John McCain

Anyone who doubts the possibility of a landslide victory for Barack Obama in November probably didn't see John McCain on the stump on this week.

The problem with Mr. McCain's appearances in Maine and New Hampshire on Monday and Tuesday was not merely that the crowds he attracted were smaller or less ardent than those who customarily flock to see Mr. Obama – though they were. Nor was it that asserting his opponent would "lose a war in order to win a political campaign" smacked of frustration – though it did.

The more fundamental weakness was Mr. McCain’s failure to answer a very basic question: Why does he want to be president? His stump speech provided no compelling rationale for his candidacy and no real roadmap for where he wants to lead the nation.  read more »

Once again, the right is up in arms, yelling that the Liberal Media is conspiring to distort coverage and silence opposing views so that their chosen candidate might claim the White House. Several specific developments account for the current clamoring.

One is the presidential-level press coverage of Barack Obama’s trip to Afghanistan and the Middle East, where he’s been accompanied by all three network news anchors and many of the most prominent television and print correspondents. John McCain, meanwhile, has taken many similar excursions but never received remotely comparable coverage. And this week in particular, McCain seems sort of like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone – left by himself while everyone else heads overseas.  read more »

During a June 18 appearance on CNBC’s Squawk Box, Steven Roth, New York real estate kingpin and the chairman and CEO of Vornado Realty Trust, suggested that a President Barack Obama could lead the United States out of its economic imbroglio.

“President Obama comes in, O.K.—that’s not a political prediction by the way, this is just a fantasy—and somehow or other, he does what he says he was going to do. He gets us out of the war,” began Mr. Roth in his heavily inflected New Yorkese.

In Mr. Roth’s imagined course of events—related to a deeply skeptical roundtable of pundits—the future president would use the billions of dollars that aren’t wasted overseas, coupled with increased tax revenues, to pay down the deficit.  read more »

I saw Charles Barron in City Hall earlier this morning and asked him what he thought of Barack Obama's trip to the Middle East.

Barron said he's unhappy to hear that Obama wants to send more troops into Afghanistan, but at least, in Barron's opinion, Obama is using his time better than John McCain.

Nuri al-Maliki was once dismissed as a powerless politician with a fleeting grip on his office. Now, though, the Iraqi prime minister is apparently strong enough to change the fundamental terms of the war debate in the U.S. presidential election in a way that dramatically improves Barack Obama’s standing on the issue.

A few weeks ago, Mr. Maliki began hinting publicly that he’d favor some kind of timeline for the departure of American troops in Iraq. Then last weekend he went further – much further – telling Der Spiegel that he wanted the Americans out “as soon as possible” and that Obama’s call for a 16-month phased redeployment of U.  read more »

Michael Bloomberg wants to hear where Barack Obama stands on the issue of free trade, he said earlier today, adding that he thinks John McCain has “a better record on this issue.”

Bloomberg was speaking across the street from City Hall, where the Consumer Electronics Association launched a nationwide bus tour advocating free trade with Colombia, among other countries.

“I think that John McCain has a better record on this issue than Barack Obama,” Bloomberg said. McCain, Bloomberg said, advocates “trading with the only ally we have left in Latin America, namely Colombia.”

“I’d like to hear a lot more from him about how he thinks we could reopen NAFTA without becoming a big loser in that,” the mayor added.  read more »

Last week presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama contributed an op-ed to The New York Times headlined "My Plan for Iraq."

In it, Senator Obama wrote:

Unlike Senator John McCain, I opposed the war in Iraq before it began, and would end it as president. I believed it was a grave mistake to allow ourselves to be distracted from the fight against Al Qaeda and the Taliban by invading a country that posed no imminent threat and had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks.

According to The Drudge Report, Mr. Obama's Republican rival, Senator John McCain, attempted to file a rebuttal but didn't make it past The Times editorial board.  read more »

There’s a conventional view that John McCain faces an impossible political balancing act.

He badly needs his party’s conservative base to stand with him in November, but that base doesn’t particularly like or trust him. However, if he reins in his more moderate instincts and caters to these activists with the purity and intensity they demand, he’ll do irreparable harm to his standing with independent voters. And, especially with the number of Republican-identifying voters dwindling, victory this fall is unthinkable without substantial independent support.

