Even their own realize the problem with running a “Ooooh Obama is scary” campaign when your party’s brand is rotten.
Tom Davis, who chaired the NRCC for four years, said he doubts the effectiveness of the anti-Obama strategy because of the contrast between the consistently unpopular Bush and the likely Democratic nominee.
“When Bush tries to articulate a vision,” Davis said, pausing to choose his words carefully, “he will butcher the Gettysburg Address. Obama, he will make an A&P grocery list sing.”
On Wednesday afternoon, the House had just voted, 412 to 0, to pass H. Res. 1113, “Celebrating the role of mothers in the United States and supporting the goals and ideals of Mother’s Day,” when Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.), rose in protest.
“Mr. Speaker, I move to reconsider the vote,” he announced.
Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.), who has two young daughters, moved to table Tiahrt’s request, setting up a revote. This time, 178 Republicans cast their votes against mothers.
This blog is 100% pro-mother. This is my mom, and she approves this message.
In citing some study of donation patterns in the primary contest, Ross Douthat labels the GOP the “Party of Sam’s Club” citing donations from janitors, waitresses, etc. Sam’s Club? Perhaps Sam’s Club is different here in Maryland, but the Sam’s Club clientele trends upward - upper middle class suburban folks who have the cash and home storage space to buy goods in bulk.
I don’t think the lower end demographic Douthat is trying to associate with the GOP (and that’s flawed as well since most of those folks vote Democratic even if they’re not donating) is the Sam’s Club demo. Wal-Mart, more likely.
The righties launch a new venture - “The Next Right” - that seeks to duplicate liberal success online. You may have heard this story before when it was Redstate.com. Or Townhall.com. Or Pajamas Media.
John McCain has been the nominee of his party for over a month now. He has no active opposition, no figure on his side of the aisle contesting him for leadership of the Republican party and the conservative movement.
And yet, Republicans are still voting against him. In Indiana McCain pulled in 77% of the vote, and he made an even worse showing with 73% in North Carolina. Even more troubling for McCain is that Huckabee is the leading protest vote. That’s the religious right vote, the anti-choice crowd and the bedrock of President Bush’s re-election victory.
In 2004 the GOP got the vote out by riling up the religious right and wooing the moderate middle. Post-Katrina and post-Iraq they have lost the middle. The press image of McCain as a maverick helps them with the middle, but they’ve still lost it. The religious right is mostly disgusted with the GOP - they haven’t kept up their end of the bargain. The religious right lined up behind the GOP to ban abortion, negate gay rights, and violate the separation of church and state. In exchange for that, the religious right was okay with allowing the business class to take their pound of flesh. But the GOP had the House, Senate, and White House and while they did enough at the edges of those issues they did not remake America into a theocracy.
John McCain does not inspire these people. Ambivalent at best about his faith, he is not the “God warrior” Bush pretends to be. He is very much the Bob Dole candidate. McCain is the “his turn” guy and in Obama he is going up against the first Democratic candidate in a long while who has the base of voters who are really for their guy.
The religious right is not going to move Democratic, but like in 2006 they are probably going to stay home while the Democratic base is poised to make the turnout in 2004 seem like training camp. The religious right’s relationship with the GOP isn’t just yet a divorce, but Mommy and Daddy are for sure on a break.
In his new ad about his Bush-style no care health care “plan”, John McCain identifies himself on screen as “President McCain”. I guess we just decided to call of the election and have George Bush designate his successor just like that?
The shamble. The disinterest. The plodding. The thick, ridiculous accent. Yes friends, failed candidate Fred Thompson is back on the scene!
Former GOP presidential candidate and close McCain friend, Fred Thompson, is set to join the presumptive GOP nominee during his visit to North Carolina next week. Since losing the South Carolina primary on Jan. 18, Thompson has been absent from the limelight-even choosing to drop out of the race via written statement.
Remember kids: McCain/Thompson 2008: Because Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau couldn’t make it.
Because you know nothing is better with our national parks than gun toting jackassery.
The Bush administration formally proposed Wednesday to scrap a longtime ban against bringing loaded weapons into national parks and wildlife areas.
Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne announced the beginning of a 60-day public comment period on the proposed update to the nation’s gun regulations.
Under the plan, an individual could carry a concealed weapon in national parks and wildlife refuges if he or she is authorized to do so on similar state lands in the state where the national park or refuge is located.
I guess its an improvement over the Republican idea to drill the national parks for oil. But not much of one.
In case you were wondering that in the midst of all the drama on the Democratic side of the aisle it was possible for the Republican party to remain brain dead on the seminal issues of our time… wonder no more.
