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$21
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By Robert M. Utley
$30.00
$24
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John McCain’s wife, Cindy, sat down with CBS News anchor Katie Couric for an interview that aired Wednesday night, pledging to Couric that the VP vetting process was indeed thorough and sounding her enthusiasm for Sarah Palin. She said she agrees with the Alaska governor about the need to teach intelligent design in the schools but disagrees that abortion should be prohibited even in cases of incest or rape.
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AP photo / Stephan Savoia
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By Robert Scheer — Welcome to the People’s Republic of Alaska, where every resident this year will get a $3,200 payout, thanks in no small measure to the efforts of Sarah Palin, the state’s Republican governor.
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Here’s the hopeful commercial the McCain campaign recently released to introduce Sarah Palin to voters around the country, featuring a hopeful soundtrack and bittersweet reminders of a more hopeful time in the McCain presidential campaign—as in, five days ago—when Palin was really, really new to McCain too!
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AP photo / Jeff Roberson
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John McCain wanted to shake things up with his unexpected nomination of an unknown “outsider,” at least when it came to the political scene in Washington—but by Tuesday, as reports about issues from Sarah Palin’s home life and professional past circulated in the media, some McCain allies (and certainly many detractors) wondered how much his unconventional move might cost his campaign.
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AP photo / Stephan Savoia
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Many Republicans who originally planned to spend Monday in St. Paul with other Republican National Convention-goers were compelled to change their plans, thanks to Hurricane Gustav—including the GOP’s own presumptive presidential nominee, John McCain, who was busy over the weekend playing the anti-Bush when it came to disaster preparedness.
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Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama sat down for a “60 Minutes” interview with his vice presidential pick, Joe Biden, to talk about why he chose Biden and what he thinks about rival John McCain’s choice, Gov. Sarah Palin, for whom Obama has a couple of nice words before noting that she “subscribes to John McCain’s agenda.”
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AP photo / LM Otero
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Considering that she is the source of much of the McCain family fortune, it’s not surprising that Cindy McCain says she was offended by Barack Obama’s assessment that John McCain is out of touch with the middle class, as well as by the Obama campaign’s ads about the McCains’ multiple homes.
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In post-Nixonian American politics, you’re nobody unless you’re associated with a scandal replete with shadowy intrigue and danger and commonly referred to in the press with the suffix -gate. Good thing John McCain’s VP pick, Sarah Palin, comes equipped with her own: Troopergate.
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gov.state.ak.us
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Mother of five, one-time Miss Congeniality, caribou hunter, pro-lifer, proponent of creationism: Alaska’s Gov. Sarah Palin is all of these things, rolled into one strategically advantageous package—at least in the eyes of the GOP higher-ups who backed her rise from relative obscurity to sudden political stardom as John McCain’s running mate.
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AP photo / John Raoux
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By Robert Scheer — Just great! Nuclear-armed Pakistan is falling apart, Iran’s nuclear program is unchecked and congressional legislation on cooperation with the Russians on controlling nuclear proliferation is now dead in the water. Horrid news except for Sen. John McCain, who thrills to a repeat of the danger lines of the Cold War, and now stands a good chance of being our next president.
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There were probably some really scintillating attack ads about Barack Obama’s other rumored vice presidential candidates ready to launch, but alas, they’ll never see the light of day.
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What was the exact nature of John McCain’s involvement in the notorious Keating Five scandal? CNN revisited this particular chapter from John McCain’s professional past for “McCain Revealed,” the news network’s profile on the senator-turned-presidential-hopeful.
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Flickr / soggydan
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Patriotism and sacrifice for one’s country usually make for reliable go-to topics for politicians, but according to Talking Points Memo, John McCain’s detractors and admirers alike are starting to suggest that the Republican presidential hopeful and his campaign honchos dial it down a bit on the subject of McCain’s time as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam.
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AP photo / Rick Bowmer
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If Barack Obama thought he had a battle on his hands when he was vying for the Democratic presidential nomination, he’s in for an even bigger struggle now, if the latest Zogby poll represents an accurate read on American voters’ inclinations at this stage in the game.
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Courtesy of the Brave New Films team, here we have a property-by-property breakdown of John McCain’s many fancy domiciles, which provide ironic contrast to footage of the presumptive Republican nominee holding forth about how Americans with mortgage troubles can just scrimp ‘n’ save their way back to solvency.
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AP photo / Gerald Herbert
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By Robert Scheer — The world according to John McCain is one in which America is triumphant at home and abroad thanks to the Bush legacy, rolling to victory internationally and mastering its domestic economic problems. If daily news would seem to deny such a rosy scenario, then that only shows skeptics lack the courage that sustained McCain as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Singer-songwriter Jackson Browne is not thrilled that his song “Running on Empty” was co-opted by the Ohio Republican Party and used as an anthem for a commercial that Browne believed made it seem as though he supported John McCain’s presidential campaign. Au contraire, Ohio GOP.
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AP photo, Mary Altaffer / Irakli Gedeniedze, pool
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By Robert Scheer — Is it possible that this time the October surprise was tried in August, and that the garbage issue of brave little Georgia struggling for its survival from the grasp of the Russian bear was stoked to influence the U.S. presidential election?
