GOP voter suppression racket goes down in flames in Montana. State party chair executive director resigns.
This morning we were the first to bring you the news of John McCain nationwide robo-call campaign charging that Obama is putting “Hollywood Above America”, whatever that means. As is so often the case, we got the original tip from a TPM Reader. And once we reported it, we heard from a host of you who’d already gotten the call in your own state.
So I wanted to take a moment again to remind you that we need your ears and eyes. We’re fine if they remain on your face. We don’t need you to send them in. But we rely on you to tip us off about robo-calls you get, mailers you receive in the mail, ads you see running on TV. If you hear or see something that seems out of the ordinary, don’t assume we already know about it.
You can contact us at our tip and comment email address which is linked right up there at the upper right hand corner of the site. Those emails don’t just fly off into the ether. I still read most of them. And for those I don’t manage to get to (we get several hundred a day), I’m one of eleven full time staffers here at TPM who are reading them too. So they all get looked at. And they are very often the basis of our biggest exclusives.
And one more point. Now we’re in the final three weeks of the campaign. This is when the really squirrelly stuff happens. In part that’s because this is when both sides are throwing everything they have into the mix. But it’s also close enough to the final day that campaigns figure (often rightly) that they won’t get caught with whatever they’re doing until after election day — at which point they won’t really care.
So keep your eyes out. And remember we rely on you, more directly and consistently than you likely imagine, to let us know where the story is, where we should be throwing our resources and what outrage or major development the bigs just aren’t seeing.
From TPM Reader KB …
I feel pretty confident predicting that Bob Scheiffer will be a bigger obstacle for Obama tonight than McCain. It feels as if every beltway McCain fan boy has emailed the old newsman to beg him to bring up uncomfortable “issues.” Expect Ayers, Wright, abortion, Cuba, taxes, race, clinging to guns, crime, welfare, deficit. The entire Dan Balz theory of “challenging Obama one last time.”
Worth reviewing Schieffer’s earlier tire-swinging …
I’ve tried my best to avoid the what they need/want/have to do nonsense and chatter. But since I’ve got a few minutes on my hands and I think it’s pretty straightforward, just between you and I, here are my thoughts.
Obama’s brief is really simple: make this debate just like the first two. No need for fireworks or decisive blows. Just seem reassuring, knowledgeable, presidential. If the whole event is more or less boring, that’s not a problem.
I don’t think McCain can do a lot on his own to help himself in this debate. What he needs to do is come up with something, maybe just luck, that knocks Obama off his stride or sticks him with a question he can’t well answer. He’s got to force an error from Obama. And in that sense McCain’s fate isn’t in his own hands.
Separate from this ‘what they need to do’ nonsense, McCain’s got himself into a bit of a hole, quite apart the poor poll numbers. He’s being telegraphing that he’s going to get all Ayersy on Obama; it’s hard to see how he can’t lay into him since he desperately needs to shake up the direction of the race. And yet, not only do attacks like that tend to turn off voters in general (though they’re often effective if done through surrogates), but a mountain of polling evidence released in the last week shows that McCain’s terrorism/Ayers attacks have done McCain great damage. I’m curious to see how McCain squares that circle.
How will McCain say Obama’s a terrorist, Muslim, Arab freak without saying it in so many words?
The 40th and final debate of the 2008 campaign season … discuss.
9:04 PM … “Hurting and Angry”… Isn’t that McCain?
9:11 PM … Forget Bill Ayers; he’s playing the Joe the Plumber card.
9:12 PM … When they invented the term “shit eating grin” were they thinking about John McCain?
9:17 PM … John McCain keeps talking about not spreading around the wealth. But what’s having the government buy everybody’s mortgage at over-market prices to keep their net worth up?
9:18 PM … Lotta ethanol.
9:19 PM … Courtesy of TPM Reader JW, the average salary of an American plumber.
9:21 PM … So that’s McCain sting line — I’m not Bush, if you wanted to vote against President Bush you should have run four years ago. Ehhh. Curious to see how Obama responds.
9:25 PM … McCain: Angry and Hurting.
9:25 PM … Schieffer wins Nobel for moral equivalence award!
9:26 PM … McCain: I went sleazy because Obama wouldn’t do a hundred townhalls with me.
9:28 PM … Highest spending since Watergate? How can that possibly be true? Wasn’t that just an excuse to say “Watergate”? The highest spending since Watergate? Can someone pull the numbers for that?
9:33 PM … What on earth is McCain talking about? Obama’s attacking vets wearing vet caps?
9:34 PM … Truth Hurts, John. The article everyone’s been talking about. 100% of McCain’s ads negative; 50% of Obama’s ads negative.
9:36 PM … The volcano bursts. Ayers, ACORN …
9:38 PM … Probably wise for Obama just to lay out McCain’s bamboozlement point by point. “Says more about your campaign than it does me.”
9:40 PM … Ayers, and economy and brighter future.
9:42 PM … I will say this: So far I think Bob Schieffer’s doing a pretty good job, simply because he’s actually gotten these two guys debating. That’s great. Put them together and let them argue.
9:42 PM … It seems like we’ve now seen McCain’s Ayers/ACORN primal scream. I’m not sure Obama knocked anything out of the park. But at the end of it, I don’t think McCain landed any solid punches either. And McCain was often incoherent and a bit kitchen-sinkish. Basically a draw, though if recent polls are any indication, the draw in debate terms may hurt McCain since people do not like McCain’s attacks.
(Late Update — 9:57 PM … TPM Reader PG disagrees: “Schieffer made these legit subjects for a central part of the debate — and on that McCain won, he was given the opportunity to keep fragging the guy and creating distraction and confusion without
seeming like that’s going negative. For the next three weeks McCain/ Palin can keep sniping at this as if it was an honest fair question — not that that will play with you or me, but if I’m persuadable and uneasy about Obama — this was not a win for him.”
9:46 PM … Climate control? The AC isn’t working?
9:47 PM … Hmmm … “Senator Obama will tell you, as the extreme environmentalists do, [nuclear energy] has to be safe.”