Flip-flopper. Elitist. Egotist. Insider politician. These are some of the labels which were branded to John Kerry
You must mean handed to Kerry by the Swiftboat crowd and their ilk. Kerry's biggest problem was that he didn't hand this crap back with a dash of backhand.
Also this:
To date, no conservative 527 groups have materialized. But Obama portrayed his call as a preemptive strike.
Key point - "to date". As the election gets closer we'll see the 527s popping out faster then feces from a cow with dysentery.
Finally this:
I always get a chuckle when conservative types get all hand-wringingly concerned about how their despised opponent may be making a mistake. Brings a tear to my eyes, it does.
It's the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine
To date, no conservative 527 groups have materialized.
Oh yeah? How about this one: Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain. From their "About Us" page:
Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain is a 527 PAC organized by Jerry Kiley. The organization has an internet following of volunteers from all over the nation.
Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain was formed to dispel the myth of "Straight talkin', principled, maverick war hero" John McCain.
Vietnam Veterans Against John McCain was also responsible for this classy piece of campaign literature.
So they're attacking McCain. They must be liberals being secretly controlled by Obama, right? Wrong. The site is run by Ted Sampley and Jerry Kiley, founders of Vietnam Veterans Against John Kerry. What we've got here is the far-right using the same tactics they used against John Kerry in 2004. The difference is that they're attacking John McCain because he's not crazy enough for their taste. Put your tinfoil hat while you try to figure out what they're trying to accomplish, but three things are for sure: they're conservative, they're a registered 527, and they really hate John McCain.
-=Logan
Research, facts, a Republican needs not these things
I'll tell you, this Google thing is just amazing. You search for "Conservative 527" and in 0.13 seconds you get a whole list.
Vets For Freedom registered as a 527 and promptly produced two anti-Obama attack ads. The ads themselves make some bizarre claims: that the civil war in Iraq is over and that "The Iraqi government has come together to make political progress."
Another 527, Freedom's Watch, lays it all out in their mission statement:
For too long, conservatives have lacked a permanent political presence to do battle with the radical special interest groups and their left-wing allies in government.
Let's just take a moment to ponder that. Conservatives have no permanent political presence. No GOP, no Moral Majority, no Club for Growth, no American Enterprise Institute, no Project for the New American Century. Liberals hold every political office from Texas to Alaska. It's a wonderful world with universal free health care, free education, the income tax rate hasn't changed since the fifites and Condoleezza Rice is happily married to Angela Davis.
Where was I? Oh yeah, Freedom's Watch, founded by former White House Press Secretary Ari Fleischer and Bush's Deputy Assistant to the President for Appointments and Scheduling*, Bradley A. Blakeman. A quick look at their Media Center shows an anti-Obama piece published just yesterday: Barack Obama: First Impressions v. Lasting Images. I'm sure there's more but they only display the most recent press releases. Draw your own conclusion on that one, but I've noticed that most of the sites I visited in researching this little rant of mine have no search features.
The list goes on. There are lots of conservative 527s at work, they just haven't gotten the press that Swift Boats got...yet.
* There's a title to be proud of. I wonder if it's abbreviated to DAPASS?
-=Logan
Research, facts, a Republican needs not these things
I'll be sure to pass your heartfelt advice on to Obama. I'm sure he'll take it with all the sincerity with which it is given.
The campaign finance issue and the presidential seal issue aren't all that major. Obama has already claimed that the seal was a mistake and vowed not to use it again, so I expect that controversy won't have much in the way of legs. The campaign finance issue may be slightly more damaging, but ultimately I don't think it will have all that much impact because there is a wide-spread perception out there that the entire campaign finance system is fundamentally fucked up. Since the majority of Obama's monetary support is coming from small, individual donations I just don't think this hurts him that much. If he had pulled out of the campaign finance system to fund his campaign with his own money or to take some huge donations from just a few corporate donors then I think it would be damaging, but as is I don't think it will hurt that much.
The FISA vote, though - that could hurt. That could be Obama's version of "I was for the war, then against it" (although it's arguably even harder to explain - I myself am not exactly sure how Obama can claim any moral consistency on this issue. At least Kerry could claim that Bush "fooled him" somehow). I don't think that the FISA issue will necessarily change anyone's vote, but what it could do is weaken Obama's support among his base, push some people to vote for Barr or Nader, or just plain stay home. Whether those lost votes are offset by the benefits Obama gains from taking FISA off the table as an issue for McCain to bludgeon him with, I'm not sure. I think in the end Obama might make out okay, since the people he's most likely to be pissing off here really have no other credible place to turn.
Well, it's been clear for months now where gerrymander stands on the upcoming election, so a "helpful" reminder such as this is to be expected. He could even be right, though several of his posts here leave room for hesitation. (Not that I'd do much better-- I've just stopped with the prediction business for a while.) All I'll say is that a Dem needs to carry all the states Kerry did, and one big one more to win the election. Me, I don't like the odds of picking a race that close.
