New polling from Quinnipiac has Obama ahead in Pennsylvania, Ohio and Florida. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.
Just in: A federal district court in DC has overruled the White House-backed motion to dismiss the House lawsuit to enforce contempt of Congress proceedings against former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and White House Chief of Staff Joshua Bolten.
The court also granted the House Judiciary Committee’s motion for partial summary judgment in part.
In doing so the U.S. District Judge John D. Bates ruled:
Harriet Miers is not immune from compelled congressional
process; she is legally required to testify pursuant to a duly issued congressional
subpoena from plaintiff; and Ms. Miers may invoke executive privilege in
response to specific questions as appropriate
and that:
Joshua Bolten and Ms. Miers shall produce all non-privileged
documents requested by the applicable subpoenas and shall provide to plaintiff a
specific description of any documents withheld from production on the basis of
executive privilege consistent with the terms of the Memorandum Opinion issued
on this date
Just a reminder: The Judiciary Committee is seeking testimony and documents from the White House relating to the U.S. attorneys firings. Bolten is a party because he is the custodian of White House records, but it’s really the White House on the line here.
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK) is still working the angles:
Stevens had been scheduled to appear at a pretrial services office earlier Thursday, to be interviewed by court officials but, under an unusual arrangement, he arrived for that meeting Wednesday afternoon, avoiding the media attention. U.S. Marshal George Walsh, whose office is in charge of booking defendants, said he was unaware of the arrangement until Thursday and was disappointed that it would appear Stevens received special treatment.
Court spokeswoman Jenna Gatski said Stevens made an early appointment with a pretrial services officer. Though a judge’s order called for Stevens to appear for that meeting Thursday, Gatski said the pretrial office sets its own schedule. Stevens appeared late Wednesday afternoon but within business hours.
Late Update: Stevens still has to show up for arraignment today, and reporters are camped out waiting for that — so I’m not exactly sure how going early yesterday for pretrial services helped him avoid media scrutiny. Maybe DC readers familiar with federal court booking procedures can explain that one to me.
Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) is at TPMCafe discussing his proposal for a new strategy against extremism and terrorism.
Joe defends the new McCain attack ad: “To some extent the appearance of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears — people complain about it — they should just relax and enjoy it.”
Marty Lederman dissects today’s ruling on executive privilege and separation of powers.
It seems we’re in for another bout of that great biennial bit of sad-sackery just can’t help unwittingly stumbling into racialized imagery and code-words when all they’re trying to do is create a good old fashioned smear ad. I feel their pain. Love is a battlefield. But before returning to that subject I wanted to hit briefly on a related matter.
Yesterday at TPMCafe, Theda Skocpol wrote that whatever the McCain camp is doing, the Obama campaign, writ large and small, will only play into his hands by getting into an argument about race. That after all is one of the things the McCain camp is trying to do. What they need to do is go on the offense, hitting McCain with vivid ads on his numerous vulnerabilities. Like the fact that he embraces all of George W. Bush’s policies and his own evident desperation.
It may surprise you. But I completely agree. As a matter of messaging and campaigning, parrying this sludge requires a deft hand, and the Obama campaign can’t let itself get sucked into a debate about race and racialized campaign messages. But that’s their issue. Not ours. My interest is on shining a spotlight on what McCain’s doing.
It was always clear that it was going to be hard for John McCain to emerge from this campaign with his reputation and the presidency, simply because of the rough terrain any Republican faces this year. At this point, it’s clear that by the end of this, the reputation is going to be shot. There’s just been too much demonstrable lying on the candidate’s part, too much sleazy campaigning, too much outsourcing his campaign to Karl Rove. More and more editorialists and even some of the prestige pundits are starting to see it.
So that means, he has to win. Because if he doesn’t, he’s got nothing left. All he is is a four term senator from a medium-sized state with no legislative record. It’s an eminently worthwhile task to chronicle his descent.
As I wrote below, it seems we’re now in for another round of that biennial bit of sad-sackery, Republican ad makers who are just trying to create a good old fashioned smear ad but just can’t help stumbling into racialized imagery and code-words. Now, I note that the McCain/Britney/Paris ad seems to be getting panned pretty widely, quite apart from any suggestion that it’s pushing any offensive race-laced messages about Obama. And we’ve gotten a few emails from regular readers who write in and say, in so many words, ‘Yes, that’s a trashy ad. But the Britney and Paris stuff isn’t about race. They’re just trying to say Obama is frivolous and insubstantial like so much else in our celebrity culture.’
Meanwhile, Robert George says that in addition to the racial angle, he believes the ad is even more clearly “designed to politically emasculate Obama.” And I think, albeit implicitly, Robert gets at the fallacy inherent in how many people think about the way race is used in political messaging — which is to see it in operating in some hyper-linear, almost Newtonian fashion. Is the ad designed to say Obama is a frivolous part of the celebrity culture? Or is it meant to associate him with white women half his age, most of whose public notoriety is tied to their sexuality? If it’s one … well, it obviously can’t be the other.
And in this case, if all McCain’s ad guy is trying to do is make the apparently unobjectionable argument that Obama really isn’t a politician but more like a flashy showbiz act then it’s not his fault if he also happens to hit Obama with a handful of themes and bits of imagery that have been used about black men for a century or two. Because that’s not what the ad is about … it’s about saying he’s a frivolous dandy. And if it’s one, it can’t be the other any more than 2 + 2 equals 4 and not 5.
But the truth is that when you’re trying to understand how race is injected into a political campaign, if you’re looking for a physics analogue, it’s not Newtonian mechanics but quantum theory. It’s not one or the other. Effective messages hit multiple themes, different messages in different people’s minds and even read differently on the first or the third reading. So is the Britney ad about emasculating Obama, as Robert George says? Yes. Is it also about simply pairing Obama up with Britney and Paris? Absolutely. It’s both. And a lot more. In many cases, this game is simply a matter of taking charged images out into the public consciousness. They don’t necessarily ‘mean’ one thing or another. You just push them out and they take on a life of their own.
In this case, if the point is to say that Obama’s a celebrity, how exactly do you get from there to Britney Spears? Paris Hilton? Mull on that for a second. Are those the most logical analogues to Obama? Play it any way you want but somehow at the end of the day we end up with a campaign message based on promoting Obama as a song and dance man and paired with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. How’d we get here? It’s the GOP race and sex equivalent of all roads lead to Rome.
To understand the dynamics of this campaign you have to understand the role of Karl Rove and his proteges who’ve taken over McCain’s campaign. Rove himself previewed the key messages of the campaign early in the year in two vignettes about Obama — first, Obama as the “trash-talking” basketball player who’s both cocky and “lazy”, and second, Obama as the cocky black guy at the country club with a hot chick on his arm who’s looking down at you.
These are the themes that are going to be returned to again and again in this campaign. They’re what McCain is running on. Obama as a flashy entertainer, the guy reaching above his station, the guy who ends up in video montages with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. The Rove-McCain line is that none of this stuff is beyond the pale. How are they supposed to help it if they’re running against a guy who’s more suited to be an entertainer than a leader and uppity and lazy to boot?