What a Day

John McCain was dealt two very low cards in this quadrennial edition of political Texas Hold 'em--a seven and a four, say. (Other candidates, like Romney, were the dreaded 2-3 combo of doom.) He just doesn't have a lot of options. Thus was his situation revealed this morning, when he beheld the latest ABC News/WaPo poll numbers: Obama 52, McCain 43.

(Sample analysis: " As a point of comparison, neither of the last two Democratic nominees -- John Kerry in 2004 or Al Gore in 2000 -- recorded support above 50 percent in a pre-election poll by the Post and ABC News.")

Financial crisis, advisor's on the payroll of Fannie/Freddie, debate imminent ... a rough start of the day. Well, why not call the whole thing off?

Tomorrow morning, I will suspend my campaign and return to Washington after speaking at the Clinton Global Initiative. I have spoken to Senator Obama and informed him of my decision and have asked him to join me....

We must meet as Americans, not as Democrats or Republicans, and we must meet until this crisis is resolved. I am directing my campaign to work with the Obama campaign and the commission on presidential debates to delay Friday night's debate until we have taken action to address this crisis....

Following September 11th, our national leaders came together at a time of crisis. We must show that kind of patriotism now. Americans across our country lament the fact that partisan divisions in Washington have prevented us from addressing our national challenges. Now is our chance to come together to prove that Washington is once again capable of leading this country. [itals mine]

This put Obama in a slightly awkward position. As we all madly clicked around to find out what the hell this meant, there was a period of a couple hours where no one really knew. It was clearly an effort to turn that 7-4 hand into a winner, and it did sort of highlight the whole "Country First" theme. It was also, simultaneously, an obvious Hail Mary (Barney Frank: "the longest ... in the history of either football or Marys."), and so we pondered what Obama might do.

[Wrinkle: Turns out Obama had called McCain this morning so the two campaigns could draft some joint language about pulling together, and then while the Obama camp waited, McCain stormed up the high road to try to seize the day. Or not, depending on which campaign you listen to.]

I was sitting in the office of a co-worker strategizing--apparently on a wavelength Obama was tuned into--arguing that he needed to come out hard and say this is exactly the time for a debate. Oh Joy!--he did (and I'm taking the credit):

It’s my belief that this is exactly the time the American people need to hear from the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsible with dealing with this mess. In my mind, actually, it's more important than ever that we present ourselves to the American people and try to describe where we want to take the country and where we wnt to take the economy as well as dealing with some of the issues of foreign policy that were initially the subject of the debate.

What I think is important is that we don’t suddenly infuse Capitol Hill with presidential politics.

Presidents are going to have to deal with more than one thing at a time. It’s not necessary for us to think that we can do only one thing, and suspend everything else.

This is a world-class smack-down (cool and elegant, Obama-esque, but smack-down nonetheless), and with it Obama flipped the debate. Now it looked like McCain was charging down a blind alley, not up the high road. It gets worse. David Letterman was openly (and effectively) mocking him:

David Letterman tells audience that McCain called him today to tell him he had to rush back to DC to deal with the economy.

Then in the middle of the taping Dave got word that McCain was, in fact just down the street being interviewed by Katie Couric. Dave even cut over to the live video of the interview, and said, "Hey Senator, can I give you a ride home?"

Earlier in the show, Dave kept saying, "You don't suspend your campaign. This doesn't smell right. This isn't the way a tested hero behaves." And he joked: "I think someone's putting something in his metamucil."

"He can't run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sara Palin. Where is she?"

"What are you going to do if you're elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We've got a guy like that now!"

Meanwhile, rather shockingly, Survey USA released a poll about the news that had happened earlier today. Major finding? 86% want the debate to go on as scheduled; only 10% want it cancelled. D'oh!

Meanwhile meanwhile, it looks like the bailout deal, the stated crisis that caused McCain to supsend his campaign in the first place, is 98% done. According to Kurtz, "Treasury has capitulated on almost every point (draft version of the deal here)," meaning that Dems will claim victory and the janitor will be cleaning up just in time for McCain to arrive and bring his own special brand of bipartisan comity.

Wait, I think I spelled that last word wrong.

Whoops

According to Rasmussen, women don't like the Palin choice:

Palin is the right choices
Men - 43%
Women - 37%

More likely to vote for McCain
Men - 38%
Women - 33%

Palin favorability
Men - 58%
Women - 48%

Looks like the gambit to woo Hillary voters has instantly backfired. Then there's this: voters are now evenly split on whether they're more likely to vote McCain because of Palin (35%) or less likely (33%), a number that will almost certainly go down when they learn more about her.

The Daily Gaffe: the Politics of No-Visitgate

This isn't one of McCain's traditional gaffes of knowledge, but one of strategy. It is wrapped in some pretty stinky paper, to boot. The issue is McCain's insistence that the reason Obama didn't visit wounded vets in Germany was because "he wanted to bring media people and cameras and his campaign staffers" and wasn't allowed to. The attack was accompanied by a nasty little commercial McCain has been running for a few days. Although instantly discredited, McCain continued swift-boating.

