The RNC’s new game plan to is straightforward enough: Republicans are ready to exploit intra-party criticisms among the Dems.
Hours before the polls closed Tuesday in the final two Democratic presidential primaries, the Republican National Committee began circulating a video of Hillary Clinton questioning Barack Obama’s qualifications to be commander-in-chief, and acknowledging John McCain has this important presidential credential.
“Senator McCain will bring a lifetime of experience to the campaign, I will bring a lifetime of experience and Senator Obama will bring a speech that he gave in 2002,” Clinton says in the one-minute video of CNN’s coverage of a news conference she held on March 8 – the day Obama won the Wyoming caucuses. “I think that is a significant difference. I think that since we now know Senator McCain will be the nominee for the Republican Party, national security will be front and center in this election. We all know that.
“And I think it is imperative that each of us be able to demonstrate we can cross the commander-in-chief threshold. And I believe I have done that. Certainly, Senator McCain has done that. And you will have to ask Senator Obama with respect to his candidacy.”
An RNC official told CNN that Republicans would use Clinton’s criticisms of Obama “repeatedly” throughout the general election campaign.
Now, with Clinton’s help, pushing back against the RNC’s efforts isn’t too difficult. For one thing, I think most Americans realize that intra-party, like-minded rivals sometimes get a little aggressive in the midst of a heated primary. When one Dem attacks another Dem, it’s be taken with a grain of salt.
For another, once Hillary Clinton steps up to start defending Obama and going after John McCain, the RNC’s project will certainly lose its salience. By Saturday, the RNC’s latest push shouldn’t matter, but it’s nevertheless something to keep an eye on.
Unless you live in Brooklyn– or unless you’re hip to the cross-over Balkan music scene– this is probably the first time you’re hearing of Which Way Is East, who are just finishing up recording their debut album. Oud player Jesse Kotansky slipped me a couple of mixes and the one I liked most is “Aish Balamo,” a love song. As they like to remind everyone, they’re part of the cultural bridge connecting Plovdiv to Brooklyn.
The House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat disclosed late Tuesday that he is ready to accept a Republican-brokered deal to rewrite the nation’s electronic surveillance laws, signaling that a long-running congressional impasse could soon be coming to an end.
House Intelligence Chairman Silvestre Reyes told CongressDaily that he is “fine” with language offered by Senate Intelligence ranking member Christopher (Kit) Bond and other Republicans to overhaul the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
Notably, the GOP language, which was offered a day before the recent congressional recess, would leave it up to the secret FISA court to grant retroactive legal immunity to telecommunications companies that have helped the Bush administration conduct electronic surveillance on the communications of U.S. citizens without warrants.
About 40 civil lawsuits already have been filed against the companies. The administration, Bond and other Republicans had backed a Senate-passed FISA bill that would have shielded the telecom firms from the lawsuits upon enactment.
“It’s about finding middle ground and we have middle ground,” Reyes said of the compromise offered by Republicans. “It’s not going to please everyone but let’s get on with it.”
Reyes said he believes enough Democrats will support the proposal to pass it in the House.
But he said House Majority Leader Hoyer told him that House Democratic leaders want to have the liability of the telecoms reviewed in federal district court as opposed to the FISA court.
A senior Reyes aide clarified his boss’ positions by saying that while Reyes thinks Bond’s proposal is a positive one, he remains supportive of Hoyer’s efforts to improve on it.
There just isn’t enough money at stake to explain this. Nobody’s suing for the money, they are suing for the discovery. Something bad happened here and the Democrats are helping the Republicans cover it up.
”Jan Schakowsky told me about a recent visit she had made to the White House with a congressional delegation. On her way out, she said, President Bush noticed her ‘Obama’ button. ‘He jumped back, almost literally,’ she said. ‘And I knew what he was thinking. So I reassured him it was Obama, with a ‘b.’ And I explained who he was. The President said, ‘Well, I don’t know him.’ So I just said, ‘You will.’ ” (New Yorker, 5/31/2004)
Overshadowed by the hype of Barack Obama’s victory lap on the Senate floor today is a simmering dispute between Majority Leader Harry Reid and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell over President Bush’s remaining judicial nominees.
McConnell has essentially shut down the Senate floor this afternoon by forcing the Senate clerk to read aloud the entire 500 page global warming bill. So if legislative language is your thing, turn on C-SPAN and watch the Senate at its best, or worst, depending on your perspective.
McConnell (R-Ky.) believes Reid (D-Nev.) has backtracked on a promise to clear a significant number of Republican judicial nominees, but Democrats are becoming more and more hesitant to give Bush judges a lifelong appointment to the federal bench in the waning months of this White House.