But is McCain’s predicament problem with his base actually as dire as all that? The most recent data from Gallup, whose daily tracking poll has shown McCain within a few points of Barack Obama for weeks now, has him winning conservative Republicans – that is to say, the Republican base – by a 90-6 percent margin.  read more »

Last Thursday, former Vice President Al Gore joined the many voices that have been calling for a crash program-a "moon-shot" national effort to get us off of fossil fuels. Senator Obama applauded the speech saying "For decades, Al Gore has challenged the skeptics in Washington on climate change and awakened the conscience of a nation to the urgency of this threat."

At the moment, neither Senator Obama nor Senator McCain are taking as aggressive a position as Gore is taking. The energy industry doesn't know how to deal with this newest energy crisis. At the heart of the discussion is the impact of our current energy practices on our economic well-being and on national security.  read more »

Two radically different story lines are emerging in the presidential race, depending on what kind of poll you look at.

If you look at the national-level data, Barack Obama seems to be underachieving. In the latest Gallup daily tracking poll, the presumptive Democratic nominee holds a scant two-point edge over John McCain. The margin is also two points in Rasmussen's daily poll—which also shows a dead-even race when "leaners" are factored in. Some other recent polls have been a little more favorable to Obama, but the combined weight of the available national data strongly suggests that Obama, despite his personal popularity and the enormous built-in advantages his party enjoys this year, is locked in a much closer race than he should be.  read more »

In a new seven-minute Web video, John McCain does to Barack Obama what the D.N.C. and progressive groups have been doing to McCain for some time now, juxtaposing various statements Obama has made about Iraq to show how his position has changed.

Also, there's much, much more of that trippy music.

Last week, I pretty much wrote off the idea that John McCain will offer his running-mate slot to Mitt Romney. I probably shouldn't have. (Talk about a flip-flop ...)

My reason for dismissing Romney was simple: The political style he exhibited in his own presidential campaign -- abandoning just about all previously held principles in an effort to hew to every conservative interest group's issues checklist -- fundamentally violated McCain's sense of propriety and honor. This went far beyond, in my estimation, the usual hurt feelings and sour grapes that campaigns produce. So why, I asked, with all the options that he has, would McCain actually give Romney his No.  read more »

The $52 million the Obama campaign raised in June is a good deal more than John McCain's $22 million, and much better than the $30 million number reported earlier in the week, which an Obama bundler had advised me was very low.

But the relevant bar is really whether it’s enough to fund the 50-state, mega-scale campaign Obama is running, and enough, compared with what McCain has, to make up for the loss of public financing.

At least in the opinion of one Democratic consultant I spoke to today, it is.

The consultant, speaking on background, said the total amount of money at Obama's disposal, when combined with the D.  read more »

John McCain addressed the 99th annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People late Wednesday morning, hours after the release of a new poll that gives him a favorable rating of just 5 percent among black voters. After airing some of his remarks, the cable news channels took up the subject of McCain’s apparent play for the black vote and the difficulties he faces in pursuing it.

But these discussions miss the point. McCain has no chance of making inroads with black voters; in fact, he’ll almost certainly fare worse among blacks than any presidential candidate in the modern era.  read more »

After saying yesterday that he is seeking a nuclear weapons-free world, Barack Obama expanded on his security program today with a speech that lays out a plan for "cyber security" and an anti-bioterrorism program.

He cited the report from the 9/11 Commission, which described a "failure of imagination" in preparing for terrorist attacks.

Here's the text:

Remarks of Senator Barack Obama—as prepared for delivery
Summit on Confronting New Threats
Purdue University
July 16, 2008

It’s great to be back in Indiana with such a terrific group of experts. In a few moments, we’ll open this up to a discussion, but first I’ll make a few comments about some of the emerging threats that we face in the 21st century, and offer some ideas about how we can face those threats.  read more »

• 6 comments

John McCain has a love-hate relationship with immigration reform. Or rather, he loves immigration reform but the conservative base hates it. That becomes apparent whenever he talks about it.

McCain and his conservative critics learned different lessons from the ill-fated attempt in 2007 to create a comprehensive immigration reform scheme. Conservative opponents of immigration reform interpreted the defeat of the Bush immigration plan as proof certain that opposition to legalization for illegal immigrants was a winning argument and that the public had embraced a border-security-only plan.

But McCain saw it differently. He survived a near-political death experience and then came back from the political grave to win the nomination of the G.  read more »

Here's Joe Biden on an Obama campaign conference call earlier arguing that John McCain had no idea what he's talking about when it comes to foreign policy:

"Quite frankly, I've known John for over 32 years. I don't understand anything about John's policy here. John talks about the central concern is the war on terror yet it's in Afghanistan. Al Qaeda, we know where they live, where they're building, it's in Afghanistan and Pakistan. And John's policy in Iraq prevents us from having a larger strategy to deal with that."

