Big post... big news... big boobs (in my icon)
Behold... the President of Virginia.
McCain Outspending Obama By Hundreds Of Thousands In Many Core Battleground States
The McCain campaign has outspent the Obama camp by hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in some cases by as much as a million dollars or more, in virtually all of the nearly dozen battleground states where both campaigns are up on the air, according to a firm that tracks national advertising.
Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, confirmed to us in response to our questions that McCain's campaign has racked up a huge ad spending advantage in what he called "traditional battleground states," the states that both campaigns are sinking cash into.
McCain is advertising heavily in 11 traditional battlegrounds; Obama is advertising in those same 11 plus roughly seven more; and McCain holds a heavy advantage in virtually all the 11 shared states.
The comparison is significant, and in one sense it lends comfort to Obama, because McCain has not been able to pull ahead in those states despite vastly outspending him in them. But the flip-side of this is that Obama has not been able to make significant enough headway in many of the seven states where Obama has the airwaves to himself.
Here's the comparison of the two camps' spending on ads up to the present in the 11 states where both are up on the air, according to Tracey:
Iowa: McCain has spent roughly $700,000 more than Obama.
Missouri: McCain has spent roughly half a million more than Obama.
Ohio: McCain has spent approximately one million more than Obama.
Pennsylvania: McCain has spent roughly a million and a half more than Obama.
New Hampshire: Spending is about even.
New Mexico: McCain has spent approximately $300,000 more, and has outspent Obama by roughly two to one.
Nevada: McCain has outspent Obama by $800,000, also roughly two to one.
Missouri: McCain has spent $500,000 more than Obama.
Virginia: Obama has spent a million more than McCain, largely because Obama is advertising statewide while McCain is only up in the northern part of the state.
Wisconsin: McCain has spent roughly a half million more than Obama.
North Dakota: Obama has outspent McCain by around $170,000.
The reason for this is partly that both campaigns are spending at roughly the same rate overall, but Obama is spread thinner and is spending in more states. Tracey says that the campaigns are both spending between $1 million and $1.6 million a day overall.
Meanwhile, Obama is up on the air in all of McCain's states, but also in Indiana, Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia.
"There are two ways to look at this," Tracey says. On the one hand, Obama is pouring significant resources into seven states where McCain is spending nothing at all, and hasn't necessarily gained enough in those states to show for it.
But Tracey adds that the spending disparity in the core battlegrounds also bodes well for Obama in some ways. "The concern for McCain is that he's outspending Obama" in the more traditional battlegrounds at a rate "that's not going to be sustainable," he says. "But he's not building any real leads in these states."
The Obama campaign may be banking on the fact that with enough spending in non-traditional states they can eventually force the McCain campaign to broaden the number of states they're spending in, making it tougher for the McCain team to keep pace with Obama's spending advantage this fall.
Late Update: Some of you rightly note that Colorado isn't on the list even though both campaigns are advertising there. We'll bring you word on Colorado's spending disparity as soon as we get it.
Separately, it's worth pointing out that the total list where both are up is still 11, even including Colorado. That's because Virginia shouldn't really be on the list, because McCain's advertising is very limited there regionally.
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Your Bill Kristol Error Of The Week
In the third sentence of his column today, New York Times “lightning rod conservative” Bill Kristol hilariously calls himself “your diligent columnist.” This, perhaps knowingly, wonderfully set up his weekly error and scandalous cover-up.
From today’s print edition of his column:
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. … What they’re putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”
That’s pretty astonishing, since there seems to be absolutely no basis for the charge.
But oh look, there’s an article in “his” very newspaper today, the New York Times, proving that McCain wasn’t in Jesus’ Silence Cone listening to ABBA, as is his usual Saturday night activity.
Oh brother, it’s time to edit the version online, mmhmm yes it is, throw in some ellipses and shit:
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. … What they’re putting out privately is that McCain … may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”
There’s no evidence that McCain had any such advantage.
No correction is listed.
We now know, for a fact, that McCain heard every question beforehand and deviously planned his answers and dumb jokes - because Bill Kristol said he didn’t.
