The response Palin has elicited in the base might very well lead to her being the selection of the electoral college should the Republicans be elected and McCain die. Remember, 70% of the delegates to the Republican convention thought Bush is doing just peachy.
I too believe that McCain misheard Europe as you or your. I imagine press conferences like that are rather loud - it would be easy to mishear a word.
I don’t see a sign of mental decay in McCain; I see signs of a man flailing about in panic because he is a Man of Action who Does Something About Things when things go wrong. So in the course of the week, he has at one time or another managed to hold about every position possible wrt the government* vis a vis *the market. I have also seen him make the usual verbal typos that people make, and spin the usual lies that politicians tell - in his case quite a few, since he reversed quite a few positions over the past four years in order to become the nominee, and now he wants to distance himself from the White House. But I don’t see any signs of any more dementia that I imagine he showed thirty years ago. This guy has always been impulsive, has shot off his mouth before he thought, has been quick tempered, and a bit of a hot dog. The question for all of us is, do we want that kind of person in the White House.
It wasn’t a press conference, it was a radio interview. And the question was repeated like 3 times, each being more specific. IIRC the final question was flat out “will you invite Zapatero, the Spanish PM, to the White House”? Or words to that effect. The interviewer got pretty specific after it was obvious he didn’t know what she was talking about.
If the truth is he simply didn’t hear (she did have a pretty heavy accent), he should’ve simply said “it was a long day, the interviewer had a heavy accent blah blah, of course the Senator knows Mr Zapatero and would invite him to the WH”.
Instead the campaign guy said McCain knew exactly who she was talking about, and was thus implying Spain wasn’t a friend of the US.
The campaign handled it dreadfully, but it’s been pretty obvious for several months that McCain is no longer in charge of the campaign; Steve Schmidt and the rest of Rove’s boys are. McCain has bascially said “I’ll do whatever you want as long as I win.” Unfortunately, he doesn’t seem to have grasped that they will also want the same kind of power they had during his administration if he wins, as they have had with W. BUt this move smacks of the current administration all over - never, ever admit that a mistake was made, even one as innocent and excusable as this one.
I think this was a bad call on the part of the campaign. On the plus side for them, no one but us politics junkies will notice it.
Now, yeah. But the Spanish noticed it, and if he’s elected it could be a serious issue between them. All because he doesn’t want a very, very minor gaffe in the news.
There was a time – within the last five years or so – when John McCain could still use the English language with finesse. I envied his ability even though it was used to bloodsuck other human beings when he was angry. Now I see a candidate for President who refers to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac as “people.” He did immediately correct himself. But it was the kind of error that he is making increasingly now. When he is speaking off the cuff, a mistake is the norm.
He makes things up and he denies saying things that he has said on the record. Some of his problem seems to be arising from confusion and lack of concentration. Some of it may be the usual political point scoring. But he is making less and less sense. Conservatives and other Republicans have begun to comment on it to in columns and blogs.
I think McCain is exhausted. He looks very bad, and hell knows I would too after this campaign. I’d probably be curled up in a ball somewhere sobbing.
Tired people make mental mistakes.
He probably does have fewer energy reserves than Obama, who is much younger and (looks, at least) very fit. He also seems to have the sort of personality that bristles at confrontation rather than relishing it, which would make interviews more tiring than they would be for others. Obama, on the other hand, seems extraordinarily relaxed in interviews. And McCain’s various injuries probably make certain things more tiring and/or painful, which adds to the fatigue.
Presidents always leave office looking much worse than they did when they went in, which makes me think the job is exhausting in and of itself. I don’t envy McCain if he wins.
And even so - there are days Obama looks pretty wiped out by the campaign schedule. It must be much more wearing on McCain who, no matter healthy he may for his age, will simply not have the same reserves at a man 30 years his junior.
If McCain died the Republicans would be completely and utterly fucked (as would the Dems if Obama died). I think the RNC would go ahead and nominate Palin as [del]sacrificial lamb[/del] presidential candidate. I doubt Romney or Huckabee would even want to be part of that trainwreck.