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AP photo / Mary Altaffer
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John McCain comes off as the tough-talking hard-liner in this Financial Times story about the Russia-Georgia conflict. Even more of a hard-liner than President Bush, who ever-so-reluctantly came around to agreeing with McCain on Monday after initially taking “a much more diluted stance” (just like Barack Obama), as John Bolton, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, put it in the FT article’s completely unsurprising conclusion.
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Right, so we’ve just seen the comparisons to Britney and Paris in John McCain’s “Celeb” commercial, one of several ads from Team McCain’s oeuvre that perhaps unwisely focus almost exclusively on the presumptive Democratic nominee instead of on McCain’s own policies and positions. Now, here’s Charlton Heston’s Moses impersonation to ratchet up the Camp-O-Meter in “The One,” a McCain spot that ends by ... saying Obama “might be The One.” Huh?
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Several leading Republican strategists, both named and anonymous, were quoted Wednesday as slamming the latest in a string of bold attack ads on Barack Obama, this one overlaying images of the young senator with troubled trollops Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. “McCain ads are just catch as catch can, one wild swing at Obama after another,” one strategist told the Washington Post.
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Keystone / Eddy Risch
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Once strongly in favor of Hillary Clinton, actress and chanteuse Barbra Streisand says her switch to supporting Barack Obama was instantaneous when Clinton pulled out of the presidential race, and that other Clinton supporters should back the Illinois senator instead of throwing their vote to Republican John McCain in protest.
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AP photo / Ziv Koren, Pool
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By Robert Scheer — Barack Obama is betraying his promise of change and is in danger of becoming just another political hack. Yes, just like former maverick John McCain, who has refashioned himself as a mindless rubber stamp for the most inane policies of the miserably failed Bush administration.
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AP photo / Jae C. Hong
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By Bill Boyarsky — The adoring media coverage of Barack Obama’s international tour is masking the reality that, whether he wins or loses, we’re almost certain to be stuck in Iraq for a long time, thanks to the legacy of George Bush.
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AP photo
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Barack Obama embarked on his international diplomacy tour—a key step in raising his profile on the world stage and demonstrating his readiness to take over the American presidency—with an important first major stop. The Illinois senator landed in Kabul, Afghanistan, on Saturday as part of congressional delegation surveying the current situation in that troubled nation.
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video.aol.com
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Dr. Marty Klein, author of “America’s War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust and Liberty,” has some additional questions for John McCain—who flailed in the face of a perfectly reasonable query about Viagra versus birth control last week—as well as his rivals for the presidency.
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AP photo / Al Behrman
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Sen. Barack Obama made a key speech on Tuesday in Washington, in which he asserted his position on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, offered a 16-month troop withdrawal timetable and outlined his plans for combating terrorism if he is elected president in November.
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The presumptive Republican presidential nominee gets what might have been a terrorist fist jab from wife Cindy over an ill-considered crack on rising U.S. cigarette sales to Iran: “Maybe that’s a way of killing them.” Ha ha, funnyman. Lucky for him, the media is in a forgiving mood these days when it comes to the ex-jet jockey, as Max Bergmann points out.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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Along with maintaining the hypervigilance necessary to avoid having one’s gaffes caught on camera and replayed endlessly on YouTube, politicians face a vast array of image-maintenance challenges these days. John McCain encountered a PR problem of the lower-tech variety on Friday, in the form of two newspaper articles focusing on details from his private life that could be gleaned from plain ol’ public records.
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momocrats.typepad.com
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According to Phil Gramm, the former senator from Texas who’s now a key economic adviser to Sen. John McCain, America’s economic woes, insofar as they actually exist, are the product of some stinking thinking by “a nation of whiners” and doom-and-gloom headlines from the U.S. media.
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AP photo / Greg Baker
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By Robert Scheer — You can’t trust the Chinese. I don’t care if you’re talking about those communists on the mainland or the other guys on Taiwan; they just won’t follow the war-games script that our weapons hawks had counted on.
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What are we to make of this new John McCain campaign ad, in which colorful countercultural degenerates prance through the opening frames, and, near the end, a still of Noble Older McCain is superimposed over footage of Hunky Younger Ex-POW McCain?
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The McLaughlin Group takes a look at why, as John McLaughlin claims, Sen. John McCain is “emerging upward”—at least in terms of the press’ treatment of the Republican “maverick,” whom one media source praised for his “zealous, unbending beliefs,” even as another touted his willingness to thumb his nose at ultraconservatives and compromise when necessary. Pat Buchanan, however, is adamant that the McCain “love affair is over.”
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AP photo / Danny Johnston
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Monday brought yet another round of political Mad Libs, which proceeds as follows: 1. (Insert surrogate name here), adviser to (candidate)‘s presidential campaign, slams (rival candidate) for lack/excess of (personal quality) on (major media outlet); 2. (Rival candidate) blasts (surrogate), hints that such antics reveal opposition’s true character; 3. (Candidate) distances self from (surrogate), who goes on to apologize and perhaps step down; 4. Repeat as necessary.