“The Democratic majority has refused to honor its commitments,” McConnell said. “It apparently believes that commitments do not matter in the United States Senate, and that actions do not have consequences.”
One of those consquences, apparently, is a complete shut down of the Senate.
Devoid of ideas for addressing global warming and unwilling to work with us to strengthen our weakening economy and energy policy, Republicans have now resorted to changing the subject with inaccurate attacks. [..] Senate Democrats have treated President Bush’s judicial nominations with far greater deference than President Clinton’s were afforded by a Republican-controlled Senate that denied hearings or floor consideration for almost 70 Clinton nominees. Three-quarters of President Bush’s court of appeals nominees have been confirmed, while only half of President Clinton’s appellate nominations were confirmed. Last year the Senate confirmed 40 judges, more than during any of the three previous years with Republicans in charge, and today’s federal judicial vacancy rate is the lowest it has been in years.
MSNBC is reporting that Senator Hillary Clinton will be suspending her campaign and plans to endorse the presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee, Senator Barack Obama, on Friday. More from the New York Times:
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is moving to suspend her campaign and endorse Senator Barack Obama on Friday after Democratic members of Congress urged her Wednesday to leave the race and allow the party to coalesce around Mr. Obama, according to a senior adviser to Mrs. Clinton.
Mrs. Clinton is likely to make the announcement in New York City, an aide said, though no final venue has been chosen.
Her decision came after a day of telephone conversations with supporters on Capitol Hill about what she should do now that Mr. Obama had claimed enough delegates to be able to clinch the nomination. Mrs. Clinton had initially said she wanted to wait before making any decision, but her aides said that in conversations, some of her closest supporters said it was urgent that she step aside. Read on…
Pepperdine’s Doug Kmiec, a conservative Catholic, raised quite a few eyebrows earlier this year when he endorsed Barack Obama for president. There have been several relatively high-profile Republicans to throw their support to Obama (some have taken to calling them “Obamacans“), but Kmiec was especially surprising.
Kmiec, after all, is also a staunch Republican who played a role with Mitt Romney’s presidential campaign. He also headed the Office of Legal Counsel for Presidents Reagan and H.W. Bush. Theologically, we’re talking about a man who can “cite papal pronouncements with the facility of a theological scholar,” and who opposes abortion rights and gay rights. He backed Obama despite his positions on these issues, not because of them.
And how did Kmiec’s Catholic Church respond after learning of his favored candidate? As E. J. Dionne Jr. explained today, by denying him Communion.
Kmiec was denied Communion in April at a Mass for a group of Catholic business people he later addressed at dinner. The episode has not received wide attention outside the Catholic world, but it is the opening shot in an argument that could have a large impact on this year’s presidential campaign: Is it legitimate for bishops and priests to deny Communion to those supporting candidates who favor abortion rights?
A version of this argument roiled the 2004 campaign when some, though not most, Catholic bishops suggested that John Kerry and other pro-choice Catholic politicians should be denied Communion because of their views on abortion.
The Kmiec incident poses the question in an extreme form: He is not a public official but a voter expressing a preference. Moreover, Kmiec — a law professor at Pepperdine University and once dean of Catholic University’s law school — is a long-standing critic of the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision.
Obviously, the Catholic Church is free to come up with its own rules. I’m not Catholic, and this doesn’t apply to me anyway. Who does or does not get Communion is the business of the church and its hierarchy.
That said, looking at this as an outsider, the church’s position — and punishment of loyal adherents like Kmiec — strikes me as wildly foolish. (Read the rest of this story…)
Let me say for the record that I am not particularly enamored of this line of questioning, because I fail to see how it materially affects one’s job performance as POTUS. There are several of our finest presidents who would not have held up to that scrutiny. However, since the Republicans crossed this threshold during the Clinton administration, making it an issue worth millions of taxpayer dollars to investigate and prosecute, it is only fair to hold them to the same standards.
(F)rom a town hall meeting in Nashville, Tennessee Monday, mixed in with platitudes about gay marriage, we get a nice little comment from this questioner on the sanctity of marriage in McCain’s life–or more to the point, sanctimony. Here is a rough transcript of her question to The Morally Righteous One, which comes at the beginning of the video (it includes McCain’s answer to this question and a previous on on Hillary Clinton):
My second and final question, you talk a lot about the character issue…and…like you, um, I was opposed to gay marriage, I was in always in favor of civil unions but the basic definition of marriage….but, then I get to thinking, that is based on what we consider to be the sanctity of marriage. There is nothing….you see long-term couples splitting up, it’s, it’s just crazy…I know that you, your own situation, you’re going to have to address that in the campaign. Infidelity is just a terrible cancer on this country….and I think if we’re going to talk about…gay marriage, it has to be in the context of the preservation of marriage…which I just don’t see it, I think we need to make it more difficult for people to get married, or whatever we need to do..if that’s…if we’re going to be consistent.
