If Sarah Palin removed her public safety commissioner for cause (and not because he refused to fire her ex-brother-in-law) why does she consider what a jerk her ex-brother-in-law is to still be the other side of the Trooper-Gate story?

From a longtime reader …

A week ago, as the McCain campaign continued to drive the media narrative and consolidate its lead in the polls, you wrote:

“…I take it that their position now is that they’re not going to get knocked off their game. Instead they’re staying focused on the ground game in the dozen and a half states where they believe the race will be won or lost….So we’re left to take it on faith that they know what they’re doing, without having much way of seeing for ourselves.”

It’s a fair point. And though it’s tempting now to dismiss the last few weeks as a rapidly-dissipating bounce, and to applaud the Obama campaign for sticking to its game plan, the truth is that we don’t know much more about how the campaign is unfolding on the ground than we did a week ago. If the polls didn’t tell the whole story then, they’re not much more enlightening now.

With that in mind, it’s worth paying attention to a little-noted development this week in Michigan. The Obama campaign filed suit in state court to block the GOP’s “Lose your home, lose your vote” scheme, a plan to challenge the eligibility of voters whose homes have entered foreclosure – despite the fact that many remain resident in those homes.
It’s a typical GOP disenfranchisement campaign, and it’s nice to see the Obama folks taking a proactive position.

But the really interesting part of the filing is the effort by the Obama campaign to demonstrate, in a court of law, that this behavior is “part of a broader state and nationwide campaign by the Republican Party to suppress the vote.” And, upping the ante, the filing alleges that “Defendant Republicans have a long history of engaging in coordinated, systematic campaigns to suppress and deny the right to vote of American
citizens. Those campaigns are often targeted at various racial groups, language minorities, or individuals of low or modest economic circumstances whom Defendant Republicans believe are unlikely to support them in political campaigns.”

The filing is aimed at a particularly egregious and politically ill-advised initiative. Not only are the Republican claims here tendentious, but they’re targeted at a sympathetic group – largely white, financially-struggling voters, caught up in the economic crisis.
But the suit invites the court to go a step further – to recognize a persistent pattern of egregious misconduct; to find that this is a local instance of a state and national campaign; and in so doing, to link this initiative with other, less politically toxic drives.

The court is more likely to rule narrowly than to recognize those claims in its decision. But by intervening directly in a local case, the Obama campaign is signaling that a national campaign to disenfranchise voters will receive a national response. And by reframing a technical debate over local election laws as a broader discussion of fundamental rights, the Obama campaign has already won. The GOP has long employed the chimerical notion of “voter fraud,” and preyed upon unpopular groups
like students, non-Anglophone Americans and ex-felons. But they made a strategic miscalculation by going after homeowners suffering foreclosures. And by linking this effort at disenfranchisement to the others, the Obama campaign is going to make them pay.

(The filing is here.)

Sarah Palin’s campaign staff declines to say whether the vice president is part of the executive branch or the legislative branch. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

Anybody seen Bush lately?

After a day of gasps, guffaws and eyes rolled over John McCain’s decision to reassign Spanish Prime Minister Zapatero to run an unnamed country in Latin America, it seems we are arriving at a rough consensus about what happened and what part of it matters.

As I posited earlier today, the most logical conclusion is that McCain simply didn’t understand the question and tried to wing it. It may have been due to fatigue, lack of attention, confusion or simply an inability to penetrate the interviewer’s fairly thick accent, or perhaps a combination of one or more of the above. It is only if you insist on the preposterous assumption that McCain fully understood and grasped what the interviewer was asking him (i.e., the position of McCain’s foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann) that you have to conclude that McCain believes that Spain is a country in Latin America which may be bent on America’s destruction.

In itself mishearing or misunderstanding a question isn’t the worse thing in the world, though being too proud to ask for the question to be repeated and going with the assumption that the mystery leader must be some Hugo Chavez type character out of Woody Allen’s Bananas does suggest a certain recklessness of character.

The McCain campaign might simply have said that he was on the phone and didn’t understand. But they’re obviously unwilling to do that since they’ve staked so much of his candidacy on his foreign policy chops.

In any case, a consensus appears to be emerging that the really shocking lapse was not the original gaffe but how the campaign chose to deal with it. Rather than copping to the goof, they decided to stick to the nonsensical statements and risk, should McCain win in November, significant damage to our relations with a major NATO ally. Coming to basically similar conclusions are Newsweek, Joe Klein in Time, Chris Orr at The New Republic and many others.

So to restate, I think the simplest explanation is that McCain didn’t understand what he was being asked. And instead of trying to clarify, he assumed the interviewer, who had already asked him about Chavez and Castro, must be quizzing him on some other Latin American strongman who was up to no good. As so often with McCain, he tried to wing it. I think the available evidence is consistent which much less generous readings of the event. But this read is plausible. And Scheunemann, whose lack of experience in press work was painfully on display today, acted with characteristically knuckle-headed aggression and doubled-down on McCain’s nonsensical statement.

And whatever the misunderstanding, let’s face it. When a president or presidential nominees gets confused in an interview, appears to say that a European country is in the Western Hemisphere and inadvertently makes highly belligerent statements toward a major ally, that’s a big problem.

(ed.note: For more on the Inane On Spain controversy, check out Americablog, where John Aravosis has been on the story all through the day.)

We’ve been bringing you the latest through the day. Now in today’s episode of TPMtv, you can hear John McCain’s Spain goof and the two reasons why the explanation from his top foreign policy adviser just doesn’t add up …

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.