Cloris Leachman, I would guess the oldest participant to date (probably by almost a decade). Reports are that she has been "entertaining," draping boobs on counter, walking through her "dances," and generally I gather exploiting op to play gritty, meanspirited comic. Rumor has it she bullied her way onto the show. And more than a few viewers are incensed that she survived the first cut.
Very low intrinsic interest/merit to this. But it occurs to me it is a danged good metaphor for McSame's presidential campaign. You read it here first.
But back to McShameful - the clodhoppered way in which his campaign does these things is increasingly being noticed. For starters, Joan Walsh climbs out of sickbed to post this:
-clip-
So I've been home with a fever watching television these last two days, and boy, this latest John McCain gambit -- calling on Obama to cancel Friday's debate -- seems crazy to me. Now, I'll admit, the last McCain decision that seemed crazy to me was his selection of Sarah Palin, and the short-term Palin bounce seemed to prove me wrong; I still believe I'll be right in the long term, and Palin's climbing negatives give me reason for optimism on that score.
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, despite his lying about it. Now, I trust Obama to be smart enough to tie the current financial crisis to foreign policy -- fairly, not as a stretch, given the global dimensions of the turmoil. But it would have also 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.
McCain campaign czar Steve Schmidt apparently thinks calling on Obama to cancel the debate is another big game-changing gambit, à la the Palin choice, but I think Americans will see it for what it is, a political stunt. It makes McCain look cowardly, like he's not ready to mix it up with Obama, and like he's hiding from the perilous economic developments of the last few weeks. (I'd probably hide, too, if I'd been insisting until recently that the economy is fundamentally strong.) It looks especially bad since it comes on the heels of Obama reaching out to McCain to suggest that they collaborate on a joint proposal for principles to guide the bailout. McCain seemed to agree -- but then went out and proposed they cancel the Friday debate.
Talking to the media a few minutes ago, Obama disagreed. "It's my belief that this is exactly the time when Americans need to hear from the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsible for dealing with this mess," Obama said. "It will be part of the president's job to deal with more things at once. In my mind, actually, it's more important than ever that we present ourselves to the American people." That's presidential.
I'd say the numbers McCain is looking at have nothing to do with the stock market or the dimensions of the bailout proposal. The numbers motivating McCain are polling numbers, and Obama's rise this week clearly has the Republican nominee on the ropes. Obama's up by 9 points in today's ABC News/Washington Post poll, an 11-point swing in just a week. Just-released CNN polls show Obama up by 4 in Colorado, 5 in Michigan, 9 in Pennsylvania. Candidates start to do desperate things at times like this, and McCain's trying to duck the Friday debate is one of them. He will regret it.
Now, as set-up for next link, a few personal confessions on the difficulty of balancing extracurricular and work obligations. Last year I was signed up for car visit to prospective new client requiring early arrival in office on Monday morning. Who does that? It being mid-Winter, even in Seattle as it happens we get snow, in this case ever-so-inconveniently beginning in the wee hours. By alarm time, there were several inches on the ground, school closures, reports of traffic tie-ups in every direction, i.e., commute chaos. My local bus did not even appear, and there were other snafus along the way, resulting in probably a pedestrian mile or more in multiple segments. I am cell-phone-intolerant, and this was situation they are made for. The net was that I inconvenienced several co-workers, perhaps irritated eventual client, and suffered intense but brief chastising from manager. But we worked through it.
Tale two, in the "I was a lot younger then" category (or maybe "I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now"!). I had red-eye flight to Texas for field-test of computerized control system on Sunday night and had painfully shoehorned-in weekend in the mountains. In those long-ago days it was possible to show up 30 minutes before flight departure with carry-ons. We had we thought a fairly modest goal for weekend, but, as it turned out, not so much. We did make summit, but approach route was plagued with downed timber, and all-in-all, I arrived home something like two hours before flight departure. Somehow I scraped off big chunks and/or showered and made flight. Demands on me at start of meeting were probably pretty modest. But then I suspect adrenaline or increasing muscle revolt might have been enough to empower me.
Josh Marshall has some enjoyable tongue-in-cheek on excuses for not showing up:
Perhaps this will shine an unflattering light on my psyche. But, like many of you, I have a busy schedule, with lots of work obligations and meetings. I also end up doing a decent number of panel discussions and speeches, though I try hard to keep those to a minimum. And like everyone, sometimes I get tired or overwhelmed and I wish I could get out of this or that responsibility.
