A number of McCain campaign aides, close associates and anonymous sources from within the GOP machine have in the past 48 hours confirmed that the war is on. There won’t be any backing down; anything they can find or make up to hurt Obama, will be used. That strategy holds a big risk for the 72 year old.

When he tried the same approach, about three weeks ago, he got chastised for spouting discredited lies by not only the Obama campaign, but also the press. But it worked; Obama’s numbers started going down, McCain’s went up – and then the financial meltdown happened, upsetting the McCain game plan.

So now he’s going to go back on the attack, but with a true vengeance. Palin started today, raking up Obama’s old connections to some people. Except for Jeremiah Wright, no subjects are off-limits. But McCain had better be careful still, because there’s a new risk involved.

By now, with only a month before Election Day, voters are deciding on their choice, and they’re now adding the ‘is my candidate of choice presidential material’ question.

Bill Clinton knows how incredibly important it is to come across as being stable, cool, not worried. It makes you look presidential. That’s what he told Barack Obama during that lunch, about a month ago: “Act like a president.” And that Obama did during his first debate with McCain. The latter continuously attacked Obama and the pundits thought McCain had won the night.

But the voters didn’t think so. All the polls after the debate showed that Obama had not only clearly won the debate, but he’d also…surprised them by coming across as ‘presidential material’.

So he is viable. Presidential.

McCain has been trying to shape himself as presidential material as well – his stunt to suspend his campaign and go to Washington a day later because of the financial crisis, was evidence of that.

But now McCain is in danger of putting himself in a position he can’t get out of. That of being seen as an aggressive idiot, a screamer who spouts lies and slanders people.

That’s not perceived as being very ‘presidential’ by many people.

Still, and judging from what happened in 2000 and 2004, former Bush campaign aide Steve Schmidt, who now runs McCain’s campaign,  and given that many voters are susceptible to believing lies, McCain might get away with it.

Something happened in McCain’s Campaign HQ, that much is clear. Just 48 hours ago, the first polls that were showing movement by the electorate towards Obama were trickling in. Just 24 hours ago, a steady stream of big polls noted swings of 3 to 5% to Obama. And then, today, a veritable avalanche of local, regional and national tracking polls showed that the swing was now 5 to 7% towards Obama!

Somebody in McCain HQ woke up, looked at the polls, scratched his head, looked at the polls again, whistled a tune, and reached for his mobile phone to tell his boss that “Mr Senator, we have a problem”.

The problem: the news has been almost solely about the economy the past week. The economy is of course Obama’s strong suit and McCain was seriously losing ground in the polls because of it. The Economy is the one major, central issue on which McCain simply cannot beat Obama. As said on this blog before, Team McCain has done everything to try to neutralize the issue in the eyes of voters.

And so now, suddenly, Senator McCain — the man who in the past months went from the Straight Talk Express man to the Cheap Mud Salesman without a moment’s hesitation — is suspending the campaign, in a most cynical effort to claim the leadership mantle on the economy.

And that after Obama had suggested that they simply put out a non-partisan, joint statement, urging Congress and secretary Paulson to agree on the emergency rescue plan as soon as possible.

Instead, McCain’s team yelled “Eureka!” and slammed McCain on television, where he announced that he is suspending his campaign and going to Congress.

It is sickening.

McCain once had a soul, until he hit an election crossroad, met the Devil and sold it. This man, this Senator, always prided himself on his cleanliness, his political sobriety. It is the man who infamously said of the mudslinging by his then-competitor, Mitt Romney: “Never get into a mud-wrestling match with a pig. You both get dirty, and the pig likes it.”  But who had no problem whatsoever to become a pig of enormous proportions.

And so now he is desparately trying to remove The Economy from the front pages by neutralizing it, so that he can go back to attacking Obama on other issues, issues where McCain is strong. In the process, McCain may be hoping that the focus on his and Obama’s return to Washington will bury the polls, which the coming days are sure to show more Obama gains.

Utterly disgusting. For America and the world, I sincerely hope that the financial crisis is resolved soon, but I also hope that people will see through McCain’s smokescreen, and see his actions for what they’re trying to hide: desparation.

But then again, Bush was elected twice, too… So I don’t have high hopes at all.

