Does it matter that Sen. John McCain, (R-AZ), is, at best, a spent force who mortgaged any ideals and principles he might have had in a Faustian bargain for the Republican Party nomination for president of the United States?

It was painful watching McCain last night and then listening to the empty suit media types prattle on about how well he did. All he has left to spout are the inanities and incoherent babble he spewed haltingly last night.

Sen. Barack Obama, the Democratic Party nominee, needs to stick to the issues. Hit them hard. Stay on message for the next 60 days talking about issues that affect ordinary Americans and how to begin to repair the damage wrought by Pres. George W. Bush and his minions. Don’t engage these idiot Republicans. Talk to the American people about the future and how he would get the nation out of the morass the Republicans have created the past eight years.

The Republicans cannot, must not win on Nov. 4, 2008.

If I had to pick one word to summarize my impression of Gov. Palin’s speech tonight, it would be “shrill.” It was a fiercely partisan speech, a mocking speech, a culture-war speech. It was ably written and ably delivered, but it came with a sneer. While it may be the kind of speech that plays well in the convention hall, I have my doubts about its ability to persuade the shrinking number of undecideds remaining to vote for a McCain-Palin ticket. We’ll see.

What may be most significant about the speech, however, could be what it portends for the fall campaign. Palin’s goal, it seems to me, was pretty simple: make common folk dislike the Democrats again. It was a speech very loosely grounded in fact but deeply rooted in division. She threw around the old canards (and some new ones, too) with aplomb. I think this is a sign that we may be in for a bitterly negative campaign.

On that level, I’d have to pronounce the speech a success. Palin proved herself to be at least a decent attack dog. One needn’t have any foreign policy experience to fill that role and fill it well. She came out swinging and never let up.

Democrats who’ve scoffed at her will have to think again. Obama’s weakness since the beginning has been his inability or unwillingness to throw an effective counterpunch. Unless his campaign quickly figures out a way to do that against a self-professed Hockey Mom, I think we just might have been looking tonight at the next Vice President of the United States.

UPDATE:  A conventional wisdom seems to be emerging that this was a speech designed to energize the GOP base.  I disagree. By and large, I think the base is energized by Sarah Palin already.  To me, this was a speech designed to drive up Obama’s negatives with swing voters.  The only question is whether she succeeded and will succeed despite the ugly sneer that accompanied her negative broadsides.

Cross-posted from Facebook

What some conservatives are saying about the Palin selection

TalkingPointsMemo had a the transcript …

Chuck Todd: Mike Murphy, lots of free advice, we’ll see if Steve Schmidt and the boys were watching. We’ll find out on your blackberry. Tonight voters will get their chance to hear from Sarah Palin and she will get the chance to show voters she’s the right woman for the job Up next, one man who’s already convinced and he’ll us why Gov. Jon Huntsman.

(cut away)

Peggy Noonan: Yeah.

Mike Murphy: You know, because I come out of the blue swing state governor world: Engler, Whitman, Tommy Thompson, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush. I mean, these guys — this is how you win a Texas race, just run it up. And it’s not gonna work. And –

PN: It’s over.

MM: Still McCain can give a version of the Lieberman speech to do himself some good.

CT: I also think the Palin pick is insulting to Kay Bailey Hutchinson, too.

PN: Saw Kay this morning.

CT: Yeah, she’s never looked comfortable about this –

MM: They’re all bummed out.

CT: Yeah, I mean is she really the most qualified woman they could have turned to?

PN: The most qualified? No! I think they went for this — excuse me– political bullshit about narratives –

CT: Yeah they went to a narrative.

MM: I totally agree.

PN: Every time the Republicans do that, because that’s not where they live and it’s not what they’re good at, they blow it.

MM: You know what’s really the worst thing about it? The greatness of McCain is no cynicism, and this is cynical.

CT: This is cynical, and as you called it, gimmicky.

MM: Yeah.

You good readers have to know that I have been reluctant to say much about this Sarah Palin mess. Needless to say, the selection by John McCain of this untested, unprepared governor is reckless, irresponsible and downright cynical.

At 72 years old, McCain is one of the oldest candidates to run for the presidency. Sen. McCain’s father died of a heart attack at 70 and his grandfather died of a heart attack at 60. McCain himself has survived four skin cancers (melanomas), including one in 2000 that was classified as Stage IIa.

As someone pointed out the other day, McCain has never had an Alzeheimer test, a grave oversight when you consider 13% of Americans over 65 have Alzheimer’s.

My point is this: Because of all these factors, McCain, who has been sloganeering that he is running for the presidency to put “country first,” owed the nation an unquestionably and superbly qualified vice presidential nominee.

