The McCain camp is denying that it was a campaign spokesperson who told local TV reporters in Pittsburgh that the “B” supposedly scrawled on the face of a young McCain campaign worker was a reference to “Barack” Obama, angrily carved into her face with a knife by a black mugger because she was a McCain supporter.
Of course we now know the victim’s entire account was a hoax. I suspect the McCain campaign’s denial is, too.
In response to our story, campaign spokesperson Brian Rogers told MSNBC that the campaign didn’t provide those details to the local reporters, but that the police did, and the reporters were sloppy in attributing them to the McCain campaign (at the 0:54 mark):
So here’s what the McCain camp would have you believe. Two different TV stations. Two different reporters. Neither could distinguish what they were told by the police (whom they presumably deal with on a daily basis) from what a campaign flack told them. So thorough is their sloppiness that even after the fact, upon reflection, both reporters stick by their stories, continuing to misattribute police statements to the campaign.
The McCain campaign denial also requires you to believe that, more than 12 hours after the concocted attack, the police — who say they were suspicious of the hoaxster’s account from the beginning — started leaking to reporters an incendiary version of events that didn’t even make it into the original police report of the incident.
Perhaps most implausibly, the McCain camp account requires you to give the benefit of the doubt to a crew that wants you to believe that Obama himself is a smooth-talking, baby-killing Islamic terrorist who embraces socialism and white women.
It is time for the McCain campaign to come clean about what role any of its staffers may have had in hyping or pushing the press to hype the charges stemming from Ashley Todd’s vicious and reprehensible hoax.
As Greg Sargent reported yesterday, McCain Pennsylvania communications director Peter Feldman pushed reporters on a highly incendiary version of Todd’s hoax — providing reporters with quotes from the fictitious attacker and telling them the the “B” scratched on Todd’s face stood for “Barack.” As the Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson aptly put it, Feldman’s actions showed “not just a willingness to believe it but an eagerness to incite a … racial backlash against the Obama campaign.”
Our reporting did not find any direct evidence that the McCain campaign’s national headquarters played a role pushing the story.
However, the national campaign has now come forward and lied about what happened in Pennsylvania. McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers has now told NBC that alleged quotes from the McCain campaign in early reports of the story were actually the product of “sloppy reporting” and that they were actually quotes from the Pittsburgh police.
This is simply not credible.
Initial reports specifically quote the McCain campaign. And at least two sources involved in the contemporaneous reporting have come forward and said on the record that the quotes came directly from the McCain campaign. To believe that two separate local news organizations made the identical mistake with the same quotes and are now both covering it up is simply not credible. But that is what Rogers is now claiming.
The McCain campaign’s after-the-fact lie about its role in this hoax makes it essential that it provide a complete and honest account of both the local and national campaign’s role. As I said above, we did not find direct evidence of the national McCain campaign pushing this story. But Gov. Palin did call Todd after the purported attack, as did Sen. McCain. And news of these calls was provided to the press.
The involvement of the candidates and specifically the release of such information — which was clearly intended to bump up interest in the story — shows some level of involvement by the national campaign.
Perhaps it is simply that the national campaign heard a staffer had been mugged and had the principals call the purported victim. One might further speculate that it was only the Pennsylvania communications director who heard about the calls and took it upon himself to push these out to the media.
Possible, but certainly a generous interpretation. And now that we see the national McCain campaign making false statements about what happened, its credibility on the whole story is simply too damaged to allow such a benefit of the doubt.
Reporters who the McCain camp cannot stonewall need to push for a clear accounting of what happened — starting by coming clean on Feldman’s role. If this were simply some other minor campaign mystery, the sort that is routinely tossed off late in a hard-fought campaign, it might not matter. But the awfulness of what was attempted here makes nothing less than a full accounting necessary.
You might think the U.S. attorneys scandal would be enough to make the White House steer clear of voter fraud bamboozlement in the very next election. You’d be wrong.
Barack Obama is noted for his powerful intellect, but I don’t think he gets nearly enough credit for the mental dexterity it takes to be simultaneously an Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist and national socialist while posing as a center left candidate. Those must be the compartmentalization skills they taught him at that Manchurian madrasah in Indonesia.
