Month: August 2008

Capital Caution

by digby

Mike Lux writes over on Open Left about the reflexive caution of the campaign and knowledgeably speculates about why it’s happening:

I fear that, at least for the moment, the Capitol Hill Culture of Caution has taken hold of the campaign.

I’m not even talking about the much commented-on move to the center. While, as I have written, I don’t think he needed to do this and in fact felt like a more open call for bold new thinking would have been a better general election strategy, I haven’t minded the centrist shift as much as some others in progressive politics. It is, after all, a pretty predictable playbook move, one that most candidates in both parties have done for many years. And the Westen/Greenberg research I wrote about the other day showed that while Democrats could take clear stands on controversial issues and still win, it also showed that centrist-sounding inoculation language on those issues was necessary to win majorities on those issues.

What I’m talking about instead is the sense of overall caution that seems to have utterly infected the campaign. Instead of having the confidence to win the bigger argument on investing in alternative energy production and conservation, they make the shift on drilling. Instead of pushing back firmly and assertively on the race card accusation, they have the campaign’s reply be “No, we’re not playing the race card.” Instead of having the confidence to really negotiate with McCain on debate formats, they fell into the we’ll-just-do-what-candidates-have-always-done formats. Instead of having the confidence to lay out some of his good new ideas on foreign policy that are clearly different from the Bush doctrine in his widely watched Berlin speech, he stuck to cautious generalities. Instead of having the confidence to back up his strong and effective primary rhetoric on FISA and NAFTA, he cautiously moved towards the conventional wisdom.

I am haunted by this because of my past experience with Capitol Hill-shaped “wisdom” around elections- being told by my brilliant young friend David Plouffe, who was running the DCCC in 1998, that the PFAW/MoveOn.org time to move on regarding impeachment campaign was a huge mistake, when in fact it was the theme that ended up turning the tide on congressional elections in our favor that year; being told by Gore’s people in 2000 that if they just didn’t respond to the NRA’s attacks on the gun issue, the issue wouldn’t have an impact; being told by Gephardt’s top aides in 2002 that the only way to win the congressional elections that fall was to “take the war off the table” so that Democrats could get on with other issues; being told by Kerry’s team in 2004 that if they just ignored the Swift Boaters, they wouldn’t get any attention. Caution kills when it comes to national elections, and the caution of my friends in Obamaland is hurting him. It’s why despite the good coverage of the overseas trip and one gaffe after another by McCain, Obama is drifting down in the polls. And in an election where it is very likely we will lose some older blue collar white voters a Democrat would normally get, caution will kill us in the fall by dampening the enthusiasm Obama has sparked among young voters and new voters in the primary.

I can understand the Obama campaign’s desire not to rock the boat too much because the boat is already rocking quite a bit with the liberal/black/young/Muslim/radical theme that the GOP has successfully put in play. Their instinct is to project calm and cool to counteract the image of a foreign naif who makes everybody nervous.

A lot of it comes from the idea that many of us have that because the Republicans are so unpopular this race is in the bag. But something’s wrong with that picture. Obama is running significantly worse than the generic Democrat in all the polls and it’s not getting any better. So, we’re not looking at a blow out, we’re looking at a fairly typical presidential race of the past few years. That means it is probably going to be a squeaker.

But as Lux points out, it is also driven by a predictable reflexive caution among establishment Dems who are running the Obama campaign. Obama has, by all accounts, a magnificent field operation ready to go. He’s got tons of money. The issues favor Democrats. As Lux says, when Democratic presidential candidates adopt the culture of Capital Hill Caution, they tend to lose.

I don’t have any answers. This campaign seems to be ending up on the same tired terrain all of these campaigns end up and that’s a disappointment. Maybe the campaign doesn’t have to do anything too risky — just not making any more overt moves to the right or give any more paeans to compromise for a while might be one way to go. I definitely think that particular tactic has outlived its usefulness.

(But hey, that Evan Bayh is a real firecracker so that ought to shake things up in ways we can’t possibly predict. Or maybe we can …)

Update: Steve Benen blogged this little nugget this morning:

I found this absolutely fascinating. The Boston Globe’s John Schwenkler compiled a graphic showing which words appeared the most frequently on the official McCain campaign blog and the official Obama campaign blog. As it turns out, one word appeared the most often on both: “Obama.”

I think we might need to see a few more mentions of McCain/Bush on Obama’s blog at this point, don’t you? This election should be a referendum on them, not him. They’ve been in power, they’ve got the record. If the election is all about Obama, the Democrats are giving up their argument.