Forget the scandals that have dogged Palin since she stepped into the arena. The fact is that she is a horrible choice because she is not qualified to be president of the United States. When we vote for McCain, because of his advanced age and health history, we’re also voting, this time more than at any time in the nation’s history, for his vice presidential pick as President of the United States.

Palin is so far out of the mainstream it does the term injustice to call her a conservative. She is a fringe right wing lunatic. Her postion on reproductive freedom is extreme, including cutting off funds to unwed teen mothers in her state. She says yes to creationism and denies global warming. She hounded out of a job a state police superintendent because he would not help her pursue a vendetta against an ex-brother-in-law by firing him.

I mean, Sarah Palin and her husband at one time or another belonged to a group that wanted Alaska to secede from the United States.

I am sorry to say this but, if the McCain-Palin ticket wins office, there’ll be no hope left for this country. No hope not because they won but that people voted for them.

In an interview with The New Yorker magazine two weeks before Sen. John McCain picked her as his running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin was sounding very much like an Obamacan:

Before she was running against him, Sarah Palin—the governor of Alaska and now the Republican candidate for Vice-President of the United States—thought it was pretty neat that Barack Obama was edging ahead of John McCain in her usually solidly red state. After all, she said, Obama’s campaign was using the same sort of language that she had in her gubernatorial race. “The theme of our campaign was ‘new energy,’ ” she said recently. “It was no more status quo, no more politics as usual, it was all about change. So then to see that Obama—literally, part of his campaign uses those themes, even, new energy, change, all that, I think, O.K., well, we were a little bit ahead on that.” She also noted, “Something’s kind of changing here in Alaska, too, for being such a red state on the Presidential level. Obama’s doing just fine in polls up here, which is kind of wigging people out, because they’re saying, ‘This hasn’t happened for decades that in polls the D’ ”—the Democratic candidate—“ ‘is doing just fine.’ To me, that’s indicative, too. It’s the no-more-status-quo, it’s change.”

Continue . . .

New York Times Op-Ed columnist Gail Collins had interesting thoughts on Sen. John McCain selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate:

It is conceivable that some people will think John McCain picked Sarah Palin to be his running mate because she is a woman. I know you find this shocking, but I swear I have heard it mentioned.

McCain does not believe in pandering to identity politics. He was looking for someone who was well prepared to fight against international Islamic extremism, the transcendent issue of our time. And in the end he decided that in good conscience, he was not going to settle for anyone who had not been commander of a state national guard for at least a year and a half. He put down his foot!

The obvious choice was Palin, the governor of Alaska, whose guard stands as our last best defense against possible attack by the resurgent Russian menace across the Bering Strait.

Continue . . .

Longtime readers will remember that Sarah Palin was on my early short list for McCain. I said back in June that she might be a good pick if McCain found himself behind in the polls and needed a Hail Mary pass. Now that he’s made the pick, how does it look?

First, Palin is undoubtedly qualified to be president and vice president. The Constitution sets those qualifications in Article II, Section 1. One need only be (1) a natural-born citizens; (2) at least 35 years old; and (3) a resident of the U.S. for at least 14 years. There’s no question that she meets those qualifications.

There’s also no question that she has plenty of experience. As many people have pointed out since Friday, Palin has been in elected or appointed office since 1992 — a year after Obama graduated from law school. That’s nearly as much experience as John McCain himself. If you count her experience on the PTA, as McCain says we should, her experience is almost Biden-esque.

The real question is the quality of that experience. Does Palin’s experience — a city councilor and then mayor of small town, energy commissioner, and 18 months as governor — make her ready to be president? The answer to that question is largely in the eye of the beholder, but I think it’ll be a tough sell to the American public. It might have been easier to sell over time with a longer roll-out, but the surprise pick makes it particularly difficult.

There’s also Troopergate. Although the facts remain somewhat in dispute, it seems pretty clear that Palin has, on at least one occasion, abused the official power of her office to get someone fired and then lied to cover it up. The first instance happened when she was mayor of small town. The most recent incident happened this summer, when she fired the chief of the state police for refusing to fire the estranged husband of her sister-in-law who was then a state trooper. She’ll probably be deposed and possibly censured in Troopergate during the fall campaign.

And then there’s Palin’s positions on the issues. To the extent that she has positions on national issues, they’re to the right of McCain. Her positions on abortion and contraception, in particular, are closer to Mike Huckabee’s than McCain’s. (Indeed, Huckabee has released a statement praising the Palin pick.) That’s why James Dobson and the religious right are so delighted in her selection.

