I think he recognized that his colleagues were turning away from him and denouncing him. I think he recognized the tack he’s on to stoke hatred in the base leads straight to defeat. This, IMO, is simply yet another attempt at pragmatism.
I used to admire John McCain, but it’s a little too late for contrition now. You reap what you sow, buddy. Anyway, tomorrow, with the way McCain’s conducted his campaign thus far, Mr. Hyde may very well make another appearance.
I don’t know which came first, honestly. I do know that the statement came after the Secret Service had to investigate a man shouting “Kill him!” at a Palin rally. So it’s not as though McCain had no idea what was happening and what he was encouraging. He knew. The media knew. Anybody paying attention for the past week knew. But it’s not polling well, so now he’s going to try to distance himself, even if he doesn’t lift a single finger to see to it that the incitement actually stops.
How low do you have to sink to make the decision that your campaign will appeal to the fears and prejudices of highly ignorant people in order to try to win an election?
I read at fivethirtyeight that Norm Coleman canceled his appearance at a McCain rally.
Newsweek poll came out that has Obama at +11.
I’m giving Democrats credit from not being cocky about this yet. Everyone is still cautious about predicting an Obama win. I think there is nothing McCain himself can do now to change things around. Only an outside event can change things.
Taking bets: how long will it be before he changes his mind on this too?
As TPM notes, this isn’t a surrogate talking off the cuff; Murtagh was reading from a prepared statement on an official McCain campaign conference call. There’s a link to the audio of the thing on the TPM page I’ve linked to.
I think we’re well beyond the point where even an election-eve video by Osama bin Laden can change the dynamic here. I think a terrorist attack on the U.S. with loss of life or major property damage, or a major terrorist attack on a U.S. embassy or a European city, is the only possible remaining game-changer.
And I’d give Obama a better-than-even chance of winning, even then: he’s done a great job of defining himself as the one who’d stay calm and keep his wits about him in a crisis, while McCain has done a great job, however unintentionally, of defining himself as the guy who’d go off half-cocked. A terrorist attack would move a lot of votes from blue to red, almost instinctually, but I think Obama’s built a very good perceptual firewall to limit the damage that would deal to his campaign.
I haven’t seen the graph in this article linked yet, but the correlation between McCain’s fortunes and the stock market is quite striking. It seems to me that Obama’s positioning on middle class woes and McCain’s complete failure to effectively respond have all but guaranteed the outcome of the race. He tried to mix things up at the town hall debate with his new mortgage proposal, but the presentation was so feeble and wishy-washy (if you noticed it at all) that it was pretty clear that his heart wasn’t in it. Barring a deus ex machina in the form of a terrorist attack or sudden magical full recovery of the economic crisis, perhaps he could pull out another Palinesque gimmick and manage to make its popularity spike coincide with the election, but I’d hate to have to bank on that as a McCain supporter.
Telling you, “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” was when he lost the election. Nothing he could say after that would have any credibility.
That video won back a bit of the respect i used to have for McCain, not all of it but some.
Not me. Now, if he had done what he did PLUS announce that he’s pulling all his ads about Ayers effective immediately, maybe then I’d consider cutting him some slack. Even then, he should also make an apology, both to Obama for the slurs and to the American people for breaking his word when he said a couple months ago that he wouldn’t tolerate any of this and would run a respectful campain.
I would have more respect for his supposed about-face if he wasn’t stoking the fires and continuing to do so. And if he was truly unaware of the bigotry that his campaign’s actions were feeding into, then he’s a myopic fool, which isn’t much better. I don’t imagine too many of the people feeling sorry for McCain would feel sympathetic towards Bush.
Don’t let yourselves be distracted. This is what we’re (still) up against:
That’s insane. If Sidley in Chicago has 500 lawyers, they probably have 1000+ staff overall. Saying that there’s any kind of connection between two people who work in that office is like saying I am connected to the Chicago Democratic machine because I once ended up on the elevator with Bill Daley when I worked in the same building as he did (which did actually happen - the elevator part, I mean).
I guess it would just be quibbling, at this point, to say that one can be a decent family man, and an Arab.
Why won’t Eva Luna be honest about her past?
She admits to having ties to the politically corrupt Chigaco machine!
What do we know about her husband?
Why won’t she talk about the allegations that she kicks puppies?
Who is the real Eva Luna?
My friends, the fate of Doperville is at stake. We must know the answers to these troubling questions!
Dear God, sometimes I’m very happy to be a Bostonian. Around my neighborhood “commie faggot” is more likely to be one’s description of themself than hurled as an insult.
I love the cognitive dissonance of people walking into a McCain rally, presumably on a weekday, yelling “get a job!” at people standing outside it holding protest signs. And this is your job, then?
Now that I think about it, Sidley’s Chicago office was also in that building at the time (they are now across the street). That means that both Bill Daley and I are directly connected to the Weathermen.
Of course. If you watch McCain in the video, he’s clearly frustrated by the woman. He’s compassionate when she says she can’t trust him… and then when she says “Arab” he shakes his head in obvious dismay and reaches for the mike. He didn’t mean to imply Arabs can’t be decent family men; he’s dismissing her as quickly as possible and refusing to play ball.
I don’t think McCain is a racist. Now that his campaign’s in terrible shape and defeat looks likelier than ever, his supporters are going nuts and I got the sense in that speech that he was suddenly alarmed at what was going on. Whether that’s something he’s realized himself or something his handlers are telling them, his contempt for the “he’s an Arab” woman looked very genuine, and that came AFTER he had twice said “Obama’s a decent person.”
The McCain campaign can perhaps be blamed for some of this, but they’ve been no worse than the Clinton campaign was in terms of using veiled racism and, in any case, you could make a strong argument that a black guy winning a Presidential campaign this late in the game would inevitably have resulted in this sort of ugliness, irrespective of what the two campaigns had said. There is a lot of hidden and not-so-hidden racism out there.
I honestly think this is bothering McCain. He may share in the blame for it or maybe not, but he looked at that event like a man who was not at all comfortable with his own audience’s position. The cat’s out of the bag and he can’t decide whether to shoot it or just run out of the room.