Asked what he thought of McCain's idea that Iraq could one day have a level of American troop presence like that in Korea, Biden said, "I love John, he has been my friend for 33 years.  read more »

The McCain campaign just responded, with a conference call, to Barack Obama's rearticulated plan for an end to the war in Iraq by arguing that Obama's intention to withdraw troops, despite the security improvements, amounts to political posturing, and that he is more concerned with winning the presidential election than winning the war.

Senator Lindsey Graham, one of McCain's chief surrogates, said that Obama was sending this message to American soldiers returning from Iraq: "Appreciate your service, but you didn't do any good."

Obama has always carefully couched his calls for withdrawal from Iraq with talk of the heroism of American troops, and has blamed a lack of political progress in Iraq, which is what the surge was supposed to accomplish, for many of the country's problems.  read more »

In theory, John McCain’s poll numbers should be improving right along with the news out of Iraq.

Just a year ago, daily news coverage was dominated by pictures and descriptions of carnage and chaos, and McCain seemed doomed: Even if he won the Republican nomination (which itself seemed a remote possibility last summer), his intimate association with the war and the widely criticized troop “surge” would surely render him electoral poison in the 2008 general election.

Today, violence in Iraq has dropped measurably (though it still persists), foreign fighters who previously flocked to the country have turned their sights elsewhere, and Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, once dismissed as a timid prime minister whose political impotence was symptomatic of broad governmental dysfunction, has consolidated his power, asserted his authority over some extremist groups, and in the last week has actually begun calling for an informal timetable for a U.  read more »

"There may be somebody special here today," said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Barack Obama's sister, upon observing the large audience in the Hilton ballroom this morning. Then she abruptly added, "Two somebodies."

It seems the Obama family is having a hard time remembering Hillary Clinton this week. Last night, Obama painfully forgot to make an appeal for the cancellation of Clinton's debt to his supporters at a fund-raiser that was billed as a unity event in which he would make an appeal for the cancellation of Clinton's debt. This morning, in front of roughly 2,000 donors, mostly women, who had donated between $200 and $23,000 to a variety of Obama-related funds, the two former rivals appeared together to argue that equal pay and rights for women was a crucial aspect of any plan for American progress, and that party unity was a critical step to winning in November.  read more »

The case for Mitt Romney as John McCain’s running mate is strong and very easy to make.

He’s well known, popular with the party base, a strong performer on television, and would bring big bucks, vigor and youth (or at least the appearance of it – he is 61, after all) to a Republican ticket that desperately needs all three. Plus, Romney’s corporate background would offer badly needed cover to McCain on the economy, while his family name could boost the ticket in Michigan and his Mormon faith could help in Colorado and Nevada. Factor in the apparent lack of all-star VP options for McCain, and the former Massachusetts governor’s prospects only seem to brighten.  read more »

The night of Wednesday, July 9, was supposed to be when Barack Obama appealed directly to his supporters to help Hillary Clinton erase her campaign debt.

But he almost forgot to do it.

After finishing his speech to a room full of New York donors at the Grand Hyatt without any mention of helping Clinton with her debt, reporters ran over to Obama's spokeswoman Jen Psaki, who was already spinning hard that Obama's failure to make a pitch was no big deal. ("He said a lot of things," she said.) Then the music stopped and Obama, very awkwardly, started speaking again.

"Hold on a second, guys -- I was getting a little carried away," he began.  read more »

John Edwards could have taken the Jim Webb route when NPR grilled him yesterday about his interest in reprising his role as the Democratic vice presidential nominee, but instead he said this: "I am prepared to seriously consider anything, anything he asks me to do for our country."

If Barack Obama were to choose Edwards, it would create an unusual situation in American politics. Very rarely does a losing vice presidential nominee land on someone else's ticket in a future election. Edwards would be the fourth person ever to do this, and the first since 1916.

The others:  read more »

Yesterday, Barack Obama lost one of his better V.P. options when Jim Webb backed out of the running, apparently deciding that the rigorous vetting process and the intense scrutiny of a national campaign weren’t for him.  read more »

Around the same time, one of John McCain’s most intriguing options might also have removed herself – but not intentionally. That would be Carly Fiorina, whose nonchalant mentions of Viagra and birth control at a breakfast with reporters yesterday are reverberating in the blogosphere today, seemingly confirming the conventional wisdom that the ousted Hewlett Packard C.E.O. would simply be too risky an addition to the G.O.P.’s national ticket.