In the end, I think the pick is more important for what it says about John McCain than for anything it says about Sarah Palin. It showed us all that he’s ready to shoot from the hip on day one. According to recent articles in the NYT and Washington Post, he made the pick after meeting her only once last February and without vetting her at all. That’s not the kind of approach to serious issues that most Americans are going to want.

The pick also showed us, I think, that McCain put politics ahead of governing. This was a choice from identity politics, pure and simple — a big gamble that Palin’s gender and religious conservatism will attract enough votes in a few key swing states to win the election. For all the things that one can say about Sarah Palin, one thing you can’t say is that she knows how to get legislation through the U.S. congress.

And, finally, the Palin pick showed us that McCain will say anything to get elected. For the last six months, McCain has argued that Obama is dangerously unprepared. By picking someone with even less foreign policy experience than Obama, that argument now looks disingenuous in the extreme. As far as I can tell, Palin’s foreign policy experience consists entirely of a family vacation to Ireland and Alaska’s geographic proximity to Russia and Canada.

I said on Friday that I was delighted by McCain’s choice. I’m even happier now that more facts are coming out.

What are your thoughts?

Have you seen People magazine’s exclusive photo of the McCain and Palin families?

Four members of the McCain and Palin familes are absent from the photo. Palin’s eldest son, Track, and McCain’s youngest son, Jimmy, are in the military and on deployment. McCain’s older son, Jack, is at the Naval Academy.

Where’s Bridget McCain?

Bridget is the McCain’s adopted daughter. She’s originally from Bangladesh and is very brown-skinned. She’s 17 years old — older than three of Palin’s children who appear in the photo and the same age as the fourth.

Are the McCains ashamed of their brown child?

Cross-posted from Facebook.

Let’s give the McCain campaign credit for one thing: They sure know how to steal the Democrats’ thunder.

Democrats dominated the nation’s attention this week with their convention, culminating with their historic affirmation of Barack Obama as the first African-American to nominated for president by a major political party. Sen. Obama punctuated that with what has been generally hailed as a successful acceptance speech in front of some 80,000 rapturous supporters in Denver last night.

It was, in short, a very good week for Democrats.

The Republicans, who hold their convention next week, have detonated a political bombshell that will sweep away attention from Democrats and undercut some of the historic nature of Obama’s ascent with their pick of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain’s running mate. More than the obvious ploy of picking a woman in hope of stealing some of the still miffed supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, it is the attention-grabbing nature of the pick that is astounding.

I am not saying that Gov. Palin is either qualified to be president, or that she is a good pick for Sen. John McCain. I am saying that for today, at least, she helps Republicans shift attention for the Democratic ticket.

The incredible thing is that Palin exposes a significant weakness in the Democratic ticket. McCain’s pick of Palin shows now that Obama was not wise to pick Joe Biden as his running mate. Those disaffected Hillary voters can now vote for the McCain-Palin ticket in some good conscience. The Republicans found a woman who was good enough when Democrats couldn’t. I’m not saying Obama should have picked Hillary. But she is not the only woman in the country.

By not picking Kathleen Sebelius or any of the number of qualified women around this nation, Obama left the door open for McCain to make this play.

Some of abhorrently sexist manner in which Hillary was treated during the primaries and caucuses, especially by the media, has pissed off a sizeable number of her supporters.

That Palin is a conservative Christian who is anti-choice and disagrees with Hillary on virtually every issue is not lost on me. Her supporters have a legitimate grievance that the Obama campaign did not pay enough attention to. Now Democrats may pay in November. I just know that women will now vote for the Republican tickets in some states in numbers significant enough to make a difference come Nov. 4.

The campaign of John McCain for president of the United States has been lurking in the gutter these past several weeks.

Karl Rove’s henchmen, when they took over the faltering McCain campaign, they quickly surmised that they could not win on the issues. The American voters would not trust Republicans to fix the mess the party has made of the economy and America’s moral leadership in the world.

To win, they figured, they have to get in the sewer and throw sludge at Sen. Barack Obama and throw sludge they have, heckling Obama at every turn, peddling trivia and inane arguments. No matter how stupid, the McCain people with wield it. No matter how insane, McCain will come in at the end to say he approved of this message.

It’s quite a Faustian bargain: Some see McCain as a honorable man, a man of integrity. I’ve never felt that. Here is a man who sold his office to Charles Keating and cost the American taxpayers billions of dollars by running interference for him with federal regulators.

