I like to think that today’s Southern California earthquake was God’s way of giving the United States a high-five for the indictment of Ted Stevens.

When it comes to political campaigns, a lot of effort goes into making sure the candidate is presented well, but it seems like the McCain campaign is asleep at the wheel. For example, take a look at this photo of Barack Obama appearing before a crowd of 200,000 today in Germany :

It’s a striking image that really captures the enthusiasm Obama has generated not only here in America, but throughout the world. John McCain, on the other hand, chose to make an appearance today on the sidewalk in front of a German restaurant, beneath a sign that reads “Fudge Haus”.



Equally embarrassing was when McCain canceled his press availability yesterday (lest he answer questions about being a total dick) only to pop up in the “Dairy Delights” section of a local grocery store :

As an Obama supporter, I couldn’t dream of a better contrast. Barack Obama addressed the world today from Berlin, echoing speeches by Ronald Reagan and John F Kennedy. Yesterday, John McCain stood between the cheese and the orange juice and tried to explain why he couldn’t remember when the surge happened. If things continue like this until November, I might be laughing too hard to make it to the polls.

It seems to me that if you want to turn the GOP into the Grand New Party, they’re going to need some grand new people, preferably ones that aren’t also suckered by the same old ideas that Republicans have convinced themselves are intellectually sound and morally righteous (“cutting taxes increases revenue”, “corporations can be trusted to self-regulate”, “America has the best healthcare system in the world”, “government ‘bailouts’ to moneyed interests are morally superior to government ‘handouts’ to people living in poverty”, etc.).

One of the things that has helped the Republicans attract voters over the years is the sheer confidence they have in their own ideas compared to the wishy-washy pandering of the Democrats (did somebody say FISA?). But that confidence can be a two-edged sword when public opinion turns against you. You can either be resolute and stick to the positions that are increasingly unpopular or you can, as Grand New Party suggests, reinvent the party and try to claim credit for ideas that you’ve spent the last few decades criticizing Democrats for.

Or the entire GOP can just take a cue from John McCain and change their positions whenever it suits them.

The McCain campaign has a new talking point :

Sen. Lindsey Graham said that a “turning point” was when Harry Reid declared the war “lost” over a year ago, and brought up an old quote from Chuck Schumer predicting that discontent with the war would lead to further Democratic gains. “The Democratic Party built a political strategy around us losing the war in Iraq,” Graham said.

McCain adviser Randy Scheunemann joined in: “Senator Obama seems to think losing a war will help him win an election.”

Well, it certainly worked for Bush in 2004.

Josh Marshall is right when he says that John McCain’s economic plan is hilarious. Apparently Maverick thinks he can balance the budget with all the savings we’ll reap from winning the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Here’s a sneak peek at his economic advisors coming up with their budget plan :

Seriously though, there’s a few problems with McCain’s miraculous budget plan. First, it doesn’t contain any numbers, just wishful thinking. I’m no economist, but I’m pretty sure I remember reading somewhere that you’re going to need to do some math at some point.

Second, we can’t afford the wars now. Paying for the occupation of two countries full of people who hate us is actually causing a lot of the budget problems that McCain is claiming to solve. If things get remarkably better under a McCain administration, we’d still going to be spiraling even deeper into debt to finance his grand plans for a North Korea-style permanent military presence. Besides, even if he were to end the war and pull all of our troops out of both countries, there’s a big difference between promising to stop digging a hole and actually having a plan to fill it back in.

Finally, if John McCain’s plan to win the wars is related to the Bush policy he’s spent the last year and a half cheerleading, then it’ll just make our budget problems worse. We’re in a “surge”, remember? All those extra troops cost a lot of money, so if John McCain’s bluster about the surge working can be taken at face value, then the only way to win the war is send more troops or, to convert this into the McCain budget plan, the only way for us to save money is to spend a lot more of it.

I know around July 4th, it’s customary for bloggers to post snippets from inspiring speeches or quote Thomas Paine or something, but the thought going through my mind all weekend is that our political system is completely revolting. Considering the gravity of the choice that lies ahead of us, the way we choose who runs our government is truly despicable. I can’t think of any better example that illustrates this than the “controversy” over Wes Clark’s comments.

Let’s start by restating the obvious. Wes Clark’s comments were factually true and well within the bounds of acceptable political discourse. Enduring through the horrors of a P.O.W. camp don’t qualify you to be the President of the United States any more than suffering through a painful bout of cancer will make you a good piano player. One does not beget the other, even if it does make your biography seem more heroic.