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More “Lone Nut” Pushing By The FBI

by dday

Glenn Greenwald beat me to today’s update on the anthrax case, showing pretty conclusively that the FBI’s case, which is being dribbled out slowly, just doesn’t add up to much. One thing I learned from Greenwald is that yesterday’s revelation about Ivins’ obsession with a sorority being the reason he mailed the letters near their house at Princeton, which already sounded ridiculous (they don’t have sororities at the several dozen other campuses closer to his Frederick, MD home?), was also completely factually wrong.

The mailbox just off the campus of Princeton University where the letters were mailed sits about 100 yards away from where the college’s Kappa Kappa Gamma chapter stores its rush materials, initiation robes and other property. Sorority members do not live there, and the Kappa chapter at Princeton does not provide a house for the women.

I know that most sexual deviants often hide out and use mailboxes near where sororities house their rush materials – it’s as axiomatic as breathing oxygen and emitting carbon dioxide – but color me skeptical.

In fact, color the New York Times skeptical as well, particularly of the FBI’s investigation methods.

They had even intensively questioned his adopted children, Andrew and Amanda, now both 24, with the authorities telling his son that he might be able to collect the $2.5 million reward for solving the case and buy a sports car, and showing his daughter gruesome photographs of victims of the anthrax letters and telling her, “Your father did this,” according to the account Dr. Ivins gave a close friend.

As the investigation wore on, some colleagues thought the F.B.I.’s methods were increasingly coercive, as the agency tried to turn Army scientists against one another and reinterviewed family members.

One former colleague, Dr. W. Russell Byrne, said the agents pressed Dr. Ivins’s daughter repeatedly to acknowledge that her father was involved in the attacks.

“It was not an interview,” Dr. Byrne said. “It was a frank attempt at intimidation.”

Dr. Byrne said he believed Dr. Ivins was singled out partly because of his personal weaknesses. “They figured he was the weakest link,” Dr. Byrne said. “If they had real evidence on him, why did they not just arrest him?”

The picture being painted of Ivins as some kind of creepy, sexually depraved deviant may be true – the obsession with Kappa Kappa Gamma (which according to the NYT ended in 1981), holding a private mailbox to receive porn – but it has literally nothing to do with sending poisoned letters to media and political figures and making them crudely look like they were coming from Islamic terrorists. The fact that Ivins voted in several Democratic primaries makes it curious that he would have sent these letters out exclusively to Democratic leaders, particularly those who were holding up negotiations on the Patriot Act (Leahy, Daschle).

There’s apparently going to be a wealth of scientific information coming out tomorrow, but for now, the biggest leak concerns Ivins’ use of freeze-drying equipment that could be used to convert wet anthrax spores into powder.

Ivins’s possession of the drying device, known as a lyopholizer, could help investigators explain how he might have been able to send letters containing deadly anthrax spores to U.S. senators and news organizations.

The device was not commonly used by researchers at the Army’s sprawling biodefense complex at Fort Detrick, Md., where Ivins worked as a scientist, employees at the base said. Instead, sources said, Ivins had to go through a formal process to check out the lyopholizer, creating a record on which authorities are now relying. He did at least one project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that would have given him reason to use the drying equipment, according to a former colleague in his lab.

I’ll go over to Greenwald for this one.

But that appears to be completely false. Here is the abstract of a 1995 research report, for which Ivins was the lead scientist, reporting on discoveries made as part of their research into anthrax vaccines (h/t substantial). This is the method they described using:

The efficacy of several human anthrax vaccine candidates comprised of different adjuvants together with Bacillus anthracis protective antigen (PA) was evaluated in guinea pigs challenged by an aerosol of virulent B. anthracis spores. The most efficacious vaccines tested were formulated with PA plus monophosphoryl lipid A (MPL) in a squalenel lecithin/Tween 80 emulsion (SLT) and PA plus the saponin QS-21. The PA+MPL in SLT vaccine, which was lyophilized and then reconstituted before use, demonstrated strong protective immunogenicity, even after storage for 2 years at 4°C. The MPL component was required for maximum efficacy of the vaccine. Eliminating lyophilization of the vaccine did not diminish its protective efficacy. No significant alteration in efficacy was observed when PA was dialyzed against different buffers before preparation of vaccine. PA+MPL in SLT proved superior in efficacy to the licensed United States human anthrax vaccine in the guinea pig model.