McCain not only cheated on the wife who waited at home for him during his five years in captivity, he threw her over for a much younger woman with a hefty bank account. McCain effectively abandoned his first wife and the family she was helping him raise.

How could anyone consider him a man of integrity?

Word is out this evening that Sen. McCain is finalizing his vice-presidential pick tonight. Because we may know as soon as tomorrow who he’s chosen, it’s now or never for another round of veepstakes.

If I were advising McCain, here’s who would be on my suggested short list:

Tom Ridge
Kay Bailey Hutchinson

As a Democrat, those are the only two that I think could be game-changing. Tom Ridge might piss off the lunatic fringe, but I just don’t think that they’d abandon the party at the end of the day. Not for a guy who’s going to be spending the next four years going to funerals.

Hutchinson, in my view, has almost no downside. She’s not an excellent campaigner, but I don’t think that’s a big deal in this campaign. McCain’s best hope of attracting die-hard Clintonites is to pick a woman, and Hutchinson’s the best of the bunch. She might also present a good contrast to Biden in the debates. Hutchinson is the pick that I fear the most.

Alaska Governor Sarah Palin is worthy of serious consideration, but she arguably wouldn’t meet the ready-to-be-president criterion. I don’t think she gets McCain anything that Hutchinson doesn’t get him already.

Meg Whitman might also be worthy of serious consideration. But her inexperience and at least questionable record at eBay could be liabilities. She also doesn’t get McCain much that Hutchinson doesn’t get him already.

Finally, Mike Pence and Rob Portman might also be worthy short-listers. I have long thought that Pence would be an excellent candidate, but he’s almost completely unknown. He’s the Chet Edwards of the GOP veepstakes. Mike who? Portman is a solid if uninspiring choice. He’s got economic experience, but that could be a liability — it might be seen as a pick from weakness rather than strength.

Although McCain has some good choices, my guess is that he’s going to go for Mitt Romney or Tim Pawlenty. For some reason, the conventional wisdom sees both candidates as relatively safe picks. My guess is that the McCain camp feels pretty good about their current position in the polls, and they don’t want to rock the boat. I think that’s a mistake.

Romney has an almost unique ability to inspire loathing. People don’t like him. Even though he holds all the right positions for the Republican electorate, he came in third in the primaries. Pawlenty has an amazing ability to inspire sleep and would look like a dope next to Biden.

I think McCain really wants to pick Joseph Lieberman, but he’ll realize in the end that Traitor Joe would be more repulsive to his base than he can handle. Lieberman gets him little that Ridge doesn’t and pisses off more people.

Wild cards include David Petraeus and Eric Cantor.

Who do I, as a Democrat, want McCain to pick? If Jeb Bush and Dick Cheney are unavailable, I’d be delighted if McCain picks Romney, Mike Huckabee, Rudy Giuliani, or Carly Fiorina.

Who do you think McCain should pick? Who do you think he will pick?

Cross-posted from Facebook.

It is obvious in this campaign that you cannot question McCain about anything without him bringing up the fact that he was a prisoner of war in Vietnam.

When I was a young newspaper reporter (a nerdy one, at that) at The Record in Hackensack, N.J., one of the journalists I looked up to was Michael Powell. Mr. Powell was then at New York Newsday but he had passed through The Record in what was becoming an itinerant career, with stops at Newsday, the Washington Post and now The New York Times.

When some of us would get discouraged about something in journalism, we would reach for some of Mr. Powell’s old stories, particularly his profile of Frank E. Rogers, the long-serving mayor of Harrison, N.J. His stories in The Record and Newsday gave us hope. He was the writer we aspired to be when we grew up as reporters.

I recount this to say that Michael Powell is a phenomenal reporter and a great writer.

I don’t know whether Mr. Powell aspired to a career at The Times (as most of us did) but we heard that he turned down The Times to go to the Washington Post when New York Newsday imploded. Some writers have been known to spurn the stultifying culture of The Times, some of them preferring the Post (Washington) and the Los Angeles Times.

In any case, Mr. Powell is at The Times now and The Times that he comes to, though still a colossus, is somewhat tarnished, prone to getting in its own way. And the Mr. Powell that I now read in that newspaper seems different. His work here, especially covering the candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama for the Democratic Party nomination and for the presidency of the United States, has bothered me at times.

Which is a long way to come around to what I want to say, which is that I enjoyed immensely Mr. Powell’s “American Wanderer . . . “ piece in Sunday’s “This Week In Review” section. The piece is well researched and well written. In fact, it may be over-written, especially the opening section:

That an air of the enigmatic attends Barack Obama is a commonplace; he is a man of fractured geography and family and wanderings.