The truly shameful part of this whole episode is that it was the press corps who created and fueled this bogus controversy, not the day late and a dollar short McCain campaign. It was the pundits themselves who had to pick their jaws up from the ground when someone had the audacity to suggest that McCain’s stay at the Hanoi Hilton didn’t magically give him the judgment, skills, and temperament to be president. The press have been the biggest purveyors of the notion that John McCain’s experiences in Vietnam makes him “presidential”, but when somebody finally asked “Why?”, they flipped the hell out.

As much as I was disappointed by Barack Obama’s knee-jerk reaction to initially “reject” Clark’s comments, I can’t say I blame him. As much as I’d love Obama to be the transformational political figure who never cowers before the brain-dead pundits and is willing to speak the truth, even when it’s politically uncomfortable to do so, he’d have to be superhuman to fix the media. How do you take on a news industry that not only does McCain’s campaign job for them, but is so intent on having the presidential campaign unfold with some advertiser-friendly drama that they’ll insist on holding Barack Obama accountable for any statement made by a Democrat?

Obama’s follow-up comments on the Wes Clark, that he was a busy guy who’s got better things to do than explain the words of others, were a much better response to press mendacity, but by then it was too little, too late. There aren’t many do-overs in politics, so even if Obama got his reaction right the second time around, it doesn’t undo the damage of his initial rejection of Clark. It’s hard to push back at a media onslaught that insists that you respond to meaningless shit that’s only of interest to political junkies, but this incident provides a good example of the downside to a rapid response.

I understand the temptation of the Obama campaign was to throw Clark under the bus and hope the story goes away. The longer the story lingers, not only is McCain subtly reinforced as the “war hero” candidate, but the Obama campaign’s silence is interpreted through the lens of a hostile press. If Obama truly respected McCain’s sacrifice, he would have said something by now, right? But the flip side is that by acting too fast, you run the risk of not only looking like a jackass to your base, but reinforcing negatives that the media and Republicans are trying to portray (ie. Dems are weak, Obama is a flip-flopper, etc.).

There’s a lot of things I want from candidate and future-President Obama, but I don’t think it’s realistic to believe that he’ll be able to stand up to every instance of media dishonesty and escape unscathed enough to win the election. I think the challenge he faces is not unlike the challenge Hillary Clinton faced in the primary (as I described it in Feb.).

For a candidate who constantly touts herself for being “prepared” to be president, Clinton’s lack of preparation in dealing with an antagonistic media doesn’t bode well for her prospects in a general election (much less her ability to govern). A smart campaign would take media bias as a given and come up with a plan to mitigate these negatives, yet this week, Hillary has settled on the strategy of whining about the press being mean to her, seemingly blind to the fact that this is an industry full of yellow journalists who have spent the past fifteen years printing and broadcasting some truly shameful muck. Was the Clinton campaign really naive enough to think they’d be any different this year?

Obama’s challenge is similar. The media’s oh-so-precious conventional wisdom is that John McCain is a maverick war hero with a history of reaching across the aisle to get. things. done. Barack Obama is the new kid on the block who can deliver a pretty speech but doesn’t have much experience beyond his quaint time in the Illinois legislature. Can these archetypes be busted? Probably, but that’s the framing against which most news in this campaign will be reported. That’s what Obama has to work with, so if he’s still stumbling whenever McCain’s POW experience is mentioned, then we’ve got a problem.

The key here isn’t to run against the GOP and the media, but to work the media refs and get them to do your dirty work for you. With a sharper media strategy, the Obama campaign can make the press corps laziness work to their advantage, but in order to do that, they need to not only do a better job of responding to stories that they’d rather see disappear, but make sure that every characterization of John McCain emphasizes negatives that the press has internalized and will thus help perpetuate (McCain is old, Bush’s third term, etc.). The Obama campaign has done a great job on this front so far, but when they spend the last week and a half playing defense on McCain’s turf, they are losing opportunities to re-frame McCain.

So as much as I would love to see Barack Obama call the press on their lazy and inaccurate reporting whenever it pops up, I’d also like to see him win. If I had to choose between the two (which seems to be the case), then I’d prefer the later.

This has been one of my recurring reality television pet peeves, the faux-badass who thinks their competitiveness makes them rise above the drama they were hired to create :

Whether you’re a cast member on a reality show or just a mindless drone working in a cubicle, at the end of the day you weren’t hired to “make friends”, but you can still find ways to do your job without being an asshole. Then again, if it weren’t for this parade of predictable immaturity, reality shows wouldn’t be nearly as fun to watch.