As said before here: if McCain can disarm Obama on the economy front, it’s back to the subjects of Character, Experience and Leadership. Those three subjects headlined the campaign for almost two weeks, until last Friday, and Obama suffered while McCain gained.

]]> http://www.kajleers.nl/index.php/2008/09/quick-obama%e2%80%99s-main-gun-now-silenced/feed/ 0 http://www.kajleers.nl/index.php/2008/09/mccains-turn-in-the-minefield/ http://www.kajleers.nl/index.php/2008/09/mccains-turn-in-the-minefield/#comments Fri, 12 Sep 2008 16:18:55 +0000 Kaj http://www.kajleers.nl/?p=202 ]]> It’s not often that a big player in the mainstream media turns around and publicly chastises a candidate for the presidency. But that’s just what Associated Press did in this analysis. Mark Halperin of ‘The Page’ titled his take on the analysis as ‘AP Slams McCain-Palin’. I guess that’s about right.

The AP writer thrashes McCain’s mudslinging of the past days. The problem: McCain was a target of mudslinging in 2000, when his then-rival George W. Bush started an outrageous slander campaign against him. So McCain took the moral high ground and said that he’d never engage in such a campaign himself.

But now he’s doing it to Obama, and McCain’s not showing any remorse over it. He thought he could get away with it, but the AP-story is just the first big one to change the narrative about the McCain campaign: from simply being an information broker, dishing out McCain’s mud, it switched to writing about the candidate’s campaign, and the mud and lies involved.

Others, such as Halperin but also the Washington Post, the New York Times, Politico.com, ABC News’s Jake Tapper and even the Wall Street Journal, have also wondered about the direction McCain’s campaign has taken. Until now, they’ve only mentioned it as asides – a few lines in paragraphs, down below at the end of big stories – but in today’s news business, it could snowball to gigantic proportions within hours.

And they’d have a point.

Because there is an element which the Associated Press writer doesn’t mention in his article (which he should have), but which is probably troubling him and other reporters. As a news organisation manned by professional journalists, you want to do your utmost to bring neutral, objective facts. If anything, the facts you are reporting must be correct.

So it is harrowing when a candidate for office – who demands that you also report his side of the story – purposely feeds you with lies about his opponent, and stands by those lies, even if it has been established publicly that they are, in fact, lies. Because at that moment, the reporters feel that they’ve been scammed, and that their medium is being used to spread lies, mud and deceit. Readers might feel the same way and start looking badly on the news media in question.

His mudslinging could potentially backlash mightily on McCain. As a politician, journalists are never your friends, That’s a fact. But it is also unwise to make them your enemies.

If McCain’s conducting of his campaign becomes the narrative the next news cycles, he’s in real trouble because that could potentially wipe out the advances he made in the past week.

Like I said, every four years. But this year’s voter vintage seems exceptionally stupid.

Honestly, you can approximately tell half of the voters anything you want, and they’ll believe you. If a politician says that his opponent wants to raise your taxes? Believe him. Don’t check it, don’t go onto the internet, and by all means, don’t read a newspaper. The guy who said it was wearing a suit, right? And he was on TV, right? Well, then it’s gotta be true, Bubba!

Don’t believe it? Think I’m being too harsh on your average American voter? They’re “not stupid!” you scream as you sit there in front of your screen, foaming while your arms flail in utter disgust at the remarks above? Well, read this informative excerpt from the Washington Post:

A Washington Post-ABC News poll taken Sept. 5 to Sept. 7 found that 51 percent of voters think Obama would raise their taxes, even though his plan would actually cut taxes for the overwhelming majority of Americans. Obama has proposed eliminating income taxes on seniors making less than $50,000 a year, but 41 percent of those seniors say their income taxes would go up in an Obama administration.

I don’t know about you, but I was flabbergasted. At least we now know why the Republicans are always doing their best to destroy the education system – they want more of those stupid idiots!

So. As I said. You can make voters believe anything you want. And Team McCain knows it. The Republicans have been winning elections this way for years. Of course, it does mean that you end up with people like George W. Bush at the helm.

I’m beginning to think that the country deserves another 4 years of disaster.

A new Wall Street Journal / NBC poll (opens as Acrobat .pdf document) out today shows that a majority of voters questioned is comfortable with the idea of having Sarah Palin in the White House as vice-president, despite a “national debate” on whether she’s experienced enough for the job.