He came of age in far corners, Indonesia and Hawaii, went to schools on both coasts and landed in Chicago, where he had no blood tie. With talent and ambition, he has leapt for the presidency at a tender age and will go to Denver to claim his Democratic nomination for the office.

There is to Mr. Obama’s story a Steinbeck quality, like so many migratory American tales: the mother who flickers in and out; the absent and iconic father; the grandfather, raised in the roughneck Kansas oil town of El Dorado, who moves the family restlessly, ceaselessly westward.

The American DNA encodes wanderlust ambition, and a romance clings to Mr. Obama’s story. The roamer who would make himself and his land anew is a familiar archetype.

And yet to describe such a man as rootless, as some people do, can stir up more questions, and an ambivalence reflected in the answers. What is rootlessness anyway? The word connotes something both celebrated and feared. Early on in Mr. Obama’s time in Chicago, the Democratic machine types would ask of this preternaturally calm young pol: Who sent him?

That question, probing and suspicious, has tendrils extending deep into our history. Again and again in American culture, the rootless outsider becomes an insider, and begins to guard his prize.

First he has to find that prize. For four centuries hope and despair pushed immigrants to these shores. Royalist Cavaliers found in the Virginias a new hierarchy. Puritans spread insistently across not always fruitful lands of New England. The Highlands English and Scots no sooner landed in Philadelphia in the 18th century than they lit out for the hills of Pennsylvania and down the mountain ridges of the Appalachians. In their sackcloth and baggy trousers, they were unceremonious and warlike wanderers.

“When I get ready to move, I just shut the door, call the dogs and get started,” is a Highlands saying transposed to a new world. The historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued in 1893 in his influential “Frontier Thesis” that the key to American vitality could be found in this relentless, drifting movement.

My only quibble with this section is that what Mr. Powell claims as a uniquelly American trait is actually a universal one. It transcends every culture. It is the linchpin of every fairy tale, adventure, or fantasy, from “Beowulf” to “Harry Potter” and everything in between.

Every society fears-lionizes the stranger who by dint of talent, vision, unique strength, or magically power overcomes to lead.

After this immensely enjoyable, yet strained, opening, the piece settles down and reaches some surprising conclusions:

Of the two nominees, Sen. John McCain has been the more peripatetic figure, with Obama the more rooted one. Obama is the one who sought out community and has stayed in one place, Chicago, for two decades. He is the one who is not divorced and has raised a family with his wife while Mr. McCain abandoned one family to marry a much younger and wealthier woman.

I hope Mr. Powell stays and that his career flourishes at The Times. I want him to take everything that is good about the place without being infected by its many maladies.

Both Frank Rich and Bob Herbert had sound advice for the presidential campaign of Sen. Barack Obama on the Op-ed pages of the New York Times this weekend.

Echoing the theme of an essay I’m working on and still hoping to post, Herbert weighed in on Saturday with advice that Obama hew close to economic themes:

I’m all for thoughtful, reasonable, even cerebral candidates. John Wayne has had way too much influence on our politics. (“Bring ’em on.” “Bomb, bomb Iran.”) But if ever there was a presidential campaign that cried out for a populist’s passion, this is it.

The last eight years have been calamitous. We’re struggling with two wars, one of which we never should have started. The economy has tanked big time. The housing market has collapsed and foreclosures have skyrocketed.

Motorists are reeling from high gasoline prices. The financial-services sector is teetering like a skyscraper in an earthquake. Robust budget surpluses have morphed into deficits stretching to the horizon and beyond. And cash-strapped, debt-ridden working families are viewing the future with high anxiety, if not outright fear.

Senator Obama should be invoking F.D.R., who wanted to make the U.S. “a country in which no one is left out.” And Harry Truman, who had no qualms about getting in the face of the political opposition. (“I never gave anybody hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”) And Robert Kennedy, who wanted the government to get behind a massive effort to rebuild the country and create millions of new jobs.

Senator Obama has been talking about the economy lately, but his approach has been tepid and his remedies vague. The electorate wants more. A so-so appearance in Martinsville, Va., this week warmed up considerably when Senator Obama began talking about jobs and the nation’s infrastructure.

“We need a policy to create jobs here in America,” he said. Suddenly, the crowd was paying closer attention.

That’s what Obama needs to be talking about, Herbert says.

Frank Rich points out that McCain is a man whose time has passed. That Obama needs to work the “Change we can believe in” theme that vanquished the vaunted Clinton machine.