McCain ignored that part of the question, of course.
That has been the meme for that past few weeks when people talked about the Democratic Primary. When Obama would lose a state by 20% or 30%, the media would go into a frenzy about him having a problem with that state’s populace, ignoring the fact that there were two very active campaigns going on by two awesome candidates, and one campaign had the power of one of the most popular Presidents in American history behind her.
So let’s ask about party unity. Where is it when it comes to the Republicans? Here is the results from last night’s Republican primary in South Dakota, almost three months to the day after John McCain became the presumptive nominee:
I hope you’ll donate a few bucks to help C&L work on our upcoming improvements to the site. I’ll run it just a few more days and see where we are. Thanks so much…
We’re using paypal and CC through them…Snail Mail checks to: Crooksandliars.com, PO Box 66310, Los Angeles, CA 90066. I have received some very beautiful letters so far. You can also buy C&L hats and coffee mugs here.
FOX News reacted quite differently to McCain’s speech last night in stark contrast to what Harold Ford thought. While he said it was McCain’s most powerful speech, Carl Cameron, Hume, Rove, Wallace and William the bloody Kristol thought it was awful. Will right wingers and the Bush administration attack Carl for sounding just like a left wing blog for pointing out McCain’s deficiencies as a public speaker? Remember what Rove and Co. said about McClellan? He reads off the teleprompter, uses a weird smile when he looks at the audience and stumbles mightily.
Cameron: …he’s just not as glitzy. Sen. McCain is working off a teleprompter, he’s stumbles with it. Occasionally you’ll see what looks to be an awkward smile as he tries to sort of connect to the audience, but it sometimes feels a little bit off. He recognizes it, the campaign recognizes it, the audience recognizes it.
Wallace: …and I have to say sometimes when you’re reading the speech along, the speech reads better than it sounds, sometimes it sounds better than it reads. I think we would agree this is a speech that was better on the printed page than it was coming from John McCain’s mouth.
Rove: Yea, content better than delivery tonight.
Kristol: I’ve got to say however watching that speech, I don’t think it was a successful speech by Sen. McCain and I think he came off as just snipping at Obama…
Despite the fact that much of the news coverage for the past few weeks on McCain has revolved around his lobbyist-run campaign, especially Co-Chair“Foreclosure Phil” Gramm’s lobbying ties to “the wrong side of the ongoing mortgage foreclosure crisis,” Chris Wallace’s “last question” about it caught McCain by surprise Tuesday night, and left him stammering, stuttering and fibbing:
Wallace: Let me ask you one last question. David Axelrod said you talked in your speech today about changing the way Washington does business, but your campaign is run by two of the biggest lobbyists in Washington. How do you respond to that?
McCain (stuttering): “Uh, I di.., look, uh, the, the, those, they are not lobbyists, but th.. the fact is Americans care about my vision and plan of action for the future,”… blah blah bs, blah … ‘Obama is a liberal’ blah…
Wallace didn’t press any further (of course) on who this “they” is, but it was a lie in any case clearly worthy of a few Pinocchios. Does the McCain campaign really not have a practiced answer at the ready for this simple a question about its mounting lobbyist problems (if so, I’m nearly certain ‘um, um, they are not lobbyists’ isn’t it) or did McCain just get so comfortable on the Republican News Network he blanked on the script?
Harold Ford so very much wants to be part of the punditocracy that he does what they all do eventually. In one clip he carries himself well by telling Tweety that McCain married into a beer fortune after Chris was going into his Obama doesn’t understand the working class nonsense. OK, that’s pretty good. However, in the next clip he has to tell the Villagers that McCain’s speech was his most powerful evah! Did he see the speech? It was awful. Giving the speech in Kenner, LA was a terrible choice because he could have gone to a Blue state to spread his message and the green background made him almost unbearable to watch. Yes, McCain’s very good in intimate settings, but giving speeches to larger audiences is not one of them.
Ford: A powerful speech by John McCain this evening!
Even FOX News couldn’t control their disdain for his speech. I’ll have video shortly of that. Is it part of the Villager sign up card to praise McCain even when it’s not called for?
Monday’s Red Wings/Penguins game was one of the greatest hockey games I’ve ever seen. Triple OT win for the Pens as Marc-Andre Fleury was “the savior” with 55 saves. Here’s the always colorful Don Cherry with his analysis. Pittsburgh is really tough on their home ice so it should be another great game…(Yes, I post about sports once in a while.)