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tl;dr version of every Kristol column:
The Candidate We Still Don’t Know
AS I went on vacation at the end of July, Barack Obama was leading John McCain by three to four percentage points in national polls. When I returned last week he still was. But lo and behold, a whole new plot twist had rolled off the bloviation assembly line in those intervening two weeks: Obama had lost the election!
The poor guy should be winning in a landslide against the despised party of Bush-Cheney, and he’s not. He should be passing the 50 percent mark in polls, and he’s not. He’s been done in by that ad with Britney and Paris and by a new international crisis that allows McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred. Let the neocons identify a new battleground for igniting World War III, whether Baghdad or Tehran or Moscow, and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts.
Obama has also been defeated by racism (again). He can’t connect and “close the deal” with ordinary Americans too doltish to comprehend a multicultural biography that includes what Cokie Roberts of ABC News has damned as the “foreign, exotic place” of Hawaii. As The Economist sums up the received wisdom, “lunch-pail Ohio Democrats” find Obama’s ideas of change “airy-fairy” and are all asking, “Who on earth is this guy?”
It seems almost churlish to look at some actual facts. No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter’s 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral votes in current toss-up states and still lose the election.
Yet surely, we keep hearing, Obama should be running away with the thing. Even Michael Dukakis was beating the first George Bush by 17 percentage points in the summer of 1988. Of course, were Obama ahead by 17 points today, the same prognosticators now fussing over his narrow lead would be predicting that the arrogant and presumptuous Obama was destined to squander that landslide on vacation and tank just like his hapless predecessor.
The truth is we have no idea what will happen in November. But for the sake of argument, let’s posit that one thread of the Obama-is-doomed scenario is right: His lead should be huge in a year when the G.O.P. is in such disrepute that at least eight of the party’s own senatorial incumbents are skipping their own convention, the fail-safe way to avoid being caught near the Larry Craig Memorial Men’s Room at the Twin Cities airport.
So why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer - and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it - is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is. The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they’re “hearing too much” about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It’s past time for that pressing educational need to be met.
What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.
With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.
McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.
McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.
Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.
While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” - as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”
Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.
To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being “proud” of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about “whitey.” But we still haven’t been inside Cindy McCain’s tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she controls, “lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve public health and safety,” in opposition to groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain’s future role in her beer empire won’t be revealed before the election.
Some of those who know McCain best - Republicans - are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration’s first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama - temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others - are missing in McCain. “He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,” Hauser told me. “If John says ‘I’m going with so and so,’ you can’t count on that the next morning,” she complained, adding, “That’s not the man we want for president.”
McCain has even prompted alarms from the right’s own favorite hit man du jour: Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry as co-author of “Unfit to Command” in 2004 and who is trying to do the same to Obama in his newly minted best seller, “The Obama Nation.”
Corsi’s writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi’s publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author’s “scholarship.” If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi’s research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi’s scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received “strong” financial support from a “group tied to Al Qaeda” and that “McCain’s personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.”
As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there’s one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told.
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Obama Campaign: McCain Is Defying Iraqi Government's Desire For Withdrawal Timeline
Here's the response from Obama spokesperson Bill Burton to McCain's attack today proclaiming that Obama wants us to lose in Iraq out of "ambition":
"All his bluster, distortions and negative attacks notwithstanding, it is hard to understand how Senator McCain can at once proclaim his support for the sovereign government of Iraq, and then stubbornly defy their expressed support for a timeline to remove our combat brigades from their country. The difference in this race is that John McCain is intent on spending $10 billion a month on an open-ended war, while Barack Obama thinks we should bring this war to a responsible end and invest in our pressing needs here at home."
The idea that McCain's Iraq policies are directly at odds with what the Iraqi government wants has gotten scattered mention by Team Obama in statements and ads. Perhaps this is the start of a renewed effort to push it for all it's worth.
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McCain protests NBC coverage
Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) campaign manager Rick Davis asked Sunday for a meeting with Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, to protest what the campaign called signs that the network is "abandoning non-partisan coverage of the presidential race."
Davis made the request Sunday in a letter that is part of an aggressive effort by McCain to counter news coverage he considers critical.
