Elephant Walk: John McCain’s Declaration of “Independence”
Friday, September 5th, 2008 by Jon Cummings
Dw.: Well, John McCain is in a pickle now, isn’t he? Last week he chose a running mate that would satisfy certain weak sectors of his ticket - the Christian Right, young people and women. One day after Sarah Palin’s speech, she is suddenly the party’s superstar. It helps him in the polls, but now he has two people to wrestle the spotlight from: Barack Obama and his own VP choice.
Jon: I think McCain needs to back away from the nastiness of Wednesday evening. Mitt, Rudy and Sarah were so over the top, and the crowd in the hall was so angry, that the long-term impact might be an implosion of the Republican Party brought on by its own misplaced victimhood and unearned condescension. McCain needs to offer something different tonight.
Ted: This speech will tell us a lot about how much McCain wants to be president, and how low he will stoop to get it. So far, he has kowtowed to his advisors and party regulars, who steered him away from picking his top choices for VP (Thompson and Lieberman) in order to go with Palin.
Dw.: Tonight’s speech has to be a winner. By even the standards of the conservative pundits, Obama’s was one for the ages. McCain needs to bring the impact, and badly. The question is how he’ll approach the task. Will he rise above the verbal flogging his compatriots inflicted over the last two and a half days, addressing the audience as a statesman? Or will he sink to a barrage of easy cliches, distortions, and the kibbles and bits the red states lap up so willingly?
Ready, steady, go…!
McCain takes the stage…
Dw: Heeeeere’s Johnny!
Jon: What was with that intro video? Very Leni Riefenstahl, with the voiceover and the flagwaving. And now McCain enters, and that huge spotlight is terribly Triumph of the Will. (more…)



Jon: Here is Laura’s “straight talk” about the achievements of hubby’s administration: 1. No Child Left Behind (enacted with more help from Democrats than anyone else, never fully funded by Bush, too reliant on standardized tests, school districts nationwide despise it); 2. Supreme Court justices Alito & Roberts (selling the populace down the river to big business, ready to gut Roe v. Wade on a moment’s notice); 3. Faith-based initiatives (even the former director of the program says the Bushies were pandering, then disrespectful to church groups); 4. The African AIDS initiative (hard to argue with this funding, though the policy behind it reeks of Christian-right asininity – and Laura’s “before” statistic that only 50,000 Africans were receiving treatment in 2001 is a steaming pile of horseshit); 5. Afghanistan & Iraq “living in freedom” (millions of them might beg to differ – if you can hear the women’s muffled voices beneath their burkas); 6. Having “kept the American people safe” (hahahahahahaha).
These GOP moves certainly are prudent, from both a governing perspective (George Bush and Dick Cheney have no business abandoning their posts during such a crisis, a lesson they’ve thankfully learned by now) and a political perspective (a slate of right-wing hits on Barack Obama would be profoundly inappropriate on a night when the homes and livelihoods of millions are endangered, as would the sight of Bush and John McCain partying through another Category 4 hurricane).
The net impact of such a throttling-back of the usual partisan festivities is unknown. On the one hand, Republicans will be unable to get started with what should be the main point of this convention, to introduce to the nation the almost completely unknown VP selection Anita Bryant – excuse me, Sarah Palin. On the other hand, McCain and other GOP operatives are not-so-quietly thanking their lucky stars that they won’t have to spend an evening “celebrating” the Bush/Cheney administration on national TV.
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