Interesting. McCain has decided that his last chance is to persuade voters with an intense barrage of commercials that will, for the last few days of the campaign, bring him to parity with Obama on air. However, there is one thing to note about this decision:
The decision to finance a final advertising push is forcing McCain to curtail spending on Election Day ground forces to help usher his supporters to the polls, according to Republican consultants familiar with McCain’s strategy.
The vaunted, 72-hour plan that President Bush used to mobilize voters in 2000 and 2004 has been scaled back for McCain. He has spent half as much as Obama on staffing and has opened far fewer field offices. This week, a number of veteran GOP operatives who orchestrate door-to-door efforts to get voters to the polls were told they should not expect to receive plane tickets, rental cars or hotel rooms from the campaign.
This is NOT how you stay on message. Lawrence Eagleburger, a McCain advisor and one of the fave five Secretaries of State he remembered has gone on the record absolutely BLISTERING Sarah Palin. This is unbelievable. Below the jump for the details.
A former Republican Secretary of State and one of John McCain’s most prominent supporters offered a stunningly frank and remarkably bleak assessment of Sarah Palin’s capacity to handle the presidency should such a scenario arise.
Lawrence Eagleburger, who served as Secretary of State under George H.W. Bush and whose endorsement is often trumpeted by McCain, said on Thursday that the Alaska governor is not only unprepared to take over the job on a moment’s notice but, even after some time in office, would only amount to an “adequate” commander in chief.
“And I devoutly hope that [she] would never be tested,” he added for good measure — referring both to Palin’s policy dexterity and the idea of McCain not making it through his time in office.
The interview was with NPR which was apparently supposed to show off how qualified Sarah Palin is. Of course, we know that’s not the case:
John McCain and the Republican National Committee are now running robocalls attacking Obama as weak on terrorism — in McCain’s home state of Arizona, according to multiple readers from the state.
The call signals genuine worry about McCain’s home state at a time when several polls show the race to be much closer than expected there.
McCain’s robocall, which was played to us over the phone by Mary Joe Bartel, a retiree who lives south of Tuscon, attacks Obama as unprepared to defend the country from terrorism, singling out Joe Biden’s recent remarks about the likelihood of Obama being tested by an international crisis early in his first term.
Flatly, this is disastrous for McCain. There is absolutely no reason Obama should be competitive in a right-leaning state (admittedly not as red as say Tennessee when Gore lost it) where the GOP presidential nominee makes (one of) his home. It will be interesting to see if this gets any media play.
FERRELL AS BUSH – “Good to see you, John. Hey let’s get a photo of this; it’ll really help your campaign out. Now let me do this: I, George W. Bush, endorse John McCain and Sarah Palin with all my heart…”
(MCCAIN tries to drift out of frame but is pulled back by BUSH)
FERRELL AS BUSH (cont’d) – “John was there for me ninety percent of the time over the last eight years. When you think of John McCain, think of me, George W. Bush. Think of this face. When you’re in the voting booth, before you vote – picture this face right here. A vote for John McCain is a vote for George W. Bush.
(to MCCAIN) You’re welcome. So, I want to be there you, John for the next eight years.”
As any good Texas-Holdem poker player (like Barack Obama) knows that when your chips get low and you are almost out of the game (down to the felt in poker terms), you wait for the best hand you can get and move all in an attempt to “double up”. Translating that to politics, with McCain constrained by taking public financing, that decision is turning into potentially a fatal one. And it explains his decision to move his ad spending out of a number of battleground states.
We have news today that McCain is drastically cutting his ad spending in a number of states:
In another sign that John McCain is on the defensive as time runs out, the McCain campaign is shifting its ad money out of blue tossup states and into red tossups and even traditionally red states, according to ad maven Evan Tracey.
McCain has dramatically slashed his ad spending in Wisconsin and New Hampshire and reduced it in Pennsylvania, suggesting that he’s either losing hope or giving up hope in winning in three states that went for John Kerry in 2004, or that he doesn’t have ample enough resources for them.
He’s also reduced his spending in Colorado, which went for Bush but is showing a lead for Obama, suggesting he may be losing hope there, too.
