The Saddleback congregation applauded Obama very nicely. But as I hear this (California!) evangelical audience cheering McCain far more wildly for everything from offshore drilling to gay marriage to taxes and clapping for every tired old stump line like it’s the first time he’s said them, I really have to wonder whether this “outreach” is going to add up to anything.
I know it’s a small sample, but as Warren points out, social conservatism is not just about religion, it’s a”‘worldview” and McCain is the one who shares it, not Obama.
The Jerome Corsi book seems to have been effectively rebutted by both the campaign and Media Matters. But I think that there are a couple of important things about this aren’t being explored as fully as they might be.
Tim Ruttan in the LA Times, with a good take-down of Corsi and the book, explains the book’s theme this way:
Corsi is frank about his motives for writing “The Obama Nation.” As he told the New York Times this week: “The goal is to defeat Obama. I don’t want Obama to be in office.”
That’s clear enough from the text. You can pretty well sum the whole thing up this way: The Democratic candidate is a deceitful jihadist drug addict who, if elected, plans to impose a black supremacist, socialist regime.
That really hits all the highlights of the underground (and not so underground) campaign against Obama. It could only appeal to people who are willing to believe, for whatever reasons, that these things might have some basis in truth — presumably those for whom some combination of his name, the term “black Muslim,” Jeremiah Wright and “liberal record” add up to that incendiary image. But the job of a book like this isn’t necessarily to get people to buy the book, but rather to legitimize some of these existent themes by having it be publicly discussed. It’s another way of getting out the word, that’s all. They don’t care if the media is refuting it or not — after all it’s the “liberal media.” Why would anyone think they would tell the truth? In that respect, regardless of the factual pushback, they have already succeeded.
Indeed, they’re “debating it” right now on Lou Dobbs. Dobbs just made the point that none of the “attack” books about John McCain are on the NY Times best seller list like Corsi’s book and that must tell you something. Mission Accomplished.
But there is something even more salient, I think, which Rutten mentions in passing. He points out that Corsi is actually quite the fringe character, a nut who associates with 9/11 truthers and racists. But then there’s this:
“The Obama Nation” was written and printed because major American publishing houses have decided that there’s money to be made in funding right-wing boutique imprints modeled after the Washington-based Regnery, which has made a small fortune stoking the hard-right furnace with combustible prose. Corsi’s book is published by Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster, which hired right-wing political operative Mary Matalin to edit the imprint. Random House has a similar imprint in Crown Forum, and Penguin Group USA has Sentinel. Their business model — and this is all about business — is predicated on the existence of an echo chamber of right-wing radio and television shows willing to promote these publishers’ products — however noxious. Beyond that is a network of conservative book clubs and organizations willing to place the sort of advance bulk orders for controversial books that will guarantee them a place on the bestseller lists.
It’s just that sort of order that made “The Obama Nation” No. 1 on Sunday’s New York Times bestseller list, and essentially “laundered” Corsi onto the respectable broadcast media’s guest list.
Rutten says this is all about making money, and I don’t disagree that there’s probably some money to be made by the wingnut welfare recipients in the food chain. But money isn’t the motive of the people who buy those books in bulk. They are making an investment in Republican politics. And the most telling thing about it is that one of the most mainstream Republican figures in the country — so mainstream that she regularly appears with her Democratic operative husband on Meet the Press with their two daughters at Christmas time — gave her imprimatur to a book written by a known delusional, right wing racist. On that side of the dial the separation between the mainstream and the violent fringe isn’t even one degree.
Dave Neiwert has, as you all undoubtedly know, written reams about how the right mainstreams its extremists. And this is one case where I think it’s come fully to fruition, right out in the open. Corsi is not just a right wing ideologue. He’s a full fledged nutcase, and yet he was hired by a major publisher, “edited” by a star GOP villager, to write an incendiary book of lies about the Democratic presidential candidate. They aren’t even trying to keep their fingerprints off this thing.
In fact, the default position among Democrats, Republicans and the media is that the only kooks in the country with whom it is unacceptable to be professionally or financially involved are on the left. And “the left” is defined so broadly that it includes groups like MoveOn and Vote Vets. The right, in contrast, has fully integrated even their extremist fringe into the mainstream and everyone accepts it.