What really sank Kerry though? Was it the little things? Or was it rather the lack of a "big picture" message that would allow voters to excuse petty foibles. W was hardly that much better a candidate, but what he did have was some room for slippage whenever the campaign ran into a pothole or two. Voters appear willing to forgive a foible or three if you give them enough reason to turn a blind eye-- and Kerry never really did that.
Obama is a whole 'nother story, though. Sure, all that talk about "hope" and "change" may sound pretty dumb to jaded ears, but OTOH smart rarely wins elections, especially at the national level. If they're sweating over that the RNC, I'd suggest they have good reason: since the end of WWII, the single best campaign setup for Democrats has been when inexperienced optimism has run against someone playing the experience card-- Kennedy in 1960, Carter in 1976, and Clinton in 1992.* The graybeards at the RNC have seen this movie before, and they're hoping times have changed enough that the outcome will be different . . . but until November comes and goes, I can't blame them for sweating a bit.
We now return to your regularly scheduled partisan discussion :)
*Carrying the point further, several of the worst defeats have come when Dem candidates tried to run on experience: Carter in 1980, Mondale in 1984, Gore in 2000, and Kerry in 2004 all fit this bill, with the exception (perhaps that proves the rule) being LBJ in 1964.
Ex ignorantia ad sapientiam; e luce ad tenebras
Kerry and Obama are flip-floppers, and McCain isn't?
Oh, that's rich, seeing as McCain pulled quite a Brock when he couldn't make up his mind whether he was a conservative Republican or a Democrat.
Despite the successful Republican attacks on the subject, Kerry wasn't much of a flip-flopper in the first place. Instead he had qualified positions compounded by verbal diarrhea to the point that, after listening to him explain his position for an hour, there was still nobody who could figure out what the fuck his position actually was. He pointed this out himself, of course, but since nobody could understand what the hell he was trying to say, it didn't help him much.
And why the obsession with policy flip-flops in the first place? Isn't the occasional policy flip a good thing? When confronted by indisputable evidence that your policy is wrong, isn't it better to decide your policy is wrong than to decide that reality is wrong, like our current President habitually does?
Calling a Presidential candidate an egotist is like calling a Kennedy a lush. The response is practically guaranteed to be, "Yeah, he is. Did you have a point?"
Call him an elitist, and all he has to do is point at the President and say, "Not elitist."
Very few people have even heard of Austin Goolsbe or Jim Johnson, and they weren't guilty of anything different from everyone else in Washington. And now that he's denounced Wright, the story doesn't have that much in the way of legs. What damage it can do is already done, and it's already drifted out of our attention span.
The FISA thing is pandering, but nobody cares. Do you know why you think people care, Gerrymander? It's because you're a political wonk, and you're mad that Obama's cheating by breaking the political rules. I'm a political wonk too. This is a site for political wonks. Everyone else here is a political wonk too, with the exception of Skeeter1, who for some reason thinks this is a site for food wonks.
And the FISA thing doesn't have legs. Joe Sixpack American doesn't give a fuck for the political rules. If you put the FISA pander in a political ad, he's only going to think, "Wow, I didn't know that that Muslim Nigger was now against that Goddamned Civil Rights Bullshit like that great man Joe Arpaio. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if he wins after all."
What both candidates don't seem to understand, particularly McCain, who has drifted steadily to the right after clinching the Republican nomination, is that people don't want to see a Presidential candidate who represents their party. Obama largely won the nomination with a promise not to represent the Democratic party, and that was in the primary where the voters are all Democrats or Democratic leaners or Rush Limbaugh listeners. If I had one question to ask the candidates, I'd ask, "Name six idiotic positions of your party, and explain what is so stupid about them."
Obama doesn't have a huge lead. He has a slight lead, because young people vote at best 2/3 as often as older people, and because people in swing states don't particularly like Obama. People out west like libertarian outsiders like Obama, but don't like Democrats, but WV, OH, MI, and WI and PA are blue-collar nanny-state states.
When the Republican is leading in the Alaska Senate race by 2 points, and is polling under 50% in the Kansas Senate race, you know the Republicans are going to get wiped out in the elections. Still, all is not lost for McCain. All he needs to do are two things.
First, he needs to declare victory in Iraq and leave. The statement would be something like, "Now that the surge which I advocated has succeeded in restoring calm to Iraq, we can afford to immediately reduce our force level there by 75%, though we will retain a small force there for the foreseeable future." See? It blunts the issue for the Democrats without compromising his earlier statements. There's nothing left to attack.
The second thing he needs to do is to grab onto the energy issue like a police dog with lockjaw, and not let go. Americans can only think about one thing at a time, anyhow.
Hey, John: All you have to do is your campaign slogan to, "John McCain: American Energy for God-Blessed American Americans, because America is still #1," and print it on bumper stickers with a background of a flag with, if you look closely, stars which are actually gushing oil wells, and you can't lose, because the Obama/Democratic Party position on energy is indefensible.
Oh, and if you're going to sell Anheuser-Bush to Belgium, but still want to get the vote of Joe Sixpack American, you might want to revise your stance on vetoing new beers.
Seeing as Obama is being called a flip-flopper, has he ever threatened to vote against his own bill?
- derumi (del-me)
"Bobby Fischer? Man, that guy is crazy!" - Mike Tyson
