Rick Davis on The Huffington Post

Geoffrey Dunn: Palin's Bob & Mark Show Shame

2009-11-04T20:12:29Z

As the inimitable Sarah Palin gets ready for the unleashing of her memoirs, Going Rogue, she announced on her Facebook page today that she's "very, very excited about the upcoming road trip for my book."

Of course she is. It will get her out of Alaska and all of the reminders of her failed governorship. Hopefully, she'll get more than a few reminders of her failed support of right-wing congressional candidate Doug "I Don't Live in the District" Hoffman, whose defeat yesterday can be directly linked to Palin's support. But that's another story.

Under a Facebook posting entitled "Road Trip!" Palin listed the "wide assortment" of interviews she's scheduling in a grueling engagement with the media elite.

We're in the process of arranging interviews with local and national media. An interview with Oprah Winfrey is already scheduled, and I'm also hoping to have the opportunity to talk with Bill O'Reilly, Barbara Walters, Sean Hannity, Greta Van Susteren, Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Dennis Miller, Tammy Bruce, and others, including local Alaska personalities Bob & Mark and Eddie Burke. (Variety is the spice of life!)

Variety? Whew! You have got to be kidding. That sounds like the variety you'd find on the senior's menu at Appleby's.

But the mention of Alaska "personalities" Bob & Mark conjures up a truly shameless moment from Palin's past, and it will be interesting to see if she has the integrity to address it in her book.

Fortunately, there's an audio recording of Palin's memorable performance, otherwise she could deny the whole affair, as she does with virtually ever charge that's ever been leveled at her.

In January of 2008, Palin, while Governor, went on the Bob & Mark radio show with a pair of Anchorage-based shock jocks, Bob & Mark, who were belittling Palin's former mentor, the matriarch of Alaska's Republican Party, Lyda Green, by calling her a "bitch" and a "cancer." Palin actually giggled throughout their remarks (you can hear her sicko giddy response on the recording, including to a "fat" joke about Green) even though she knew full well that Green was a breast-cancer survivor. Palin then added ever-so-sincerely that "we'd be honored" to be visited by Bob and Mark in Juneau. She puts on that phony Palinspeak voice that she invokes when she tries to sound "official."

"She really has no moral compass," Green told me recently. "She uses people in a very un-Christian way. She only does what is best for Sarah."

Of course no one in the McCain campaign called Green or any other Republican leaders in Alaska before making the selection. And I wonder if she provided this tape to his fawning campaign manager Rick Davis before finalizing her selection as McCain's running mate? Let's see how she handles this shining moment from her life in Going Rogue.

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn's book The Lies of Sarah Palin: The Untold Story Behind Her Relentless Quest for Power will be released by St. Martin's Press in spring 2010.

Geoffrey Dunn: McCain's Latest Palin Lie

2009-10-13T21:31:05Z

John McCain's duplicitous defense of his 2008 GOP running mate Sarah Palin this past weekend is as dishonest as it is shameful. He knows better--but for reasons that are rooted deeply in McCain's peculiar sense of chivalry and his political self-interest, he has refused to come clean about Palin with the American people.

"There are fundamental facts that cannot be denied," he asserted on CNN's "State of the Union" on Sunday. "When we selected, or asked, Sarah Palin to be my running mate, it energized our party. We were ahead in the polls, until the stock market crashed."

The implication is that the Republicans would have won were it not for the economic collapse that took place on September 15.

Many McCain and Palin operatives in the aftermath of the election have blamed the economy for their loss. That's like blaming a lake in the middle of the 18th fairway for costing one a golf match. The lake doesn't cost you the match--driving your ball into it does.

The economy collapsed for the Democrats, too. They had the same hazards in their fairway as the Republicans. Moreover, the economy was not Obama's strong suit. He didn't play well to white working class voters and he had a hard time articulating how he was going to address the banking collapse.

But let's take a look at some "fundamental facts" about McCain and the economy:

In 2005, McCain told the Wall Street Journal: "I'm going to be honest: I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated."

In 2007, McCain told the Boston Globe: "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should."

On August 20, only days before he selected Palin, McCain told the press he did not know how many houses he owned.

On the morning of September 15, the day on which the McCain-Palin campaign tanked in the polls, John McCain said: "Our economy, I think still--the fundamentals of our economy are strong." (Even Rick Davis, McCain's ever-loyal campaign manager, said he wished that McCain had never made that remark.) The following day, McCain's economic adviser Carly Fiorina said that Sarah Palin was "not fit" to run a Fortune 500 company.

While McCain was undertaking his hackneyed "suspension of his campaign" and rushing back to Washington, Palin was nowhere to be seen. The campaign did not want to unleash her on the American people. And when McCain finally arrived in the capital, his Republican colleagues in Congress scattered. As it turned out, John McCain had very few friends in Congress on either side of the isle.

And what did Palin have to say about the economy? Here, in her immortal words, is Palin's response to Katie Couric's question about the federal bailout package:

That's why I say I, like every American I'm speaking with, we're ill about this position that we have been put in. Where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the health care reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh, it's got to be about job creation, too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So health care reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade -- we have got to see trade as opportunity, not as, uh, competitive, um, scary thing, but one in five jobs created in the trade sector today. We've got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation.

I would hope that John McCain would have the decency to re-read those words and follow his running mate's eyes as she delivered them. Comforting they were not. Tina Fey did not have to change a single word.

While McCain may have a difficult time accepting "the fundamental facts" of the 2008 election, the Obama insiders who conducted polls about Palin know what happened.

Joel Benson, Obama's chief pollster, noted that after Palin's devastating performance with Couric, "Palin went from having, in our poll, the highest favorable/unfavorable ratio to the worst of the four principals. By the time she got to the vice-presidential debate, in our polling, her negatives were almost as high as her positives." In other words, stick a fork in it.

One former key McCain campaign strategist has called his colleagues' excuses about Palin and the economy "intellectually dishonest." So be it.

Did Palin give a "bounce" to the McCain campaign in the early weeks of September? Absolutely. Did her balloon come crashing back to earth once the American people caught on to her act? You betcha.

It's time for John McCain to tell the truth about his campaign and, rather than blame his own failures on "the stock market crash," to accept responsibility for the failures of his economic credibility and the selection of his running mate. He's yet to address the real "fundamental facts" of the 2008 campaign.

Award-winning writer and filmmaker Geoffrey Dunn is at work on a book about Sarah Palin and American politics, to be published by Macmillan/St. Martin's next year.

Joseph A. Palermo: President Obama Opens Up Records, Shuts the Revolving Door

2009-01-22T23:09:59Z

"Executive Order 13233 of November 1, 2001, is revoked."

That simple line that concludes President Barack Obama's "Presidential Records" Executive Order of January 21, 2009 is music to the ears of any historian or journalist who wishes access to presidential records. It's the first blow (and hopefully not the last) against the regimen of secrecy and contempt for the public's right to know that characterized the Bush administration. Researchers will no longer face Bush-era stonewalling and obstacles when seeking public records. It's a long-awaited opening for truth and reconciliation and Obama showed wisdom and good judgment in taking this step on day one of his presidency. I cannot begin to convey my appreciation that we now have a president who clearly recognizes the need for candor and openness to help historians keep the record straight.

Another of President Obama's early executive orders, titled "Ethics Commitments by Executive Branch Personnel," sets very clear standards and rules for everyone who works in the departments of the Executive Branch. It bans hiring lobbyists who had plied their trade over the past two years, and no department will hire anyone who lobbied that same department. Once employees leave the Executive Branch they will be barred from lobbying the administration as long as Obama is president. The aim here is clear: President Obama is seeking to break down the old "revolving door" model of business-as-usual in Washington. We all know the modus operandi of the past eight years has been for high-paid lobbyists to be placed in plum positions inside the departments that could do them the most personal good only to return to the private sector after their stints in "public service" to be paid even more lavishly than before.

It would be difficult to construct a more inherently corrupt system of governance.

By breaking the nexus between lobbyists and government departments President Obama is doing something that hasn't been done before. He has raised the ethical bar higher than any previous president. The last Democratic president, Bill Clinton, simply replaced Republican lobbyists with Democratic ones without altering the corrupting influence of K Street. President Obama has slammed shut the revolving the door. It will be a high standard for future presidents to meet. This action will have immediate effects. It will cool the jets of the Rick Davises and Vickie Isemans and Steven Grileses of this world, and might even keep some of those self-centered, greed-driven government job seekers out in the private sector where they belong.

But the Congress is a different story.

I would call upon Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to pass anti-lobbying legislation similar to the standards that President Obama has set forth for the Executive Branch. The nature of the Legislative Branch, with its collective dependency on big campaign donations to finance frequent elections, makes lobbying reform of any kind an upward battle. But Obama has shown real leadership on this issue and the Congress should do its part to clean up how Washington does business. An opportunity like this might not come along for years and the Democrats in Congress should put their money where their constantly yapping mouths are. Let's see if the Democrats in Congress have the same impulse to clean up Washington as does their standard bearer.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. President Obama also: Ordered Guantánamo Bay shut down; Banned torture; Ordered a full review of U.S. detention policies and procedures; and Delayed the trial of Ali al-Marri, whose case is at the center of the Supreme Court's review of indefinite detention policies.

We're off to a pretty damn good start.

Monroe Price: Sarah Palin: the All-in-One Reality TV Show

2008-12-07T19:26:06Z

It's hard to have yet another Sarah Palin epiphany, but that's what happened as I was drifting happily through a conference called "Reality Worlds," organized at the Annenberg School for Communication by Marwan Kraidy and Katherine Sender.

Scholars devoted to the genre were generating all sorts of theories about these relatively inexpensive and ubiquitous program efforts. But what occurred to me (and undoubtedly has occurred to others) is how Palin's trajectory through the political campaign approximates the rhythm of makeover and other reality TV shows.