“There’s definitely a scaling back in those states,” says Tracey, who tracks national ad spending for the Campaign Media Analysis Group and gave TPM some numbers so we could flesh out and synthesize disparate reports about various spending shifts into a big picture.
It’s a curious decision to move out of some of these states, especially Colorado where Obama has a solid but not insurmountable lead. Of course, if Obama wins Colorado along with Iowa and New Mexico and holds the Kerry states, he wins. But Colorado is not an outrageously expensive state, so throwning some coin there seems like a no-brainer. Until you get a look at how much money McCain has left to spend:
“Republicans, RNC donors and at least one RNC staff member have e-mailed me tonight to share their utter (and not-for-attribution) disgust at the expenditures. … The heat for this story will come from Republicans who cannot understand how their party would do something this stupid … particularly (and, it must be said, viewed retroactively) during the collapse of the financial system and the probable beginning of a recession.”
Now the press is having a field day, even speculating there may be tax implications:
I just got off the phone with a well-respected and well-known tax attorney who doesn’t want to be identified.
I asked him earlier in the day whether Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin can avoid paying taxes on the $150,000 worth of clothes the RNC bought her, as she and the RNC maintain. (They said the RNC now owns the clothes; she’s just borrowing them.)
He said that, after consulting with a number of experts at his prominent firm, he thinks the RNC and Gov. Palin are wrong.
“It’s probably not a ‘gift,’” he said. “The issue is whether it counts as ‘income.’”
Now, I have a simple solution to this problem. Sell the clothes to Rich “Starbursts” Lowery. You remember Rich. He revealed after the Vice Presidential debate that Gov. Palin’s performance was so awesome, that he saw “starbursts”:
More challenges for John McCain: Likely voters overwhelmingly reject his effort to make an issue of Barack Obama’s association with 1960’s radical William Ayers. Fallout continues from McCain’s pick of Sarah Palin for vice president, with 52 percent saying it weakens their confidence in his judgment. And on optimism, it’s Obama by 2-1. Skepticism about the Ayers issue was one of the factors cited by Colin Powell in his endorsement of Obama yesterday, and in the latest ABC News/Washington Post poll likely voters broadly agree: Sixty percent say Obama’s relationship with Ayers is not a legitimate issue in the presidential campaign; 37 percent say it is.
The Acorn numbers are less solid, but that issue hasn’t been explained as well. With Ayers, it’s as simple as, “he did those acts 40 years ago when I was eight, and the board I served on was headed by conservatives.” So Acorn needs to be explained a little better, but overall these are great numbers that show that McCain’s antics aren’t working to any appreciable degree. But hey, keep it up McCain. Maybe your favorables can get into Dick Cheney territory. Full results (including the head-to-head I presume) should be released later.
One of the stories bubbling just over the surface is the issue of John McCain’s health. While the story of his frequent bouts with cancer have been well documented, and he did allow reporters to see his records in a very controlled setting, many have demanded a more thorough accounting of his various medical issue. The New York Times will be shedding some additional light on this issue.
The New York Times will break new ground on the health of the presidential candidates and their running mates in a major expose set to be published in Monday’s print edition.
Lawrence Altman — the veteran Times reporter, George Polk Award winner, and one of the few medical doctors working as a full-time journalist — has spent weeks working with the campaigns and medical professionals on the piece, sources say.
Much of the speculation centers on new questions about the status of John McCain’s cancer raised by the story. The Washington Post reported last week that a growing number of doctors believe that McCain’s melanoma is “more advanced than his physicians concluded and that the chance of recurrence is consequently higher.”
But another peculiar facet of the Times story involves the McCain campaign’s refusal, as of this weekend, to turn over Sarah Palin’s medical information.
Strategy ’08 is a new blog dedicated to covering issues surrounding the 2008 Presidential Campaign between Barack Obama and John McCain. Authors are long-time bloggers and unabashed Barack Obama supporters dansac, slinkerwink, turneresq, zenbowl, smash artist and gdh1 who often post on DailyKos and elsewhere.
Stumble It!