Clearly, Ivins’ legitimate work researching anthrax vaccines entailed the use of a lyopholizer. As the commenter notes, “If you google ‘lyophilize’ and ‘anthrax’, most of the pages returned are about anthrax vaccines, which is what Dr. Ivins was working on at Ft. Detrick.”

You’re going to hear about some fantastic new technique – some radical DNA technology that the FBI hopes to use as a tool to convince a CSI-loving public about the dead accuracy of their claims. But as Dr. Meryl Nass notes, the most sophisticated technology can link the powder to a lab, but not an individual. This is an effort to close a case that should not be closed. Rep. Rush Holt, who represents the district from where the anthrax was mailed, wants an investigation.

Having watched how [the FBI] collected evidence, I don’t have a lot of confidence, and I think the burden is on them to satisfy me, and other members of Congress, that they’ve done this right. . . . The case seems to me at this point to be circumstantial, and again, without briefings from the FBI, it would be presumptuous of me to say. And it would be presumptuous of people in Central New Jersey to breathe a sigh of relief and say: “They got the murderer. He is no longer at-large.” The people deserve better re-assurances than what they’ve been given.

Finally, there’s this op-ed from Richard Spertzel, the head of the biological-weapons section of Unscom from 1994-99 and a member of the Iraq Survey Group. He is completely unconvinced by the claims leaking out of the FBI, but his claims should be met with absolute skepticism.

Let’s start with the anthrax in the letters to Sens. Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy. The spores could not have been produced at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked, without many other people being aware of it. Furthermore, the equipment to make such a product does not exist at the institute […]

In short, the potential lethality of anthrax in this case far exceeds that of any powdered product found in the now extinct U.S. Biological Warfare Program. In meetings held on the cleanup of the anthrax spores in Washington, the product was described by an official at the Department of Homeland Security as “according to the Russian recipes” — apparently referring to the use of the weak electric charge […]

Furthermore, the anthrax in this case, the “Ames strain,” is one of the most common strains in the world. Early in the investigations, the FBI said it was similar to strains found in Haiti and Sri Lanka. The strain at the institute was isolated originally from an animal in west Texas and can be found from Texas to Montana following the old cattle trails. Samples of the strain were also supplied to at least eight laboratories including three foreign laboratories. Four French government laboratories reported on studies with the Ames strain, citing the Pasteur Institute in Paris as the source of the strain they used. Organism DNA is not a very reliable way to make a case against a scientist.

I don’t know what Spertzel is getting at with the “Russian recipes,” but he’s actually contradicting himself with this editorial. In 2002 he claimed that he could make this stuff. He’s been pushing the state-sponsored terrorism angle for years, as well. In this situation, your friends may be your enemies and it’s hard to piece together where the truth lies. Whatever the case, there needs to be a coordinated, sustained effort to get a full-scale investigation rather than having Ivins tried in the media.

This timeline from Marcy Wheeler is also helpful.

UPDATE: …an update here (h/t Steinn Sigurdsson) – if you look at Ivins’ patent for the anthrax vaccine in 2002, he very clearly used a lyopholizer in the course of the research.

The concentrated sample was desalted again using the same buffer, frozen and finally lyophilized using a Speed-Vac. The dried samples were dissolved in 25 μl of the TRIS buffer described above and diluted 1:1 with a 2×SDS solubilization buffer consisting of 50 mM Na 2 CO 3 , 4% (w/v) SDS, 12% (v/v) glycerol, 2% (v/v) 2-mercaptoethanol and 0.01% (w/v) Bromphenol Blue prior to heating at 95° C. for 5 min.

As a kos commenter notes, “lyophilizer” is another name for freeze dryer, so to suggest that Ivins had access to some strange and exotic equipment without reason is just stupid. There is seemingly no critical thinking in some of these news accounts.

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Knowing Ourselves

by digby

The Wall Street Journal published this interesting article a few days back about how people respond to pollsters and what pollsters are doing in this election to control for bias. Give it a read if you’re interested in these things.

The sidebar to the article actually interested me more than the article itself because I think it speaks to the recent dialog about whether or not there is such a thing as dogwhistles and who they are aimed toward:

HOW THE UNCONSCIOUS AFFECTS THE TRUTH

Pollsters try to get voters to reveal the biases they’re too embarrassed or afraid to admit by asking questions like, “Is the country ready to elect an African-American president?” But people also have biases they don’t know they have. These implicit biases, as psychologists call them, are picked up over a lifetime, absorbed from our culture, and work automatically to color our perceptions and influence our choices.