Sure, people are saying that Corsi’s book is full of holes. So what? It’s “out there” and it’s getting more press every day. And in all of that, nobody’s calling out Mrs Carville on the fact that she shepherded these extremist lies into the mainstream. (Or her husband, for that matter.) Yet MoveOn taking out an ad that has the word “Betrayus” in it is worthy of a congressional censure.
As long as the villagers are in agreement that the only people who are truly beyond the pale in American politics are on the left, then this will continue. Mary Matalin will still be considered a perfectly respectable person by both the “right” and the “left” (as if there’s any discernible difference among the cognoscenti) and there will be no professional or social repercussions. Meanwhile even staid, old organizations like the ACLU suffer from the myth of being some sort of far left fringe organization and Democratic politicians run for cover when the right wing publicly “tars” them with guilt by association.
This is an ongoing problem that we see being played out once again in a national election. And I don’t think the progressive movement has fully come to grips yet with just how powerful this image of scary left wing freaks still is in the national imagination — or how thoroughly the right’s extremist views have been accepted by the political establishment. It’s something that needs to be addressed in a much more cohesive way.
CNN has a countdown clock going for the Rick Warren faith forum and the best political team on television is doing a “pre-game” show.
Apparently, people all over the country are so excited that they are gathering in front of the TV counting the minutes until they can hear these two professional politicians make canned remarks about their religious beliefs.
I have to say that I’m really losing interest in the VP race at this point. It’s always tedious, but this year has been especially excruciating. (Kerry chose on July 6th, 2004.) Here’s the latest teaser from Jonathan Stein at Mojo, with what I agree is probably the real story:
Reportedly, John Kerry is being considered as Obama’s VP. I’m not buying it. This has to be a series of headfakes from the Obama campaign, right? Creating media speculation on different options — one week of Bayh, one week of Biden, one week of Kerry — keeps people talking about the choice for almost month. And ultimately, they can find a better choice than any of those three, meaning that even if the actual choice is flawed, people will still say, “Whew. Better than the other options, anyway.”
There’s more to it, though, I think. The Obama campaign has been very good at rolling out announcements for maximum dramatic effect. All those primary endorsements were tightly held until just the right moment. So, I think there’s at least a possibility that it may be a better choice (whoever that is) than we are all currently fearful it might be, even on the merits. It’s very hard to imagine that choosing Bayh or Kerry would be dramatic and I think it’s pretty clear that when it comes to stagecraft and tempo (if not their politics) they go for the drama.
I’m hopeful it will be someone that will galvanize the race and get everyone excited going into the convention. The race could certainly use an energy boost.
Walter Isaacson asked John McCain about McCain’s inexplicable love for ABBA. McCain played the POW card:
“If there is anything I am lacking in, I’ve got to tell you, it is taste in music and art and other great things in life,” McCain joked. “I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up again.”
That would be a two-week story on Al Gore, with much chortling to be had by all.
Not to mention the all-timer, a combination of lying and pandering that went down the memory hole so fast you couldn’t even see it:
While visiting Pittsburgh, John McCain said that while he was captured, he really loved the Steelers! The 1967 Steelers were 4-9-1. (thanks to Scarce)
“When I was first interrogated and really had to give some information… I named the starting lineup, defensive line, of the Pittsburgh Steelers as my squadron-mates!” — Sen. John McCain
McCain also said the same thing about the 1967 Green Bay Packers. McCain was a POW from late 1967 to early 1973 […]
In McCain’s best-selling 1999 memoir “Faith of My Fathers,” McCain writes:
“Once my condition had stabilized, my interrogators resumed their work. Demands for military information were accompanied by threats to terminate my medical treatment if I did not cooperate. Eventually, I gave them my ship’s name and squadron number, and confirmed that my target had been the power plant. Pressed for more useful information, I gave the names of the Green Bay Packers offensive line, and said they were members of my squadron. When asked to identify future targets, I simply recited the names of a number of North Vietnamese cities that had already been bombed.”
In 2005, A&E ran a movie version of “Faith of My Fathers.”
And McCain discussed that precise clip on CNN.
The actor playing McCain, asked to name the men in his squadron, says: “Starr; Greg; McGee; Davis; Adderly; Brown; Ringo; Wood.”