Right at the top of his remarks before taking questions from the Nashville crowd — where regular unleaded goes for about $3.85 — McCain said he wanted to discuss “what’s on everybody’s mind, the price of oil.”
McCain said he was struck by the loud opposition by “the elites in this country.”
“The hysterical reaction was a little bit funny,” he said. In Washington, McCain noted, “the wealthiest people live in Georgetown” and can walk downtown to work. By contrast, he said, the lowest-income workers live the furthest away.
McCain explained that Barack Obama had called the plan “a gimmick”
“Well, I’d like to have some more quote gimmicks to give low-income Americans some relief,” he jabbed back.
I keep thinking about an item Time’s Joe Klein wrote about a month ago. Klein, a McCain admirer, predicted that McCain would avoid the cheap and pathetic style of campaigning we’re seeing now. McCain, Klein said, “sees the tawdry ceremonies of politics — the spin and hucksterism — as unworthy.” If he doesn’t, “McCain will have to live with the knowledge that in the most important business of his life, he chose expediency over honor. That’s probably not the way he wants to be remembered.”
Klein was mistaken. McCain has seen the tawdry ceremonies of politics — the spin and hucksterism — and has come to believe that Americans are just dumb enough to fall for the con. McCain almost certainly knows that this gas-tax idea is ridiculous, and he has to realize that railing against the “elites” for acknowledging reality is a special kind of stupid.
And yet, McCain peddles nonsense anyway, hoping voters won’t know the difference. That his proposal wouldn’t do anything to help low-income Americans, wouldn’t lower the price of gas, and would boost oil company profits seems entirely irrelevant. A confidence man in the middle of a scam can’t be bothered with reality — it only gets in the way of the deception.
Well, it wasn’t the speech that many had hoped for after this exhausting primary season. It certainly wasn’t a concession speech on the eve where Barack Obama clinched the number needed to be the Democratic presidential candidate. I’m sure that many will be angry that it wasn’t. What it was, however, was a thank you to all her supporters for standing by her and working so hard on what has been a historic campaign, and moreover, a call to respect her supporters and their values. But, for all her detractors online, we must acknowledge that it has been historic. More than seventeen million Americans voted for the first serious female presidential contender in U.S. history (no offense intended to Shirley Chisholm). As a woman and as the mother of girls for whom I hope will find no glass ceilings to impede them, this has been an extremely hard fought race that will open doors for future generations. Christy at FDL:
Given how narrow the margins are between the Obama and Clinton camps, can we honestly say that potentially throwing out close to half the Democratic party’s votes to salve individual needs for revenge or punishment or saying “suck it up and deal” is a winning strategy for November? Is it the human thing to do — something that felt right when the GOP spat it at you after the 2000 race was decided by SCOTUS? Is that who we want to be as a party, who Obama supporters want to be as a whole? Clinton folks? I don’t think so, not based on most conversations I’ve had with staunch supporters on either side.
I certainly hope folks aren’t willing to cut off their votes to spite their nation, anyway, and that supporters of one candidate aren’t quick to be dismissive to those on the other side of the fray.
It’s time we all stood up and became the leaders we wish to see. That means putting the nation and it’s desperately needed policy changes ahead of our own egos and grudges and snippy, poo-flinging urges. That means finding compassion somewhere inside the ire, and forgiveness inside the scars from a very closely fought race — because we must, or we will lose. All of us will lose.
In the Los Angeles Times today, Jonah Goldberg began the right’s extreme makeover of John McCain’s disastrous record on Iraq. Declaring “there is one candidate who’s been consistently right about the war, and it isn’t the Democrat,” Goldberg invents a fictional McCain at odds with President Bush from the outset of the war:
“Meantime, there was the supposedly dogmatic McCain challenging Bush’s approach to Iraq nearly from the get-go.”
As the history shows, not so much.
Demonstrating that experience is truly no substitute for judgment, John McCain like President Bush was wrong at almost every turn in promoting the invasion and occupation of Iraq. From his predictions of a short war and claims U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators to his announcements of mission accomplished, his ongoing confusion over friend and foe in Iraq and so much more, McCain’s is an unbroken legacy of error.
Threat Level: McCain - I’d secretly spy on Americans, too.
The Public Record: When Dick Cheney was CEO of Halliburton in the 1990s, he spoke out against the sanctions against Iran - the same Iran he’s now rattling the saber toward for their terrorist ties.
Attytood: An Iraqi in America wonders whose war is it, anyway?