Palin is one-person reiteration of everything from "Who Wants to be a Millionaire" (early round dismissal?) up through and including "Survivor."

And then now, there's the story of Palin and her hair stylists, including Amy Strozzi, who received over $40,000 and was awarded an Emmy for her work on the show "So You Think You Can Dance." Shades of "Making the Cut," "Million Dollar $alon,"and "Top Hair."

Palin wasn't even mentioned in the Annenberg talks, but her arc during the campaign could have been a subtext for all the scholarly presentations.

Laura Grindstaff, for example, a professor at the University of California, hit a kind of proverbial Palin nail on the head when she spoke about how these shows seek out a center of American life, and engage in what she called the "production of ordinariness" through reality television.

Grindstaff was talking particularly about an MTV series called "Sorority Life" which chronicles the life of pledges as they move towards acceptance and initiation. I didn't ask, but it seemed to me that one could call Palin, whatever else she was, a kind of initiate, a rushee who among other things had to go through a process of hazing (did she make it? You be the judge.).

At the Philadelphia event, I talked with a very helpful Penn graduate student, Rebecca Pardo, who, like a lot of modern young scholars, has a slight and admirable obsession with "reality" filtered through this art form. She loves the work of Nicholas Couldry (a professor at Goldsmiths in London) and sees Palin as the embodiment of what Couldry has called the Myth of the Mediated Center.

Pardo also put me on to Justin Wolfe, who blogs about "The Hills," a reality show about life in 90210, hedonistic and pragmatic California. Wolfe has written , without, blogwise, using capital letters, about Palin and the process of candidate selection in reality shows:

"it's funny because the way sarah palin was chosen is, in many ways, just like the way heidi montag was chosen for the hills. if you strip all the fame away from heidi montag, if we pretend that she's just a normal girl what's special about her, what sets her apart? nothing, really, she's just normal. kind of pretty, sort of ambitious, but mostly normal. and, without the magic ticket she was given into the world of celebrity, into the show, that's how she would've probably stayed, a normal girl from a small town in colorado. If course, that's the Sarah Palin narrative, too: plucked from the relative obscurity of the alaskan wilderness into the national spotlight, with the barest of real experience or qualifications but with scads of those particular qualities that resonate with the american public: personality, relatability, normality.

"

As on some reality shows (take "Project Runway" for example), Palin was subjected to ingenious and daunting tests that would raise public anticipation about the outcome--triumph or failure. Would she make it to the next round? When Sarah met Katie Couric, it could have been one of these "tests" revealed to the contestant ("for your next challenge, you must go one on one with a noted anchor-person who will ask you questions you may have no way of answering"). Palin's life was a series of created melodramas with accompanying anxieties and the imminent apprehension of failure.

No reality show is complete without the backroom drama, as "Dancing With the Stars," illustrates through the elaborate process of trying to turn someone quite ordinary (in some respects) into the surprisingly gifted (the Pygmalion moment, the alchemy of transformation). Can you really make this person rhumba? Can he or she be trained to be a cook or a business executive (or an expert on foreign affairs)? We were all on pins and needles to see if this process would work with Sarah.

My mind drifted to one of my favorite shows I never watched in entirety: "Ladette to Lady," the story of a group of relatively inexperienced young women,who are given an old-fashioned five-week course in learning how to behave like a real lady. They are sent to Eggleston Hall, an English finishing school.

There was a lot of Ladette to Lady in the Palin tale, though Palin was not a Ladette, by any stretch. And the Republican National Committee wasn't Eggleston.

You could say that this wasn't a real reality show because it didn't have the panel of judges requisite in some versions. But I think of that curious crew of indifferent panelists Wolf Blitzer oddly and unrealistically named "the best political team on television." They could just as well have had cards and numbers; and Sarah (holding Todd's hand tightly) might have been seen on camera -- like frightened ice-skaters -- waiting for the results in an isolated room.

Zala Volcic, a Slovenian now living in Brisbane spoke, at the Annenberg conference (part of Professor Barbie Zelizer's Annenberg Scholars Program in Culture and Communications Program) about That's Me, a Big Brother style Balkan reality TV show which mixed roommates from all over the former Yugoslavia. The show was designed to "negotiate the struggles among religious, ethnic and national groups that still plague the region." That's Me was supposed to smooth conflict, and did not necessarily succeed. This was reality show as social engineering. Think Palin: The Message, energizing the base.

There was much talk at the Annenberg workshop about "parenting" as a persistent theme in reality shows. Mark Anthony Neal, the Duke scholar of hip-hop, gave an exuberant talk on Snoop Dog and his program called "Fatherhood." There and on so many other shows, the fragile nature of parenting--and the possibility of failing and the complexities of succeeding--were tracked.

Of course, the Sarah candidacy--right out of the box--was about mothering in American society--mothering and having a career, mothering and the extraordinary decisions about a child with Downs Syndrome, parenting and an unmarried daughter who discovers pregnancy--it goes on and on.

Much of reality television scholarship is about voting habits of the committed viewers. Stephen Coleman (Leeds), the guru of Big Brother voting, has concluded that there's not a gulf between those who vote in "real" elections and those who vote in "reality" elections. Aswin Punathambekar of the University of Michigan probably had a slightly different view. He spoke, movingly, about the temporarily intense political activity and rampant mobile phone voting in North-East India for the Indian Idol candidacy of Amit Paul.

And then, of course, there were the clothes. Palin and her relationship to clothing is Reality TV writ large. It's the epitome of the "makeover" story. One can think of the RNC operatives as channeling "What Not to Wear", the British show with Trinny Woodall and Susannah Constantine, even including those choice bits of surveillance where Trinny and Susannah view videos of the poor subject.

It's a small and maybe obvious epiphany--The Palin campaign as all reality shows rolled into one. The Annenberg conference luxuriated in phrases that resonated with the campaign like "cult of the commonplace." But mostly, it was interesting to see, through the Reality TV Show lens, what the Republicans -- McCain and Palin's handlers or the audiences reacting to her so enthusiastically -- were actually doing, thinking and reflecting this summer and fall.

Erik Ose: Ten Chumps Who Helped Elect Barack Obama

2008-11-14T17:26:18Z

Barack Obama ran a great campaign. While shattering all fundraising records, he created a movement backed by small donors, not big lobbyists. Using community organizing techniques derided by his GOP opponents, he mobilized millions of supporters and gave them an ownership stake in his historic candidacy.

But he got some invaluable help along the way. With the post-election analysis season almost over, it's worth taking one final look at some of the characters who ensured President-elect Obama would make it to the White House.

This list is devoted to a special breed, seasoned political players and 15-minutes of famers alike, who did everything they could to stop Obama, only to see their efforts backfire. It's a bipartisan honor, evenly split between Democrats and Republicans. For obvious reasons, this list omits the folks with the most to gain from Obama's defeat, namely, John McCain and Sarah Palin, and Bill and Hillary Clinton. Although they also deserve special recognition for trying every boneheaded trick they could dream up.

Jeremiah Wright - The good Reverend's sin was enjoying his turn at the microphone too much. From the start, he was a nuisance and distraction. Wright got irritated with Obama after being asked not to deliver the invocation at his 2007 announcement speech in Springfield, IL, and made sure the press knew about it. Rev. Wrong for Obama should have disappeared after tapes of his most incendiary sermons aired on national TV last March. But by resurfacing barely a month after Obama's masterful speech on race in Philadelphia, Wright tried his best to sabotage the damage control. And by continuing to draw attention to his outrageous beliefs in the process of defending himself, he allowed Obama to repudiate him entirely.

Rick Davis and Steve Schmidt - Joint acclaim for the two strategists who were initially hailed by the press as turning around McCain's campaign. They undid all their own hard work by advising McCain to pick Sarah Palin, thus undercutting Schmidt's strategy of painting Obama as too inexperienced to lead. They urged McCain to ignore his gut instinct to choose either Sen. Joe Lieberman or former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania. Together, their counsel trumped Mark Salter's preference of Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, who would have been a formidable VP candidate. Pawlenty's only drawback was that he was sold to McCain as the safe pick, which left him out of step with McCain's need to gamble on a "maverick" choice.

Schmidt also deserves special props for convincing McCain to announce he was temporarily suspending his campaign and returning to Washington for what turned out to be bungled negotiations over the $700 billion financial bailout package. And Davis gets a shout out for signing off on TV spots attacking Obama over ties to former Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac advisors, shortly before it was revealed he had been earning $15,000 a month as a lobbyist on Freddie Mac's payroll for the past several years.

Mark Penn - Assigning honors to Hillary's strategists is tough, because collectively they ran a criminally dysfunctional campaign unequaled in modern politics. But Mark Penn was at the center of much of the infighting and tension that plagued her inner circle. According to Newsweek's behind-the-scenes account of the election, Penn was suspected of being less than honest with the campaign team about polling results that were unfavorable to Hillary, which helped Obama catch them unaware and unprepared with his Iowa caucus victory.

John Edwards and Mike Easley - This pair of North Carolina pols each contributed an assist through the self-serving ways they tried to play the endorsement game. Edwards withheld his endorsement for months, until it was clear Obama would beat Hillary and be the Democratic nominee. Thus Edwards made sure he would not be identified as an Obama team player, and limited damage to the Democrats' chances when Edwards' own career went up in smoke in August in his self-inflicted adultery scandal. Outgoing N.C. Governor Mike Easley endorsed Hillary a week before the state's May 6 primary. In doing so, the unpopular lame duck enraged Obama voters in North Carolina, particularly African-Americans, and solidified Obama's support.

Joe The Plumber - By basking in his moment in the spotlight, and running his mouth about his far-right wing nutty beliefs, he was immediately discredited as a spokesperson for average working stiffs. The unlicensed plumber whose name wasn't even Joe and whose income level would qualify him for a tax cut under Obama's tax plans made a mockery of McCain's last-minute campaign gambit to frighten voters with the spectre of higher taxes.