That’s very interesting. Because polls have for months been showing that voters are somewhat concerned over Barack Obama’s lack of experience. It is the very reason why Team McCain has from the start been highlighting Obama’s perceived “lack of experience”.  Obama selected Joe Biden, a Senator with 33 years of experience in foreign affairs, to be his running mate. That’s a lot of experience, but it hardly made a difference in the polls.

So what can we conclude from this? That experience is something that only troubles Obama? Or is experience simply not that important to voters?

To paraphrase Lord Acton: “ideology blinds, and absolute ideology blinds absolutely.”

That is at the core of the question, when trying to analyze why voters deem Obama’s lack of experience a problem, but are less concerned about Palin’s lack of experience. I think the explanation for that is that people are more inclined to forgive candidates for a lack of experience, if those candidates candidly and forcefully prove that their are vehemently defending the ideas of those voters.

Months ago, I had a conversation with a hard-right American woman on some political discussion forum. When I asked her why she would never vote for Hillary Clinton, she literally said that “politics is not the place for women”. She said that women should be taking care of the family, making sure that the kids are healthy and the house is clean, etcetera.

However, shortly after John McCain selected Sarah Palin to be his veep, I saw a post of the woman on the discussion forum again – and she was thrilled by Palin, and she would go out to register, and vote for her. All the talk about how women should not be in politics was out the window, because Palin is backing the same hard-right, Christian ideology. (Minus the “women should stay at home” stuff, obviously.)

That threw me back to the 2000 election. I had many discussions with American voters then about their presumed choice for the presidency. I was aghast; quite a few of the people who said they’d be voting for Bush, didn’t really like his socio-economic agenda, but said they “had to” vote for Bush as he was the only candidate promoting a conservative Christian agenda. Some of these people had voted for Clinton in ’92 and ’96, but were finally turned off by the Lewinsky scandal.

They all acknowledged that Clinton’s economic policies had worked, and worked fabulously, and they acknowledged that Al Gore would probably continue those succesful policies. But it didn’t matter.

During the 2000 election campaign, experience was also an important factor. Al Gore had been vice-president for 8 years, and had served in the Senate for many years before that. Bush, despite having been governor of Texas, was completely inexperienced in foreign affairs. He proved it by a number of gaffes during interviews and debates. But it didn’t matter.

Bill Clinton, while on the stump for Gore, famously pressed the voters to “choose wisely”. Nonetheless, for those Americans, ideology trumped wisdom. They all voted Bush in the end.

At the end of 2003, I talked to some of the same people again. The disaster that was Bush’s economic and fiscal “policy” was clear, and these guys weren’t stupid. But I wasn’t surprised at all when they said that they would still be voting for Bush. They all believed that Kerry would be just as tough as Bush as commander in chief, so that wasn’t the problem. No, their problem with Kerry was that he wasn’t promoting a Christian-conservative agenda. And perhaps Bush could finally install a new conservative Supreme Justice in the Supreme Court during his second term. They were finally turned off when Bush botched that with his Harriet Miers nomination.

To Christian fundamentalist wingnuts like them, people like Sarah Palin can do no wrong. If today documents showed up which clearly show that Palin illegally deducted millions in tax expenes, if today someone reports that Palin once drowned a kitten, or if Palin today says that as president, she’d sell Alaska to Canada, they would still support her.

As for independent, not necessarily very religious women who are flocking to Palin: as some polls have shown, many are voting for her because she’s a woman. A fairly large number of women now view Palin as the torch bearer of the feminist struggle for equality. Some have, without blinking, switched from the quite liberal Hillary Clinton to the ultra-conservative Sarah Palin. I’m charging here, but that’s a bit like a cow preferring a butcher over a PETA volunteer to have as her new friend.

That aside, it’s quite ironic for them to vote for someone because of her gender. These women seem to be making the same mistake as the misogynists they’re fighting. Misogynists will not vote for a woman because she’s a woman. Feminists, who joined the struggle to fight for acceptance of equality between men and women, now say that they are voting for Palin because she’s a woman. Misogyny in reverse.