A massive study called Project Implicit uses a simple online test to attempt to measure the pervasiveness of dozens of implicit social biases, including those based on race, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, weight, age and religion. The project, housed jointly at the University of Virginia, Harvard University and the University of Washington, collects 20,000 responses a week — and hundreds of researchers are using its data to predict how people will behave based on their unconscious prejudices.

The findings from Project Implicit’s six million participants over a decade of testing reveal lingering suspicion of minority groups: Some 75% of whites, Hispanics and Asians show a bias for whites over African-Americans. Two-thirds of all respondents feel better toward heterosexuals than gays, Jews than Muslims and thin people over the obese. Minorities appear to carry some of the same biases. As many African-Americans show a preference for whites as for blacks. A third of Arab Muslims show a bias in favor of non-Muslims, and more than a third of gays prefer straight people. The strongest biases are against the elderly. More than 80% of test-takers showed a bias for the young, and that included respondents older than 60.

Project Implicit — which is funded in part by the National Institute of Mental Health and the National Science Foundation — studies how people associate a group of people, shown in photographs, with either positive or negative words. (Demonstrations and registration for the full tests are available online at implicit.harvard.edu2.)

Most of the research around its data is academic. One current project aims to see whether liberals or conservatives are more enthusiastic about the future or more nostalgic about the past. Practical applications are starting to evolve too. Clinical psychologists are studying whether implicit biases affect how doctors care for their patients.

Bias against African-Americans and the elderly will likely play a role in November’s presidential election. Presumed Democratic Party nominee Barack Obama’s father was black, and presumed Republican Party nominee John McCain is about to turn 72 years old. But researchers say they do not know to what degree bias will play out among voters. “We are not slaves to our associations,” says University of Virginia psychologist Brian Nosek, one of Project Implicit’s founders and principal researchers. A focus on Sen. Obama’s promise of change, for example, could lead voters to forget his race; Sen. McCain’s war record could let voters forget his age. Overriding bias requires a concerted effort, Mr. Nosek says. Most people don’t see their own implicit bias, which can appear spontaneously as intuition, a gut feeling or a vague doubt about a candidate.

In the anonymity of the voting booth, those feelings could have a significant effect on undecided voters, says Yale University psychologist John Dovidio. With as many as 15% of undecided voters up for grabs, implicit bias could have a big effect in the presidential election.

University of Washington psychologist Anthony Greenwald, who developed Project Implicit’s online test, predicts that Sen. McCain will get more votes than the polls currently predict in states with small black populations and that Sen. Obama will get more votes than polls predict in states with large African-American populations. The reason: whites unconsciously understate their pro-white bias by telling pollsters they will vote for Sen. Obama, while blacks unconsciously understate their pro-black preference by saying they don’t intend to vote.

“There may be more in us that anticipates what we are going to do than we can report to others or ourselves,” says Mr. Nosek. We aren’t lying, he says, but we also may not be telling the truth.

I think that people who study political propaganda and marketing understand this stuff very well, particularly conservatives who rely on stoking people’s prejudices and fear of change. It’s not the conscious they are aiming for, it’s the unconscious, where we don’t even know we think the way we do.

Dogwhistles work in a number of ways, most importantly giving plausible deniability to those who use them. The people who hear them often don’t even know what it is they’ve heard — it’s simply that they are suddenly discomfited or agitated about a person. (Others are not so subtle.) As the understanding of this phenomenon becomes more and more sophisticated, we can expect its application in politics (and business) to become equally sophisticated — by creating backlash in unusual ways and playing to people’s resentments about being called on their resentments. I think it’s important to be aware of it and to discuss it when we can see that people are manipulating others with these methods. As the article states, it takes a concerted effort to override these biases and people can’t do it if they don’t know what’s being done.

*On a more prosaic level, you have to wonder if the right’s multi-pronged campaign to paint Obama as some kind of exotic, black “other” in the public unconscious is going to successfully override people’s biases against the elderly if the only people stoking it are late night comics. It might be enough — popular culture is extremely powerful. I guess we’ll see.

Update: Drew Weston wrote about this over the week-end. I would hope that Obama does NOT take his advice on how to deal with it however. Disaster.