Sheldon Adelson - The wealthy casino mogul behind the right wing 527 group Freedom's Watch was suspected of being the Republican sugar daddy who anonymously funded the Clarion Fund, which dumped 28 million anti-Islamic scare DVDs in swing states around the country through mailings and paid advertising supplements in newspapers. Adelson and similar fat cats who bankrolled GOP-leaning PAC's wasted lots of money producing an avalanche of hate propaganda - mailers, robocalls, even DVDs. But this campaign tactic has lost much of its effectiveness in a world where people have access to multiple sources of information on the internet, instead of being limited to what they see on TV, read in their newspapers, or find in their mailboxes. Should have spent their cash on registering new Republican voters at conservative churches, state fairs, and NASCAR races.

Geraldine Ferraro - The most prominent member of the Nobama Democrats, she gave credibility to the divisive, time-wasting efforts of pro-Hillary deadenders who clung to PUMA, Just Say No Deal, and other faux-grassroots groups after Obama clinched the nomination. Ferraro was forced to step down from her official role with the Clinton campaign in March after claiming, "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position," similar to comments she made in 1988 about an earlier black presidential contender ("If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race"). She reared her head again in May, quoted by the New York Times as saying she might not vote for Obama in the fall, because "I think Obama was terribly sexist."

Yet by refusing to cede her role as a Hillary surrogate, and tirelessly fanning the fames of party disunity, she helped keep media attention on the myth that there were legions of disaffected Hillary voters whose allegiance was available for harvest by any candidate in a pantsuit. Without Ferraro's efforts to keep the gender pot stirring, Sarah Palin might not have presented such a tempting opportunity for Team McCain to make a play for women voters.

Ashley Todd - It didn't get any uglier than this. Dishonorable mention goes to the mentally unstable McCain campaign volunteer with delusions of grandeur who thought she could scare America into believing she was attacked and robbed by a 6' 4" pro-Obama black thug who cut a (backwards) "B" into her face after spotting her McCain bumper sticker. Despite skepticism from police, the McCain camp rushed to exploit the situation, peddling breathless versions of events to the press that could not be confirmed at the time. McCain and Palin even called Todd to wish her well, guaranteeing the incident would receive widespread media coverage. Then Todd's story fell apart, as she admitted it was all a hoax and was charged with filing a false police report. The McCain campaign was left burned and looking even more desperate and unbalanced than they had before, with less than a week to go until the election.

Looking back over this parade of campaign horribles, it's no wonder the GOP blame game started long before election night, when the depths of McCain's meltdown became evident. There's a lot of credit to go around. But every fool on this list can rest assured that despite their worst intentions, they made a unique contribution towards helping the best man win in 2008.

Erik Ose is a veteran of Democratic campaigns in North Carolina and blogs at The Latest Outrage.

Rick Davis Calls Palin's $150,000 Shopping Spree A "Failure Of Management"

2008-11-14T14:31:56Z

(CNN) -- Rick Davis, the campaign manager for former John McCain's White House bid came to Sarah Palin's defense in an upcoming interview with the National Review, saying the now-infamous $150,000 clothing tab for the Alaska governor was caused by a "failure of management."

In the interview, set for publication next week, Davis notes Palin's appearance at the Republican convention came only days after she was named to the GOP ticket, and the Alaska governor had few clothes on hand that were appropriate for the event.

"We flew her out from Alaska to Arizona to Ohio to introduce her to the world and take control of her life. She didn't think 'dress for the convention', because it might have just been a nice day trip to Arizona if she didn't click with John. Very little prep had been done and if it had, we might have gotten picked off by the press. We were under incredible scrutiny."

Election Results: McCain Campaign Manager On The Five Must-Win States

2008-11-03T09:21:48Z

George Stephanopoulos writes this morning on McCain's must win states and his interview yesterday with McCain campaign manager Rick Davis. Go here to see a collection of pundits' predictions on the election.

Here are the six states to watch between 7pm and 8pm tomorrow night:

Virginia and Indiana after the last polls close at 7pm, Ohio and North Carolina after 7:30pm, and then Pennsylvania and Florida after 8pm.

These are the canaries in the coal mine.

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis conceded on "This Week" that John McCain has to win five out of six of these states to have a viable path to the presidency.

He could get there by holding all of the Bush states -- Indiana, Virginia, Ohio, Florida, and North Carolina -- and losing Pennsylvania, and then sacrificing Iowa and New Mexico.

But he will then need to secure Nevada and Colorado and all the rest of the Bush states later in the evening.

McCain Camp: "We're Pretty Jazzed Up"

2008-10-31T10:57:34Z

On a Friday morning conference call with reporters, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis boasted that, in partnership with the RNC, he expects to have outspent Barack Obama on television ads to the tune of $10 million in the last 10 days of the race. He described the campaign as "pretty jazzed up" during its sprint to the finish.

Davis said his internal numbers showed that Obama's 30-minute infomercial was "mostly watched by Obama supporters. ... It was an interesting use of something in excess of $5 million in campaign cash." Davis noted that Obama could have run "a week's worth of 30 second ads in all targeted states" for the amount of money spent on that one night. Noting that Obama is going up on the air today in Arizona, North Dakota and Georgia, Davis taunted: "We encourage them to please go up in other states that we intend to win, and spread out their campaign cash."

McCain's campaign manager said that the GOP had always believed that the last week of television was the most important, because they could target "late breakers." (He may just inspire Obama donors to take the Democratic nominee's latest fundraising pitch more seriously.)

Davis said that he was looking at the best ten days of internal polling since the Republican convention, and that the campaign had "shaken off effects of the financial collapse that suppressed our numbers" -- admitting that the economic crisis has damaged his candidate.

For his part, McCain political director Mike Duhaime said the campaign's ground game was crushing the Bush-Cheney's respected 2004 effort -- making 5.3 million calls and door-knocks in the past week alone, compared to 1.9 million over the same span of time in 2004.

The McCain high trust also pushed back against recent polls -- specifically, the high Democratic party identification that many respected polling firms assume. Gallup, for example, gives Democrats an 11-point lead over Republicans in party ID.

Lead McCain pollster Bill McInturff argued that those numbers are outdated, because America is now a "center right" nation. Noting Thursday's Fox poll showing Obama ahead by only three points (with a nearly equal amount of Republicans and Democrats sampled), McInturff defended the poll's party balance. He claimed that his "friend" Andy Kohut at the PEW poll is using a party identification model that would be appropriate in "1976, after Watergate" but doesn't make sense today. "I don't see how you have party ID at negative 8 [percent for Republicans]" he said. "That's not America ... anywhere in the last generation and a half."

McInturff alleged that Democrats have a difficult time rising over 50 percent, overall, in the American electorate. "We're seeing in Missouri and Pennsylvania that the Barack Obama number is dropping," he said. McCain's is generally coming up. [Obama's is] dropping because of that structural barrier in this country." He added that new voter registration makes the race "difficult to predict." But in the end, the McCain campaign thinks it's "very close, compared to how a lot of very well-respected pollsters have it."

McCain Camp Pushes New ACORN Outrage

2008-10-30T13:55:31Z

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis held a conference call on Thursday to dish out some more press criticism and fan the flames of a new alleged ACORN-Obama campaign connection.

McCain officials and the RNC have been working for weeks now to elevate the ACORN issue, as the group faces embarrassing registration fraud investigations in over a dozen states. So far, their efforts have been without much success. A recent Time/CNN poll of voters in swing states found the Obama-ACORN link was "not resonating with most voters."

But on Thursday, Davis was back at it, citing new court testimony alleging that the Obama campaign sold a list of high-dollar donors to Project Vote, an ACORN affiliate.

Project Vote denies the claim. And the accuser, a former Project Vote employee named Anita Moncrief, was fired for charging personal items to the group's credit card, and did not witness the registration fraud being investigated.

Nevertheless, Davis bemoaned during Thursday's call, "Why do we have to constantly be learning about this [Obama's relationship with ACORN] outside the news media?"

Davis said the press had established "a pattern, followed religiously, of not asking hard questions" of Obama's ties to ACORN. "If this were a Republican organization I dare say there would be a different attitude on the part of the press," he added.

But the press did cover Moncrief's accusations about Obama and ACORN as soon as they were unveiled on Wednesday. The problem is that, in most of the accounts, the ACORN accuser came off somewhat badly.

"Moncrief acknowledged she was fired in January from Project Vote for running up more than $3,000 in personal expenses on a [company] credit card," the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review reported, adding: "She said she has paid half the money back, and 'I am really sorry.'"

The Philadelphia Inquirer also noted that Moncrief is currently "unemployed after short stints in two jobs since she was fired" by Project Vote in January. On cross-examination, Moncrief also acknowledged that she never worked on ACORN's voter registration in Pennsylvania -- the subject of the current court case.

Meanwhile, the AP quoted a Project Vote spokesman as saying: "The bottom line is, Ms. Moncrief was not in a position to have the facts on many of the things that she's speculating about," he said.

John Fund, a dogged columnist on the ACORN beat for the Wall Street Journal, also reported on Project Vote's denial of Moncrief's claims:

Ms. Moncrief testified that in November 2007 Project Vote development director Karyn Gillette told her she had direct contact with the Obama campaign and had obtained their donor lists. Ms. MonCrief also testified she was given a spreadsheet to use in cultivating Obama donors who had maxed out on donations to the candidate, but who could contribute to voter registration efforts. Project Vote calls the allegation "absolutely false."

