WaPo: “McCain Takes the Fight To Negative Opponents”
Come up with your own WaPo headline?
Will the FEC rule that Rudy can’t say ‘9/11’ anymore if he loses the New York primary?
If you check your morning paper, most of them have a story about John McCain standing tall and fighting back against horrible negative campaigning down in South Carolina, especially with that flyer attacking McCain’s war record. But as near as we can tell the flyer or mailer actually isn’t a flyer or mailer because it was never fly’d or mailed to anyone. The guy behind it just mailed it to a lot of newspaper editors. Then the McCain camp got in the act by publicizing the ‘smear’ with a big press release. And everything kind of went from there. Paul Kiel has all the shocking details in today’s Must Read.
In today’s episode we examine how the GOP is grappling with the fact that it’s actually got to nominate one of these guys …
Robocalls in South Carolina accuse McCain of supporting experiments on unborn babies.
You never want to admit you were about to lose faith. But I was starting to think that South Carolina was going to let me down this year and not gin up some attacks about candidates’ mandatory homosexuality or infant vivisection. But it looks like they’re finally getting down to some good ole ‘experiments on unborn children‘ contrast calls.
From TPM Reader AM:
In response to [the] piece on the Edwards media blackout:
I served as an advisor for the Edwards campaign on its energy/environmental platform and when we met with John and Elizabeth back in October, he made it very clear that his strategy was to ride the wave of media coverage following a victory in Iowa. It actually sort of played to his advantage that the media gave him scant coverage in advance of Iowa because the “surprise” win would have received major airplay in the days leading into New Hampshire. But Edwards is caught in a maelstrom that he couldn’t effectively counter… two very strong candidates, one of whom (Obama) grabbed the mantle of being the change candidate. Edwards couldn’t differentiate himself enough from Obama and didn’t get the much needed win in Iowa. He then made a strategic gamble that backfired when he tried to knock Clinton out of the race and make it a two-man show with Obama. Not only did Clinton surprise everyone, I believe Edwards attacks on her in the debate and his comments about her tearing up actually helped her.
While I think there’s something here to the idea of the corporate media ignoring his candidacy because of his message, there’s more to this story.
Late Update: Not so fast, says TPM Reader KJ:
With all due respect, I think reader AM has it backwards: the year-long media blackout of Edwards in 2007 was clearly what forced Edwards into making that “strategic gamble” (as AM called it) on Iowa.
It can’t be said to have backfired, because it wasn’t really a gamble – by that point, Edwards had no other plausible choice but to stake everything on Iowa.
Later Update: The Edwards camp has put out a video about the media ignoring him:
Greg Sargent has more at The Horse’s Mouth.
“So it’s ok to slather a squirrel in oil and fry it on a popcorn popper, but not to marry and have sex with it? That hardly seems fair.”
That was one readers comment in response to Mike Huckabee’s new statement equating gay marriage and bestiality.
On Tuesday night I updated you on the latest results in the pitched battle between Ron Paul and Rudy Giuliani in the Michigan primary. As you know, Paul ended up getting twice the votes Rudy got in Michigan and now also has twice as many delegates as Rudy has — 2 to 1. The small number overall admittedly made it a cinch for me to come up with the percentage difference.
But until last night I thought the Rudy v. Paul fringe candidate cage match was just a figment of my political imagination. That was when we heard from TPM Reader EM down in Columbia, South Carolina who’d just gotten what we at first thought was an anti-Rudy robocall from Ron Paul’s campaign. On closer inspection it seems that it was actually a live caller, reading an attack script.
It seemed odd given Paul’s devotion to Austrian economics that he would embrace the palpable inefficiencies associated with manually calling gazillions of South Carolinians with actual phone calls rather than automating the process. But then it was pointed out to me that the Paul campaign, judged as an economic actor likely has excess capacity when it comes to hyped-up anti-Fed gun rights supporters with too much time on their hands and willing to work the phone banks. After all, how else can you explain the decision to dedicate such resources to spamming youtube? So it may actually make sense. In any case, check out the latest from the Paul/Rudy mano a mano …