Who is she? Who is the carefully groomed and scripted Debra Bartoshevich in McCain's new ad "Debra"?
Is she a lifelong Democrat, a Hillary backer who switched to McCain because Obama lacks "experience"? That is what she and her PUMA admirers claim. But the YouTube video at the top of this post, an unscripted interview with a local reporter, tells a far different story. What lifelong Democrat says, as she does repeatedly, "Democrat party"? And why was the McCain team already so poised to recruit her that she got a phone call from them "approximately three minutes" after Hillary Clinton's June 5 concession speech?
Her strange journey to center stage of McCain's Democrat-switcher campaign began long before that campaign gleefully leaked to reporters their coup in persuading one of Wisconsin's Hillary Clinton delegates to pledge publicly she would vote for John McCain. Read on below the fold!
I hope nobody thinks this is too cynical and overly analytical... but I'm watching Joe Biden's son bring tears to the eyes of convention goers with the recounting of the heroics of his father after his mother and brother were killed in a car wreck. It's definitely a touching story, and I've got to admit it touches me just as much or more so than the timeworn crosses in the sand 5 1/2 years of John McCain's POW story...
How's this for another kick to working Americans who are struggling to get by? According to the guy that helped develop McCain's health care plan, no Americans should be considered uninsured.
His logic? Anyone who can get into a hospital emergency room is able to access health care, and therefore shouldn't be considered uninsured. His solution to the health insurance crisis is simply to define the problem away.
I am a member of Veterans for Obama from Columbia SC and I have volunteered to have a "convention party" every day of the convention, well no one has bothered to RSVP or share a desire to experience the convention with "friends" or other Democtratic leaning progressives.
I was phoned today by a reporter from the State questioning me about the "convention party" and was wondering if it would be alright for him to stop by and interview any willing "convention goers" that desired to share their thoughts. I have sent out a new e mail to the group Veterans for Obama and have one reply that will be here.
John Kerry just explained not only why I'm a Democrat, but why I don't trust Republicans on ANYTHING -- including their so-called strength: "national security".
People have been jumping all over John McCain's forgetting of how many homes he owns, and rightfully so - the idea of a man who can't even remember his own assets being the guy who'll fix the American economy is just outright laughable. I'm all for ripping on McCain on this front, or really on any front. But while it's good to take from this a sense of just how out of touch McCain is about the real conditions of the economy, there's another thing we should take away from this - and a disturbing pattern that raises questions about whether this man is fit to hold the office of leader of the free world.
Running for president requires great strength and stamina. The race is long and treacherous. John McCain has been forcefully pushing his argument that he is better qualified for the job than his opponent, Barack Obama. In fact, McCain contends that Obama is not qualified at all. The latest McCain ad says that Obama is "dangerously unprepared" to be president.
Ok, now I guess I have to talk about real things in order to fill out this entry. It really bothers me when I see the McCain ads talking about how Barack Obama wants to raise "your" taxes. Obama's tax plan raises taxes only for people who makes over $600,000 a year. Here's my idea for a response ad:
Now that we have seen the very passionate, very aggressive, very clear in her support for Sen. Obama (the Next President of the United States of America!) speech from Sen. Clinton the Dog is wondering if we are seeing a political head fake. This might be too clever by half, but stick with the Dog on this.
We know that summer is a usually a time where most voters are more interested in the Olympics or the Pennant Race in MLB or even the recalcitrant brown spot in the middle of the lawn than the presidential politics. It is a time of framing and dirty tricks precisely for this reason. But this summer has been a little different. We had a primary process that was not over until the beginning of June, so there was more awareness going into the summer. Then we had the PUMA’s pop up. They got plenty of air time claiming that they would not support Sen. Obama, no, no, no, never! This went on, even though Sen. Clinton appeared in Unity, NH with Sen. Obama and gave her unequivocal support. It kept a story line going that would get play on every network everywhere, right up to this week and the convention.
I'd like to promote the new, awesome site ObamaTaxCut.com (please use this link to help avoid overloading the server) put together by Zach at AlchemyToday:
53% of Americans think Barack Obama will raise their taxes, which means at least 52% of Americans don't know anything about his tax policies. In fact, 95% of Americans will see a tax cut from Obama, and 80% of Americans will get a bigger cut than they'd get from McCain. Calculate your Obama Tax Cut at ObamaTaxCut.com!
At work today I was talking with a friend and co-worker, a middle aged Filipino American woman married to a white Republican. She's really cool, very smart and a retired middle school teacher. I know that she hasn't been happy with the Bush years. She's even forwarded me some anti-Bush stuff.
So anyway, the conversation meandered into politics and the Dem convention. I asked her if she'd seen Michelle's speech and she said she'd seen some of it. Then came the bombshell . . .
She said she wasn't sure about Michelle because of all the "stuff" she's been hearing about her i.e. the right wing smears. She didn't like what Michelle had to say before her speech, you know, the I'm not proud of my country crap. I defended Michelle and said "Michelle's a wonderful woman. That stuffs all B.S."
She also was afraid that Michelle wanted to be a co-president "like Hillary" and I assured her Michelle is more interested in being a good mom to her kids and public service, etc. (Heads up: This might be another smear wingers are using against Michelle - strong Democratic woman = big threat to presidency)
The problem with Democrats' attacks on John McCain so far is that they don't dig deep into the consciousness of the American voter. They are rational yet superficial attacks that do not penetrate the believability threshold of most voters. This election so far has been a rerun of previous failed Democratic campaigns in which they assume voters are both fully informed and rational actors when they respond to political rhetoric. This couldn't be farther from the truth, especially when it comes to swing voters. Both assumptions have led to countless failures on the part of the Democratic party to frame their own candidate in a positive light and exploit their opponent's weaknesses. Democrats -- stuck up in their ivory tower yet again -- fail to understand the psychology of the non-partisan swing voter and moderate voters from each party. They fail to understand how the mind and the consciousness perceives, interprets and analyzes information. The way they frame their arguments are flat, flaccid and boring. It doesn't pull at the heartstrings, it doesn't sound believable, and it doesn't grab those unconscious psychological levers in the brain like the Republican message does.
Nothing says how little trust you have in someone like a prenup, and it also shows who is very much the junior partner in the relationship.
If Cindy McCain really wanted to help her husband's presidential campaign, she should be asked to make a big public display of tearing up that prenuptial to show that if she's willing to trust Grandpa Asshole with her hundreds of millions, we should trust him with our trillion dollar budget.
If she doesn't, why should we trust him with not just our money, but our country and security?
Why isn't the corporate conservative media's first & truest love above 50?
Hollywood couldn't write a more perfect script of the most bestest perfect candidate possible. 'merica is blessed with such a man and yet he is not above 50%?
Any reasonably alert Kossack knows the vicious, unprincipled depths to which the Radical Right, i.e., the modern Republican Party and its hacks, will sink in their attempt to destroy Barack Obama. In case you need to see them all in one place, these are attacks that McCain and his thugs have ACTUALLY made:
Obama is a traitor
Obama may just be the AntiChrist.
Obama is a secret Muslim pro-terrorist Manchurian candidate.
Obama is a Marxist.
Obama is just a paper-thin "celebrity"
Obama hates the troops.
Obama is an ally of terrorists here in America.
Obama is an elitist who despises white middle class Americans.
Obama is simply an "affirmative action" candidate.