In this case, the campaign is objecting to a statement by NBC's Andrea Mitchell on "Meet the Press" questioning whether McCain might have gotten a heads-up on some of the questions that were asked of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who was the first candidate to be interviewed Saturday night by Pastor Rick Warren at a presidential forum on faith.
Warren told the audience that McCain was being held in "a cone of silence" so he wouldn't hear the questions, which were similar for both candidates.
Warren referred again to "the cone of silence" when McCain came onstage, and the senator joked: "I was trying to hear through the wall."
Mitchell reported that some "Obama people" were suggesting "that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well prepared."
A McCain aide said that is not the case: "Senator McCain was in a motorcade led by the United States Secret Service and held in a green room with no broadcast feed."
Mitchell made the comment in the context of saying McCain did better, and that the Obama camp was defensive. In response to the campaign's letter, she pointed out that journalists get criticism from both sides.
"I wasn't expressing an opinion," Mitchell said. "I was reporting what they were saying."
Here is the text of the letter:
August 17, 2008
Mr. Steve Capus
President, NBC News
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Steve:
We are extremely disappointed to see that the level of objectivity at NBC News has fallen so low that reporters are now giving voice to unsubstantiated, partisan claims in order to undercut John McCain.
Nowhere was this more evident than with NBC chief correspondent Andrea Mitchell's comments on "Meet the Press" this morning. In analyzing last night's presidential forum at Saddleback Church, Mitchell expressed the Obama campaign spin that John McCain could only have done so well last night because he "may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama." Here are Andrea Mitchell's comments in full:
Mitchell: "The Obama people must feel that he didn't do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because what they are putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well-prepared." (NBC's "Meet The Press," 8/17/08)
Make no mistake: This is a serious charge. Andrea Mitchell is repeating, uncritically, a completely unsubstantiated Obama campaign claim that John McCain somehow cheated in last night's forum at Saddleback Church. Instead of trying to substantiate this blatant falsehood in any way, Andrea Mitchell felt that she needed to repeat it on air to millions of "Meet the Press" viewers with no indication that 1.) There's not one shred of evidence that it's true; 2.) In his official correspondence to both campaigns, Pastor Rick Warren provided both candidates with information regarding the topic areas to be covered, which Barack Obama acknowledged during the forum when asked about Pastor Warren's idea of an emergency plan for orphans and Obama said, "I cheated a little bit. I actually looked at this idea ahead of time, and I think it is a great idea;" 3.) John McCain actually requested that he and Barack Obama do the forum together on stage at the same time, making these kinds of after-the-fact complaints moot.
Indeed, instead of taking a critical journalistic approach to this spin, Andrea Mitchell did what has become a pattern for her of simply repeating Obama campaign talking points.
This is irresponsible journalism and sadly, indicative of the level of objectivity we have witnessed at NBC News this election cycle. Instead of examining the Obama campaign's spin for truth before reporting it to more than 3 million NBC News viewers, Andrea Mitchell simply passed along Obama campaign conspiracy theories. The fact is that during Senator Obama's segment at Saddleback last night, Senator McCain was in a motorcade to the event and then held in a green room with no broadcast feed. In the forum, John McCain clearly demonstrated to the American people that he is prepared to be our next President.....
We are concerned that your News Division is following MSNBC's lead in abandoning non-partisan coverage of the Presidential race. We would like to request a meeting with you as soon as possible to discuss our deep concerns about the news standards and level of objectivity at NBC.
Sincerely,
Rick Davis
Campaign Manager
John McCain 2008
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Exclusive: McCain to name VP on Aug. 29
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to celebrate his 72nd birthday on Aug. 29 by naming his running mate at a huge rally in the battleground state of Ohio, Republican sources said.
That’s a week from Friday, and the day after his rival, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, accepts the Democratic nomination at a 70,000-person spectacular in a Denver stadium.
The campaign has begun building a crowd of 10,000 for Dayton, Ohio, according to an organizer. McCain is scheduled to appear with his running mate at a large-scale event in Pennsylvania shortly thereafter.
Senior Republicans are in the dark about who he’ll name, although they say former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty are prime contenders after a trial balloon by McCain gave him very negative feedback about the idea of picking an abortion-rights running mate such as Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania and the first secretary of homeland security.