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Comeback Story

by digby

Malevolent right wing hack Alex Castellanos has written an epic article today explaining why everyone suddenly has “doubts about Obama” (as this headline declares, linking to two Republicans.) I think Castellanos fancies himself something of a writer. Unfortunately, his rather florid style obscures the point he’s trying to make.

However, there is one nugget in the article that made me realize that we may be in the midst of a turn in the narrative:

Barack Obama should not have to hit a three-pointer to win this election. It should be a lay-up. Yet if Senator Obama is doing so well, why is he doing so poorly? And if John McCain is doing so poorly, why is he doing so well?

The Rasmussen Reports Daily Tracking has McCain down only 1%, 43% to Obama’s 44%. Real Clear Politics National Average of surveys pegs McCain less than 3% behind, with Gallup showing it tied, and USA Today actually placing McCain ahead of Obama, 49% to 45%. CNN reports McCain is in a better position in Colorado, Michigan, and Wisconsin than he was a month ago and they have moved Minnesota toward McCain into the toss-up category. Give them credit, despite the occasional criticism from this McCain supporter and others, John McCain’s maverick band of campaign warriors are keeping this race competitive and, yes, even winning a hand or two, in the face of the worst political environment Republicans could have envisioned and the best global media exposure any Democratic presidential candidate has managed. McCain’s recent attacks have worked. McCain’s attacks on Obama’s tax increases, his elitism and celebrity, his canceled visit to wounded troops, as well as McCain’s sharp response to Obama’s imagined Republican racial attacks, all dumped cold-water on the Obama campaign, stunting momentum from his European swing and creating a Berlin backlash.

McCain as comeback kid?

This would be a thrilling storyline for the media. Their favorite maverick was defeated in 2000, was the front runner for the ’08 nomination, but went down in flames last summer. Then, like Jimmy Stewart in Flight of the Phoenix, the scrappy flyboy rebuilt his rickety campaign and came back to win the nomination against far better financed opponents. Then he faced down the Obama juggernaut and was given up by everyone as a hopeless cause — no way, no how, could this tired veteran compete against the young genius and his hordes of cheering followers. And waddaya know? The grizzled old warrior’s still got it. Wouldn’t it be something if he pulled it out?

I don’t know if it will catch on, but it seems tailor made for the media, hungry to advance a feel good story about a favorite village elder overcoming adversity and never giving up even when everybody says his best days are behind him. They can bring up his POW experience with vomitous frequency and talk about guts and glory for days.

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Hear No Evil

by digby

I think one of the enduring mysteries for tinfoilers about the Iraq war invasion must be, “why didn’t they plant WMD?” My guess is that such a dangerous mission would require far too many people to keep the secret considering that they would have to produce at least some kind of believable stockpile. One of the benefits of international anti-proliferation regimes is that scientists from various places would have to be involved to vouch for the origins and authenticity of such things, so it prevents people like Dick Cheney from doing what you know he wanted to do.

But could they forge and plant documents right from the White House? It appears they did:

A new book by the author Ron Suskind claims that the White House ordered the CIA to forge a back-dated, handwritten letter from the head of Iraqi intelligence to Saddam Hussein.

Suskind writes in “The Way of the World,” to be published Tuesday, that the alleged forgery – adamantly denied by the White House – was designed to portray a false link between Hussein’s regime and al Qaeda as a justification for the Iraq war.

[…]

“The White House had concocted a fake letter from Habbush to Saddam, backdated to July 1, 2001,” Suskind writes. “It said that 9/11 ringleader Mohammad Atta had actually trained for his mission in Iraq – thus showing, finally, that there was an operational link between Saddam and al Qaeda, something the Vice President’s Office had been pressing CIA to prove since 9/11 as a justification to invade Iraq. There is no link.”

There’s obviously been a ton of speculation about administration involvement in forgeries relating to the war, including the Niger documents, so this isn’t completely shocking. Apparently they even delivered it on White House stationery to the CIA to create the forgery. Talk about arrogant …

As interesting a piece of data as this is, I’m actually more interested in this revelation:

Suskind contends Cheney established “deniability” for Bush as part of the vice president’s “complex strategies, developed over decades, for how to protect a president.”

“After the searing experience of being in the Nixon White House, Cheney developed a view that the failure of Watergate was not the break-in, or even the cover-up, but the way the president had, in essence, been over-briefed. There were certain things a president shouldn’t know – things that could be illegal, disruptive to key foreign relationships, or humiliating to the executive.

