It Is April, Do You Know Who Your Political Opponent Is?

McCamy Taylor

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Mon Apr-21-08 05:16 PM
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It Is April, Do You Know Who Your Political Opponent Is?

I do. Mine is John McCain. Here is the second journal in my series about GE strategy that we should be working on now:

I. McCain Did NOT Learn His Lesson from Keating Five Keating Five is the worst scandal in McCain�s closet. It may be difficult for Obama to bring it up, however, since doing so will give the RNC a green light to bring up Rezko. On the plus side, it is likely to give McCain second thoughts about introducing Rezko to the general election campaign, since his own involvement in the Keating case is much, much worse. For Hillary, the Keating case is all positive, since everyone already knows about Whitewater and they know that after the millions were spent, the Clintons were cleared of wrong doing (and if they do not know it, they can be told in twelve words or five seconds).

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/03/24/politics/main3964240.shtml?source=RSSattr=Politics_3964240

In a CBS report �Keating Scandal Still Haunts McCain� which came out after his recent lobbyist scandal, the durability of Keating Five was revealed. No one has forgotten the name and the gist of this story. McCain and three other Senators got into hot water for trying to use their power to intimidate regulators who were investigating a Savings & Loan whose owner, Charles Keating, had contributed to the campaigns.

The investigation ended in early 1991 with a rebuke that McCain "exercised poor judgment in intervening with the regulators." But the Senate ethics committee also determined McCain's actions "were not improper nor attended with gross negligence."

Snip

In the Keating investigation, the committee said more than one year had passed - a "decent interval" - between the last contributions Keating raised for McCain and the two 1987 meetings he attended with banking regulators. McCain later paid $112,000 - the amount Keating raised for him - to the U.S. Treasury.

�Poor judgment.� Well color me Checkers. Now, the real problem for McCain is that though he claims that he learned his lesson, recent events prove that he did not learn his lesson.

McCain has claimed the Keating scandal sensitized him even to the appearance of potential conflicts of interest. But in recent weeks, McCain has defended himself anew over another instance in which he intervened with federal regulators on behalf of a prominent campaign contributor - years ago but after the Keating rebuke. Again, McCain denies acting improperly.

McCain wrote two letters in late 1999 to the Federal Communications Commission on behalf of Florida-based Paxson Communications. He urged quick consideration of a proposal to buy a television station license in Pittsburgh, although he did not ask the FCC commissioners to approve the proposal. At the time, one FCC commissioner's formal nomination was pending before McCain's Senate committee, and the FCC chairman complained that McCain's letters were improper.

McCain wrote the letters after receiving more than $20,000 in contributions from the company's executives and lobbyists. Chief executive Lowell W. "Bud" Paxson also lent McCain his company's jet at least four times during 1999 for campaign travel.

McCain will campaign as clean politician. His wife is rich. Why should he need money? However, America really does not know that much about him, and it would be very easy to alter its image of him with these two stories.

II. Friendly Fire From His Fellow Republicans Will Be Our Best Friend Before they were for him, many of the right were against him. Just look at this article from Newsmax in 2006 spelling out all the reasons why John McCain is not fit to be president.

http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2006/8/30/123006.shtml

The article talks about McCain�s temper.

A July 5 NewsMax.com article quoted former Sen. Bob Smith, a New Hampshire Republican who served with McCain on the Senate Armed Services Committee, as saying, "I have witnessed incidents where he has used profanity at colleagues and exploded at colleagues . . . He would disagree about something and then explode. It was incidents of irrational behavior. We've all had incidents where we have gotten angry, but I've never seen anyone act like that."

Snip

"I think he is mentally unstable and not fit to be president," former congressman LeBoutillier said.

The article repeats some of McCain�s most embarrassing verbal blunders:

"Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly?" McCain said at a GOP fund-raiser in Washington. "Because Janet Reno is her father."
When running stories on Sen. George Allen's recent reference to a student of Indian descent as a "macaca," a genus of monkey, the media referred to inappropriate remarks by other political candidates but never mentioned McCain's 2000 statement, "I hate the gooks," a racial epithet for Asians. McCain later apologized and said he was referring to his wartime captors.