Sen. John McCain on Tuesday rejected calls by his Democratic opponents for universal health coverage, instead offering a market-based solution with an approach similar to a proposal put forth by President Bush last year.
McCain’s belief in the power of the free market to meet the nation’s health-care needs sets up a stark choice for voters this fall in terms of the care they could receive, the role the government would play and the importance they place on the issue.
The Republicans largely really believe some of this bull about the free market. They really think in their heart of hearts that the solution for every issue is to sprinkle some of that magical “free market” fairy dust and all will be well. The problem is, that is not what Americans feel. Oh sure, we’re willing to give the market a go of things - and for some things it works great. But we effectively operate under a free market health care system right now and its woefully unpopular. That’s the reason why health care is a serious issue in 2008 in a way that it wasn’t in 2004, 2000, etc.
John McCain is so out of touch with normal Americans (his health care costs are covered by his military disability, his Senate health care plan and should anything fall through the cracks his wife’s generous inheritance can take up the slack) that he believes that what people want is more of the current mess.
Yet the American mood on large national issues like this is not a faith based free market system, but rather historically tends to favor a collective system where we all pay in and benefit.
So today the RNC pushed out a press release falseley claiming that the DNC had used Iraq footage from Fahrenheit 9/11. The funny thing is, that was the more sedate of the charges as the first round insinuated that Dems had received it from terrorists (from Michelle Malkin, naturally). RNC Chairman of the moment Mike Duncan:
As you are already aware, and as has been widely reported, the DNC’s ad is troubling for at least two reasons. First, its message is factually false; the DNC is deliberately misleading American voters. Second, it constitutes an illegal excessive in-kind contribution from the DNC to its presidential candidates. Now the Republican National Committee has learned that the ad features footage from Michael Moore’s 2004 conspiracy theory, “Fahrenheit 9/11.”
The funny/sad thing is the RNC and the con bloggers are more upset over where the footage may or may have not have come from than they are about the people and the party who have put our soldiers in harm’s way in the first place.
Tony Zirkle, who is seeking the Republican nomination in Indiana’s 2nd District, stood in front of a painting of Hitler, next to people wearing swastika armbands and with a swastika flag in the background for the speech to the American National Socialist Workers Party in Chicago on Sunday.
“I’ll speak before any group that invites me,” Zirkle said Monday. “I’ve spoken on an African-American radio station in Atlanta.”
Link includes Zirkle standing in front of a picture of Hitler, flanked on each side by the U.S. flag and Nazi flag. Really. In 2008.
Tancredo is so aftaid of Hispanics he wants to put American soil on the other side of his wall. Idiot.
Republican Tom Tancredo supports the border wall. The U.S. representative attended the hearing in Brownsville yesterday.
During the hearing, he told the Brownsville landowners, “I suggest that you build this fence around the northern part of your city…” implying that all of Brownsville should be on the Mexican side of the wall.
Clearly this is good for out of touch John McCain.
Americans’ confidence in the economy continued to plunge this month as their homes lost value at the fastest rate in two decades, according to reports released on Tuesday.
The data suggested that the housing slump was far from a recovery and the job market might continue to weaken, ratcheting up pressure on the Federal Reserve, which began a two-day meeting on Tuesday, to take steps to stave off a prolonged slowdown.
The reports were consistent with a recession, economists said, though some optimists have insisted the economy is growing, albeit at a snail’s pace. President Bush remained in the latter camp at a news conference on Tuesday, where he said the economy was facing “a tough time.”
Who knew that the RNC would bust out the wahmbulance so soon in the 2008 campaign. And they’re going straight to legal maneuvers to squelch the ad. Funny how the party of “tort reform” always jumps to the lawyers.
The ad hits a nerve. And I hope it keeps doing so (I gave to the DNC for the first time in years in response to it).
The committee’s chief counsel, Sean Cairncross, said he sent letters Monday to NBC, CNN and MSNBC insisting that they stop airing the commercial.
At issue is McCain’s answer, in January, to a question about Bush’s theory that troops could be in Iraq for 50 years.
McCain said: “Maybe 100. As long as Americans are not being injured or harmed or wounded or killed, that’d be fine with me, and I hope it would be fine with you, if we maintain a presence in a very volatile part of the world where al-Qaida is training, recruiting, equipping and motivating people every single day.”
Democratic Party chief Howard Dean said “there’s nothing false” about the ad.