I wonder how these women sleep at night. Oh wait, I know – “ideology blinds, but absolute ideology blinds absolutely.” And that while darkness helps people get to sleep! Of course, how could I forget…

Time for Team Obama to turn the lights on McCain, while also asking Palin what exactly she thinks of the economic policies of George W. Bush. Does she support his policies, like McCain does? And how does she feel about the fact that McCain doesn’t agree with her view on abortion, which holds that abortion should never be allowed – even not in the case of incest or rape? Isn’t that a problem?

If the game of Team McCain is to paint Obama as “just another tax-and-spend liberal”, i.e. your average Democratic candidate and nothing special, then it is time for Team Obama to paint Palin for what she is: an ultra-conservative, right-wing Republican. And you do that not by accusing or pointing fingers, but by continuously asking questions via the media.

The answer is to question her.

And now comes the ultimate test, as described in my previous post (and hours before these new Gallup polls came out): who of the two candidates brings change, but not too much change?

My money’s on McCain, for all the wrong reasons. Obama will have to shift into 4th gear and the debates still remain; but there’s not a whole lot in terms of issues Obama can pull from the shelf, and McCain is the better debater.

As I wrote here, McCain gaining on Obama in the polls would give Obama another reason to get worried. “Because then The Media’s big story will be ‘John McCain, The Comeback Grandpa’. And that would constitute Reason 5.” I had previously named 4 reasons why Obama would be losing; number 5 is just around the corner.

Over at RealClearPolitics, the GOP-leaning Tom Bevan looks at Barack Obama’s chances in getting 7 ‘red states’ to come over to his column. Bevan doubts that Obama’s strategy will work. But that’s beside the point. Obama’s campaign team is trying to ‘Bravo-Romeo-Delta’ the McCain team all at once. And the reason is that Obama simply has more money to buy ammunition, and the timeframe to do it.

Team Obama is aiming at seven red states to rake in, come november. Some states come across as viable targets, like Virginia and Indiana – both reddish states but with old industrial cities, where manufacturing jobs have disappeared fast in the past eight years.  A lot of people in those states are very angry with the Republican thugs that have trashed the US for all those years. Time for payback. In these two states, Obama stands a reasonable chance.

Normally, Indiana would not be in play. The people of the good Hoosier State are usually okay with voting Democrat when it comes to local politicians and even members of Congress, like Representatives and Senators. Evan Bayh, for instance. But Indiana normally votes GOP for the presidency. (I dunno, perhaps they want their presidents to have a destructive streak.)

But the other five states seem long shots. North Dakota, North Carolina, Montana, Georgia and Alaska aren’t exactly Democrat Land. Au contraire. So, Bevan concludes, Team Obama is hoping that it can lure Team McCain in spending some of his meagre funds in those states, therefore allowing him less money to spend in battleground states like Ohio and Florida.

Now flip the coin, and you can see why some McCain operatives must be getting restive over Obama’s spending spree in those seven states anyway, and regardless of Bevan’s arguments. The RealClearPolitics electoral college aggregate poll is revealing. The RealClearPolitics-count is 238 electoral votes for Obama, and 163 for McCain.

Count out the tossup states, and it’s still 322 votes for Obama, and 216 for McCain. People have so far been glaring at the popular national vote polls, which show the race between Obama and McCain increasingly tighten. But that’s not what either David Plouffe (Obama strategist) or McCain’s strategist Rick Davis are looking at.

Their eyes are fixed on the electoral college vote. So far, those numbers have been consistent, regardless of the national popular vote aggregate. Obama  has a pretty sizeable buffer to play around with that fantastic asset, like anyone with a lead in any election: time.

The situation on the battlefield is that Obama simply has more guns to fire, and the time to move them around. McCain has fewer guns and more ground to cover. He’s already racing around the country, hopping from state to state, and is dedicating his time almost exclusively to the local media. That’s telling, because that’s the kind of flying around candidates usually do to either pre-empt holes, or plug them in the last month or so.

The reason: even if Bevan is right and Obama in the end only gets two out of seven states, he will still have gained two states that are normally not in play for any generic Democrat. Even winning one state, Indiana, would be a hoot. And it would still mean that McCain had to have been on the defensive offense all the time, demanding too much of his overstretched artillery, while Obama’s guys are blasting them from every side.