“They key was a signaling system, where the president made his wishes broadly known to a sufficiently powerful deputy who could take it from there. If an investigation ensued, or a foreign leader cried foul, the president could shrug. This was never something he’d authorized. The whole point of Cheney’s model is to make a president less accountable for his action. Cheney’s view is that accountability – a bedrock feature of representative democracy – is not, in every case, a virtue.”

Isn’t that interesting? We know Cheney believed the executive branch should have virtually untrammeled power and should operate without any restraints from the congress. Now, we also know that he believed the president himself should be a genial figurehead who didn’t have a clue about what was being done in his name while unnamed deputies carry out the wishes they supposedly think he’s vaguely “signaled” he wants them to. No wonder he picked himself to be Bush’s VP. He knew he had a chance to put his theory perfectly into practice with a manchild who would be more than satisfied to merely strut for the cameras and wouldn’t ask too many questions.

Someone should write a book called “The Lessons Dick Cheney Learned from Watergate and Its Aftermath” because it would reveal in stark terms just how this administration came to be even worse than Nixon.

The White House is characteristically subdued in its response:

The White House plans to push back hard. Fratto added: “Ron Suskind makes a living from gutter journalism. He is about selling books and making wild allegations that no one can verify, including the numerous bipartisan commissions that have reported on pre-war intelligence.”

Yeah, if there’s one thing the Bush administration can’t abide it’s making wild accusations no one can verify.

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Captain Courageous

by dday

Aides organizing President George W. Bush’s trip to China for the Olympics considered having him worship at a house church, one of the underground religious institutions that routinely face harassment, but the Chinese refused.

Pastors, lawyers and other political activists that Bush considered meeting in Beijing as a powerful signal of support have instead been ordered by the authorities to leave the city during the president’s visit. Scores of others have been arrested.

The idea of giving a Reaganesque “tear down this wall” speech on human rights in China – as members of Congress and others have called on Bush to do – has been abandoned as potentially insulting to the president’s hosts, said one senior administration official. It would be unlikely that most Chinese would see or hear it anyway, because of state control of the media.

It’s perfectly understandable. They might not have given 43 the comfy seat cushion to watch the opening ceremonies if he pulled a stunt like that. That, or they wouldn’t have lent us the $2 billion that day.

In other news, President Lincoln called off the Battle of Antietam because he considered it “too risky,” FDR briefly mused about sending troops into the Far East as a response to Pearl Harbor but figured “someone might get hurt,” Kennedy decided against proclaiming “Ich bin ein Berliner” out of respect for East Germans “who might not agree”….

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How Convenient

by digby

Vice President Dick Cheney will not make an appearance at the Republican convention in Minneapolis-St. Paul next month, according to sources in his office. Cheney has not sought a speaking slot at the convention, nor has his staff sought a role for him at the convention.

The McCain campaign has not gone out of its way to reach out to Cheney, though a segment of conservative Republicans had been pressing the campaign to include Cheney in the convention agenda.

“Conservatives still think highly of him and are enthusiastic supporters whenever he speaks,” says a leading conservative who has spoken to the campaign about Cheney. “For a campaign that has largely failed in reaching out to conservatives, reaching out to Cheney wouldn’t be a bad idea.”

McCain and Cheney famously do not get along, and with McCain’s focus being almost exclusively on attracting independents and women to the polls, it’s not a surprise that engaging Cheney isn’t on the top of his list.

McCain and Cheney famously don’t get along? I guess they don’t like each other because each reminds the other of himself because I’m not seeing a whole lot of difference between them. In fact, McCain’s personality seems like the perfect amalgam of Junior and Cheney — juvenile, arrogant, bullying and mean.

I’m surprised they haven’t figured out a way to keep Bush out of there but since he’s still the president they sort of have to let him appear. If they could send him to Crawford instead, I’m quite sure they would. The last thing Republicans want right now is for the American public to be reminded of the last eight years just before they go to vote.

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Follow The Money

by dday

I think we’re finally starting to see some traction on John McCain’s ties to the corporatocracy, in this case Big Oil. It takes a candidate ad to put these things into the media bloodstream, and now they’re a bit more encouraged to run with it. Campaign Money Watch has done some good work with this too. The fact that McCain got over a million dollars in oil executive contributions almost immediately after relinquishing on his stance on offshore drilling is too juicy to pass up, and the revelation of the Hess Corporation donations add to the intrigue.

Senator John McCain received a burst of donations in June from oil company employees after he came out in favor of offshore drilling, according to a report released last week by Campaign Money Watch, a watchdog organization.

