McCain campaign: shameless And incompetent

At The Atlantic Joshua Green adds an important new twist to the Palin "Accessorama" story broken yesterday by Jeanne Cummings. The RNC's September filings with the FEC show that they employed a personal shopper to acquire Sarah Palin's expensive new wardrobe.

But it gets worse. The PS was one Jeff Larson, a notorious Republican operative, a protege of Karl Rove, and one of the last people McCain would want to be linked to in news stories as he tries to portray himself as a new kind of Republican reformer. Larson's firm FLS Connect was behind the infamous robocalls in South Carolina in 2000 that smeared John McCain and doomed his campaign. FLS also is responsible for the nasty robocalls smearing Obama, which are drawing such bad publicity for McCain this week.

Add to that the fact that Larson stands accused of renting an apartment in DC at a steep discount to GOP Sen. Norm Coleman. Larson's wife works in Coleman's office in Minnesota. That's one of several tawdry corruption scandals swirling around Coleman that threaten his re-election. Another allegation against Coleman: that he accepted expensive clothing as a gift from a Republican backer, businessman Nasser Kazeminy. Snazzy duds seem to be an accepted perk among a certain class of Republican office-seekers.

Anyway, the McCain campaign should have had the sense to keep a sleazy operative like Larson away from their guy or at least make sure their ties to him did not become public. And yet, the RNC uses him unnecessarily as Palin's personal shopper and then names him in an FEC filing. It's both shameless and incompetent...the twin hallmarks of the McCain campaign throughout this year.

Joshua Green highlights the point that it's a basic question of competence for a presidential campaign to obscure any connections with unseemly political operatives:

What’s so incompetent about this from a political tradecraft perspective is that both parties ordinarily take the easy precaution of making sure such embarrassing material isn’t obvious to reporters, which they do by routing the payment through a law firm or consultant. Here they neglected to do so.

What McCain's campaign has done during this summer and fall is raise the very same kinds of doubts that Hillary Clinton's campaign raised during last winter and spring. Clinton's campaign organization showed itself to be supremely, and surprisingly, incompetent at really basic things - like managing its budget; identifying the states it needed to compete in, implementing a plan for each, and opening offices there; keeping surrogates under control; and identifying a coherent and consistent message for their candidate to present.

McCain's campaign since he won the Republican nomination battle has raised similar doubts about their competence. Funny, both Clinton and McCain have tried to defeat Barack Obama by portraying themselves as the more seasoned candidate while casting Obama as a lightweight. And yet Obama's campaign has been consistently competent at carrying out the campaign fundamentals, whereas McCain and Clinton both have looked like they were flying by the seats of their pants.

crossposted at unbossed.com

Clinton not sure whether Unitary Executive has gone too far

Hillary Clinton in her own words is almost always more disappointing than the ideal candidate of her supporters' imagination. Today Michael Tomasky of the Guardian publishes an interview with her that ought to make your heart sink, that is if your heart is able to stomach all the equivocations.

Tomasky says that his goal in the interview was to circumvent her habit of "avoiding [rather than] actually answering the question, and reverting to a pre-ordained script". Her responses however do more to highlight Clinton's legendary evasiveness.

The most striking answer was to the first question, which had been intended (we're told) to evoke some candid thoughts: Which of the powers of the president that George Bush has assumed would you relinquish?

Clinton hemms and haws about having to look into the matter after she takes office. Chiz.

Here's that section of the interview:

I want to start with some questions about foreign policy and terrorism. If you become president you'll enter the White House with far more power than, say, your husband had. What is your view of this? And what specific powers might you relinquish as president, or renegotiate with Congress - for example the power to declare a US citizen an enemy combatant?

Well, I think it is clear that the power grab undertaken by the Bush-Cheney administration has gone much further than any other president and has been sustained for longer. Other presidents, like Lincoln, have had to take on extraordinary powers but would later go to the Congress for either ratification or rejection. But when you take the view that they're not extraordinary powers, but they're inherent powers that reside in the office and therefore you have neither obligation to request permission nor to ask for ratification, we're in a new territory here. And I think that I'm gonna have to review everything they've done because I've been on the receiving end of that. There were a lot of actions which they took that were clearly beyond any power the Congress would have granted or that in my view that was inherent in the constitution. There were other actions they've taken which could have obtained congressional authorization but they deliberately chose not to pursue it as a matter of principle.

I guess I'm asking, can a president, once in the White House, actually give up some of this power in the name of constitutional principle?

Oh, absolutely, Michael. I mean that has to be part of the review that I undertake when I get to the White House, and I intend to do that.

Let's look at the implications: "Other presidents...have had to take on extraordinary powers..." Actually, none have been obliged to do so. The problem is that some presidents wish to take them.

"But when you take the view that they're not extraordinary powers, but they're inherent powers..." That's not the problem. The Constitution gives the President no "extraordinary powers" except the role of commanding the armed forces during time of war or rebellion. The problem is that presidents wish to have powers that aren't granted by the Constitution.