Cut back to real life. The CNN anchor asks McCain: “For those who don’t know the story, were those NFL football players?” “That was the starting lineup of the Green Bay Packers, the first Super Bowl champions, yes,” McCain responded.
It would be irresponsible not to speculate that the accumulation of these lies and exaggerations bespeaks a craven personality that cannot be trusted as a world leader.
Cokie, take note. (lol)
…by the way, John McCain is extremely reluctant to talk about his POW status. Discuss.
I’m willing to bet that a decade from now, far from being seen as the first step in reassembling Russia’s old empire, the Russo-Georgian war will be virtually forgotten, a tiny, week long border conflict over a couple of unimportant territories that had been in limbo for 17 years and were bound to blow up sooner or later
If there was no such thing as neoconservatism, I might agree. But I’m willing to bet that we will be hearing about “the betrayal” for some time to come. It’s a perfect rallying cry for those who need perpetual war to accomplish their goals.
As for the rest of Kevin’s post in which he says Bush didn’t do too badly, well I think he did as well as he could — considering it’s become pretty clear that the Georgians hadn’t yet learned that everything he says in bullshit and the best thing to do is assume the opposite.
Kevin asks:
I wonder if a gunslinging President McCain would have done as well?
It’s hard to know since he’s a corrupt, pandering politician who is clearly willing to do anything to get elected, but if we take him at his word, we’d have to assume that we’d have declared war on Russia.
Here’s a thought: what if John Mccain had been president during the Cuban Missile Crisis? I have to figure that pondering that question is why guys like Dick Lugar aren’t endorsing him.
“I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed. 20-30 million tops…”
Joseph Galloway has written a thoughtful overview of the situation in Georgia and the broader implications for McClatchy today:
Although Vice President Cheney bravely rattled a sword or two and George Bush was talking a little tougher to his old soul mate Vlad the Impaler, the simple truth is that there’s not a damn thing we can do about the Russian invasion and perfidy short of nuking them. Defense Secretary Robert Gates made it amply clear that we aren’t going to do that, or much of anything else beyond sending some humanitarian medical aid and supplies for the Georgian refugees.
The Georgian government made two mistakes — it took the Bush administration’s rhetoric seriously and it ignored the Russians’ bluster — and now both the Georgians and the world had best brace themselves for further Russian military action, economic pressure and diplomatic chicanery.
The opportunity to punish the Georgians is simply too tempting for Russia to ignore, so Putin will drag them back into Moscow’s orbit, if not Moscow’s ownership, and thus fire a warning shot across the bow of other breakaway republics that are considering membership in NATO or otherwise thumbing their noses at Putin.
Washington can respond only with tough talk. We can threaten to punish the Russians by expelling them from the International Monetary Fund and the Group of Eight wealthy nations, but with a fat bankroll bulging with Arab-size oil earnings, the Russians don’t really need to care about this.
If there’s any silver lining to these dark clouds, it might be that Bush and Cheney will be so preoccupied grumbling at Bush’s buddy Vladimir and issuing empty threats that they won’t have time to issue other threats or take some irrational action against the Iranians.
Things have truly come to a sorry pass when both our military and our diplomatic threats are as empty as our national treasury, and the Russians of all people can afford to laugh them off.
This is why most people over the age of nine learn that issuing a bunch of threats and failing to carry them through — or following through and failing to succeed — is a recipe for people to stop taking you seriously. Bush and Cheney (and now McCain) have made a fetish out of sabre rattling for the past eight years and the results have been, shall we say, less than stellar. The US has shown that its volunteer military, while valiant, is undermanned and overstretched, its intelligence services are willing servants of political manipulators and its leadership is dishonest, immoral and incompetent. It’s understandable that somebody out there would think that now is the time to make a move. That it would be Bush’s soul brother Pooty-poot was entirely predictable.
BTW: I’m really glad to see Eventheliberal Michael O’Hanlon all over television again. I fully expect that he’ll be calling for nuclear war any day now.
If Ceci Connolly has a spare moment from whatever she’s doing right now, she could certainly write up this and start an enduring narrative that lasts until November.