But the largest collective response from a single company, the report noted, came from the Hess Corporation. Together, Hess employees or their relatives poured out more than $300,000 to Mr. McCain’s joint fund-raising committee with the Republican National Committee in June, according to campaign finance records.

On Monday, after the web site, Talking Points Memo, listed the names of the Hess contributors, scrutiny fell on a couple, Alice Rocchio, who is identified in campaign finance records as an office manager at Hess, and her husband, Pasquale, who is listed as a foreman at Amtrak.

They each gave a whopping $28,500 to Mr. McCain and the Republican National Committee […]

Mr. McCain’s joint fund-raising committee took in more than $1.2 million in contributions in Texas alone from oil and gas-related donors in June, according to Campaign Money Watch. More than 70 percent of that money came after June 15, the day before Mr. McCain came out in favor of offshore drilling.

Further digging from the WaPo has found that a driver for Hess maxed out to McCain as well. It’s an unlikely profile for a $2,300 donor.

It’s entirely possible these contributions are legitimate and that Hess staffers just love McCain ever since he flipped on drilling. That’s the charitable explanation. The bad one is illegal straw contributions from oil companies, and McCain’s track record on campaign finance in this election (he’s actually breaking the law as we speak) is not good.

It’s well-established that the McCain campaign is crawling with lobbyists and deeply corrupted by their influence, with the new set of positions matching the concerns of the new corporate contributors. This set of oil company donations is the most vibrant example, and so it makes the most sense to continue on the offense and keep pointing them out.

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FYI

by digby

This is a very interesting article in today’s LA Times by polling expert Nate Silver about the state of the election. He talks about the reasons that Obama seems to be under performing the “generic Democrat” and explains how this happens in a broad based party of discrete interest groups. But this is the part that stuck out at me:

But neither McCain nor Obama can be considered a generic candidate, because both enjoy strong appeal among independent voters. This is particularly the case for McCain, who has largely managed to avoid the stigma attached to the tarnished Republican brand. In a recent poll conducted for NBC News and the Wall Street Journal, only 31% of voters had a favorable view of the Republican Party, compared with 48% who held a negative one. But McCain’s numbers were nearly the reverse: 42% viewed him positively, against 30% unfavorably.

How has McCain done it? It has mostly to do with his reputation as a moderate. In that same NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, only 21% of voters said they viewed McCain as “very conservative,” while 34% pegged him as a moderate. As long as he maintains his moderate brand, McCain will seem acceptable to some large number of independent voters and some smaller number of Democrats.

This is predicted by something known as the “median voter theorem,” which essentially holds that as the electorate shifts ideologically — that is, to the right or left — the candidates will tend to shift along with it to narrow their ideological differences with the average voter. Over the last several years, the electorate has shifted leftward — and the two parties have responded accordingly in this year’s presidential race. The GOP will nominate a candidate who is widely perceived as being to the left of the party’s conservative base, whereas the Democratic Party will again pick a standard-bearer more authentically liberal than centrist.

I agree that McCain was chosen because he wasn’t perceived as a doctrinaire Republican, but is it true that Obama was chosen because he’s more authentically liberal than centrist? I thought he was running as someone who was beyond labels — a post-partisan whose vision was to transcend partisanship altogether. The problem is that these Independent voters still see McCain as a moderate while they see Obama as a raging liberal. The post-partisanship hasn’t sold to them the way it was supposed to, at least not yet.

I would think that it’s time to put McCain right in the middle of the culture of corruption and at the center of right wing conservatism where he belongs. Say what you will about him he is no moderate and it’s wrong that he’s reaping the benefit of that misunderstanding. If Obama is a raging liberal, then McCain is a full on Cheney style fascist. Someone should tell the people.

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FNB Politics

by digby

Perlstein dug up his prophetic essay from March 2007 about the character of the coming Republican presidential campaign:

Faggot. Ni**er. Bitch. Please excuse the blunt language. From here forward, to avoid the ugly words, I’ll refer to it as “FNB politics.” With little to show the electorate in 2008—after six years of uninterrupted control—besides sub-standard care from a privatized workforce at Walter Reed Hospital, thrice-married “family values” presidential candidates, and a boom in home foreclosures, the conservative base’s 2008 strategy has begun to emerge: Weaken the major Democratic opponents by making their image unpalatable to the public.