"I think I'm gonna have to review everything they've done..." Why review? Hasn't the Senator from New York been paying sufficient attention during the last 6 years that she can declare definitively that she'll renounce powers that George W. Bush assumed? The question was not "Will you think about it?", but "What specific powers might you relinquish?".

"they took [actions] that were clearly beyond any power the Congress would have granted or that in my view that was inherent in the constitution." Taking actions without authority is merely the nub end of the problem. The real problem is that Bush takes actions that violate the letter and spirit of the Constitution.

It should have been relatively easy for Clinton to list a long series of presidential "powers" that she would renounce. In fact, Tomasky feeds her one suggestion in the question itself: the "power to declare a US citizen an enemy combatant". Yet Hillary Clinton cannot bring herself to identify a single power that she's definitely prepared to renounce before taking the oath to protect and uphold the Constitution.

The rest of the interview is fairly underwhelming as well, particularly if (like me) you'd like a candidate who's willing to lead.

Asked whether she agrees with the silly proposition that "the terrorists hate us because of our freedoms," Clinton first seems to reject it, or at least talk around it, but then doubles back to declare "Well, some do."

Asked why Congress doesn't cut off funding for Iraq, or attach it to timetables for withdrawal, as most Americans want, Clinton responds that Republicans won't let them. No explanation about why Democrats need to cave in and continue to send bills to Bush that the Republicans want.

Asked whether she'll support Mukasy's nomination despite his comments on torture, Clinton boldly declares that she's "gonna look at the entire record of the hearing." Again the dodge "I wasn't really paying attention at the time."

Tomasky also tried and failed to get Clinton to provide him with a single example of when she staked out a controversial position in favor of any progressive cause. As he remarks in a commentary on the interview:

One major concern of liberals about Clinton is her preternatural caution as a politician-her general unwillingness to stick her neck out and risk political capital in behalf of a progressive policy goal that wasn't a safe issue. I asked her to name one issue during her Senate tenure on which she'd done this. Answer: "Well, I think, you know, voting against funding. What did we get, 12, 13, 14 votes on that?" She was referring to a vote last May to make emergency supplemental appropriations to the Iraq war effort. The measure passed 80-14. Clinton and her chief rival for the Democratic nomination, Barack Obama, both voted no, announcing their votes very late in the process.

This, of course, wasn't really what I meant. By the time of this vote, she was in full presidential campaign mode and trying to establish her bona fides with the party's anti-war base. So the political risk inherent in this vote was small. Indeed it was Joe Biden, who was the only senator/presidential candidate to vote yea, who risked something politically, whatever one thinks of his vote substantively.

After I followed up, Clinton went into a defence of how progressive her voting record was; but again, this wasn't what I meant. I was asking about examples of leadership. So the answer to the question was that there really wasn't one thing that she could think of on which she'd taken a risk in behalf of a progressive policy end.

To be more precise, Clinton rejects the very premise that progressives have reason to think she's an "overly cautious politician":

Well, you know I've made so many votes, Mike, and I've tried to vote as I thought was the right thing to do, and if you look at my voting record as it's evaluated by most of the progressive organizations that look at voting records, I have a very, very high percentage of having voted with them, so I don't quite know what their concern is.

To be perfectly candid, I'm not one of those progressives who think Hillary Clinton is overly cautious. I'm a liberal.

crossposted from unbossed.com

Zombies to the left, super-patriots to the right

crossposted from the zombie-kingdom, unbossed.com

It turns out that the founder of unbossed.com, em dash, is a zombie in the pay of Hillary Clinton. Until today, my guess is that you would not known that. Read the infinitely entertaining Mr. Richard Poe for all the chilling details.

Poe has spent many years working with the equally perspicacious David Horowitz to uncover all manner of left-wing conspiracies, shining particular light on the less real ones.

Poe has maintained an exhaustive, and still expanding, list of enemies. Some no doubt are personal enemies (neighbors, for example), others (perhaps the majority) are enemies of all mankind—enemies such as the late philosopher Karl Popper, a famous anti-totalitarian and exponent of the ‘Open Society’. Near the top of Poe’s list are George Soros and Hillary Clinton

Clinton, Poe has learned, has a secret “far-left agenda” that she’ll impose on America once she seizes control of the government. It turns out that our own em dash is part of Clinton’s secret conspiracy, as Poe has can now reveal.

Can it be that leaders of the leftwing blogosphere suck their nourishment directly from the swollen teat of Senator Clinton’s pendulous fundraising apparatus?

Oh yes, it can. There is a veritable army of zombie-bloggers sucking at Clinton’s pendulous swollen teats of nourishment. For Clinton "helped to start and support" Media Matters for America, which allegedly rents out some office space to the Center for Independent Media, which once gave a fellowship to em dash.

Em dash, you zombie, you’re out in the open now.