A Republican lawyer who looked at the files Moncrief provided claimed that they went beyond what is publicly available through FEC disclosure forms. On the McCain conference call, Davis alleged a quid pro quo between the facts as alleged by Moncrief and the Obama campaign. "The implication is there's a direct link between the Obama campaign and a charitable organization in return for voter registration activity," Davis said, referencing the more than $800,000 paid by the Obama campaign to another ACORN affiliate, Citizen's Services, earlier this year for get-out-the-vote-operations (though the Obama camp had originally mis-labeled the purpose of the payments in its FEC reports).

Toward the close of Davis's conference call, though, it was clear that the various guilt-by-association streams trotted out by the McCain campaign were being combined into one blast. "Time and time again he has not been held accountable," Davis said, adding that "you gotta wonder" what Obama's "vision of America" might be in light of all the "various relationships" he and his campaign might have -- including Bill Ayers, Bernadine Dohrn and the "latest figure" Rashid Khalidi. "Oh boy, that's off limits," Davis mocked, impersonating what he took to be the press's disinclination to cover these figures. As the Huffington Post first reported on Tuesday, the McCain-led International Republican Institute approved hundreds of thousands of dollars in grants to a Palestinian research group that counted Khalidi as a co-founder and member of its board.

Will any of Davis's last-minute effort to stir the ACORN pot once more make a difference? The only poll that matters, as they say, is only five days away.

Mark Nickolas: What Political Malpractice Looks Like (The B Team That Ran The McCain Campaign Into The Ground)

2008-10-27T18:32:17Z

Yesterday's big New York Times story on the state of the presidential race says the final days will find both campaigns buried in red states:

Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, are planning to spend most of their time in Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Missouri, and Indiana, all states that Republicans had entered the campaign thinking they could bank on...Republicans and Democrats said there were signs that two states that had once appeared overwhelmingly Republican — Georgia and South Carolina — were tightening, in part, because of surge of early-voting by African-Americans.

What's so remarkable about this is how arrogantly self-confident the McCain camp was about most of these red states just a few months ago, when they bragged about not spending money on television or hiring any staff or mocked the Obama camp's efforts and joked about their voter registration efforts.

We'll have plenty of time to dissect this pig after November 4th, but I wanted to get a head start on some of the most egregious acts of political malpractice I have ever seen at this level of politics in my life.

What's even more noteworthy is how we discussed -- in real-time -- just how absurd some of their actions were. We didn't need the benefit of hindsight to understand that the USS McCain was being navigated by some of the poorest political strategists ever to run a presidential general election campaign.

Exhibit A: McCain Electoral Strategy Briefing (June 6):

On June 6th, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis narrated a slick 14-minute video briefing where he laid out which states were solidly in the Obama and McCain camps and which states would remain as the battlegrounds.

First, notice how they began the general election believing that Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Indiana, North Dakota, and Montana were solidly in their column and not even worthy of battleground status. They simply added all of these 153 electoral votes into their column before moving on their pockets of opportunity and what they believed were the real battleground states:

Next, check out where McCain thought his pockets of opportunity were located:

That's right, the B Team thought they had an opening in California. Beyond this video, Davis said this to the the Arizona Daily Star a few weeks later:

"There are some states were we have really unique opportunities," Davis said, pointing to historically Democratic states like California, Michigan, Wisconsin and Connecticut.

Finally, here's how the McCain team saw the battleground -- and yes they really believed that Washington, Oregon and Connecticut were going to be in play, but not Virginia, North Carolina, and Indiana.

Now, with just 8 days to go, half of the states where McCain is left campaigning are those he claimed were not competitive and certain to be in his column. It's pretty remarkable just how arrogant these guys were even a few months ago about some of these red states. Here are a few more examples:

Exhibit B: The New York Times (June 8th):

Mr. Obama’s aides said some states where they intend to campaign — like Georgia, Missouri, Montana and North Carolina — might ultimately be too red to turn blue. But the result of making an effort there could force Mr. McCain to spend money or send him to campaign in what should be safe ground, rather than using those resources in states like Ohio.

...Mr. McCain’s advisers dismissed the Obama campaign claims as bluster. “We’re confident about our ability to win those states,” said Steve Schmidt, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain.

Exhibit C: McCain Campaign Blog (June 20th):

Obama will spend money in states that he has almost no chance to win, and he has money to burn now that he's broken his pledge to accept public financing. Frankly, we will need him to burn as much as possible in solid red states--better he spend $10 million in Texas than another $10 million in Ohio.

Exhibit D: McCain Camp Says Obama Staffing In Missouri Means They're "In Trouble" and "Have To Have A Surge" (July 9th):

“When you feel like you have to put that many people in the state to cover it, means you think you’re in trouble and you have to have a surge,” said Jack Jackson, McCain’s Missouri co-chairman.

Exhibit E: North Carolina GOP Not Convinced State Will "Be A Race" (July 23):

There remains some skepticism among Republicans about whether the Obama effort is for real or just a feint. Some of them think Obama is likely to refocus his efforts on more traditional swing states closer to the election.

"We are anticipating that it could be a race in North Carolina," said Ferrell Blount, a former state GOP chairman from Pitt county who is advising the McCain campaign. "But we are not totally convinced it will be at this point. But we want to be prepared to spend some money in North Carolina, and we are trying to make some preparations."

"If McCain has to play a serious game in North Carolina," said Blount, "then something is going on that is not very good for John McCain."

Exhibit F: McCain Camp Says No Plans To Open Indiana Office Despite 25-30 Obama Planned (August 4th):

Jonathan Swain, a spokesman for Obama's campaign in Indiana, said plans are to have 25 to 30 campaign offices in the state.

It's part of a push by Obama to become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win Indiana's electoral votes since Lyndon Johnson did so in 1964.

In addition to the offices, Obama has run campaign ads in Indiana -- one of 18 targeted states in which he has done so -- and has brought in staff to run the campaign here.

McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee, is taking a different approach to Indiana.

Some might call it confident; some might call it laid-back at best.

Asked whether the campaign has any plans to open an office in Indiana, campaign spokeswoman Leah Yoon -- who is based in Michigan, not Indiana -- had a one-word answer: "No."

Exhibit G: Florida GOP "Not To Worry" About Voter-Registration Trends or Efforts to Link McCain to Bush (August 17th):

Florida Republican Party Chairman Jim Greer told GOP activists Saturday not to worry about voter-registration trends favoring the Democrats or claims that Sen. John McCain represents "a third term" for President Bush.

...Registration figures released last Sunday indicated that the Florida Democratic Party signed up about 250,000 new voters in the first seven months of this year, while the Republicans gained just over 98,000. But Greer said the GOP has a better "get out the vote" operation in the closing days of a campaign.

"Don't be concerned about that because they register anything with a heart beat — anything — and our party and these leaders, all of you, have the best turnout-to-vote organization in the nation," Greer said. "They (the Democrats) might register a lot of people but they're not going to the polls on election day."

Exhibit H: Georgia Governor Mocks Obama, Invites Him To Spend Millions In State (August 28)

As for talk that Georgia is in play in the presidential race, [Gov. Sonny] Perdue invited Democrats to come and “spend as much money as possible in this state. Millions and millions of dollars.”

The outcome will be the same and the money wasted, Perdue said. “I think they are feigning a move that won’t happen.”

These items should simply whet your appetite for the full post-mortem that we'll be able to do following next week's electoral rout. Suffice it to say, the McCain camp will have re-written the book on how not to run a presidential campaign and will go down in history as one of the least competent teams ever assembled.

Mark Nickolas is the Managing Editor of Political Base, and this story was from his original post, "What Political Malpractice Looks Like"

John McQuaid: McCain's Narrative Problem

2008-10-27T16:59:22Z

Robert Draper's New York Times piece on the McCain campaign skillfully maps out the strange remove from which McCain and his aides have been operating, a place that few people outside the world of politics could locate in their own experience. It is an imaginary land built entirely of literary abstractions, including "narrative," "character," and "true character moment." (Attn. literary theorists: You could make an argument that it's the first post-structuralist campaign.)

Here is one example:

The campaign was in the throes of an identity crisis by June 24, when a number of senior strategists gathered at 9:30 a.m. in a conference room of McCain's campaign headquarters in Arlington. As one participant said later, the meeting was convened "because we still couldn't answer the question, 'Why elect John McCain?' " Considering that the election was less than five months away, this was not a good sign.

"We had a narrative problem," Matt McDonald recalls. "Obama had a story line: 'Bush is the problem. I'm not going to be Bush, and McCain will be.' Our story line, I argued, had to be that it's not about Bush -- it's Congress, it's Washington. And Obama would be more about partisanship, while John McCain would buck the party line and bring people together."

The others could see McDonald's line of reasoning -- and above all, the need to separate McCain from Bush. But the message seemed antiseptic, impersonal. That was when the keeper of McCain's biography, Mark Salter, took the floor. There's a reason McCain bucks his party, McDonald remembers Salter arguing. It's because he puts his country ahead of party. Then the speechwriter, who is not known for his dispassion, began to yell: "We're talking about someone who was willing to die before losing his honor! He would die!"

OK, then. I can appreciate as well as anyone the difficulty of crafting a consistent national message for a presidential campaign, especially a losing one taking place in a time of crisis. But like most people, I tend to think that the message flows from some basic questions any contender might ask him/herself before running: what do I want to do as president? What problems does the country face at this pass in our history? What programs and policies might I put in place to confront those problems? One perk of running for president is you get to think really, really big.

But there's very little evidence in this piece, based on months of reporting and interviews with McCain staffers, that McCain and his advisers have done this. His campaign seems based on one idea alone: because of who he is - not what he has done as a senator, not what he wants to do as president, but who he is - John McCain should be president. It's not like this is nothing. Who John McCain is is clearly an interesting story, and they play around with it just about every conceivable way in successive attempts to sell his candidacy. But nowhere in the piece do you get the sense that McCain is grappling with the issues of the day. Instead, his staff is shown furiously packaging and staging the candidate's reactions to passing news events such as the Russia-Georgia skirmish, trying to fit them to one of their narratives.