The fact that Obama embodies the worst nightmares of so many on the political right says far more about them that it does him. In this piece at The Corner, Mark R. Levin, bristling over normally rational conservatives like Colin Powell and Charles Fried falling under Obama’s demagogic spell, pushes ajar the door to his inner psyche, where the horrors are of the communist-cum-Nazi variety. Levin doesn’t go in much for the Obama as closet Muslim nightmare. I’m sure it’s just a failure of imagination.
Bear with me. The intricacies of GOP dirty tricks in Pennsylvania take some unraveling. But this is too rich, and the best part comes at the end.
On Thursday the Pennsylvania GOP sent out an email to 75,000 Jewish voters in the state warning that electing Obama could lead to a second Holocaust, the AP reports:
“Jewish Americans cannot afford to make the wrong decision on Tuesday, November 4th, 2008,” the e-mail reads. “Many of our ancestors ignored the warning signs in the 1930s and 1940s and made a tragic mistake. Let’s not make a similar one this year!”
A copy of the e-mail, provided by Democratic officials, says it was “Paid for by the Republican Federal Committee of PA – Victory 2008.”
It warns “Fellow Jewish Voters” of the danger of a second Holocaust due to the threats to Israel from its neighbors and touts Republican presidential candidate John McCain’s qualifications over those of Obama.
The state GOP is now running away from that email as fast as it can. The AP leads with the state GOP’s disavowal of the email, but it seems a bit more complicated than that. There doesn’t seem to be any dispute that the state party or one of its committees sent the email. The party’s defense seems to be that the consultant who the party hired wasn’t authorized to send that particular email and was fired.
Except the AP got in touch with the consultant and that’s not quite the story he tells:
Political consultant Bryan Rudnick was identified as the person responsible for it. Rudnick, reached Saturday night, confirmed that he no longer works for the party, which employed him a few weeks ago as a consultant to do outreach to Jewish voters.
“I had authorization from party officials” to send the e-mail, Rudnick said, but he declined to say who had signed off on it. “I’m not looking to drag anyone else through the mud, so I’m not naming names right now,” he said.
That’s a pretty good story in its own right: Another under-the-radar GOP sleaze tactic exposed and yet another low- to mid-level GOP operative scapegoated because he got caught on the wrong side of the McCain campaign’s shifting line between what is just sleazy and what is too sleazy (a line that seems to get drawn immediately after the GOP gets busted).
But it gets better.
Like the state GOP, the McCain camp is running away from this email, and the spokesperson doing the distancing is none other than Peter Feldman. That’s the same guy who on Thursday, the day the email went out, was pushing the mugging hoax to reporters as a politically motivated attack by a black Obama supporter, playing to the worst of white fears and racial prejudices.
Speaking of the email to Jewish voters and without any apparent hint of irony, Feldman told the AP Saturday night that McCain “rejects politics that degrade our civics.”
Amazing.
No word on whether the AP asked Feldman about his role in pushing the mugging hoax.
TPM is hiring two new politics reporters, to report from Washington, DC. Full-time. Salary based on experience. Health care provided. Applicants should send a cover letter, resume and no more than three clips to talk (at) talkingpointsmemo.com with the subject heading ‘Politics Reporter’.
In response to a question about Colin Powell’s endorsement, John McCain says he’s proud five former Secretaries of State have endorsed him. Then he forgets the name of the fifth one …
Anyone can forget a name. And this guy’s under an amount of physical fatigue and emotional stress that would challenge men half his age. (As much as I believe that McCain’s age is showing, this point is worth remembering.) But if you watch the video, after he lists off the four names again to jog his memory and then just isn’t able to remember the fifth, he lets out a heavy sigh and with what I’d describe as a resigned smile, says “and one other.”
Not sure what to say but that it seemed emblematic of the moment.
Stevens’ jury will begin deliberations from scratch on Monday morning after Judge Emmet Sullivan replaced a juror, who had a family emergency, with an alternate.
From CNN …
Ensuring that news of the Republican National Committee’s sartorial spending spree will remain in the headlines for at least one more news cycle, Sarah Palin on Sunday sounded off on the $150,000 wardrobe that was purchased for her in September, denouncing the report as “ridiculous” and declaring emphatically: “Those clothes, they are not my property.”
A senior adviser to John McCain told CNN’s Dana Bash that the comments about her wardrobe “were not the remarks we sent to her plane this morning.” Palin did not discuss the wardrobe story at her rally in Kissimmee later in the day.