“Change We Can Believe In” was brilliantly calculated for a Democratic familial brawl where every candidate was promising nearly identical change from George Bush. It branded Obama as the sole contender with the un-Beltway biography, credibility and political talent to link the promise of change to the nation’s onrushing generational turnover in all its cultural (and, yes, racial) manifestations. McCain should be a far easier mark than Clinton if Obama retools his act.

What we have learned this summer is this: McCain’s trigger-happy temperament and reactionary policies offer worse than no change. He is an unstable bridge back not just to Bush policies but to an increasingly distant 20th-century America that is still fighting Red China in Vietnam and the Soviet Union in the cold war. As the country tries to navigate the fast-moving changes of the 21st century, McCain would put America on hold.

After reminding Obama that the media is not his friend, that the press would highlight and amplify his presumed faults while glossing over and giving a pass to McCain on real defects, Rich offered the following advice:

What should Obama do now? As premature panic floods through certain liberal precincts, there’s no shortage of advice: more meat to his economic plan, more passion in his stump delivery, less defensiveness in response to attacks and, as is now happening, sharper darts at a McCain lifestyle so extravagant that we are only beginning to learn where all the beer bullion is buried.

But Obama is never going to be a John Edwards-style populist barnburner. (Edwards wasn’t persuasive either, by the way.) Nor will wonkish laundry lists of policy details work any better for him than they did for Al Gore or Hillary Clinton. Obama has those details to spare, in any case, while McCain, who didn’t even include an education policy on his Web site during primary season, is still winging it. As David Leonhardt observes in his New York Times Magazine cover article on “Obamanomics” today, Obama’s real problem is not a lack of detail but his inability to sell policy with “an effective story.”

That story is there to be told, but it has to be a story that is more about America and the future and less about Obama and his past. After all these months, most Americans, for better or worse, know who Obama is. So much so that he seems to have fought off the relentless right-wing onslaught to demonize him as an elitist alien. Asked in last week’sNew York Times/CBS News poll if each candidate shares their values, registered voters gave Obama and McCain an identical 63 percent. Asked if each candidate “cares about the needs and problems of people like yourself,” Obama beat McCain by 37 to 23 percent. Is the candidate “someone you can relate to”? Obama: 55 percent, McCain: 41. Even before McCain told Politico that he relies on the help to count up the houses he owns, he was the candidate seen as the out-of-step elitist.

So while Obama can continue to try to reassure resistant Clinton loyalists in Appalachia that he’s not a bogeyman from Madrassaland, he must also move on to the bigger picture for everyone else. He must rekindle the “fierce urgency of now” — but not, as he did in the primaries, merely to evoke uplifting echoes of the civil-rights struggle or the need for withdrawal from Iraq.

With his choice of vice president in place and the party convention starting this week, the real campaign is about to begin. How will we finish? Obama has to craft a message for the times, a message that will convince America to turn away from the chimera that is McCain to the real solutions that Obama offers.

The presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain in recent weeks has brandished his stint as a war prisoner every time anyone deigned to criticize the good senator. The inimitable Maureen Dowd offered a catalog:

So it’s hard to believe that John McCain is now in danger of exceeding his credit limit on the equivalent of an American Express black card. His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength — and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he’s reticent to talk about his P.O.W. experience — by flashing the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated. The captivity is already amply displayed in posters and TV advertisements.

The Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, the pastor who married Jenna Bush and who is part of a new Christian-based political action committee supporting Obama, recently criticized the joke McCain made at the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally encouraging Cindy to enter the topless Miss Buffalo Chip contest. The McCain spokesman Brian Rogers brought out the bottomless excuse, responding with asperity that McCain’s character had been “tested and forged in ways few can fathom.”

When the Obama crowd was miffed to learn that McCain was in a motorcade rather than in a “cone of silence” while Obama was being questioned by Rick Warren, Nicolle Wallace of the McCain camp retorted, “The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous.”

When Obama chaffed McCain for forgetting how many houses he owns, Rogers huffed, “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison.”

As Sam Stein notes in The Huffington Post: “The senator has even brought his military record into discussion of his music tastes. Explaining that his favorite song was ‘Dancing Queen’ by Abba, he offered that his knowledge of music ‘stopped evolving when his plane intercepted a surface-to-air missile.’ ‘Dancing Queen,’ however, was produced in 1975, eight years after McCain’s plane was shot down.”

It is an all-around excuse for Bad Boy McCain. He could commit adultery and engage in rank political corruption because, you guessed it, he was a prisoner in the infamous Hanoi Hilton.

Never mind that he is the least temperamentally suited man  to run for the office since Barry Goldwater, the presidency of the United States is his for the asking simply because he was a war prisoner.