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Ever since he received President Bush’s official smooch of approval, Sen. Joe Lieberman has moved much more aggressively to the right, putting some of the more hawkish types from his new crowd to shame with his saber-rattling rhetoric about Iran. Here, the Brave New Films team charts Lieberman’s nearly complete transformation in recent years.
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AP photo / Mark Farmer
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By Robert Scheer — Remember Curtis LeMay, the Air Force general played to chilling effect by Sterling Hayden in the 1964 movie “Dr. Strangelove”? If you’re too young for that reference, you probably don’t recall when the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD) dominated our military posture toward our Soviet enemy.
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Charlie Black, lobbyist and adviser to Sen. John McCain’s campaign, has apologized for his statements suggesting that the presumptive Republican presidential nominee would stand to gain from another terrorist attack on American soil. Rescinding his earlier claims, Black said, “I deeply regret the comments. They were inappropriate.”
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AP photo / Marcio Jose Sanchez
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By Bill Boyarsky — Watching the couples in line for licenses in Beverly Hills on the first day of gay marriage in California, I was struck by how the scene was so commonplace, even boring—just a bunch of men and women waiting their turn at a nondescript government office.
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McCain campaign aide Charlie Black is in hot water after word spread that he’d suggested McCain’s chances for taking over the White House would improve if another terrorist attack happened on U.S. soil, as well as for characterizing Benazir Bhutto’s assassination as potentially beneficial for McCain’s presidential bid. Well, here are another few things to worry about vis-à-vis Black, courtesy of MoveOn.org.
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AP photo / Gary Kazanjian
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John McCain is showing his commitment to lessening America’s dependence on foreign oil by offering a $300 million prize to anyone who can conjure up a superior automobile battery, energy-wise, than the current standard. But at the same time, he’s supporting Bush’s push to lift the ban on drilling in U.S. coastal waters.
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AP photo / Hans Deryk
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Presidential candidate Barack Obama is currently enjoying a 15-point lead over Republican rival John McCain, according to a new poll conducted by Newsweek, which found that 51 percent of registered voters around the country favored Obama for president, while 36 percent picked McCain.
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Now that the presumptive nominees are getting ready to do battle for the presidency, their wives are also subject to increasing scrutiny by the press and public. Here, Cindy McCain takes a moment to endure the (soft focus) glare of ABC News cameras and answer softball questions about her husband’s stance on women’s rights and whether she’d feel safe with Barack Obama as president.
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Among the various tidbits of personal information we learn about John McCain from this appearance on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” is that the Arizona senator’s favorite movie is “Dude, Where’s My Car?” Is it just us, or is that a slightly troubling factoid about a man hoping to be our nation’s next president?
Posted on Jun 18, 2008
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How did the two presumptive presidential nominees react to Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling that Guantanamo Bay prisoners have a constitutional right to challenge their detention in court? Find out on “Left Right & Center,” KCRW’s weekly radio show on current events and politics, featuring Matt Miller, Arianna Huffington, Robert Scheer and guest host Amity Shlaes filling in this week for right-leaning regular Tony Blankley.
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From ThinkProgress.com
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President Bush says he is now reconsidering the swaggering cowboy image that he adopted early on in his presidency. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric,” he tells the U.K.‘s Times Online as his time in office ticks out.
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AP photo / LM Otero
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The Brits are in on the American election speculation game, judging by this Daily Mail article about John McCain’s first wife, Carol, which, despite reporter Sharon Churcher’s “tsk-tsk” tone about McCain’s possible philandering and his eventual wife-swap (enter Cindy, beer heiress, pictured), also allows that Carol McCain still cares about her ex-husband and supports him in his political ventures.
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Presumptive Republican presidential nominee (still waiting for the handy acronym here, people) John McCain has a new advertisement that makes a play for the anti-war crowd with his bold pronouncement: “I hate war.” All right, but how does his latest incarnation explain the liberties he once took with a certain Beach Boys surf classic?
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Say what you will about Libertarian Bob Barr, but one thing’s for sure: We haven’t seen a mustachioed presidential contender like this since ... Teddy Roosevelt? During a “Colbert Report” appearance on Wednesday, Barr seemed pleased with Stephen Colbert’s assessment of his tea strainer, but gave his host the wary eye throughout the rest of his visit. A very serious man, that Bob Barr. No sudden moves, Stephen.
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AP photo / Jeff Chiu
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By Robert Scheer — Will the real John McCain stand up? Actually, I don’t expect him to, now that he is the Republican presidential candidate, pandering to the irrationalities that drive his party. Nor is it likely that the fawning mass media will pressure him to the point of clarity. But I remain genuinely confused as to what makes him tick.
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Those reporters who were given just three Internet-free hours to curl up with John McCain’s huge stack of medical records (right before Memorial Day!) were privy to some mighty intimate details about the presumptive Republican nominee—and pundits were subsequently saddled with the task of making talk of polyps, chin herpes (ew!) and freckled buttocks somehow sound like good news for the GOP.
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