Two interesting events happened today. First, as you've undoubtedly heard, Sarah Palin was found to have abused her position as Governor in Alaska. Second, McCain is clearly uncomfortable with the current line of attack his campaign is using, and came to Obama's defense when someone stated that he was scared of an Obama Presidency (leading to McCain being booed by his own audience).
On Olbermann tonight, Jonathon Alter mentioned a previous presidential candidate (Humphrey?) who completely changed their platform just a few weeks before the election and came back from a big deficit in the polls to almost pull off a victory. Alter suggested that McCain's only remaining course to victory might be to make a similar 180 degree change.
So what do you think... What would happen if McCain went back to the old McCain? What if he fired his campaign staff, fired Palin and started running as the "maverick" that he was in 2000? I suspect that he would lose even bigger than he will currently, but at least he will salvage some of his honor. Anybody else have any thoughts?
(Note: I don't think this will actually happen, it's just an interesting theory.)
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9 comments:
Attention-getting changes in position have been his meta-policy all along, that's why he's a MAVerraticK.
He won't change position, but might change the game. It's too little too late to win with push-polls, Diebold hacks, voter purges, Supreme Court rulings, and what has worked the last few cycles. Plans A, B, C, D. and E are not effective enough. They may activate Plan X. Satan gave Karl Rove an imagination for a purpose.
538 had a guest post suggesting Osama bin Laden may jump into the game again with a globally-televised enthusiastic endorsement of Obama, or a massive terrorist attack, either of which would boost McCrazy. That could be with or without funding from the US spook houses.
Considering they have the wealth of supportive companies like ExxonMobil to play with, the RNC campaign funds, $23 Bbbillion missing in Iraq loaded onto planes somewhere, and $700 billion in new fffunding from Congress that could be diverted to "friends" who help McCain take power,
McCain could…
…divert funds to someone like Saakashvili of Georgia (or Putin this time?) to provoke an international incident which McCain would then fly to --suspending his campaign--and resolve peacefully, returning home as a hero to ticker-tape parades through Times Square and public adulation;
…have "friends" crash airplanes into bldgs or atomc powr plants;
…use internees at camp x-ray, abu ghraib alumni, detainees in secret CIA prisons worldwide, who may agree to do something crazy in exchange for their own or their family's release;
etc etc.
One problem with that is that we are already having an international economic crisis that any manufactured crisis may have trouble overshadowing!
Alternatively, it is quite possible that, given the unpopularity of the Bush misadministration internationally, that an OKtober surprise may come from a country that wants to further weaken Bush-Cheney-McCain.
In the hard-to-imagine event we see Cheney waving from his chopper, voluntarily leaving the White House grounds, one expects the building to explode minutes later. Then the movie starts. Jim Baker crawls out of the woodwork…
I hope Obama has a good plan to decontaminate the White House and get out the anthrax and bad vibes and whatnot the BushCheneys leave there. I wouldn't want my kids playing around in Mister Cheney's boogers.
All signs are good for Obama at the moment. Historically, he's looking like a winner. He's gone from 53¢ September 12 to 85¢ October 10 on the IEM. Rasmussen has him above 78, Intrade at the same. Sam Wang has started to say it's over. 270towin has incredibly high odds on him winning, as well. Colleyrankings lags but is moving. Obama has plenty of money left to counter attack ads and a half-hour infomercial planned!
Interesting video! Campaigning FOR Obama -- saying good things in defense of him -- may help the Panamanian-born ex-prisoner and moose-eatin' sidekick. He looks dignified dismissing the neanderthal supporters, but his ads and underlings are stoking it elsewhere. Obama's call-in is interesting, too.
Lookin' more like Clinton vs Dole '96 all the time. Target: 379+ EVs. And it will be good to see Al Gore on the Supreme Court.
Just clicked refresh and saw that e-v.c has Oct 11 up now.
A member of my immediate family works at our local Dem HQ, and they are not overconfident. They are waiting for the McCain X factor, too. Their only question is, Will there be an external X factor, or will McCain do what he does best: shake up his own campaign like he promises to shake up Washington? If McCain fires Palin and his staff, I think he has a chance. Otherwise, he has to hope that the stock market goes up 2000 points or bin Laden rears his head again.
If his campaign goes down the Ayers and Muslim route, then he is not fir to even serve as a senator.
Let's suppose he does can everybody. Who does he get for VP? Dick Cheney. Just remember, Dick Cheney can declare martial law until the morning of January 20th, 2009.
I really shouldn't give poll junkie too many bad vibes, but scenarios in which the election itself is (caused to be) botched in some way are not unthinkable. Lo-tek methods like wite supremacists w/ no traceable links to McCain and poor speling skils doing drive-bys in democratic neighborhoods could terrorize voters, suppressing 100s of 1000s of votes, maybe millions in a key state like Florida. If the outcome is repug, they go with it, if not, they don't certify the result, let the state legislature cast the electoral votes, have the state or federaL Sureme Court approve it.
Even that probably wouldn't work.
But… Years of monitoring every phone call, e-mail, electronic communication may have given them some data they could use against Obama. Pictures of him smoking crack with OJ or in bed with John Edwards wouldn't do it either. We'd all assume they were photoshopped.
