Not a Big Truck

It’s truly amazing how much better McCain looks as he is giving his concession speech than he ever did during the campaign.  Physically, his face looks relaxed; he isn’t grimacing and he looks comfortable.  He isn’t making Frankenstein faces and herky-jerky motions and he appears to be at peace.  He looks more like the John McCain we all used to know.

As Obama continues to hold onto his leads in national and swing state polling and expands the playing field into what were expected to be solid GOP states, the emails from the Obama campaign pleading for money are starting to make me chuckle. See this bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping email from yesterday evening:

Our spending plans have been stretched by John McCain’s negative attacks and the overwhelming resources of the Republican National Committee. … [J]ust this week, we’re facing new and unexpected spending against us in Montana and West Virginia.

Oh no!  The Republicans are having to defend Montana and West Virginia, states that the Democrats never expected to have much of a chance of winning!  I’m surprised they didn’t mention that McCain is having to spend money on robocalls in Arizona now.

Saw this gem on Ben Smith’s blog over at Politico and thought it was good enough to repost here:

Sen. John McCain’s senior foreign policy adviser cites a steamy romance 50 years ago with a Brazilian babe among the things that illustrate the candidate’s decades-long interest in Latin America.

Speaking at a panel discussion Friday on the next U.S. president’s Latin American policy, McCain advisor Richard Fontaine started out by mentioning an old Brazilian flame of McCain’s, who recently emerged in the press.

”Talking a little about his personal experience, he was famously born in Panama and has traveled all over the hemisphere for many years,” Fontaine said. “In fact, I saw, I guess it was last week, that his old girlfriend in Brazil has been found from his early days when he was in the Navy and was interviewed. She’s a somewhat older woman now than she was then, but it sorta speaks to the long experience he has had in the region — in the most positive terms.”

Whether or not you favor a federal bailout of the troubled sectors of the American financial system, this quote in this morning’s NYT is striking:

One, Representative Jim Marshall, a Georgia Democrat facing a re-election contest, told colleagues in a private meeting that he would vote for the measure to bolster the economy. “I am willing to give up my seat over this,” Mr. Marshall said, according to another person who was there.

Marshall represents a very competitive and military-heavy district that has voted Republican in recent presidential elections.  He is facing a former Air Force general in this fall’s congressional election.

Call me biased, but I am impressed with Marshall’s statesmanship.  John McCain claims he is putting the country first when he is flying back to Washington and trying to cancel the debate purely for a photo-op stunt.  Marshall takes a big political risk for something he believes in: now that truly is putting the country first.

Obama was strong here, starting at the 4:50 mark.  “You were wrong.”

James Fallows makes a subtle but insightful point about the debate: Obama looked at McCain numerous times and addressed comments directly to him.  McCain did not look at Obama once.

I think this will prove advantageous to Obama in the coming days as clips of the debate are replayed, as is happening already.  It’s much more compelling to see a clip of Obama addressing criticism directly towards McCain, in a “2-shot” with both candidates in the picture, than to see McCain talking only to the camera.  It makes Obama look tough and confident.

McCain’s proposal to postpone Friday’s debate, on the grounds that he and Obama should set politics aside and return to Washington to work on the Wall Street bailout, is absurd, a transparent campaign gimmick.  I’m convinced that part of the reason he has proposed a postponement is in order to give Sarah Palin more time to cram for her vice-presidential debate with Joe Biden.  McCain suggested a specific date for the postponed presidential debate: next Thursday, October 2, the date of the VP debate — which would then require the VP debate to be postponed as well.  Palin clearly has a lot of studying to do and I bet that factored into McCain’s thinking.

Incidentally, McCain’s proposal certainly is not winning him any friends in Oxford, Mississippi, where the University of Mississippi has spent 5.5 million dollars on debate preparations and has inconvenienced the student body and citizens of the town with schedule changes and extensive security measures such as closing off major roads days in advance.  University spokesman Andy Mullins stated that the school would probably be unable to accommodate a last-minute schedule change.