Finally, the article suggests that McCain is not healthy enough to serve because of his age and melanoma history.

The beauty of the right wing attacks on McCain is that if Democrats leveled these same attacks on him, they would sound mean. However, if right wingers and Republicans can be quoted saying these mean things about him, then they sound like they are bringing up honest objections. So, for people who have moved beyond the Clinton-Obama flame wars and who want to find something productive to do for the general election, start looking online for quotes that can be used in the general election, before the RNC starts scrubbing the internet. These things are much worse than Obama saying that McCain is better than Bush or Hillary saying that McCain has passed the Commander-in-Chief test. There is political gold out there.

III. McCain is a Serial Adulterer, Too Yep, McCain is a certified adulterer. He even dumped the wife who raised his kids while he was a POW and married a rich woman who got him into Congress.

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2006/0607.benen.html

And then he committed adultery against Cindy with Vicki.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/02/20/john-mccain-affair-links_n_87690.html

So, we can pretty much assume that Monica is off the table. And no racially charged innuendo about Black men being hypersexual, either. I would not bring this one up, unless Clinton is the nominee and some McCain staffer is dumb enough to try to make Monica an issue and McCain decides not to fire that person ASAP. Since the press really likes sex, as in really likes SEX!!! I expect them to report on the sex angle of this election without any prodding from either candidate.

IV. McCain�s Is Stumbling Down Memory Lane I have a theory. John McCain could be suffering the normal effects of aging on the mind and memory. If that is the case, he is totally unqualified to be president and his nomination is a joke. However, if his last melanoma was just a little bit more advanced than his doctors admitted and if he required Xray therapy, it could have caused some damage to a part of his brain that would explain his current difficulties verbalizing and his problems with memory. If this is the case, he might want to fess up, since this type of localized lesion would be better (i.e stable and isolated, more like a fixed disability) than the more common alternative, progressive dementia of old age.

Here is an article about some of his recent gaffes:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/us_elections/article3736044.ece

Last week, while questioning General David Petraeus in Congress about progress in Iraq, the Arizona senator also garbled the distinction between the Sunni Muslims backing Al-Qaeda and the Shi�ite radicals who are sponsored by Iran.
Senator Joe Lieberman, his friend, had already had to whisper a correction in his ear last month when he claimed that Al-Qaeda was being trained by Iran. �I�m sorry; the Iranians are training the extremists, not Al-Qaeda. Not Al-Qaeda, I�m sorry,� McCain said hastily.

At this rate, I can envision reporters starting a new game this fall Let�s stump McCain. Use strings of similar sounding words with very different meanings and see if he can keep them straight. Sounds sort of evil to me, like bear baiting, but we all know that members of the press are a nasty bunch who get their kick from pulling the wings off flies.

http://www.rollingstone.com/news/story/5920188/the_press_vs_al_gore

"You can actually disprove some of what Bush is saying if you really get in the weeds and get out your calculator, or you look at his record in Texas," Time magazine columnist Margaret Carlson told radio morning man Don Imus at the height of the campaign. "But it's really easy, and it's fun, to disprove Gore. As sport, and as our enterprise, Gore coming up with another whopper is greatly entertaining to us."

This actually sounds awful, and I hope to God that they don�t do it. It will be enough if they simply report his blunders in a truthful manner.

This one is going to hurt McCain more than any of the others. Clinton will just floor him with her grasp of details. She will wash over him like a hurricane. The contrast between Obama�s youth and McCain�s mental feebleness will make the contest seem like a joke. I can not wait for the first debate.