I made the mistake of watching some of the T.V. coverage of the Presidential campaign last night—I guess that's what happens when the Yankees have the night off and I'm too tired to do anything else. Listening to the commentary is mind numbing and most of it ranges from misleading to out and out inaccurate.

As I watched these candidates move around in the security and media bubble of the modern Presidential campaign I was thinking that they must feel as if they've been abducted by aliens. Poor Barack Obama-he's going to travel to Iraq so he mentioned that while he was there he might listen to what the military folks have to say.  read more »

I’m noticing a pattern here: Some outfit conducts a poll, throws Bob Barr’s name into the mix, and reports back that the former Georgia congressman and current Libertarian presidential nominee is scoring somewhere in the mid-single-digits. Then, a bunch of news outlets run the same basic story about how Barr is poised to play the spoiler this year. Here are three such stories just from the past few days. Believe me, there are – and will be – plenty of others.

Maybe we need some perspective here.

Yes, it is theoretically possible that this election will come down to a handful of votes in one state, in which case the support that Barr receives – or that any other third-party candidate receives, for that matter – could theoretically swing the election.  read more »

John Kerry said over the weekend that John McCain lacks the judgment to be President, leading the Associated Press to note, quite appropriately, that “it’s probably a good thing McCain rejected overtures from Kerry…to form a bipartisan ticket” in 2004.

But the context of Kerry’s verbal attack is much broader than that.

The story of the McCain-Kerry used to be almost heartwarming, a tale of post-Vietnam reconciliation between two veterans whose experiences led them to remarkably different conclusions about the war and the government that sent them into it.  read more »

This is not the worst way to change the subject. On Sunday, the New York Times reported that preparations for August’s Democratic convention have been “marred by costly setbacks and embarrassing delays” and that organizers might be forced to scale back their plans. But this morning, all anyone is talking about is Barack Obama’s decision to deliver an open-air acceptance speech in front of more than 75,000 partisans.

The timing is probably (mostly) a coincidence.  read more »

This morning, The Politico ran an innocuous-seeming story in which a series of unnamed Republican consultants and strategists – with the exception of Ed Rollins, who went on the record – took turn taking shots at various aspects of the McCain campaign’s strategy.

The story didn’t seem particularly surprising, given (a) McCain’s underdog status in the presidential race, which automatically makes many Republicans uneasy; and (b) the general willingness of unnamed consultants and “strategists” to use the cloak of anonymity to tell the world how much better Campaign X would be if they were running the show.  read more »

The speech Barack Obama gave today on the role of faith-based initiatives in his administration is bound to win over some of the Christian voters the campaign thinks it can poach from the Republican Party.

It may also irritate some of his socially liberal supporters, who are already distressed over his move to the center. Also, the phrase "faith-based initiative" is, at least for now, firmly linked to the current president. (Although the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives was a cornerstone of of George W. Bush's platform, Obama said Bush's program "never fulfilled its promise" and pledged to get rid of it entirely and start his own.  read more »

I'm on vacation this week, enjoying the sun, surf and sand here in Long Beach New York, where we've had a small summer home since 1987. I'm on the West End of town, where the biggest problem over the last few years has been the proliferation of second and third cars and the difficulty of parking on the narrow and crowded streets: Until this summer. This summer the big news is the price of gasoline. In the last year and a half, the price of gasoline has doubled. In January, 2007 gasoline was less than $2.20 a gallon, today it is well over $4.  read more »

Here's Obama's second national TV ad, which, like the last one, will air in 18 states (although unlike the last one, it's only 30 seconds long, not a minute).

It's Obama's pitch to blue-collar workers and conservative Democrats. He says he's offering job creation, health care, tax cuts for "workers." Perhaps most notably, this spot delivers the message that Obama is also a worker.

UPDATE: Ambinder points out that the claims in the ad about Obama's welfare-to-work qualifications are a bit on the overblown side.

Glance at practically any public analysis of John McCain’s vice presidential options and you’ll find the name of Tim Pawlenty mentioned prominently. The 47-year-old second-term Minnesota governor is, supposedly, at or near the top of McCain’s shortlist.