McCain reminds me of my father, before he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, when his state of mind could best be described as “at times, kind of befuddled.” The similarity is scary.
I don’t think it’s any medical condition, be it age, illness, or fatigue, that is causing his misstatements. I think the man is floundering because he is so desperate. This is his absolute last shot at the presidency; he can’t tell himself that he’ll run again in four years. And he’s wanted this very badly for a long time - probably for fifteen, twenty years. He’s screwing up because he’s panicked, and he’s panicked because he wants this so damned much. No crisis that happened to the country could panic him the way this campaign is, and I’m assuming he would actually handle the stress of the office better than this. On the other hand, I have the feeling he won’t be allowed to run much of anything. If McCain is elected, I imagine it will be largely the same people in charge as now, except for Cheney.
Because you could throw a couple of female pages/prostitutes at Strom and get him to shut up. McCain, however, insists on speaking even though it is clear to everyone, even himself, that he has no idea what is coming out of his mouth. He talks like a late term Dick Nixon or Ronald Reagan, and he hasn’t even taken office yet. And this is the best candidate for “Leader of the Free World” that the RNC can front? Every time he makes a public appearance he seems to be coming apart like a cheap gold watch, and I’m not sure he’d even wake up if he got a call on the White House Hot Line at 0300.
In comparison, here is a clip of Barack Obama speaking more or less extemporaneously on The Late Show. He seems in control, confident, witty, deferential and respectful to Sarah Palin as an opponent without being openly condescending, and generally in charge of the conversation. He talks to issues, insofar as he goes into any detail at all, rather than blathering on about some tangential discussion, and he disarms the whole “lipstick on a pig” controversy with aplumb and without animosity. Endorsement by the Oprah contingent aside, I can’t think of a single candidate who at least appears more prepared for the role of being President since at least Gary Hart, and he harkens closer to Eisenhower or FDR in terms of speaking eloquently and at length about actual issues rather than campaign slogans.
Well, I suppose he could be doing quadratic equations in his head for fun, but the evidence would suggest otherwise. Until he starts displaying a mastery of geography, I’m concluding he doesn’t know how to read a map.
The party matters more than the person, so I’m not too bothered by McCain acting old. At least he and his party don’t believe that the government exists to redistribute wealth from the productive to the unproductive. I’ll take a little early-stage Alzheimer’s over a three-quarters marxist.
Honey, this week the nation, led by none other than that well-known lead com simp George W. Bush, went further toward communism than anything Obama ever devised in his entire life. And he pretty much had to, or we were back to the Great Depression. Now I’m not quite old enough to remember that myself, but my parents sure do. It was not a fun time. And yet everything that the Democrats have tried to put in place to make sure it wouldn’t happen again, the Republicans have tried to tear down. And they finally succeeded. And they were then shocked, shocked I tell you, to find greed and cheating on Wall Street of all places!
Politically, tax-wise, all bets are off now. They’ll probably both keep on campaigning on the same stuff, but once whoever gets into office, it’s going to be a massive job just to keep the country solvent without going into enormous inflation because of the huge deficit we had already run up, to which we will now add $700 billion. My guess is that Obama will continue the expiration of the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, but significantly reduce the $1000 rebate he has campaigned on, but I have nothing but gut to say that, and I could easily be wrong. In any case, the last thing Obama wants is communism. You apparently either can’t or won’t see how heavily tilted the field is in favor of people who start out wealthy and/or educated (and these two tend to be fairly closely associated, although it is certainly not a 1:1 correlation). He wants to even it up a bit. Is that so terrible? It’s not like wealthy people went broke during the Reagan years, and the taxes he’s proposing on the wealthy would be lower than those, as I understand it. Was Ronald Reagan a communist?
Frankly, if I were a candidate at this point, I’d be hoping to lose. It was a bad enough job before this week. Now it’s a nightmare. Fortunately, Obama is a better man than I am (well, I’m not a man, but you get the point), and takes the responsibility of being the nominee seriously.