Lawmakers To Issue Subpoenas, But Not For Palin, on Trooper-Gate Okay, seems like the finger-pointing is breaking out in the McCain campaign over the green screen / Walter Reed / McCain McMansion goof in last night’s McCain speech.
Last night at the Google/Vanity Fair party celebrating the last night of the RNC, McCain chief Rick Davis was telling people the whole thing was the fault of McCain ad man Fred Davis.
You would never know it from the media coverage but John McCain is not one of America’s greatest war heroes. He is a former POW who survived, heroically. He deserves to be honored for that heroism.
But one thing distinguishes McCain from other war heroes, the kind whose heroism changes history rather than their life stories.
America’s two greatest war heroes were Ulysses Grant and Dwight Eisenhower. Grant saved the union. And Ike saved civilization.
And neither one ever bragged about their experience. (Can you imagine Ike smacking down Adlai Stevenson by saying that while Adlai ran a nice medium-sized state, he was the Supreme Allied Commander who ran D-Day, defeated Hitler, and liberated Europe?).
Impossible. Like Grant, Eisenhower did not brag.
The big papers and cable networks in the lower 48 states may be cowed. But Alaska’s biggest newspaper, the Anchorage Daily News apparently isn’t. They’re asking Sarah Palin to stop stonewalling the ethics investigation probing her firing of the state’s Commissioner of Public Safety.
So it seems that that school in North Hollywood that the McCain campaign accidentally used as a speech backdrop instead of a picture of Walter Reed Army Medical Hospital is about to release a statement.
From TPM Reader TH …
I think there’s a connection between the mansion-cum-middle school picture and the lousy speech prepared for McCain. It has to do with the stress that Palin’s nomination puts on the GOP ticket, on the resources she necessarily diverts from McCain. Whatever you think of the Palin speech, whether it was cynical or alienating to anyone outside the base, it was solidly written. I’d even say well written. McCain’s wasn’t. It was decidedly second rate, not just badly delivered but clumsily written (except for the part about his POW experience, which I assume he has on file: that worked). How did that happen? Everyone knows McCain is a bad public speaker, so one would assume his campaign would it least give him a rock solid text to work from. But I suspect the campaign only has so many first-rate people on hand, and all of those people in the McCain campaign were tasked with taking care of Palin, leaving the top of the ticket to the second-stringers.
The Daily Muck As noted below, it seems like we may have solved the mystery of the bizarre mansion they had up behind John McCain last night on the big TV screen that on TV made it look like a green screen. We’re digging in to confirm. Click for the whole story.