If McCain had picked any of the far more experienced candidates on his short list, they would have come fully equipped with a long paper trail implicating them in the horror show that is the Republican Party of the last eight years.
The McCain campaign and the Bush White House negotiated terms that unfolded as a script over the past several days, several sources told me.
Obama's surrogates must not wait for the scales to fall from the public's eyes so that they see Sarah Palin as she is and find her preposterous. Democrats must tarnish her on her own terms.
I am now hearing from the Karl Roves of the world that having a 17-year-old daughter get pregnant out of wedlock will sympathize Palin to millions who know the pain of that situation. But my question is, where was the advice?
We in the press need to be absolutely sure that when we strip subjects of their privacy over matters they do not want disclosed, we have some higher ethical justification. In this case, there was none.
Entrusting the most important job in the free world to President Palin is like leaving your children an insurance policy consisting of a freezer full of moose meat.
Learning about sex offenders in one's midst brings anxiety, mixed with uncertainty. But the alarm is eclipsed by another question: how accurate are the search results?
Bristol Palin's pregnancy is at the heart of what women and the right wing have been fighting over for thirty years, and it isn't abortion, it's privacy and the right to control your own reproductive choices.
If John McCain is smart, a viewing of When The Levees Broke might put his Straight Talk Express back on the right track. It might even find its way into his acceptance speech on Thursday night.
McCain and Palin have had only one substantive conversation, it seems, but he concluded she was right for the role. Or maybe that's what his casting director told him.
The Palin nomination is not about external realities and what Democrats call "issues," but about the symbolic mechanisms of the political mind -- the worldviews, frames, metaphors, cultural narratives, and stereotypes.
I have executive experience having overseen my neighborhood's annual block party for the past 16 years -- dealing in areas where some of my neighbors have been unruly and uncooperative.
A Hail mary is not the play the Republicans are running. This is not a last-second desperation play. There's a lot of time left in the game. This is deception by design: It's the Fumblerooski.