This reaches its low point with the Sept. decision to suspend the campaign, which is supposed to be a "true character moment." But as Hilzoy notes, the campaign's response is all about staging and perception and "character," not, well, character - the qualities a real leader employs to respond to a political crisis:

If a Presidential candidate truly wants to do the right thing in a situation like this, it seems to me that the best thing to do is not to talk about it, and not to do anything dramatic, but to work as hard as you can behind the scenes. Very few difficult policy decisions are improved by having Presidential politics injected into them, and this seemed unlikely to be one of the exceptions. McCain is not on any of the relevant committees, has no obvious expertise in finance, and, by all accounts, does not have the kind of standing in Congress that would let him rally members behind him. That means that it's not at all clear how his returning to DC would help at all, especially since he could just as easily have tried to round up support for whatever course of action he thought best by phone.

If McCain had actually asked himself what the right thing to do was, it's hard to see how he could have come up with the answer: suspending my campaign and heading to Washington. If he did think that that was the most helpful thing he could do under the circumstances, I'd have to seriously question both his judgment and his insight into his own capacities.

It may be that there was nothing McCain could have done to turn the tide of the election this year. But he did have an opportunity - the one taken away from him in 2000 - to put his own stamp on the Republican Party. Sure, it might have torn the party apart - but the party is coming apart now anyway. And even that would have shown that McCain and his aides were actively thinking about the party and the country, rather than merely endlessly crafting perceptions.

Geoffrey Dunn: Rick Davis and McCain's Failed Campaign Strategy

2008-10-21T01:05:17Z

October has not been a good month for Rick Davis, the notorious uber-lobbyist who's also managing John McCain's failed campaign for the American presidency. His candidate is sinking in the polls and the election is slipping through his fingers. What's more, the GOP is going to be outspent by four-to-one in the final weeks of the campaign and several prominent Republicans--Colin Powell, former GOP governors Bill Weld and Arne Carlson, President Bush's former spokesman Scott McClellan, and conservative foreign policy expert Ken Adelman--have just jumped ship. And, finally, his second spot on the ticket is going rogue on him, looking very much like a hooked salmon aboard a fishing trawler in Bristol Bay. It is not a pretty picture.

November promises to be even worse. Davis will be blamed for orchestrating one of the biggest losses in recent Republican history, as polls are beginning to suggest not only a Democratic Party landslide, but a complete transformation of American electoral politics. Come January 2009, it will not be a good time to be a right-wing Republican lobbyist in Washington, D.C.--which has pretty much been Davis's job description for the past decade. The political trough at which Davis and his partners at Davis, Manafort & Freedman have fed gluttonously will have gone dry.

Karma is a bitch. If there's been one single person responsible for the Republican downfall this election, it's been Rick Davis. Forget George Bush and the rest of the washed-up Neanderthals in his administration. Davis had plenty of time and opportunity to stem the tide--and he has made bad decisions at every turn. Davis will be remembered as the guy who lost to an untested African American with the middle name of Hussein and who is arguably one of the most liberal members of the U.S. Senate. It's quite an accomplishment.

Excuses are already being made for McCain's performance and fingers are being pointed. In a phone conversation today, Davis blamed the economy and "an immensely unpopular president" as two of the hurdles facing his campaign. McCain also has pointed the finger at Bush, while campaign staffers have called Davis rigid and out-of-touch and unable to adapt. He's also been blamed for not crafting an overall narrative to McCain's campaign and for allowing both McCain and Palin to pander to daily gossip rather than to the economic and foreign policy issues facing the country.

Davis has claimed that "we're holding our own" and still predicting victory. He says that "money is not going to decide this race."

He's right. There are plenty of other factors that will decide the outcome on November 4--all variables which could have been approached differently by Davis, the University of Alabama dropout and Navy brat who was schooled in the Republican South and then followed the yellow-brick road to Washington.

Here's a half-dozen:

1. Take the economy. Please. The Obama-Biden ticket is facing the same economic crisis as McCain. And the electorate is far less likely to support big-spending Democrats during times of economic downturn. The difference is that voters, by an overwhelmingly large margin, feel that Obama has a far greater command of economic issues than does McCain. So the difference isn't in the crisis itself, but how the two campaigns have engaged it.

McCain's ridiculous claim that the economy was essentially sound didn't play well in the likes of Pennsylvania, Virginia, Michigan and other states hit hard by the economic downturn. (Nor did his eleven houses.) It cost him his lead in states like Ohio and Florida. By reducing his solution to cutting taxes as an appeasement to "Joe the Plumber," he has further alienated independent and undecided voters in those critical swing states.

Joe the Plumber is a creation of Rick Davis. Shallow is as shallow does.

If you watch Davis on television, you see a man angry and out of touch with the American people--pretty much like John McCain. The guy needs to take a daily Valium. And for him to put his face on the Sunday morning talk shows reflects an arrogance of grand proportions: the guy couldn't sell hand warmers in a blizzard. His negative ratings are probably right there with George Bush--only Bush is more likable.

2. Then there is Sarah Palin. Oh, boy. This one, of course, got foisted on McCain by Davis and Steve Schmidt, and while there has been a surge from the conservative Republican base since Palin's selection, support from moderate Republicans for the ticket has gone soft--and from independents it's gone south. And more south. When Elisabeth Hasselbeck is calling the shots for you, you know you're in trouble.

Mainstream America simply does not view Palin as qualified for the position--let alone the presidency should something happen to the 72-year-old McCain. What was it that Colin Powell said?: "Now that we have had a chance to watch her for some seven weeks, I don't believe she's ready to be president of the United States, which is the job of the vice president. And so that raised some question in my mind as to the judgment that Senator McCain made."

Of course, there's been a string of Republicans in recent weeks who have taken their shots at Palin. "The Palin candidacy is a symptom and expression of a new vulgarization in American politics," wrote Wall Street Journal columnist, Peggy Noonan, the Wall Street Journal. "It's no good, not for conservatism and not for the country. And yes, it is a mark against John McCain."

Davis saw stars when he and Schmidt happened upon Palin as a possible running mate. The two shared videos of her appearing on Charlie Rose during the days leading up to the decision. They convinced themselves that she was the counterbalance to McCain. And they brought few people into their small circle of decision. Then they convinced McCain.

How wrong they were. Palin is at best a gimmick; at worst, she's a fraud. Is there anyone out there now who seriously believes that the Republicans would be behind in states like Florida or Iowa or even New Hampshire with the VP selection that McCain really wanted--Joe Lieberman--on the ticket? Or would they be behind in the critical state of Pennsylvania had former GOP governor Tom Ridge been on the ticket?

Even to watch Palin fully scripted on Saturday Night Live was painful. Why would anyone from the McCain campaign allow her to further embarrass herself on national television? Davis is simply clueless when it comes to understanding the dynamics of the national polity. To watch him in these final days of the campaign is to see someone truly out of touch with mainstream America. He's nearly as clueless as Palin. Only angrier.

3. Moreover, Davis and Co. clearly had not vetted Sarah Palin properly prior to the decision. My sources in Alaska say that interviews with key Republican figures in the Last Frontier were never conducted, including one with Lyda Green, a veteran Republican state senator in Alaska, and a former ally of Palin's turned hostile. Not only was there far more to the Troopergate investigation than Palin initially let on, her intellectual deficiencies are manifestly apparent to anyone who engages her in serious political discussion.

4. John McCain told Barack Obama in the third and final debate that he wasn't George Bush. He should have told Rick Davis that long ago. The entire McCain campaign strategy has been to hold those states won by Bush in 2004 and to do it in the same manner that Bush did--once again, by appealing to the conservative, right-wing base of the party. Davis still thinks this is a winning strategy.

The trouble is: John McCain is not George Bush--even though Davis has tried to reconfigure him as such. I honestly believe that the deep anger boiling at the surface of McCain's psyche is that he's having to sound like a conservative Republican to win the Presidency. Davis has never understood the McCain brand.

Trying to mimic the Karl Rove electoral strategy has failed McCain and failed him badly. The real John McCain is indeed a maverick, someone who reached across the isle during his lengthy career in the Senate. He's actually a pretty likable guy. Had that been the John McCain who debated Barack Obama in each of the three presidential debates, rather than the angry conservative, does anyone think that McCain would have lost to Obama by two-to-one margins with independents watching the debates?

McCain is an anti-ideologue, and while he had to appeal to the base to win the Republican primary, his one possible course to victory in the general election would have been to move to the middle. Davis had him steer off the other way.

5. The right-wing harping on Obama has backfired. If it didn't work for Hillary Clinton to bring up the likes of Bill Ayers and Reverend Wright, why in the hell did Davis think it would work a second time around when the American voters had already rejected it in the first place? This isn't Alabama, Dorothy.

Poll after poll shows that the hit pieces on Obama aren't working, but, today, reports indicate that Davis and Palin want to go back to harping on Reverend Wright and Obama's "socialism."

6. Davis has tried to make it a campaign about Obama's character. The American people want to hear about issues.

Perhaps Davis didn't watch the Democratic primary closely enough. But both Democrats and Republicans sitting in their living rooms saw Obama hold his cool against attacks from both Hillary and Bill Clinton for six solid months. He didn't flinch. The American people already knew that Obama had the poise and temperament to serve as Commander-in-Chief.

Conversely, Davis has crafted a campaign persona that has played into the public's worst perceptions of McCain's personality and temperament. He's projecting his own anger and frustrations onto his candidate. And it's downright ugly.

What could Davis have done to win the election?

Rather than challenging Obama's character, Davis should have been highlighting McCain's own foreign policy experience, particularly in the Middle East, rather than harp on a couple of missteps by Obama early in the campaign. His admonishing of Obama about dealing with the "enemy" in debates and on the stump have come off as condescending and, even, racist.