V. 100 Years of War He said it, we just have to repeat it. I am still waiting for the buttons with McCain�s snarling face that read �100 Years of War, I can live with it� at the top. And at the bottom �I hope you can too�. These will be the "War is good business. Invest your son" of the 2008 campaign if someone will just make them. Hmmm. I have a button maker. Maybe I should whip some up.

VI. Attack His Strengths Democrats forget this one lots of times. They tell themselves �Old so and so is a blank and a blank and a blank so we can not do x, y or z, because no one will buy it.� But this is probably the most important one of all, since McCain has nothing to offer the country except his feel good I spent Viet Nam I a box for you straight shootin� Maverick self. He has no solutions to the economic crisis. He has no plans to end the war. He has no hope. No optimism. He says the jobs are not coming back. If he is elected president, the circle of lobbyists who surround him like a pack of hyenas will run the country. Do we want that?

Now, this is going to be tricky. It has been easy for Obama to complain that Clinton was a dirty trickster in the primary when she ran attack ads, because the GOP has spent 15 years characterizing her as a bitch and even her own supporters think of her as a fighter. So, his camp has been taking advantage of a narrative that was already in play.

It has been more difficult for Clinton to get the press or voters to listen to her when she complains of deceptive mailers or attack ads, because Obama has no history, so there is no narrative of Obama as a cheater or bastard to play upon. Therefore, she wages an uphill battle.

In McCain�s case, there is a narrative that he does not cheat or attack character. So, when the RNC and Rush and FOX begin their inevitable smear campaign against the Democratic nominee, McCain is going to make like Obama. A few days after each attack,he will say "I disavow that. We should talk about the issues, not distractions." And everyone will praise him for being such a good guy--even though Dems will all know that he is a cheater who is benefiting directly from the smears he dissavows. So, the Democrats are going to have to get their act together. They are going to have to stop sniping each other and focus on the opponent which means pointing one great big Democratic finger at McCain and saying You are to blame! And they will have to use the left wing press and bloggo-sphere to denounce every attack against the Democrat as coming directly from the RNC�and McCain�even as McCain denies it.

This is one reason why Karl Rove wants to see a fractured Democratic Party. If the attacks against the Democratic nominee are coming from other Democrats as they did in 1968----antiwar Dems who supported McCarthy denouncing the nominee Humphrey�or in 1972---working class Dems who supported Humphrey splitting from McGovern�then McCain can campaign and still look like a good guy.

That is why one of the goals of the Democrats has to be to show that the �good guy, McCain� myth is just a myth. He cheats on his wives. He utters racial and sexist slurs. He gets into fights with other members of Congress. He takes bribes. But it has to be done fairly. If the Democrats look like they are crucifying a war hero, they will look like bad guys. How do you avoid doing that? It is a judgment call. If you think to yourself I am merely showing the true man behind the mask you will not cross any lines. For the sake of America's future, do not do in the general what many Democrats have done in the primary. The kind of attacks which I have seen leveled against Democratic candidates by voters who claim to be Democrats (some of them are probably Freepers) would turn Americans off the Democratic Party forever. Here is a good rule of thumb. If you are citing something that was said or done, it is probably sound criticism. If it is blanket condemnation like McCain is a "liar" "NeoCon" "warmonger" it is inappropriate. As with good fiction writing, show, don't tell.

Testimonials from people who know the man, who have witnessed him and his temper, who have seen the things he would rather not have discussed in public are probably the best way to go here, since this kind of information has the effect of unmasking the figure on the stage in the Greek tragedy, turning him human. And if it comes from a well known conservative or a Republican or a member of his own family, that is even better, because it will ring true.

The time to start is now. It takes many months to define a candidate�s character. If we wait until September, it is too late. McCain will have defined himself. And his self definition is a lie. Do we want America to buy another lie as almost half of them did in 2000? Hell, no. Our job is to help them open their eyes.

Conclusion: These are all things that Democrats can do now to improve the party�s chances this fall. I am going to start combing the internet for right wing and Republican quotes that will reveal the true John McCain and try to put together a journal entirely devoted to them.