This week, 16 months into his campaign, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) released his first policy paper on technology. Over at the Wonk Room, former Clinton administration privacy counselor Peter Swire notes that the paper gives McCain credit for “creating” the “Do Not Call” list. But the Federal Trade Commission chairman announced the list two years earlier:
McCAIN: 2003 – McCain led in creating the FTC’s ‘Do-Not-Call’ telemarketing registry to allow consumers to opt out of receiving telemarketing calls. And, when the law was challenged in court, McCain led the effort to ensure that it was upheld.
REALITY: FTC Chairman Tim Muris announced in October 2001 that the FTC was going to do the Do Not Call list. Yet somehow McCain magically caused the Do Not Call list in 2003. And, given the independent agency status of the FTC, it is a stretch to say that ‘McCain led the effort to ensure that it was upheld.
Not quite as sexy as “inventing the Internet,” but the difference here is McCain actually put this down in writing, eliminating the need to misinterpret a quote.
This isn’t even the first of these exaggerations TODAY.
My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War. This is an act of aggression.
First serious crisis, ay? If I didn’t know better, I’d say that McCain had forgotten the lessons of 9/11.
Obviously, this newfound meme of McCain’s consistent exaggerations will hit a nerve with the chattering class. George Stephanopoulos will hold a roundtable on Sunday to discuss “McCain’s honesty problem.” Cokie Roberts will lament that “McCain isn’t straight enough,” and investigative reporters will be dispatched throughout the country to look into every one of McCain’s prior statements. Children at area high schools where McCain has spoken will be grilled about their recollections. David Broder will use the word “Pinocchio,” and that’ll just open the floodgates. Howard Kurtz will opine on whether the media is being too lenient in the face of these obvious falsehoods. Chris Matthews will shout, “I mean, isn’t this getting ridiculous?… Isn’t it getting to be delusionary?” McCain will patiently try to clarify his comments but the media will have none of it. The soundbites will be clipped to make McCain look even worse. The pundits will snicker and former rivals like Mike Huckabee will say “I don’t know why he feels that he has to exaggerate and make some of this stuff up.” Newspaper editorials will openly wonder whether McCain is deliberately trying to sabotage his own campaign. The New York Times will flat-out call him “crazy.”
This is part of my new book, “Election on Bizarro Earth.” It am not good!
Some of us have been gobsmacked by this since the beginning of the Georgia crisis but it took a whole week for The Washington Post to finally write something about the fact that McCain has been strutting around — and mucking things up — with his presumptuous “I am the president” act.
McCain’s Focus on Georgia Raises Question of Propriety After Chiding Obama, He Dwells on Crisis as a President Might
Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president.
Asked about his tough rhetoric on the ongoing conflict in Georgia, McCain began: “If I may be so bold, there was another president . . .”
He caught himself and started again: “At one time, there was a president named Ronald Reagan who spoke very strongly about America’s advocacy for democracy and freedom.”
With his Democratic opponent on vacation in Hawaii, the senator from Arizona has been doing all he can in recent days to look like President McCain, particularly when it comes to the ongoing international crisis in Georgia.
Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili says he talks to McCain, a personal friend, several times a day. McCain’s top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, was until recently a paid lobbyist for Georgia’s government. McCain also announced this week that two of his closest allies, Sens. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (I-Conn.), would travel to Georgia’s capital of Tbilisi on his behalf, after a similar journey by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The extent of McCain’s involvement in the military conflict in Georgia appears remarkable among presidential candidates, who traditionally have kept some distance from unfolding crises out of deference to whoever is occupying the White House. The episode also follows months of sustained GOP criticism of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, who was accused of acting too presidential for, among other things, briefly adopting a campaign seal and taking a trip abroad that included a huge rally in Berlin.
[…]
But McCain and his aides say his tough rhetoric on the Georgia crisis, along with his personal familiarity with the region, underscores the foreign policy expertise he would bring to the White House.
The problem is that it sends mixed messages to the players. But then, that’s probably the point:
His focus on the dispute has also allowed McCain to distance himself somewhat from President Bush, who has been sharply criticized by many conservatives for moving too slowly to respond to Russia’s military incursion into Georgia and South Ossetia, the breakaway province at the heart of the dispute. McCain’s first statement on the conflict last Friday came before the White House itself had responded.