He should have crafted a positive, uplifting campaign message, with an optimistic vision for America. That is at the heart of Obama's campaign, and it's now why he's winning in the polls. Obama does not walk on water and he does have limits to his experience and he's made a handful of mistakes along the campaign trail. Davis hasn't capitalized on a single one of those deficiencies. Instead, he and Schmidt keep falling back to an attack on Obama.

By fashioning a campaign based on fear and negativity, hatred and doubt, John McCain now finds himself with an awfully steep hill to climb between now and Election Day. He had every opportunity to win this campaign against a relative newcomer with a challenging name. But just as did Hillary Clinton, he has snatched defeat from the jaws of victory--because Rick Davis and others who form the heart of the McCain-Palin inner-circle have drastically misread the American people and, as a result, have crafted an overarching campaign strategy based on failure.

Rick Davis: Campaign Rethinking Playing The Rev. Wright Card

2008-10-20T14:14:27Z

John McCain's campaign manager says he is reconsidering using Barack Obama's relationship with Reverend Jeremiah Wright as a campaign issue during the election's closing weeks.

In an appearance on conservative Hugh Hewitt's radio program, Davis said that circumstances had changed since John McCain initially and unilaterally took Obama's former pastor off the table. The Arizona Republican, Davis argued, had been jilted by the remarks of Rep. John Lewis, who compared recent GOP crowds to segregationist George Wallace's rallies. And, as such, the campaign was going to "rethink" what was in and out of political bounds.

"Look, John McCain has told us a long time ago before this campaign ever got started, back in May, I think, that from his perspective, he was not going to have his campaign actively involved in using Jeremiah Wright as a wedge in this campaign," he said late last week. "Now since then, I must say, when Congressman Lewis calls John McCain and Sarah Palin and his entire group of supporters, fifty million people strong around this country, that we're all racists and we should be compared to George Wallace and the kind of horrible segregation and evil and horrible politics that was played at that time, you know, that you've got to rethink all these things. And so I think we're in the process of looking at how we're going to close this campaign. We've got 19 days, and we're taking serious all these issues."

McCain has reportedly avoided discussion of Wright because of its racial implications. Apparently, since he already stands accused of stoking crowd anger akin to the South in the 1960s, his campaign just might be willing to walk down that slippery slope and risk justifying Lewis' proclamation.

Even before Davis took to the Hugh Hewitt Show, it was clear that members of McCain's inner circle were pining for him to use some of Wright's more inflammatory quotes to hammer away at Obama. Vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin told New York Times columnist Bill Kristol that she didn't know "why that association isn't discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said."

Certainly there are Democrats operatives who have long anticipated the Wright card being played and are shocked, to a certain extent, that McCain has avoided the topic. One high-ranking strategist told the Huffington Post that he thought the Republican ticket could have gained far more traction by going after Obama's pastor "as opposed to some neighborhood association" -- referencing former Weather Underground member Bill Ayers. McCain, he added, didn't have to even do it himself. He could pass the task over to a 527 organization or outside group. But with the money woes facing the Republican Party, the fundraising and infrastructure for such an effort has not been built. The decision to bring up Wright is left firmly in McCain's hands.

McCain Compares Obama Small Donor Issue To Ayers And ACORN

2008-10-20T12:22:51Z

On a Monday conference call with reporters, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis worked hard to elevate the issue of Barack Obama's undisclosed small donors, suggesting that it relates to other campaign controversies and could imperil Americans' confidence in the election outcome.

"I just hope we know every one of those donations came form legitimate U.S.-based sources" Davis said, adding that America "knows" what it's like to have election results questioned after the fact. Davis also conflated the Obama camp's non-disclosure of donors giving less than $200 (which is not required by law), with both the ACORN voter-registration issue and Bill Ayers.

"This pattern of non-disclosure, of non-responsiveness follows a pattenr of [the Obama camp] setting their own rules to apply to this campaign that is consistent with all other patterns we've seen," Davis said. (Though, of course, the rules about not disclosing donors contributing less than $200 were not set by the Obama campaign.)

"'We don't respond to questions about ACORN'," Davis said, imitating the Obama campaign. "I don't mean to have this call devolve into a 'relationship' call," Davis said, before leading the pack of journalists down precisely that trail -- bringing up (and distorting) Obama's description of Bill Ayers as "just one of my friends in the neighborhood."

It's not clear that this a smart strategy. While it's true that Obama's fundraising haul is unprecedented in its scope and potential impact, it's not clear that tying the issue to the Ayers gambit will make the press treat the new claim any more seriously. In fact, most reporters' questions to Davis after his statement focused on horse-race questions, as opposed to Obama's disclosure.

In a preemptive face-saving measure, Davis announced on the call that the Republican National Committee would begin disclosing its own small donors starting on Tuesday -- something the committee has not previously done. But the extent to which the move is an election-season stunt or long-standing policy for the RNC was not made clear. A follow-up question to the RNC asking whether it would stick with the policy after November was not immediately returned. This piece will be updated if and when we receive a response.

McCain Camp Manager: Colin Powell Not Equipped To Make Political Predictions

2008-10-20T08:47:38Z

When asked on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" program Monday for his reaction to Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama, John McCain campaign manager Rick Davis called into question the political acumen of the former Joint Chiefs chairman and Secretary of State.

"Look, I doubt if Colin Powell is equipped to do a whole lot of political prognostication," Davis said, dismissively, adding: "That's what you guys do, right?"

It was perhaps a snarky throwaway line, but it could be seen as a slight to the man McCain himself has described as one of the "most credible, most respected" men in the world.

Davis was certain to add the de rigeur testimony to Powell's service, saying: "He is a great American and served this country with great distinction. What his views are on the political scene are completely up to him."

McCain's campaign manager also addressed the issue of bringing up Bill Ayers, which Powell has criticized as "demagoguery."

"John McCain tried to point out how people should be informed about Barack Obama's background, including his relationships with domestic terrorists like William Ayers. People are going to form these judgments. It's great fodder for us to debate every day. I think it's fun," Davis said.

When asked about Powell's sharp criticism of McCain's handling of the economy, Davis oddly lumped in Joe Scarborough with the "Joes" trying to carve out a middle class living. "I think John McCain has continued to talk about it -- where working class people all around the country, the Joes of the world, whether they are Joe like the Talk Show Host or Joe the Plumber -- but the Joes around the country are working hard, earning a living and trying to be the generators of economic progress in this country."

Davis did give the Obama campaign some credit for their $150 million fundraising haul in September. "That is a 'wow' moment. No question about that. It's an enormous amount of money," Davis said.

Then he alleged, however, that "enough questions have been raised by the media" that all of Obama's small donors should be disclosed online. "He's got great geeks working on the website. They ought to have them get to work saying I'll put up on a website all my donations."

Bill Scher: McCain Campaign Manager In '04: "Nothing Is More Discomforting Than a Smear Campaign"

2008-10-14T23:24:24Z

In 2004, long-time McCain campaign manager Rick Davis penned an op-ed for the Boston Globe, lamenting and lambasting the use of smears to win presidential campaigns.

The essay titled, "Anatomy of a Smear Campaign," detailed how Sen. John McCain suffered from smears when running against then-Gov. George W. Bush in the 2000 South Carolina primary, and made the following observations:

-- "Every presidential campaign has its share of hard-ball political tactics, but nothing is more discomforting than a smear campaign."

-- "It's not necessary, however, for a smear to be true to be effective."

-- "Rebutting tawdry attacks focuses public attention on them, and prevents the campaign from talking issues."

Davis went on to urge the 2004 presidential nominees "to publicly order their supporters not to go there," as that was "[t]he only way to stop the expected mud-slinging."

More on the change of heart from McCain and Davis over at LiberalOasis.

Gary Cohan: Conduct Unbecoming: John McCain's Dishonorable Endgame

2008-10-12T17:17:40Z

Conduct unbecoming an officer and gentleman is a punishable offense of the U.S. military defined by Article 133 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice as:

• "Action or behavior in an official capacity which, in dishonoring or disgracing the person as an officer, seriously compromises the officer's character as a gentleman."

• "Behavior in an unofficial or private capacity which, in dishonoring or disgracing the officer personally, seriously compromises the person's standing as an officer."

• "Knowingly making a false official statement;"

• "Using insulting or defamatory language to another officer in that officer's presence or about that officer to other military persons;"

John Sidney McCain's compelling life narrative is dominated by his 40-year-old military credentials and his fabled "grace under pressure" while confined and tortured as a POW during the Vietnam War.

He supposedly emerged from his long personal nightmare as a "changed man" who claimed the title of "maverick" to signify his unwillingness to pander to political expediency, speak truth to power and fight injustice wherever he witnessed it as an avowed "reformer." I long for such a politician. John McCain, however, is not this man.

Now that his electoral chances grow more remote every day, John McCain is facing the prospect of coping yet again with his own serially dashed ambitions to occupy the highest office in the land. Crushed by Bush in 2000 after seamy Rovian smears and daunted in 2004 by a "War President" with unprecedented powers, McCain has been about as frustrated a Presidential wannabe and as angry as a career politician with his innate temperament can get.

As Rolling Stone author Tim Dickinson writes in the October 16, 2008 issue, the true story of the "make-believe maverick...reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty." There were hints of these troubling character flaws in his youthful pre-war years. Dickinson notes that even as a young man, McCain wasn't particularly popular. "His friends seemed to dislike him, with one recalling him as "a mean little fucker." That "mean little fucker" is still quite alive and well in McCain's shrinking, 72-year-old, 5' 9" frame.

In military parlance, Mr. McCain -- the candidate -- is now behaving in a manner "unbecoming an officer" -- notably the highest-ranking officer, as Commander-in-Chief of the United States military and as the President of the United States.