Matt Drudge is continuing his pattern of ignoring negative stories about McCain and highlighting even the silliest of stories that make Obama look bad.  Here’s a current example: Drudge links to this article, entitled “Joe Biden loses Barack Obama the Catholic vote.”  This article, from The Telegraph, is utter garbage.  The author argues that Biden is costing Obama the Catholic vote, because Catholics were split 50-50 between Democrats and Republicans before Biden joined the ticket, but now that he is on the ticket, Catholic leaders are heavily criticizing him and other pro-choice Catholic politicians.  The author claims that this increased attention means Catholics are going to turn away from the Obama-Biden ticket, even though he cites no statistics to support this conclusion, and even though one would assume that the 50% of Catholics who were supporting Obama were already aware of the fact that he and most other prominent Democrats are pro-choice.

Yet as Drudge links to tripe like this, he ignores McCain’s incompetent, bumbling response to the ongoing crisis on Wall Street, in which the Arizona senator has said he would fire the SEC chairman (the president can’t do that) and has confused the SEC with the FEC.

I’m pretty close to the point where I will start boycotting Drudge.

The McCain campaign is running a dishonest and dishonorable campaign.  It has decided to throw out as many shiny metal objects as possible in hopes of distracting voters and the media from issues or stories that could be devastating to McCain’s candidacy.  Give them credit, they’ve been really good at it over the last few weeks.

Republicans and Democrats have used such tactics before. As an earlier post notes, however, Republicans tend to use them more often and, probably, more successfully. So, in that sense, this campaign hasn’t provided that much that is new in terms of dirty tactics.

What does seem remarkable about the McCain campaign is its apparent lack of an ideological core. What does it stand for? Why does he want to be president? What are Republicans bringing to the table that is different than the last eight years? What improvements have they made to the Goldwater/Reagan Republican party?

Bush at least had “compassionate conservatism” (2000) and the notion of exporting American democracy through hard power (2004).  Even if neither of those ideas materialized into something beneficial, it at least lent some sort of meaning to those campaigns. At this point, it seems like Republicans are running just to remain in power, offering no agenda.  Maybe I’m missing something, but “reforming Washington” just doesn’t seem like a guiding philosophy for a party, especially one that would be reforming the government that it has largely controlled for the last 8 years.   

Say what you will about Goldwater/Reagan Republicanism (it certainly had its limitations, but there was a governing philosophy there. Goldwater took a massive defeat in 1964, partly because he refused to compromise on his guiding principles. Reagan didn’t alter his positions to fit the electorate, he held his positions until the electorate moved to him. There was an intellectual current to that movement.

What is the intellectual current running through McCain’s candidacy? Country First? This lack of a vision for the country, I think, is the reason the McCain campaign focuses so much on winning the short-term battles in the media.  They release tough ad after tough ad to keep the attention of the media and to create the perception that they are winning, but seem to provide very little in terms of revealing any novel intellectual insights into how reform or change will be instituted in government. 

The campaign is trying to win this election to govern, but governing should be a means to an end. Some policies or some governing philosophy should be the end. The current Republican party is trying to govern for the sake of governing or, at most, just to prevent the Democrats from governing.

The Conservative party in Britain has been out of power for over a decade. Things were grim for that party during the Blair years. But while out of power, they reformed themselves, found a fresh intellectual core, and adjusted their conservatism to meet modern challenges. Relying on Thatcher’s conservatism no longer sufficed.

The Republican party must recognize that it will have to cut its ties to Reaganism and find a new intellectual current to revive its party. Such a revival will be difficult to occur while still in control of the government. Campaigning simply for the right to govern and not for the opportunity to infuse new ideas will only delay the inevitable reconfiguration that American conservatism must undergo.

Then again, as an Obama supporter, maybe I’m just hoping the Republican take a dive.