McCain has even not bothered to develop a plan for many of the problems ailing America because we deserve to have him as our president because he’s a prisoner of his and our past.

The New York Times

Obama Chooses Biden as Running Mate

In a lot of ways, this presidential campaign is about biography, who John McCain is and who Barack Obama is.

A lot of people say, for instance, despite his books, that they don’t know much about Sen. Obama. He’s still too new to the national scene.

Here’s my question: John McCain has occupied the national scene for decades. Does it matter that much of what we know about him is either incomplete, or outright fabrication?

For instance, his record in the United States Navy.

I came across an article, Will `Ace’ McCain Flame Out Again? by Kelly Patricia O’Meara, that lays out in more details what I’m about to tell you.

We’ve heard ad nauseum about how McCain came from a family of warriors, how his fathers and other forebears were admirals. How about McCain himself?

McCain has been a Congressman and United States Senator. We know him as a “war hero” (McCain spent all of 20 hours in combat, getting 28 medals) who was a prisoner of war for five and half years. Just this week, when John McCain could not remember just how many houses he owned, one of his campaign handlers mentioned that he was a prisoner of war for five and half years.

Before any of this, however, McCain was indeed a pilot in the navy and he did fly in Vietnam. But he probably should have never flown in anyone’s navy.

John McCain graduated 894th out of 899 cadets at the U.S. Naval Academy.

McCain got elite assignments in the Navy despite racking up an unusual number of crashes. Until his fateful crash that led to his capture and POW status in Vietnam, McCain had been involved in four other crashes.

McCain’s engine allegedly “quit” and his plane plunged into Corpus Christi Bay in 1958. He would regain consciousness at the bottom of the water. But, when the engine was tested afterward, there was no indication of engine failure. Later, while deployed in the Mediterranean, McCain flew too low over the Iberian Peninsula and took out power lines. Then, returning from flying solo to Philadelphia for an Army-Navy football game, McCain allegedly got a “flameout” and had to eject, landing on a deserted beach as the plane slammed into trees.

Then, in 1967, the ever snakebit McCain was seated in the cockpit when a rocket slammed into the exterior fuel tank of his assigned A-4 Skyhawk. McCain escaped from the burning aircraft but dozens of his shipmates were killed and injured in the explosions that followed.

Just three months after this incident, the Vietcong shot McCain’s A-4 Skyhawk down over Truc Bach Lake near Hanoi, North Vietnam.

“John McCain,” says one Navy pilot in the linked O’Meara article who was an acquaintance of McCain in that era, “was the kind of guy you wanted to room with — not fly with. He was reckless, and that’s critical when you start thinking about who’s going to be the president,” The old pilot laughs, and then continues: “But the Navy accident rate was cut in half the day John McCain was shot down.”

The rest of the story–McCain’s torture during five-and-a-half years as a prisoner of war–we pretty much know. He came home a war hero, cheated on the wife who raised his family while he was away, then dumped her for a much younger woman who then financed his political career.

I just would have loved to see what Karl Rove would have done with McCain, especially his conduct as a POW, if he had had the opportunity.  There are Vietnam veterans (in the video above) now who see McCain as less than a hero for his conduct as a POW. They are calling for the record from that time to be declassified.

McCain’s Mansions

As that self-made man, McCain, has done himself, pull yourself up by your bootstrap (Ferragamo moccasins, in his case). If you can’t hack it in this economy, get a second job.

CNN Talks With John McCain About His Extramarital Affairs

The New York Times published a story on Sunday that had me scratching my head.

Timesman David D. Kirkpatrick’s piece, Response to 9/11 Offers Outline of McCain Doctrine, is not quite like the usual admiring pieces that we’ve come to expect from the mainstream media about McCain, explaining away obvious and prodigious faults while pumping up questionable actions as valorous. This piece contained actual criticisms of McCain, including from a retired general who was a former supporter of the Arizona senator before before breaking with him over the Iraq war.

Kirkpatrick, nevertheless, coated McCain in a heroic sheen. John McCain got to his Senate office in Washington, D.C. late on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, moments after terrorists flew the first plane into the World Trade Center.

McCain, that old warrior (at least, as the story would have you believe) immediately recognized this for what it was:

“This is war,” he was quoted as murmuring to aides, as the sound of scrambling fighter planes rattled windows and sent panic through the room.

I’m sure Mccain was not rattled. He is a war hero, remember?