His campaign is guilty of inciting crowds to hatred against a political opponent by intentionally spewing racist lies and fabricated vitriol, questioning our next President's patriotism in a time of war, tacitly approving his own campaign's spokespeople and advertisements' specific statements that his political opponent is "palling around with terrorists," Mr. McCain indelibly stains the "honor" he has been accorded from years of public and military service.

He has now earned the ignominious fate of a public "court martial" in polling places all across America on November 4th.

Article 133 stipulates that the maximum punishment for violations of this code of conduct is:

• "Dismissal,"

• "Forfeiture of all pay and allowances, and"

• "Confinement for a period...for which a punishment is prescribed in this Manual, or, if none is prescribed, for one year."

Just how many of these infractions has the esteemed former Navy flyboy committed? According to the U.S. Military Code's complete list of punishable "conduct unbecoming" offenses: 10 out of 10.

John McCain has run a dispirited, dishonorable, duplicitous, wedge-issue driven and erratic campaign during a time when his country is at war and faces the gravest economic crisis since the 1930's. His political stunts -- the most egregious of which is named "Sarah Palin" -- are more than cagey electoral strategy. They are hazardous to the health and welfare of this nation.

The conduct of his 2008 campaign should alert the nation as to what kind of White House he would champion and this should disqualify him for the highest office in the land.

However, by appealing to the most divisive and blatantly ignorant instincts of his Republican base, McCain assumes that he will gain electoral traction in a campaign that has been spinning its wheels for months. He and Mrs. Palin seem to have succeeded in molding their gullible "Joe Sixpack" cohorts into fearful lynch mobs.

Outrageous as this would be in any context, it is amplified by the fact that his opponent is the first African-American candidate in U.S. history to be the likely occupant of the Oval Office in a nation that has a shameful saga of racial hatred, lynching and, yes (gulp), political assassinations.

This nation hungers for domestic and international peace, intelligent leadership, true bipartisanship, grace, truthfulness and dignity. We -- as Americans first and Republicans, Independents and Democrats last -- need an "Officer and a Gentleman" in the White House. We must send a message that we will hold John McCain to the same standards that his beloved military has so eloquently set forth in Article 133 of the Military Code.

Thankfully, opinion leaders, lawmakers and average citizens from both sides of the aisle have taken note and are equally appalled. They have publicly scolded McCain-Palin in recent days for their "lynch-mob tactics." calling their behavior "unconscionable" and desperate." I join with them in calling for the Republican Presidential campaign to repudiate forcefully and publicly these hate-filled comments and to engage in some "leaderly" crowd control in the days ahead.

I sincerely hope that on November 4th the public throws the book at this empty shell of a former "officer and a gentleman," elects Senator Obama in a landslide to deliver us from the long national nightmare of corrupt Republican rule and sends Mr. McCain and his ilk a clear message that, in the 21st century, Americans will no longer tolerate from its politicians "conduct unbecoming."

William Bradley: Waiting For "Whitey"

2008-10-10T17:38:26Z

If only there were a tape of one of the Obamas talking like this. Say, Michelle Obama. Ranting about "whitey."

It's come to this.

I've spent a lot of time talking this week with some top Republican pros, in person and on the phone. It's fear and loathing times in America, and especially for Republican Americans.

Virtually all of these Republican pros think Barack Obama has it won, most even before Obama won his second debate with John McCain. None of them dislike McCain, or have any bone to pick with Steve Schmidt or Rick Davis. (That's how you know I didn't talk to John Weaver, McCain's former chief strategist who said yesterday that McCain's events are encouraging "an angry mob mentality.") At least one of them has voted for Obama absentee. One or two said, wistfully, "What about the Whitey tape, maybe that would change it?"

Of course, there is no Whitey tape. The whole thing was almost certainly lifted from a financial thriller, "The Power Broker,' by Stephen Frey. Which I read when this nonsense about a purported tape of Michelle Obama ranting about "whitey" surfaced in June.

When you're waiting for "Whitey," you're in much worse shape than when you're waiting for Godot. I'll return to the "Whitey" episode in a moment. It's instructive.

All agreed that McCain's campaign executed a series of deft, rapid improvisations after Schmidt largely took over in July, putting McCain back into a game that any other Republican would have been out of all along this year.

Ironically, when Schmidt, who I profiled here on Huffington Post, managed Arnold Schwarzenegger's landslide re-election as California's governor in 2006, the style of the campaign was totally different. Even when behind, as Schwarzenegger was for several months, that campaign had an inexorable quality to it, perhaps reflecting Schwarzenegger's hyper-confident personality.

This campaign has a "zany" quality to it, as one longtime Republican strategist put it. Perhaps reflecting McCain's more impulsive personality.

All agreed the economy was always going to be a huge problem for McCain, because he is tied to the deregulationist policies of this era of Republicanism at the national level. If the economy got worse, as it did, with a vengeance, he would have trouble playing in the economic stimulus game.

But all agreed, even those few who still like her, that the selection of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate may have proved a death knell to the McCain campaign even before the epic financial crisis.

"She hasn't stepped up to the big stage," was the most positive assessment. Most were more scathing, calling her totally unqualified, embarrassingly uninformed even for someone in her current office. Two cited this morning's David Brooks column in the New York Times, in which the conservative writer bemoans how the Republican preference for "culture war" -- which is essentially an ongoing political gambit in which guys who are elites pretend not to be by attacking education and expertise in favor of "authenticity" -- has managed to drive knowledge workers (even including bankers!) away from the party.

Sarah Palin, a bridge to nowhere? Certainly a bridge too far. As stunts go. Of course, she wasn't McCain's real first choice. But she was his final choice.

Most worry about an Obama presidency, but see that there would have to be big changes in the country anyway given the nature of our crises.

John McCain's new TV ad says that Barack Obama worked with a terrorist.

And yet, maybe that "Whitey" tape might save the day after all.

The Whitey tape, for those who've forgotten, is something that set my friends over on the right all atwitter this past June when a wacky anti-Obama/supposedly pro-Hillary web site -- and you know you're in fringe territory when the proprietor refers to "Barky" -- announced that a tape of Michelle Obama ranting about "whitey" was about to be released. Or maybe it was a dvd. Or maybe it was going to be held for awhile. Till, say, October.

When and where did this Michelle outburst purportedly occur? Well, it was definitely in Chicago. A few years ago. Definitely. Michelle Obama was there with Louis Farrakhan at Jeremiah Wright's church. Or, actually, she was there with Mrs. Farrakhan at Jeremiah Wright's church. Okay, she was there with Mrs. Farrakhan across town. And so on.

The tape, or dvd, or cave painting, or whatever format this thing was supposedly in, of course never surfaced.

But not before former Walter Mondale campaign manager Bob Beckel was on Fox News saying he heard something big was probably going to come out the next day. Which got the far right all atwitter about how Beckel had supposedly said the tape was coming out the next day. Which was not exactly what he said.

This McCain campaign web video details what it calls Barack Obama's close alliance with Bill Ayers. The "radical education foundation" it mentions was actually funded by the conservative Annenberg Foundation.

As it happened, nothing happened the next day, no whitey tape, no nothing.

Then it turned out that the whole scenario was suspiciously similar to the major plot point of a 2006 novel, Stephen Frey's "The Power Broker."

I've enjoyed more than a few such financial thrillers on long plane rides. Well, at least before we had laptops. The best was one of the first I know of, Paul Erdman's "The Crash of '79," which is about a global financial collapse and war in the Middle East. Uh-oh.

"The Power Broker" is nowhere near as fun. In it, the first African American candidate with a real shot at the presidency, a former tennis star-turned-US senator named Jesse Wood, secretly has a big bone to pick with white people.

Not that he lets it on in public, where he is invariably elegant, articulate, and charming. Behind the scenes, he is secretly backed and bankrolled by a cabal of former Black Panthers, one of whom pulls his strings. A close associate of Senator Obama, er. Senator Wood, is an angry black preacher.

In one of his conversations with Reverend Wright, er, Reverend Roundtree, the candidate reveals his true feelings: "You know, I had to put up with so much crap from Whitey when I was playing tennis back in the day, it was ridiculous. Tennis racquets busted while I was in the shower, no towels, the worst locker, called nigger all the time, even by the help. ... If I get elected president, I'm gonna act the way I'm supposed to act in front of the camera. Smile and dance like a good black man, do what I'm expected to do like a good boy. But behind the scenes, I'll fuck Whitey, and I'll fuck him good, I really will."

Naturally, he is secretly filmed while saying this. Because he, like Michelle Obama, is a brilliant pol.

Later in the novel comes the scenario for release of the whitey tape. Determined by a big oil man named Hewitt, no relation to far right radio show host and blogger Hugh.

Hewitt thought for a second. "I'm going to let Jesse win the nomination and let the public get used to him as the Democratic candidate. Give the country some time to get to know Jesse Wood, to start to like him. And they will because he's a very likeable guy. Then I'm going to drop the bomb, after everyone's started to like him. That way the clip will have maximum effect and people will be as angry as they can be. Whites and blacks. Whites for the obvious reason, blacks because they'll feel like he let 'em down."

Unfortunately, in the real world, there is no such tape. While it is obviously tempting for those grasping at straws to imagine that this Jeremiah Wright type stuff was actually said by one of the Obamas themselves, the Obamas' opponents can't have it both ways.

Either they have been brilliantly plotting to win the White House for a great many years -- or, even more nefariously, are a "Manchurian candidate" set-up, with sophisticated string pullers guiding every move (there's a whole column in that crazy fantasy) -- or they have not.

There's no whitey tape, and the resigned attitude of these top Republican pros seems not inappropriate.

Oh, and as for this "Manchurian candidate" stuff? Obviously it's said by people who don't know either the Frank Sinatra movie (directed by Robert F. Kennedy's great friend John Frankenheimer) or the Richard Condon novel.

Because "The Manchurian Candidate" is really a Medal of Honor war hero and former prisoner of war programmed by American's enemies during his captivity to bring them to power.