And then there’s the foot soldiers. The mantra of the 2004 election was ‘ turnout, turnout, turnout’. Team Bush, of whom many people have now joined the McCain campaign, knew that a lot of Democratic-leaning voters were fired up to vote Bush out of office. So the GOP boosted its get out the vote-machine to levels never seen before. They managed to squeeze out approximately 60,000 more Bush-voters in Ohio after a very polarising campaign.

After they managed to tarnish John Kerry’s image as a war hero, the next step was reigniting feelings of fear among the electorate. Still, Bush almost lost and many of the 60,000 voters that gave him a second term had been canvassed incessantly by the Bush campaign machine. Oh, and the local political machine too – Ohio had a GOP governor, and thus blatantly GOP administrative infrastructure.

Polls show that the Bush foot soldiers of 2004 are no longer as motivated now as they were in 2004, and the political machine of Ohio has changed hands. Democrats run the place.

The same thing goes for states like Virginia and Indiana, but there’s a catch: in 2004, the GOP didn’t really need to build up big, expensive GOTV infrastructures in those two states. They will need to do so now; they simply cannot afford to take the chance of losing either one of them to Obama.

Team McCain is also betting on the GOP itself to help out their presidential candidate. That may be, but locally, the GOP is in problems. There’s not a whole lot of money to spare in the GOP congressional coffers, so the candidates won’t be very eager to share what little cash they have with McCain. And they will be even less inclined should Team Obama succesfully carry out another strategic attack: that of throwing McCain in with Bush.

If Obama succeeds in painting McCain as a Bush Republican, something which isn’t hard to do as McCain has embraced nearly all Bush policies, few Republican state candidates will want to infect themselves with the bad image.

So. Obama has the money, the ammunition, he has the time to place his artillery and foot soldiers wherever he wants them to, and that while he is in the position to paint the new general of the opposing army as a cardboard copy of the last general that lost a big battle.

Once again, this election is Obama’s to lose. With all he has going for him, we’ll see where he stands in three weeks, when I return from my holidays.

But perhaps I was wrong. The tracking polls are starting to show dents in Obama’s armour. Over at Real Clear Politics (I’m always careful with these guys as they’re clearly pro-GOP), the latest rundown of tracking polls shows that although Obama is still leading, the margins seem to be getting smaller, not bigger.

That spells trouble for Obama. Of course, Americans being Americans, I would not be surprised if they once again elect someone who will tear their country even further apart. Because that’s what Republicans do: they pretend to be all Christian morals, but before you know it, they’re out with TV-ads calling people traitors and sodomizing your 3-year-old.

Either way, Obama has not yet been able to close the deal and I’m afraid that that’s because people are still very doubtful of him. Of course, American pigheads being American pigheads, they keep noticing that Obama is black. Perhaps that’s it. It can’t be because of ideological reasons. Because how many average Americans read candidate platforms these days?

I‘ve said from day one, so even before the primaries, that Americans were very capable of electing a carbon copy of George W Bush into office. I also predicted that the election would be very close.

When the new King of Expectation beat the Oracle of Chappaqua, I said I was convinced that any generic Republican would win the election. Now, I’m going back to that position. I’ll be keeping it until Obama truly starts improving his poll numbers and significantly moves away from McCain.

So it was refreshing to see Nichols criticizing Obama for a change in an article pasted here, but unfortunately, Nichols missed the mark. He was right to criticize Obama, but for the wrong reason.

Both Barack Obama and John McCain are right: more troops are needed in Afghanistan, but with one unifying mandate, not two different ones that cancel each other out. As is currently the case.

So I wrote Mr Nichols an email. To which he didn’t respond, of course.

Dear Mr Nichols,

I read your article on the commitments Mr Obama made to Afghan leaders, on TheNation.com.

Fine article, good read, but I felt that some points were missing.

Like many people, you correctly state that there’s too much fighting going on, and not much building.

But that’s exactly the problem; the deployment to Afghanistan has become a chicken-or-the-egg dilemma.

As you know, the American troops are basically on a fighting mission named ‘Operation Enduring Freedom’, in Afghanistan. Their mandate is combat, and only combat.

Then there’s NATO’s ISAF, that has a very different mandate for the troops. ISAF is confined to (re)building, nation building, etc.