I don't think the nation would accept Obama losing (but what do I know?).
I think the congressional nancys have made some big mistakes not just in electronic surveillance and other legislation but in allowing Cheney and Bush to get away with their crimes.
I have a lot more respect for the democratic values of South Koreans, Filipinos, Thais, Pakistanis, and the French than I do for the Americans right now, altho a victory for Obama would do a lot to restore my faith (as Clinton did before he promoted his willie to chief exec). Democracy has such a feeble pulse in America right now and night nurse Dick Cheney is standing by with an IV of sodium pentothal.
I think the hope-crushing scenario of Obama losing would cause such an explosion of pent-up rage that the republicans would be better off with the even-mindedness and magnanimity of an Obama presidency.
CraigTFD: I actually meant to put that question in the original post. They probably won't win, so it would have to be someone without a lot to lose. It would have to be someone with economic experience. And it would have to be someone who can legitimately play the Maverick card along with McCain. My first would be Michael Bloomberg. If not him, then possibly Chuck Hagel. Of course both of them are known to have ties to Obama as well, so would they be willing to throw away a potential role in the Obama administration to play Sancho Panza to McCain's Don Quixote?
The other possibility is of course Joe Lieberman. He certainly doesn't have a lot to lose, since his support of McCain has pretty much killed any chance of close ties to Obama, and probably any reelection hopes as well. I don't think he's going to win on the economy either, though he almost has to be better than McCain. But McCain likes him and he's certainly a better candidate than the current option.
Obama and terrorists. I wonder who else gets the scarlet letter T. All the undergraduate and students (mostly teachers!) who took a class from Ayers? His department colleagues? All the people on the Annenberg Challenge board? Those who nominated him for Citizen of the Year and those who congratulated him? The publishers of his 15 books? The university that made him a distinguished professor? What rubbish.
He looks dignified dismissing the neanderthal supporters, but his ads and underlings are stoking it elsewhere.
I wish to withdraw that comment! It occurred to me later that the formulation
Obama=Arab
->Obama= NOT Arab
Obama=decent family man, citizen
implies that
.:. ARAB=NOT decent, NOT family man, NOT citizen
I can't trust Obama. I have read about him and he's not, he's not uh — he's an Arab. He's not — "
"No, ma'am. He's a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues and that's what this campaign's all about. He's not [an Arab]."
Googling for the quote I see that millions of people had the same reaction.
I guess it's the 1-2-3 punch of
first, anger at the woman,
then, being glad that McCain corrected her
that allows the subliminal message three (Arabs are indecent…) to go unnoticed (for a moment).
There are racist signals like this surrounding us every day. That's just one. I'm sure many kids who saw that picked it up. It wouldn't be hard to design a social psychology experiment in which kids watch 5 min of spongebob or something, see a short news clip like this, and then more comics. The control group sees another clip of equal length with the same word Arab used with the same frequency, maybe a news report about the Arab League or some short neutral statement by Jimmy Carter or someone. Thirty minutes later, give them a questionnaire in which they have to choose attributes to describe certain words including Arab. Or a week later or a month later. We acquire words and fine-tune their meanings and connotations from a small number of exposures, say 5 to 15. I think you would find this usage by McCain in the mass media measurably affects the connotation of the word.
You don't have to be over 5 years old and watching the news, either. On Cartoon Network, Popeye teaches my preschool daughter that black men wear bones through their noses and are cannibals who cook white people in large black pots, and that Native Americans wish to capture and enslave skinny white girls like Olve Oyl for sexual purposes. I wonder if in 2083, when she's 80, if those messages will have left an imprint or have subliminally altered her attitudes and behavior. Thank you, America. I can't escape this even in Japan. Perhaps this is an echo of the racist past and the racist government propaganda used in WW2.
Occasionally, the BBC has a news item on US torture methods, waterboarding, and so on. They usually show the same short clip of a man being waterboarded each time. I have to change the channel because I don't want my kids to watch a man being tortured and ask me what are they doing to that man, and why they are doing it. I still have a little bit too much pride as an American to have to tell them that the US is a rogue nation that detains and tortures people in violation of the Geneva Conventions. I also have some hope that the age of torture will end soon and merely be an embarrassing historical episode for the rest of our history. Let me offer a no-brainer prediction that it is just a matter of time until junior high and high school kids start mimicking their elders and begin waterboarding each other on the playgrounds and in the locker rooms, and someone gets killed, shaming the nation further.
I've heard people make that argument. I don't agree with it. His comment can certainly be taken that way, but it can just as easily be interpreted as a perfectly civil comment. McCain isn't nimble enough a wordsmith to come up with a response that subtle on the fly. From someone more deft, I could see that being a backhanded insult, but not from McCain.
I don't mean that it was an expertly crafted electoral mind-bomb of Clintonian or Rovean design, just that it betrays and conveys some anti-Arab sentiment.
Try a variation as a thought-experiment:
"He's not an American, he's an honest human being!"
As an American in Japan, if I heard this on TV I would think "They sure hate Americans" or "Americans sure are bad" and I would notice kids soaking it up, probably spitting out "American" in a disparaging way next time they used the word.
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