New McCain-Palin TV ad hits the airwaves touting “The Original Mavericks.” That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.
A coalition of right-wing churches is pushing a test case to allow them to be tax exempt and endorse political candidates.
If John McCain wins, for all that has happened over the last eight years in Iraq and elsewhere, we would get a new president even more closely tied to the DC neoconservative axis than President Bush has ever been.
The TPM email bag this morning is chock of emails saying, in so many words, is it time to panic? I’m actually not taking much summary license here. Most of the emails I’m talking about actually ends with some form of that sentence. Since a lot of you are asking this I thought I should provide some sort of answer.
First, I think the USAToday/Gallup poll is an outlier. I wouldn’t put much stock in it. It’s clear that McCain is getting a sizable bump out of his convention. But remember, Obama did too. It quickly subsided, as was expected. And we should expect McCain’s to as well. We’ll know more by the end of the week.
Polls aside though, I continue to see a campaign in which the McCain camp has a consistent and aggressive message. They’re constantly on the attack and largely defining the debate. The Obama campaign is largely reactive, parrying the attacks — sometimes rapid response, sometimes slower response, but defined largely by response. It seemed that way to me in July, in August and it seems that way to me now.
At several points over the last year, I’ve underestimated Obama’s campaign. And 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. That’s difficult for someone in my position to evaluate. The messaging and air war is something that is inherently visible. The ground game is very difficult to evaluate because it’s much more difficult to see. So we’re left to take it on faith that they know what they’re doing, without having much way of seeing for ourselves.
I certainly hope they do. But what I see is a campaign that is for some reason either unwilling or unable to take the initiative in the national messaging war. It’s all reactive. And, yeah, that worries me.
Yglesias has a good point here. The McCain campaign’s ability to frame their message around a series of demonstrable lies is only possible because most of the press takes an agnostic position on whether his messages and ads are true or not. But if the press won’t, don’t we need to stop relying on the mainstream press to make that point? That’s a very tall proposition. But this is a pattern we’ve seen cycle after cycle. Complaining about it only achieves a sort meaningless moral victory.
Just more evidence. Over the weekend Gov. Palin said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac had “gotten too big and too expensive to the taxpayers.”
Only they’re not even taxpayer funded. It’s only the government takeover, which Sen. McCain supports, that could change that.
I understand that the TV networks and the big papers feel like they’re not allowed to criticize Gov. Palin. But we’re in the middle of a housing and credit crisis and she doesn’t even know what Fannie and Freddie are. It’s an embarrassing level of ignorance that would sink a candidate for house or senate.