“We deliberately used John McCain’s words. This isn’t some ominous consultant’s voice from Washington. This is John McCain’s own words. And we’ve been very upfront about everything that he’s said.”
The RNC wants a new standard for campaign ads: Don’t run ads against Republicans if you’re going to use their actual words.
Why do Republicans like Karl Rove insist on offering advice to Democrats? It was bad enough when they were in power and in control of everything, but the “architect” of the least popular president in modern history and the man behind the Republican loss of the House and Senate dispensing wisdom is way past the point of credibility.
If you’ve read Rick Perlstein’s Before The Storm, this increasingly regular infiltration of the Republican party at the state party level as well as getting involved in arcane ways with the national platform is right out of the same strategy the Goldwater faithful used to take over the Republican party. They didn’t have the power to get their candidate into viability, but I sense that they are on the verge of throwing a small but disruptive wrench into the workings of the well-oiled GOP machine.
Conservatives have regularly had to do a song and dance to cover up the fact that their policies are not favored by most Americans (and conversely liberals have done a suck job at selling their majority positions) but I like the idea of Paul’s brand of unabashed yet tone-deaf conservatism getting louder in the Republican party. Especially in the next ten years.
The North Carolina Republican party is up on the air with an ad trying to paint Sen. Obama as a radical black nationalist and McCain writes a letter to try and get them to pull it back.
Maybe I’m too cynical, but I think the McCain camp’s real beef is that its too soon to go to the black nationalist well. They’d prefer to see these things in October and then “condemn” them in barely heard whispers.
Yes, Clinton won. Doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. Obama leads in money, states and most importantly - delegates.
Ron Paul has 22% of the vote so far in the GOP primary. Yes, they had one. I can’t wait for them to raise a ruckus at the GOP convention. Truthers, untie!
I kid you not. John McCain’s speech trying to connect to the failing Republican-led economy compares his piddling campaign troubles last year to the U.S. economy. “I feel your pain” it is not.
Sure, you lost your job, your house, the dollar is weaker than the loony, but that’s just like John McCain carrying his own bags.
Oh, and he picked a failing Ohio factory as backdrop for his argument in favor of free, unfettered trade.
In case you were wondering if Erick Erickson and Redstate were still stupid, wonder no more. In this insipid post, Erickson tries to attack Sen. Obama, which is nothing new but what is novel (read: stupid) is that he tries to use highly respected professor Lawrence Lessig to do it. He posts a highly edited clip of a presentation Lessig gave in which one of the clips cited is a silly video of Jesus singing “I will survive”. Erickson then goes on to call Prof. Lessig a “digital communist” because of his long-standing objection to our crazy pro-corporate copyright laws and his hand in the creation of the Creative Commons copyright alternative.
Oh, Erickson also accuses Google of complicity in the whole digital communist conspiracyTM because they didn’t think they should host Michelle Malkin’s anti-Muslim hate videos on Youtube. And net neutrality, that’s bad too according to Erickson and part of the conspiracy as well — never mind that net neutrality benefits sites like Redstate.
You know that he’s grasping for straws because even a good amount of the Redstate commenters think this is a stupid and sloppy attack.
Scarborough tries to cut off Rachel Maddow, unlike so many other liberals in the media, Maddow doesn’t let him get away with it and in retaliation Scarborough walks off the set. It’s the schoolyard bully you give a good whack in the nose, folks.
The country’s economic health deteriorated further in the early spring as shoppers buckled under the strains of the housing and credit debacles and a weaker employment climate.
Manufacturers and others businesses, meanwhile, were walloped by zooming prices for energy and other raw materials. However, their ability to jack up retail prices to customers was mixed, with some companies restrained by competitive pressures, according to the Federal Reserve’s new snapshot of nationwide economic conditions released Wednesday.
“Economic conditions have weakened,” the Fed report stated.
Consumer prices pushed higher last month as increases in energy, food and airline tickets overwhelmed the biggest drop in clothing prices in nearly a decade.
The Labor Department reported Wednesday that consumer prices rose 0.3 percent in March after being unchanged in February.
Oil prices rose to new heights Tuesday, surging to almost $114 a barrel after the U.S. dollar fell and worries mounted about the global oil supply.
A report from the International Energy Agency said Russian oil production dropped this year for the first time in a decade. Crude oil shipments along one U.S. pipeline were said to be moving below capacity. And Italy’s ENI reported a 5,000 barrel per day reduction in production at one of its facilities in Nigeria.
This is clearly the sort of environment where we should elect yet another Republican who doesn’t know a thing about economics and surrounds himself with believers in supply side economics that don’t work.