I must apologize then to faithful readers of unbossed.com, who might well feel that they have been duped by our pretence of reporting on facts and such at this site. There were no facts, there was no such. We are an army of zombies working to impose Hillary Clinton’s swollen teats upon an unsuspecting nation of innocents.

The recent post at unbossed tearing Clinton down for her bellicose foreign policy and hawkish advisers? A mere ruse to distract you, the reader, from our secret zombie endeavors.

The post denouncing Clinton and other Congressional hawks for disowning their 2002 vote that gave George Bush a blank check to invade Iraq? The description of Clinton the presidential candidate as a ”jellyfish”? Well, we fooled you, didn’t we?

And the cleverest ruse of all has been this one: Aside from taking the occasional swipe at Hillary Clinton, unbossed.com has mostly ignored her. Now that is deep zombie cover for you. You’d never have guessed whence we take our marching orders.

The company presidential candidates keep

Perhaps, like me, you're less than convinced that any of the leading presidential candidates can be trusted entirely to adopt mature policies, however essential. Perhaps you're wondering whether they will definitively and forever sweep into the landfill of history all the many outrages against decency that President Bush has mounded up around the White House, like a fortress of so much manure.

Perhaps you're concerned that once again so-called liberals will try to compete with so-called conservatives in bellicosity, chest-thumping, strong-on-defensism, mine-shaft-gapism, and so forth—thus insuring some kind of continuity in the insane policies of the Bush administration. Perhaps, for example, you fear that each and every one of them would ultimately refuse to withdraw from Iraq (notwithstanding everything), out of an excess of caution regarding what the "serious people" in Washington might think of their hawkish credentials.

You should be worried, because by now virtually every one of them has publicly taken an obstreperous or incautious stance on some foreign policy issue...threatening Iran, for example. It already looks like a race to the bottom, and I fear that there'll be a lot of table-pounding before the primaries are over. This list of hawkish foreign policy advisors assembled by the main presidential candidates may give you even more grounds for concern.

In particular, I'm astounded (though not in the least surprised) to learn that Hillary Clinton relies upon the advice of that notorious Brookings-Institution fool, Michael O'Hanlon.

This is the person who recently returned from a hurried visit to Iraq, hosted by the US military, and declared in an op-ed that (a) he was a longtime critic of the Iraq War, and (b) "we are finally getting somewhere" in Iraq. Neither was true, as many people pointed out.

Last year, sensing that O'Hanlon was going to be promoted hard by the administration's apologists as a 'sensible' (i.e. hawkish) "liberal", I wrote a profile of O'Hanlon's recent career as a self-promoting goofball. His war-mongering has since become legendary, but it's worth emphasizing that O'Hanlon is a laughingstock for a whole range of reasons.

Here I'll quote part of that profile, where I talk about the desperation of think-tank "experts" to retain their seats in front of the microphones:

You can see that that is exactly what O'Hanlon prizes from the boast in his Brookings bio:

O’Hanlon has appeared on the major television networks more than 150 times since September 11, 2001 and has contributed to CNN, MSNBC, BBC, and FOX some 300 times over that same period.

Who in the hell counts up their television appearances? And who subdivides the tally between major and minor networks? It's pathetic, but all too characteristic. These people are desperate self-promoters living in fear that their pretensions to omniscience will be exploded and the microphones snatched away. O'Hanlon, for example, claims to be an expert in eleven areas of national and international policy (including expertise in several Asian countries). Yet he speaks only a single foreign language (French) and his undergraduate degree was in physics.

This know-it-all has been wrong about virtually everything important in Iraq (one of his proclaimed areas of expertise), such as when he congratulated Bush for denying that a civil war had broken out this spring [of 2006]. That was, by his own admission, the day after 30 headless bodies were discovered en masse in Iraq. And a full year after we began seeing headlines regarding the systematic kidnapping and torture committed by Iraqi Interior Ministry forces, he writes drivel like this:

If the country begins to descend toward civil war, the temptation of many [Iraqi security forces] will be to take sides in the sectarian strife rather than stop it.

Puffed up experts such as this are frauds who can only retain their grip upon respectability by avoiding scrutiny of their record.

That's sufficient to demonstrate, I believe, that O'Hanlon's advice even in his areas of "expertise" is about as worthless as any advice could possibly be. Even more troubling, he's a confirmed and unrepentant hawk on Iraq. In other words, he believes in principle in a policy of bashing certain countries, at least certain Middle Eastern countries, as long as the bashing is done efficiently and with some tidiness.

And this is the clown whom Hillary Clinton counts as a trusted advisor? To my mind, that says a great deal about her sense...not just about her preferred foreign policies, but also about her basic sensibilities.

All of the lists of advisors for Democratic candidates are troubling—for whom the lists include and whom they don't include—even if none of the others have stooped as low as to turn to Michael O'Hanlon. And the Republican candidates' advisors are even more extreme (Norman Podhoretz, for heaven's sake).

So it looks like our choices next year may boil down to (a) 8 more years of hell, or (b) 8 more years of heck.

crossposted from unbossed.com