He goes on to describe the many ways we’ve already seen Democrats derided exactly that way through this campaign. His predictions about Obama are especially interesting:

FNB politics cam be tricky to write about, and to pin down, because it relies on surfacing deep-seated anxieties and archetypes that, when revealed to the light of day, appear ridiculous. It’s even trickier to fashion indictments—in a bottom-up media ecology where Karl Rove need never say “show Edwards carrying a purse” (like the Johnson aide caught on tape in July 1964 suggesting that his campaign cast Barry Goldwater as radioactive by using images of “kids being born with two heads”) to start the evolution in motion. Take the saga of Trinity United Church of Christ and its “black value system”—a crucial building block in the absurd smear that Barack Obama is a Manchurian black nationalist. The first mention I could find of it via the blog search engine Technorati came in July, on a site called PollywogCreekPorch. The next was December 8, on the site Faith and Action, which reports that an “exclusive commitment to a cultural and national identity played a major role in Obama’s decision to identify himself with Christianity.” You find the claim proliferating around the time the madrassa smear refused to stick; a key driver was a column titled “Barack Hussein Obama: Who Is He?” by none other than Ted Sampley, the pioneering swift boater who invented the charge that John McCain was brainwashed by communists. By February, Tucker Carlson was quoting the Trinity document, noting it “calls for congregants to be ’soldiers for Black freedom.’” Handily, he dropped the second part of the clause, “… and the dignity of all humankind.” That message—looking after your own ethnic group is complimentary, not incompatible, with aspirations to universal justice—is less controversial; it’s the lesson every Diaspora Jew is taught from the cradle. But is Barack Obama only out to help blacks? The doubt has been planted in the public mind. Doesn’t this contradict another Limbaugh slur—that Obama is “Halfrican” (the implication being that he was only pretending to be black, sneaking in the affirmative action back door)? It’s another tricky facet of writing about FNB politics: In a discourse that plays on half-conscious archetypes, opposites can cohabit comfortably—as in dreams. John Dower, for example, in his brilliant War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War, shows the simultaneous stereotypes of Japanese as pathetically weak midgets and indomitable giant monsters. Surrogates need only throw various archetypes “out there,” as they say; the dungeon that is the human subconscious can be counted on to do the rest. It gets downright gothic in the case of Obama. One of Limbaugh’s ongoing jabs is that white female reporters find him sexually irresistible. “Snerdley is convinced Maureen [Dowd] wants Barack Obama,” he sighs. “I don’t even want to go there.” He depicted Time’s Ana Marie Cox as helpless before Obama’s overpowering sexuality, putting the following thoughts into her head: “Well, there’s no question the power is crackling through his jeans!” It reminds me of a Nixon masterpiece. The visuals for the Republican presidential candidate’s most pathbreaking commercials in 1968 featured only mood-setting stills. The one that began with Nixon intoning, “It is time for an honest look at the problem of order in the United States,” flashed pictures of burned out buildings—no black rioters, just the consequences of what rampaging blacks did. Then, finally, on a rubble-strewn street, a close-up of a mannequin that, if you weren’t paying attention, could scan subconsciously as a naked white woman lying helpless in the middle of the street: Birth of a Nation time.

And here’s the key:

The genius of FNB politics is that it can make those who diagnose it sound like barking moonbats. Sometimes you have a case. Sometimes, you’re just being paranoid (Matt Druge says “Dems rumble in Hollywood jungle; Clinton-Obama throwdown”—Aha! Jungle!—and “Obama team takes a ’Lincoln Bedroom’ shot”). And it’s often only in retrospect that the game seems truly deliberate. In 1952, Nixon used the word “traitor” to describe Dean Acheson, Adlai Stevenson, and Harry Truman. Outrageous!, Democrats responded. Whatever do you mean?, Nixon said in wounded tones, claiming he’d been misunderstood; he only meant they were “traitors to the high principles in which many of the nation’s Democrats believe.” Today, it’s obvious that he meant to suggest, you know, the crime of treason. The bonus: His charge also revealed liberals as shrieking and hypersensitive. That’s the problem with FNB politics, and Reagan showed it better than anyone. He used to make jokes: About Africans, “When they have a man for lunch, they really have him for lunch.” So, when gubernatorial candidate Pat Brown distributed a pamphlet (“Ronald Reagan, Extremist Collaborator—An Exposé”) of such quotations in 1966, it backfired. Reagan was making a joke! Why are these liberals so humorless?

Read the whole thing, here.

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