Oh, and by the way ... In the sequel to "The Power Broker," the secretly "whitey"-hating black presidential candidate ends up winning. And he's the hero's friend, too.

McCain Not Mentioning The Market; We're Not "CNBC"

2008-10-10T14:25:09Z

The Politico reports:

McCain didn't talk about the stock market yesterday, and didn't put out a statement on it, while Obama did both, and McCain campaign manager Rick Davis was asked about that on a conference call (about Acorn!) this afternoon.

"There's very little a candidate for president can say and very little the president can say about what's happening in the stock markets except hope that they correct themselves," Davis said, adding that McCain's mortgage plan could be an "elixir" for the financial crisis.

...

The campaign, he said, shouldn't become a "CNBC news show on the stock market."

Barack Obama's campaign has released a statement:

Obama issued the following statement just before 7 p.m. Thursday: "As millions of Americans lost more of their investments and hard-earned retirement savings today, it is critical that the Treasury Department move as quickly possible to implement the rescue plan that passed Congress so that we can ease this credit crisis that's preventing businesses and consumers from getting loans and causing dangerous instability in our market. While we face a very serious challenge, now is not the time for fear or panic, but for all of us to come together with resolve and determination that we can steer ourselves out of this crisis and restore confidence in the American economy."

McCain Camp Divided Over Negative Attacks

2008-10-09T23:19:28Z

Top McCain campaign officials are grappling with how far to go with negative attacks on Sen. Barack Obama in the final weeks of what is turning into a come-from-behind effort.

Sen. John McCain has allowed a series of increasingly harsh broadsides in new campaign ads and in speeches by his wife, Cindy, and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin. But the Arizona Republican has rejected pleas from some advisers to launch attacks focusing on Sen. Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Some McCain campaign officials are becoming concerned about the hostility that attacks against Sen. Obama are whipping up among Republican supporters. During an internal conference call Thursday, campaign officials discussed how the tenor of the crowds has turned on the media and on Sen. Obama.

David Donnelly: McCain Campaign Rewrites Keating Scandal

2008-10-06T15:24:31Z

In a conference call with reporters today, John McCain's lawyer John Dowd claimed that the Keating Five ethics investigation into McCain and four other senators was a "political smear job."

That seems to put him at odds with what McCain has claimed over the years. In fact, in 1999, McCain told a hometown reporter, "The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."

McCain has often referred to the Keating Five scandal as the defining moment of his career - a moment in which he became a reformer. But the recent twist of historical fact by his lawyer undercuts what McCain has insisted for years - that he learned a lesson from the Keating Five scandal.

If that lesson was to fight for reforming the campaign finance system, it's a lesson he left behind years ago. McCain used to be the lead author of a bill to fix the presidential public financing system back in 2003, but he's refused to cosponsor it since then. He used to call the Arizona Clean Elections public financing law a national model, but now he says he opposed reform for federal offices.

If that lesson was that appearances matter, then he ought to have a look around his campaign office. His campaign is run, staffed, advised, and funded with the help of some of Washington's most successful - and infamous - lobbyists. From lobbyist Rick Davis, his campaign manager, who lobbied for Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and received secret payments from Freddie for a no-show job, to lobbyist Charlie Black, his senior advisor, who has received payments from some of the most vile dictators in the past several decades, McCain's campaign has some of the worst "optics" of any presidential campaign in recent memory.

The Keating Five connections are very troubling for what they mean today - both on economic philosophy and on McCain's willingness to get cozy with special interests. Here's Campaign Money Watch's ad making that case:

Ari Berman: McCain's Kremlin Connections

2008-10-06T10:54:14Z

With the McCain campaign attacking Barack Obama for his flimsy ties to reformed Weatherman Bill Ayers, it seems especially relevant now to highlight McCain's questionable relationship with his embattled campaign manager, Rick Davis, and Davis' controversial clients. As Mark Ames and I report in a new article in The Nation, "McCain's Kremlin Ties," Davis worked to advance to the interests of Russian proxies in Eastern Europe and powerful oligarchs tied to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, with McCain lending a helping hand.

Over the course of the presidential campaign, John McCain has repeatedly emphasized his willingness to stand up to Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin as proof that only he possesses the fortitude and judgment to become the next leader of the free world. In his acceptance speech at the Republican convention, McCain lashed out at Putin and the Russian oligarchs, who, "rich with oil wealth and corrupt with power...[are] reassembling the old Russian Empire." McCain rushed to publicly support the Georgian republic during its recent conflict with Russia and amplified his threat to expel Moscow from the G-8 club of major powers. His running mate, Sarah Palin, suggested in her first major interview that the United States might have to go to war with Russia one day in order to protect Georgia--the kind of apocalyptic scenario the United States avoided during the cold war.

Yet despite McCain's tough talk, behind the scenes his top advisers have cultivated deep ties with Russia's oligarchy--indeed, they have promoted the Kremlin's geopolitical and economic interests, as well as some of its most unsavory business figures, through greedy cynicism and geopolitical stupor. The most notable example is the tale of how McCain and his campaign manager, Rick Davis, advanced what became a key victory for the Kremlin: gaining control over the small but strategically important country of Montenegro.

According to two former senior US diplomats who served in the Balkans, Davis and his lobbying firm, Davis Manafort, received several million dollars to help run Montenegro's independence referendum campaign of 2006. The terms of the agreement were never disclosed to the public, but top Montenegrin officials told the US diplomats that Davis's work was underwritten by powerful Russian business interests connected to the Kremlin and operating in Montenegro. Neither Davis nor the McCain campaign responded to repeated requests for comment. (Davis's extensive lobbying work, especially on behalf of collapsed mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has already attracted critical media scrutiny.)

Read the full story here.
Read more: Russia, McCain Campaign, McCain's Money, Rick Davis, Rick Davis Russia, John McCain, Rick Davis Kremlin, 2008 Election, Politics News

Watchdog Group Links McCain's Ties To Freddie And Fannie With Keating Scandal

2008-10-01T11:12:33Z

On Wednesday, a non-partisan watchdog group unveiled a new ad that compares John McCain's role in the current financial mess to the Keating Five scandal that ensnared him in the late 1980's.

McCain's own ads have hit Barack Obama for receiving donations from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. Campaign Money Watch uses the same territory against the Arizona Republican.

"During the Savings and Loan crisis, John McCain was caught red-handed pressuring regulators to go easy on his friend Charles Keating," the ad begins, later adding: "Twenty years later, the lobbying firm owned by John McCain's campaign manager took hidden payments from Freddie Mac."

Watch:

The revelation that McCain campaign manager Rick Davis's firm received payments from the housing giants -- even after the company stopped rendering any discernible services -- has blunted the GOP's attacks against Obama's fundraising haul. But this ad takes the next step, tying McCain's reliance on lobbyists-as-advisers back to the 21-year-old Savings and Loan scandal.

Campaign Money Watch director David Donnelly says that while the ad is only online at the moment, the group hopes to put money into a TV buy in the near future. "It was designed for a media buy," he said, noting that the extensive disclaimer was prepared to fall within all laws regulating 527 ads.

Robert Greenwald: John McCain: Economic Disaster

2008-09-30T10:42:26Z

John McCain does not have the ability to fix this economic crisis. After declaring the fundamentals of the economy strong, he created a political circus in Washington last week by mucking up bailout negotiations; a deplorable stunt, considering he and his political cronies helped cause the current meltdown.

It was McCain and his economic adviser Phil Gramm who pushed for the deregulation that helped lead to the banking crisis, and it was McCain's crony Rick Davis who had deep lobbyist ties to Freddie Mac. Don't let others be fooled by McCain's economic grandstanding because the reality is his policies and principles will only exacerbate our financial hardships. That's why you must spread this video.

McCain is being deceitful with his sudden populist message and support for regulation; his economic policies still favor our nation's wealthy elite. Call out McCain's economic dishonesty. Send this video to friends and ask them to sign up for a free Brave New Films video subscription to know the latest on TheRealMcCain.com. Then, post it on your blogs and spread it on networking sites like Digg and Reddit. These are some of the best ways to reach people who are not following this debate closely.

Let's make sure everyone knows McCain can't get us out of the mess he got us into in the first place.

Andy Borowitz: McCain Replaces Palin with Startled Deer

2008-09-28T23:59:41Z

With less than a week to go before the crucial vice-presidential debate, GOP presidential nominee John McCain announced today that he was replacing his running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, with a startled deer.

According to campaign insiders, the decision to select a hoofed mammal to replace Gov. Palin evolved after Sen. McCain watched his running mate's performance in a series of interviews with CBS's Katie Couric.

"Good Lord, a startled deer could do better than that," Sen. McCain reportedly said, prompting his aides to draw up a shortlist of startled deer.

The Arizona senator supposedly brushed aside concerns that a startled deer would wilt under the pressure of a televised debate, telling aides, "At least a goddamn deer won't go on about Alaska being close to Russia."

The McCain campaign said today that Sen. McCain's new running mate, Bucky the Red Deer, would not be made available to the press prior to the debate.

"Bucky is very much a work in progress," said McCain campaign manager Rick Davis. "Right now we're working on keeping him from bolting off the stage."

Bucky's opponent in the upcoming debate, Delaware senator Joseph Biden, appeared today to be trying to manage expectations for the high-stakes face-off with his four-legged rival.

"Bucky the Red Deer is articulate, bright and clean," Sen. Biden said. "That's storybook, man."

Elsewhere, former "American Idol" star Clay Aiken revealed that he was gay in an exclusive interview with Duh magazine.

Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com. He hosts "Countdown to the Election, with special guests Joy Behar (The View) and Jeffrey Toobin (CNN, bestselling author of "The Nine") at the 92nd Street Y in NYC on October 22 at 8 PM. Student tickets half-price. For tickets go to 92y.org.