McCain Campaign // Current

Remember the Pig?

A top notch Republican political consultant makes an 11th hour call to the McCain campaign.

mrkgreene
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Rift Cracks 'Demoralized' McCain Campaign

The blame game has begun. Not only Palin, but many of the McCain staffers, as well, are circulating their resumes and pointing the... more

Jlarson
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Cindy McCain lawyer invokes Obama drug use - Politico.com

John Dowd, Cindy McCain's attorney, complained in a letter to New York Times executive editor Bill Keller earlier this month that the paper had scrutinized the GOP nominee's wife but not investigated matters surrounding Barack Obama including his youthful drug use.

"You have not tried to find Barack Obama's drug dealer that he wrote about in his book, Dreams of My Father," Dowd wrote in a two-page letter sent to Keller while the paper was reporting a piece about Cindy McCain.

The McCain campaign released the missive late Friday night in response to that story, to be published in the paper's Saturday edition. It's the first time anybody so closely associated with McCain has raised the issue.

Continuing the campaign's drumbeat of criticism against the Times, Dowd wrote on Oct. 1 that the paper was not covering the two candidates equally. In addition to the reference to Obama's "drug dealer," Dowd notes that the Times also has not "interviewed his poor relatives in Kenya and determined why Barack Obama has not rescued them."

After mentioning the topics, though, Dowd suggests that "none of these subjects on either side are worthy of the energy and resources of The New York Times."

Dowd is a Washington attorney at Akin Gump. He represented John McCain when the senator was investigated for his involvement in the "Keating Five" scandal in the 1980s. Initially a top fundraiser for McCain at the start of this campaign, Dowd defected to Fred Thompson last year when the Arizonan's campaign nearly ran aground. He's since come back into the fold, deployed to represent Cindy McCain to news organizations running investigative pieces.

The Saturday story, part of the newspaper's biographical "Long Run" series on the two candidates, offers a mostly negative look at Cindy McCain, reprising anecdotes about her drug abuse, miscarriages and the difficulties in her long-distance marriage to a senator.

In addition to releasing the Dowd letter, the campaign issued a lengthy statement denouncing the piece. A spokesman noted that the paper included little about Cindy McCain's extensive charitable work.

"This campaign made every effort to share personal accounts of Mrs. McCain’s good works with the paper, but apparently they were deemed unfit for publication in the New York Times," said Michael Goldfarb.

The aggressive pushback is just the latest in the campaign's ongoing war with the Times. Campaign aides have publicly claimed the paper is an arm of Obama's campaign.

Despite their criticism, McCain officials still cooperate with Times journalists and cite the paper's reporting when it's in their interest. A front-page story on Obama's ties to Bill Ayers earlier this month, for example, was the peg that Sarah Palin used to insert the '60s-era domestic terrorist into the campaign.John Dowd, Cindy McCain's attorney, complained in a letter to New York Times executive editor Bill Keller earlier this month... more

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1 month ago

Obama, McCain Economic Plans Video

McCain and Obama clash over the economy.

starr111
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1 month ago

McCain's $52 Billion Plan Video

52 Billion Dollar Plan from McCain???

starr111
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1 month ago

What McCain Hasn't Tried

John McCain likes Barack Obama. He admires and respects Obama. He believes Obama is "very impressive, he's thoughtful,... more

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1 month ago

George F. Will - What McCain Learned From the Rough Rider - washingtonpost.com

John McCain, like many Americans who should know better, extravagantly praises Theodore Roosevelt. He is a kindred spirit of the... more

starr111
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1 month ago

McCain in a Bear Market

"Are you going to get any better or is this it?" With, mercifully, only one debate to go, that is the question about John McCain's campaign.

In the closing days of his 10-year quest for the presidency, it's less that Obama has bad ideas than that Obama is a bad person.

Demonstrated by bad associations Obama had in Chicago, such as with William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist. But the McCain-Palin charges have come just as the Obama campaign is benefiting from a mass mailing it is not paying for. Many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts -- telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans' accounts have recently shed. In this context, the McCain-Palin campaign's attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama's Chicago associations seems surreal -- or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, "like being savaged by a dead sheep."

Recently Obama noted -- perhaps to torment and provoke conservatives -- that McCain's rhetoric about Wall Street's "greed" and "casino culture" amounted to "talking like Jesse Jackson." What fun: one African American Chicago politician distancing himself from another African American Chicago politician by associating McCain with him.