“Within hours, Mr. McCain, the Vietnam War hero and famed straight talker of the 2000 Republican primary, had taken on a new role: the leading advocate of taking the American retaliation against Al Qaeda far beyond Afghanistan. In a marathon of television and radio appearances, Mr. McCain recited a short list of other countries said to support terrorism, invariably including Iraq, Iran and Syria.

“There is a system out there or network, and that network is going to have to be attacked,” Mr. McCain said the next morning on ABC News. “It isn’t just Afghanistan,” he added, on MSNBC. “I don’t think if you got bin Laden tomorrow that the threat has disappeared,” he said on CBS, pointing toward other countries in the Middle East.

Within a month he made clear his priority. “Very obviously Iraq is the first country,” he declared on CNN. By Jan. 2, Mr. McCain was on the aircraft carrier Theodore Roosevelt in the Arabian Sea, yelling to a crowd of sailors and airmen: “Next up, Baghdad!”

KirkPatrick wrote this entire passage almost approvingly. He does not point out that none of the alleged 9/11 terrorists were Iranian or Iraqi, or that 14 or 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudi citizens, and that the financing for this “Attack on America” was wholly from the Saudi coffers.

That McCain was wrong in his analysis of the situation and wrong on the prescription to remedy the situation was also not part of the story. It was just another admiring piece that took pains to mention that McCain was “Vietnam War hero.”

“Now, as Mr. McCain prepares to accept the Republican presidential nomination, his response to the attacks of Sept. 11 opens a window onto how he might approach the gravest responsibilities of a potential commander in chief. Like many, he immediately recalibrated his assessment of the unseen risks to America’s security. But he also began to suggest that he saw a new “opportunity” to deter other potential foes by punishing not only Al Qaeda but also Iraq.

“Just as Sept. 11 revolutionized our resolve to defeat our enemies, so has it brought into focus the opportunities we now have to secure and expand our freedom,” Mr. McCain told a NATO conference in Munich in early 2002, urging the Europeans to join what he portrayed as an all but certain assault on Saddam Hussein. “A better world is already emerging from the rubble.”

To his admirers, Mr. McCain’s tough response to Sept. 11 is at the heart of his appeal. They argue that he displayed the same decisiveness again last week in his swift calls to penalize Russia for its incursion into Georgia, in part by sending peacekeepers to police its border.

His critics charge that the emotion of Sept. 11 overwhelmed his former cool-eyed caution about deploying American troops without a clear national interest and a well-defined exit, turning him into a tool of the Bush administration in its push for a war to transform the region.

“He has the personality of a fighter pilot: when somebody stings you, you want to strike out,” said retired Gen. John H. Johns, a former friend and supporter of Mr. McCain who turned against him over the Iraq war. “Just like the American people, his reaction was: show me somebody to hit.”

I mean this is a nightmare. Would America really let this happen? Elect McCain, a man even more unsuitable than George W. Bush, to the presidency?

The Obama campaign seized on a motif early in the campaign, saying that a vote for John McCain would be a vote for a third term for George W. Bush.

Let me offer another scenario: Karl Rove’s brass knuckle attack on McCain–you know, the one about him fathering a child with a black prostitute–did not work (after which Rove would have rolled out the crazed Manchurian candidate attack–they had already questioned Mccain’s patriotism, although not quite loudly yet; I would have loved to see what Karl Rove would have done to McCain’s hero status up close, in a hard-fought contest that the 2000 election would have been) and McCain emerged with the nomination and occupied the White House the last seven plus years.

What this Times story told me is that–and hard as this may be to imagine–America with McCain as president would have made all of the same mistakes that the administration of George W. Bush made in the aftermath of Sept. 11.

Our foreign policy would have been just as bellicose, if not more so. A president McCain would still have countenanced torture, shredded the Constitution, violated civil liberties, would have run just as inept a federal bureaucracy, betrayed the people of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, and been just as befuddled a steward of the economy.

The polls say McCain is within a striking distance of winning the presidency, an event that I find alarming.

The Democratic world may soon wake up with a text or email from the Obama campaign announcing his choice for VP. Drudge, the NYT, and other media outlets have been abuzz this evening with the story of Obama’s “short list” and impending announcement.

The names being floated are Bayh, Biden, Kaine, and Sebelius. Kaine would be my pick, but I think they’re all head fakes. The stories out tonight have the distinct feel of a carefully scripted campaign leak. So why leak at all?

The answer? To make the actual announcement more surprising and newsworthy.

So who, then, would generate that kind of buzz as a surprise pick? There are a lot of people whose pick would be surprising, but very few whose selection would really grab the headlines:

Clinton
Gore
Webb
Hagel

My gut tells me that Webb and Hagel are the least likely of the four.

What’s your guess?