All good and well, but all the Afghans and the Taleban see are Western military uniforms.

Aside from that, the Taleban are very effective in applying what is basically an African tribal strategy. Instill fear, fear and fear among the civilian population, and ensure that the (re)building effort by NATO fails.

Their tactics are horrendous, and well documented by Dutch soldiers, who have been in Afghanistan since the start.

The biggest frustration of Dutch soldiers is that whenever they build a school or small hospital in a small rural town, the Taleban usually sneak into the town after the Dutch have left, and then raze the schools and hospitals. Those who have cooperated with the Dutch are killed, and often their entire families as well. They are public executions; young boys and girls are hanged up on their feet, so upside down, and then gutted, like one would with a cow. The warning is clear to the villages in close proximity: this is what happens to you when you cooperate with ISAF.

Dutch soldiers are now being spurned by local Afghan leaders. They would like to cooperate, but they say they can’t, because the Dutch (and other forces) won’t always be there to protect them.

In the beginning, ISAF troops made the error of promising Afghans that they were safe from the Taleban, that they’d be protected. Years of experience has shown the Afghans that those promises are empty.

And to Afghans, he who controls an area, rules that area. It’s that simple.

Another problem is the ISAF mandate. NATO troops are in Afghanistan, yes, but they’re there under a tight mandate. They are in principle not allowed to undertake offensive action against (known) Taleban forces. They are allowed to defend themselves, and the civilian population, but that’s it.

Dutch Special Forces have now taken to baiting tactics; they try to attract enemy fire, by for instance sending a lone jeep with soldiers into a known ‘hot zone’ and then faking that the jeep has a breakdown. Taleban spotters, often civilians whose family members have been taken hostage by the Taleban and so forced to enroll into their ranks, then go into action. All they usually do is call in the location of the jeep – but the talk via open walkie-talkie radio is then intercepted by the Dutch, the location of the civilian spotter located, and he is subsequently killed.

The Taleban then later show up, collect the remains, and present them to the inhabitants of the killed civilian’s town, exclaiming the perverse violence of the ISAF troops.

A couple of months ago, a Dutch TV programme comparable to ’60 Minutes’ found out that Dutch troops had started undertaking offensive action, to flush out the Taleban that had been systematically razing schools and hospitals in towns. The broadcast caused a political outcry. As a result, the Dutch forces are now back to full defensive ISAF duty. And they’re frustrated, because the results of their rebuilding efforts are nil.

This is happening throughout ISAF-‘controlled’ territory. Taleban attacks on the civilian population and ISAF troops are up. The number of hospitals, schools and medical posts in villages being razed is up. Production of poppies, the sale of which is probably the Taleban’s main source of income, is up by record numbers. And the ISAF troops are, by their mandate, not allowed to do anything about it.

Then Operation Enduring Freedom. US forces are fighting the Taleban hard, but there are two problems.

1) the population of the villages they half destroy while bombing Taleban troops who purposely take up positions in those villages, are VERY unlikely to aid the Americans and be anti-Taleban, and
2) the Taleban are constantly withdrawing to Pakistan, where GIs can’t touch them. (Eerily reminiscent of the VietCong’s retreat tactics into Laos and Cambodia.)

So US forces are doing something that the ISAF can’t – fighting offensive – but not doing what they should be doing after the fighting, which in turn is what ISAF is doing.

There are two main strategic problems.
1. Geographic divide. There are areas where the NATO ISAF troops simply are not allowed to operate.
This is Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) territory. This results in OEF GIs flushing out the Taleban from a village, and then moving on, with no ISAF troops following up to do the rebuilding – and staying there for a while to ensure that Taleban troops don’t sneak back in. Plus: Pakistan.

2. Mandate divide. As shown, the two operations have very different mandates. Problem is, if you change the ISAF mandate to allow for offensive (i.e., more risky) actions, most NATO countries will pull back their troops. (The Dutch had to extend their ISAF mandate period because no other NATO country wanted to send troops to replace the Dutch.)

The only way to solve this:
- ONE mandate, for all forces in Afghanistan.
- MORE troops, to ensure that newly built infrastructure (which is why ISAF’s there, for Christ’s sake!) isn’t immediately razed after the troops depart.

So far, both Obama’s and McCain’s proposals fall short of the mandate-thing.