Occasionally in these moments, in a perverse kind of private entertainment, I've found myself imagining what would happen if I pawned off on someone just the ballsiest, most inane excuse for flaking on some commitment. And not something that people might buy -- nothing entertaining about that -- but just something completely off the wall and nonsensical. What would people's reaction be? Speechless, laughter, tearing me limb from limb? Would they ever speak to me again?
So, let's see, I can't moderate the panel because I've been called to Washington to give a special briefing on guerilla tactics to be used against the Taliban?
Or maybe, I want to be at the meeting, but as weird as this sounds, all the bridges and tunnels out of Manhattan have been shut for the day. Some counter-terrorism thing probably. I tried renting a helicopter but they're all booked by people at the UN.
Isn't this pretty much what John McCain tried to pull today? But actually really did it? And on a national stage? He wants to cancel the debate? And maybe also Palin's debate. Are you kidding? Why not cancel the election too? And because he has to go back to DC to solve the financial crisis? Really? The topic he knows nothing about and after he's shown up less in the senate in the last two years than anyone but Tim Johnson, the guy who had the stroke? Which of my employees is going to call from home tomorrow and say they can't come to work because of the financial crisis?
One of the advantages of running a presidential campaign is that roughly half the country is deeply committed to believing or at least saying that virtually anything you do or say makes sense. And so it is here. But, look, if you were living in the real world, if you were some hotshot young executive at a Fortune 500 company trying to rise in the ranks, and you pulled some whacked crap like this, it would probably get you blackballed permanently. People would think you were either deeply unreliable or maybe just had a screw loose. And yet here he is -- is he kidding? He can't debate Barack Obama because he's got to go to Washington and save the economy? It's like the biggest 'dog ate my homework' in history.
And as far as this martyrdom or "suspension" of his campaign, I suggest that we the media-inundated must watch closely for decline in McSame gaffe frequency - the only apparent available metric for a real suspension. Josh Marshall has a wrap-up as to what the "suspension" appears to involve:
As we've been reporting, John McCain's attack ads have remained up on the air across the country as late as this evening. And now it turns out that his campaign has instructed TV stations around the country to start airing them again starting on Saturday. In other words, McCain's ads may actually disappear from the air for a few hours on Friday.
At this point it looks like the only thing that got cancelled in McCain's much ballyhooed suspension of his campaign was the appearance on David Letterman.
I confess I have not explored that Letterman link. I hope it fully captures the DL wrath at having been stood-up by the arizonan wart-hog and all which even got play on NBC this AM. (I don't view these late-night shows, being either a-bed or here harrassing you.)
As far as the idea of cancelling tomorrow's (!) debate, the Talking Points have assembled a great assemblage of opinions. I promise you that link is worth your while.
Changing the subject only slightly, Glenn Greenwald as always is dogged when he gets a meaty subject, in this case Governor Palin. You will note his willingness to admit error. Also note he is not of the crowd fussing over what I might label people magazine/enquirer zingers, or even her lack of experience. He suspects her of having some serious cerebral capabilities. But the bottom line for Glenn is that she has been "pity-inducing," strong language, in the few cases where she has been allowed to talk without a McSame operative controlling her larynx. This is brief excerpt - please follow link and read it in toto:
-clip-
But Sarah Palin's performance in the tiny vignettes of unscripted dialogue in which we've been allowed to see her has been nothing short of frightening -- really, as I said, pity-inducing. And I say that as someone who has thought from the start that the criticisms of her abilities -- as opposed to her ideology -- were much too extreme. One of two things is absolutely clear at this point: she 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.
What seems most likely is that she's perfectly conversant in the exceedingly narrow and parochial range of issues she's concerned herself with as Wasilla Mayor and Alaska Governor -- oil drilling on the North Slope, specific local budget items, corruption issues inside the Alaskan State GOP, and evangelical and religious matters. She really doesn't seem to have any thoughts about anything outside of that -- or if she does, she is suppressing them -- and is thus capable of spouting little more than empty right-wing slogans. That's what makes all the issues raised by the excellent on-scene reporting by Salon's David Talbot more significant than it otherwise might be -- she could be a religious fanatic with an extremist agenda, or a power-crazed, vendetta-fueled, secrecy-obsessed Cheney-ite, or something else altogether. She may not even know what she is, and we're clearly not going to find out.
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posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:14 PM
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