The attacks are part of a newly aggressive McCain operation whose aim is to portray the Democratic presidential candidate as a craven politician more interested in his image than in ailing soldiers, a senior McCain adviser said. They come despite repeated pledges by the Republican that he will never question his rival's patriotism.

The gaffe, however, is this: McCain is not George W. Bush, and pushing a story he knows is false has begun to backfire. The WaPo has a front page story debunking the McCain spin today (the link above). The NYT has a similar critique. Josh Marshall captures it nicely:

As I alluded to at the top of this post, it is the norm that obvious campaign tactics that are treated as obvious after a campaign is over are nonetheless treated by most reporters as ambiguous or unclear during a campaign. But in this case it would be nice if that were not the case. Because here we have a candidate, John McCain, who is running on a record of straight talk and honorable campaigning running a campaign made up mainly of charges reporters are now more or less acknowledging are lies.

Josh is a little skeptical that the MSM will criticize McCain for the internal contradiction (honorable straight-talker vs. swift-boating liar), but I'd say that horse is already half-way out of the barn. McCain has never known how to modulate his attacks, and at this level, and for this duration, he can't get away with being McNasty and a kindly old war vet simultaneously.

The Daily Gaffe: Anbar Awakening

Is it possible that this neglected blog will become nothing more than an erratic collection of posts on the gaffes of John McCain? I wouldn't rule it out, especially not before the Oregon Brewers Fest ends. Anyway, the current run bodes badly doesn't it? Nevertheless...

Katie Couric is doing interviews with both presidential candidates. In the McCain installment, she asked this question:

Senator McCain, Sen. Obama says, while the increased number of U.S. troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What's your response to that?

McCain's response is typically touchy (he chafes when questioned on subjects over which he claims mastery), but includes another basic factual error.

I don't know how you respond to something that is such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel McFarlane (phonetic) was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history. Thanks to General Petraeus, our leadership, and the sacrifice of brave young Americans. I mean, to deny that their sacrifice didn't make possible the success of the surge in Iraq, I think, does a great disservice to young men and women who are serving and have sacrificed.

But McCain (in another irony) is the one with the bad history:

The surge wasn't even announced until a few months after the Anbar Awakening. Via Spencer Ackerman, here is Colonel MacFarland explaining the Anbar Awakening to Pam Hess of UPI, on September 29 2006. That would be almost four months before the President even announced the surge. Petraeus wasn't even in Iraq yet.

Ilan Goldenberg, tracking down the quotes at Democracy Arsenal, adds another. This is from a story in Foreign Affairs by a scholar of the Iraq war, Colin H. Kahl:

The Awakening began in Anbar Province more than a year before the surge and took off in the summer and fall of 2006 in Ramadi and elsewhere, long before extra U.S. forces started flowing into Iraq in February and March of 2007. Throughout the war, enemy-of-my-enemy logic has driven Sunni decision-making. The Sunnis have seen three "occupiers" as threats: the United States, the Shiites (and their presumed Iranian patrons), and the foreigners and extremists in AQI. Crucial to the Awakening was the reordering of these threats.

It should be noted that I was unclear about the timing of the Anbar Awakening and might well have made this gaffe myself. But then again, I'm neither running for President nor a self-professed expert on military strategies. If this is McCain in his area of expertise, how will he do in a debate where he'll be expected to discuss policy in subjects in which he can't express even passing interest?

The Daily Gaffe - Iraq/Pakistan Border

McCain, chiding Obama for his misjudgment, issues a gaffe that would have been a 48-hour story had Obama made it:

McCain: We have a lot of work to do, and I'm afraid it's a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border. And I would not announce that I'm going to attack Pakistan, as Senator Obama when he was did ... during his campaign.

As you know, Iraq's eastern border is Iran. Iran's eastern border is Iraq. The particular amusement in this quote for me is McCain's lecturing, faux-polite dig there at the end. It's a tasty scoop of irony for an old man who gets confused about where the fronts of our wars are.

The Daily Gaffe

New Feature!

It seems that almost every day, John McCain makes what should be a campaign-ending gaffe, be it calling Social Security a "disgrace," failing to adequately explain his position on the economy after his national chair and chief economic advisor Phil Gramm describes America as "a nation of whiners" or this, from today's news:

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said on Friday that his Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, is likely to be in Iraq over the weekend. (Rueters)

As Josh Marshall points out, this is a big no-no. Quoting a "knowledgeable insider," he writes:

If it is true that Obama is going to Iraq this weekend, it is a very serious mistake for McCain to have disclosed it publically. Even for run-of-the-mill CODELs the military gives guidance like, "Please strongly discourage Congressional offices from issuing press releases prior to their trips which mention their intent to travel to the AOR and/or the dates of that travel or their scheduled meetings. Such releases are a serious compromise to OPSEC." If Obama is going to Iraq this weekend, I can not begin to imagine how much this is complicating the security planning for the trip.

This is the guy who has such broad foreign policy experience, remember.

No doubt my 12 daily readers will form the nucleus of support that will one day force the media to cover McCain responsibly, all due to this new feature. No doubt.