In often-lengthy remarks about Georgia this week on the campaign trail, McCain repeatedly talked of how many times he had been to the region, let it be known that he had talked daily with Saakashvili since the crisis began and made it clear that there had been times he thought Bush’s response could have been stronger.
He provided a primer for why Americans should care about the “tiny little democracy” and tried to tie the foreign crisis with a domestic one: oil. Georgia is “part of a strategic energy corridor affecting individual lives far beyond” the region, he said.
“His statements have been very presidential,” said John R. Bolton, a former U.N. ambassador under Bush who has since become one of the sharpest critics of the administration’s recent foreign policy. “These are the kinds of things that the president should have been saying from the beginning.”
How nice for him. He gets to “act” presidential, appeal to his conservative base, distance himself from the hated Bush and make a pitch for perpetual war for perpetual peace. And knowing the Mayberry Machivallis’ belief that there is no such thing as policy, only politics, they probably conspired with him to let him do it. After all, the Big Money Boyz goals have a big stake in keeping things all riled up in oil country.
But lest you think that the Washington Post is being too hard on the old boy, never fear. He’s got it all under control:
At the same time, McCain also appears sensitive to going too far. In remarks both Wednesday and yesterday, for example, McCain explicitly ruled out direct military action against Russia, a step advocated by some hard-line conservatives.
“We want to avoid any armed conflict, and we will not have armed conflict,” McCain said at a fundraiser yesterday in Edwards, Colo. “That’s not the solution to this problem. But we have to stand up for freedom and democracy as we did in the darkest days.”
Big of him to “rule out” military conflict, don’t you think. Seeing as he’s only one of a hundred Senators it’s quite a feat, but he seems to be in charge of Americn foreign policy right now, so I guess we should be happy that he’s not calling for nuclear strikes.
I’m not sure I understand this, however:
The Obama campaign has been generally cautious in its remarks about the Georgia conflict, and the campaign yesterday declined to comment on the appropriateness of McCain’s role. But earlier this week, Obama adviser Susan Rice said McCain “may have complicated the situation” with his early tough rhetoric on the dispute.
I don’t know why they shouldn’t comment on it unless they feel that the earlier taunting about presumptuousness and celebrity have rendered them impotent to attack McCain when he’s behaving as if he’s already president — or that the public will somehow reward them for their “proper behavior.” That’s a bad bet.
The pictures this week have been pretty bad. McCain has looked like he’s already president and the Democrats have simply been nonexistent. We can hope that nobody was paying attention — but then they didn’t need to be. All they had to do was see the images on TV in passing to get the idea that McCain was being sought out by reporters for his views on the crisis and Obama wasn’t. For those who were paying attention it was even worse.
I certainly hope the Obama campaign wasn’t counting on the press to see the rank hypocrisy of McCain’s actions in time to stop the damage. One of the cardinal rules of dealing with the mainstream media is that they wait for the rival to put out a press release or chat them up on something like this before writing about it. They publicly admit that if the other side doesn’t make an issue of something, they won’t do it themselves. If the Obama campaign didn’t complain that McCain was acting like he’d been anointed Emperor (as the article seems to suggest) then that was a mistake. The press hasn’t mentioned it until now — when it’s so obvious even they couldn’t ignore it — and it’s too late to undo the damage. McCain has definitely shown himself to be a “strong leader” (however bad his leadership) in a crisis, even to the extent that he’s managing it without being president. Let’s hope that Phelpsmania is the more enduring memory of this week.
When he left for vacation in his birth state a week ago, ahead of the convention season, the Illinois senator had a three-point edge over McCain in the Gallup Daily tracking poll.
By Thursday, as Obama packed his bags to fly back to the US mainland, his Gallup lead was still three points — 46 percent to 43.
The moving average failed to budge despite a rhetorical onslaught by McCain on the crisis in Georgia, as the Republican’s campaign scented an opportunity to hammer Obama on his perceived weak spot of foreign policy.
“I would attribute this to the amount of coverage of the Olympics, and the fact that foreign affairs generally isn’t of much interest to Americans except under very unusual circumstances like the war in Iraq,” pollster John Zogby said.