There is certainly some logic to this. First, Pawlenty is loyal – he sided with McCain early and unflinchingly stuck with him last summer, when everyone else in the world seemed to give up on him – and McCain likes loyalty. Second, Pawlenty would balance McCain’s advanced age and maverick streak with (relative) youthfulness and more appeal to the Republican base.

Plus, he’d offer the chance to pick up Minnesota, a state that the G.  read more »

UNITY, N.H. – A remarkable event, and well-staged.

Hillary Clinton showed up in a blue pantsuit. Barack Obama was jacketless, with a blue tie.

Clinton was first to the mic, in front of a lively crowd of thousands gathered on gently sloping grass next to the local elementary school. A large old-style sign, perhaps 25 feet tall, spelled out "Unity" at one side of the arena --just in front of a huge, crane-hoisted American flag.

Unity, Clinton said, is not just a beautiful place but a "wonderful feeling.” She looked forward to Barack Obama taking the oath of office. He looked a bit bashful on his stool.  read more »

Justice Kennedy started the fireworks. As the deciding vote in the landmark Supreme Court decision which extended habeas corpus rights to detainees held at Guantánamo he not only made legal history -- he set off one of the heated debates of the presidential campaign. John McCain argued that Barack Obama is weak on terror. Obama argued that McCain is George Bush revisited.

If you redacted the names you might think it was 2004 and the candidates were George W. Bush and John Kerry. Back then Kerry accused his opponent of frittering away America’s reputation and disregarding the sensibilities of the international community. Bush derided Kerry for being soft on terror and holding America hostage to the “international test.  read more »

Who says John McCain's web operation isn't hip?

After the McCain campaign's "Dr. No" hit on Barack Obama for what they depict as his naysayer approach to energy solutions got a modicum of traction in the press, the campaign has produced a short web video called Dr. No.  read more »

The spot includes a series of Obama's remarks disapproving of various proposals to address the energy crisis, with a soundtrack obviously intended to evoke the James Bond theme. The typography, orange and green backgrounds and psychedelic circles around Obama's head are perhaps the funkiest visuals ever used in a Republican presidential candidate's ad. At least since

The McCain campaign continues to push back on the devastating L.A. Times-Bloomberg poll that showed Barack Obama with a 15-point lead.

McCain spokesman Brian Rogers just sent out an email directing recipients to today's Gallup tracking poll, which has the two candidate tied with 45 percent of the vote.

The McCain campaign thinks that all the attention Barack Obama is putting on his opposition to the gas-tax holiday is a winner for them because the proposed holiday polls so well.

But the Obama campaign obviously thinks the issue is still worth pressing, and has now set up a new web site (or a section of his usual web site, anyway) to draw contrasts about what they are calling "The Choice on Energy: Poll-Tested Gimmicks vs. Real Solutions."

John McCain used to be Lincoln Chafee’s kind of Republican.

In 2001, Mr. McCain and Mr. Chafee were the only two Republican senators to vote against George Bush’s tax cuts.

Now, Mr. McCain favors making them permanent, and Mr. Chafee thinks the Arizona senator has lost the right to call himself a maverick.

“Technically, the definition of maverick in the dictionary is an unbranded calf, which is appropriate—you got no brand on your flank,” said Mr. Chafee, a former Republican moderate from Rhode Island who lost his seat to a Democrat in 2006 and switched to independent. “McCain just made a calculated decision to pander.  read more »

In light of the news that Barack Obama will be appearing with Hillary Clinton in Unity, New Hampshire on Friday, it's worth noting that Obama has already started borrowing from Clinton's campaign rhetoric.

"Germany, a country as cloudy as the Pacific Northwest, is now a world leader in the solar power industry and the quarter million new jobs it has created," Obama said today in Las Vegas.

That echoes Clinton's familiar, and sharper, line about Germany's solar power production. As she said in Fresno on October 24, "Explain to me why Germany gets more of its electricity from solar power than California.  read more »

Earlier today the Bush administration made clear they don't intend to intervene in the negotiations between the Iraqi government and several large oil companies.

Chuck Schumer, along with Claire McCaskill and John Kerry, responded quickly with a letter to Condoleezza Rice asking her to prevent the deals from going forward until there is an oil-revenue sharing law.

Both Schumer and Kerry are on the Senate Finance Committee; Kerry and McCaskill are both surrogates for Barack Obama, whose campaign has been going after John McCain for McCain's new, oil company-friendly position on offshore drilling.

Here's the release along with the letter (which, weirdly, doesn't include McCaskill's name at the end of it).  read more »