Heather Hurlburt of Democracy Arsenal adds more details to the biography of Daniel Kurtzer, the Obama advisor that the McCain campaign foreign policy apparatchiks are trying to smear for attending a legal conference in Damascus and suggesting that the Israel-Syria peace process is a good thing: When the McCain campaign goes after an Orthodox Jew, [...]
A point I haven’t heard made elsewhere: There’s currently a lot of discussion in the media about the conventions and who’s going to get a bounce from them, Obama or McCain. Is this at all relevant to the question of who is going to win in November? No, unless you believe that political campaigns have [...]
The McCain campaign’s constant invocation of the candidate’s POW past is weird bordering on irrational: yesterday, Nicolle Wallace used it as evidence that McCain didn’t “cheat” at Saddleback. By a VERY generous interpretation, she could have meant that POWs don’t cheat. Or that once you’ve been a POW, you’ve been through so much you’re above [...]
• It was going to be about politics and his other hobby, yelling at people, but Mark Penn already does that blog. [Gotham Acme] • Dog owners are racist. Cat owners are just mean. [Yahoo!] • “McCain’s decision to jam up Obama’s news cycle with a VP pick on August 29th and compress his newsmaking [...]
Remember when Phil Gramm called the U.S. a “nation of whiners” who didn’t understand that the economy wasn’t so bad? Remember how the Obama campaign seemed slow to exploit Gramm’s gaffe? Those days are over. In a matter of hours, the Obama campaign has gone meta over McCain’s inability to remember how many houses he [...]
Back in early 2007, John McCain inextricably linked his chances of becoming the next president to the course of the Iraq war and the success of the surge in troops that he advocated and President Bush adopted. It was, to say the least, a politically risky decision. At the time, Iraq was a dead weight [...]
“Intelligence activity in the past decades has, all too often, exceeded the restraints on the exercise of governmental power which are imposed by our country’s Constitution, laws and traditions.” — The Church Committee Report, 1976 Over the last several years, American concerns over the rewriting of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act were premised on a [...]
Jamie Rubin makes some important points about John McCain’s knee-jerk bellicosity. In the case of Georgia, my guess is that McCain was overwhelmed by personal feelings since he had befriended the young Georgian President over the years. Such passion is great for political campaigns–see my column below–but it’s not a great way to make foreign [...]
