Colin Powell just endorsed Barack Obama during an appearance on Meet The Press.
Powell’s post-MTP presser:
Video of the MTP appearance shortly …
Late Update: Here’s Powell announcing the endorsement on Meet The Press:
McCain defends his campaign’s robocalls on the grounds that the calls don’t say what they in fact say.
Late Update: Here’s the video:
If you’re thinking to yourself that there’s little more than two weeks before election day and Obama has a solid lead in the polls, don’t be so sure.
Yes, it looks good for the Democrats. But you need to play close attention to the McCain campaign’s final weeks’ strategy under and just above the radar. McCain’s final strategy relies on two pillars. The first is aggressively playing to voters’ fears of electing a black president. Make no mistake: not just his campaign in a general sense, but McCain himself and his top handful of advisers, are banking on the residual racism in a changing America to get them over the finish line. The second is an aggressive use of innuendo to convince casual voters that Obama is in league with Islamic terrorists bent on killing Americans.
Many people have asked whether enough Americans really care any more about the cultural convulsions of the 1960s. The answer? It doesn’t matter. For the McCain campaign, Bill Ayers has nothing to do with 60s radicalism. Ayers is nothing more than a tool that permits McCain, Palin and all their surrogates to use the noun “terrorist” in polite company in the same sentence as “Obama,” over and over and over again. It allows them to cobble together a ‘respectable’ version of those Obama smear emails they can push in commercials and robocalls and surrogate talking points every hour of every day.
Stripped down to its components McCain’s message to voters is this: “Don’t forget. He’s definitely black. And he may be a terrorist.” That’s the message. The nuts and bolts is a concerted effort to keep Democrats from voting — through intimidation, by striking new voters from the rolls, which is going to happen to lots of them, clogging polling stations to create delays that keep late day (predominantly) Obama voters from voting altogether. Smears in the air and voter suppression on the ground.
Many people say, well … all this stuff just hasn’t worked. But the truth is that the really corrupt and vicious part of McCain’s effort only comes now because it’s only in the last couple weeks that you can pull stuff that the press won’t get to call you on before election day — after which it doesn’t matter. Will it take Obama down? So far McCain’s gutter campaign has hurt him more than helped. But there’s no reason to be sure it will continue that way. And many Obama supporters, sure the election is basically wrapped up, appear ready to slack in the stretch and let McCain smear and cheat his way into office.
John McCain responds to Barack Obama’s record September haul, says Obama’s fundraising model will inevitably lead to scandal and we’ll eventually have to pass legislation to fix the situation. That and other political news in today’s Election Central Sunday Roundup.
From TPM Reader PP …
You mentioned that Obama drew 100,000 people to a rally in St. Louis Saturday. After that, he went to Kansas City, where he held another rally which drew an estimated 75,000. I was there. Kansas governor Kathleen Sibelius was there, and remarked that we know what kind of person he is since he was raised by two strong Kansas women. Obama spoke positively, of what he plans to do to help Americans, his vision of America, and only mentioned his opponents policies, not his character. He also stopped by his local office, talked to some local volunteers and jumped in on some phone calls they were making.
McCain: Obama’s small-donor fundraising model in desperate need of reform.
I spent most of this weekend at a family celebration. So it was only this evening that I got a chance to see Colin Powell’s statement at the beginning of Meet the Press this morning, which you can see here …
And what struck me was that Powell’s rationale for supporting Obama tracked very closely with some of the harshest critics of Sen. McCain, despite the fact that he used less cutting words to express them.
There were three key points he hit. First, he questioned McCain’s unsteady and erratic response to the economic crisis. He didn’t use the word ‘erratic‘ but he might as well have. McCain was “unsure”, “almost everyday there was a different approach to the problem,” he “didn’t have a complete grasp of the economic problems.” In contrast, Obama had “steadiness” amidst the crisis.
Second, he questioned McCain’s “judgment”, particularly but it would seem not exclusively in his decision to pick Sarah Palin as his running mate, someone Powell said was unqualified to serve as president.
Third, he said he was “disappointed” in McCain’s sleazy campaign tactics. Yes, ‘sleazy’ is my word. But Powell’s own words were pretty clear — he was talking about McCain’s campaign of distortion and innuendo aimed at painting Obama as a crypto-Muslim and terrorist. It “goes too far”, said Powell, in something of an understatement.
It’s quite a blow for McCain on each point. But the most galling must be what Powell said about his judgment, his steadiness in moment’s of crisis. Powell and McCain are both in their early 70s. Obama is a quarter century younger. And in so many words Powell said that compared to Obama, McCain simply lacks the seasoning, the maturity to be president.