After their enjoyable 2006 congressional elections, Democrats eagerly anticipated that 2008 would provide a second election in which a chaotic Iraq would be at the center of voters' minds. Today they are glad that has not happened. The success of the surge in Iraq, for which McCain justly claims much credit, is one reason why foreign policy has receded to the margins of the electorate's mind, thereby diminishing the subject with which McCain is most comfortable and which is Obama's largest vulnerability.

McCainseeking traction in inhospitable economic terrain, said that the $700 billion bailout plan is too small. He proposes several hundred billions more for his American Homeownership Resurgence -- you cannot have too many surges -- Plan. Under it, the government would buy mortgages that homeowners cannot -- or perhaps would just rather not -- pay, and replace them with cheaper ones. When he proposed this, conservatives participating in MSNBC's "dial group" wrenched their dials in a wrist-spraining spasm of disapproval.

It might be prudent for McCain to throw caution, and billions, to the wind. Obama is competitive in so many states that President Bush carried in 2004 -- including Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico -- it is not eccentric to think he could win at least 350 of the 538 electoral votes.

If that seems startling, that is only because the 2000 and 2004 elections were won with 271 and 286, respectively. In the 25 elections from 1900 to 1996, the winners averaged 402.6. This, even though the 1900 and 1904 elections -- before Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma attained statehood, and before the size of the House was fixed at 435 members in 1911 -- allocated only 447 and 476 electoral votes, respectively. The 12 elections from 1912 through 1956, before Hawaiian and Alaskan statehood, allocated only 531.

In the 25 20th-century elections, only three candidates won with fewer than 300 -- McKinley with 292 in 1900, Wilson with 277 in 1916 and Carter with 297 in 1976. President Harry Truman won 303 in 1948 even though Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrat candidacy won 39 that otherwise would have gone to Truman. After John Kennedy won in 1960 with just 303, the average winning total in the next nine elections, up to the 2000 cliffhanger, was 421.4.

"Someday, Labour will win an election. Our job is to hold on until they are sane." Republicans, winners of seven of the past 10 presidential elections, had better hope they have held on long enough.

"Are you going to get any better or is this it?" With, mercifully, only one debate to go, that is the question about... more

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1 month ago

Sarah Palin's Bridge to Somewhere

Tell us why this is interestingI mean the one who bases foreign policy experience on the proximity of Russia to Alaska and who speaks cutely about Vladimir Putin poking his little head into American airspace. Where did they put her?

The Palin who performed so miserably in one-on-one media interviews was nowhere to be seen during Thursday night's debate with Joe Biden. Instead, the affable, tough, determined pit-bull-hockey mom presented to the GOP convention was back with a jaw-jutting, happy-warrior vengeance.

So, yes, I am relieved. I had been concerned that she would stumble badly and humiliate herself. No fair-minded person wanted that. In fact, she managed to control the debate in many respects by bridging from the question asked to the talking point she wanted to hammer.

She was often too cute by half -- winking and gosh-darning her way through the debate -- but she did what she needed to do. Among other things, she declared a populist war of Us vs. Them -- everyday, honest, hardworking Americans against Wall Street, greed, corrupt politicians, liberals and, of course, the media.

Poor Gwen Ifill was irrelevant -- a second-tier actor in Palin's morality play. Over and over, Palin skipped past Ifill, as well as Biden, to speak directly to the American people. I am one of you, she told them. And these people -- Democrats and the media -- are neither of us, nor for us.

And she said it in the nicest, gosh-darn way, bless her little heart. The GOP loved it, but did anyone else? Did Palin change hearts and minds? Probably not. My suspicion, bolstered by early polls, is that people left the debate with their original impressions intact.

To Democrats, she's still a dangerous lightweight, though possibly more so than they suspected because she is also a charming and effective manipulator. To Republicans, she's a bright light, a change agent, a reformer and a maverick who identifies with real people around the kitchen table.

With the very first question about the bailout bill -- was this the worst of Washington or the best of Washington? -- Palin went straight to her hockey mom narrative, though she switched to the more mainstream soccer field.

"As we try to figure out has this been a good time or a bad time in America's economy, is go to a kid's soccer game on Saturday, and turn to any parent there on the sideline and ask them, 'How are you feeling about the economy?' And I'll betcha you're going to hear some fear in that parent's voice."

Of course, if you go to a Starbucks today and ask the iPodder blogging on her Apple about Sarah Palin, you're gonna hear some fear in that person's voice, also. Betcha!

Palin's strategy throughout the evening was to avoid questions to which she didn't have answers and rely on the American people to like her so much they didn't care.

Tell us why this is interestingI mean the one who bases foreign policy experience on the proximity of Russia to Alaska and who... more