Sources close to McCain say he has wrestled with the choice, torn between a high-stakes, high-reward pick like Ridge or Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman - the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2000 - or a safer and more conventional selection such as Romney or Pawlenty.
Friends say he has yet to make a final decision, and is not expected to do so until after Sen. Barack Obama announces his choice.
McCain friends emphasized that he talks about the decision with almost no one, and could even change the announcement plans and go sooner.
“McCain views this as the one decision that he has total, utter, nonnegotiable control over,” one campaign official said.
The announcement strategy - provided McCain doesn’t change it - calls for naming the pick early Friday morning to try to suppress Obama’s bounce coming out of his convention.
“You’re going to own the weekend,” a McCain official said.
The Republican convention begins the following Monday - Labor Day - in St. Paul, Minn.
McCain advisers say they don’t think it would make sense to name the vice presidential designee earlier because the impact would get diluted by Obama’s selection. And because the GOP convention is second, they have the advantage of knowing the opposition ticket before showing their own cards.
“You can fire the bullet once,” said one key Republican. “You want the most meaningful target.”
Alex M. Triantafilou, chairman of the Hamilton County (Ohio) Republican Party, said in an exuberant post on his blog this weekend: “Sen. McCain is expected to host a rally on August 29 in Dayton and is looking for a BIG venue and for a BIG crowd. He'll get it. This is not yet public. I guess I just made it so.”
The post has been removed without explanation.
PolitickerOH.com reported Monday morning that the event will be at the 10,000-seat Ervin J. Nutter Center, a sports and entertainment complex at Wright State University.
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Bloomberg (AND RON PAUL) Set To Be On Presidential Ballot In Virginia
The state of Virginia is, for the first time in many decades, a toss up in the presidential election. And with its 13 electoral votes and polls showing a tight race, the commonwealth should host a fierce competition between Barack Obama and John McCain.
This past week, however, a small but potentially significant ripple was introduced to that equation. On Friday, under the radar, the Independent Green Party of Virginia successfully gathered enough signatures to put New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's name on the presidential ballot. They did it all without the mayor's knowledge or consent. Moreover, they wrote in as his number two Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a hero to an impassioned group of libertarians, online activists, and U.S. foreign policy critics.
The "Indy Greens," as they are known, still have a few more hoops to jump through before Bloomberg's name will officially be put into the presidential queue. Some of them, according to state officials, are relatively minor matters, including getting the party's electoral representatives to provide contact and home address information. Others are very much major, like seeing to it that Bloomberg doesn't object and ask for his name to be removed.
If the Indy Greens have their way, however, one of the most widely known Independent politicians in the country -- joined by a running mate with a cult-like following -- will be positioned to siphon off votes from the two major party candidates.
"Indy Greens started the presidential petition drive on January 1, 2008 in Independence, Virginia," explained Carey Campbell, chairman of the party. "Eight months, 15 days later, the cake is baked. The deed is done. We're happy hillbillies. Since January 1st, Indy Greens collected 70,000 petition signatures. Seven successful petition drives to put five candidates on the ballot for U.S. House, and 2 statewide petition drives... and now Michael Bloomberg on ballot for president. We made a promise to Mr. Bloomberg, and now we have kept that promise."
Virginia state law requires that a candidate receive 10,000 signatures of qualified voters, including 400 in each of the state's 11 congressional districts, in order to gain access to the presidential ballot. The Indy Greens, over the course of many months, collected far more than the minimum.
But they also did it without Bloomberg signing off. When contacted over the weekend, an aide to the mayor said his boss was "unaware of the effort." As such, the possibility exists that Bloomberg could publicly ask that his name be removed from the state's ballot, something that Virginia officials say would be cause, at the very least, for an investigation.
"If it is an issue that a candidate is put forth, we assume that the internal communications have happened. But if we were to receive a letter from Mayor Bloomberg that he doesn't want his name on the ballot, we would have to look into the matter to see why the nominee for a party doesn't want to be that nominee," said Matthew J. Abell, the Assistant Manager at Virginia's State Board of Elections. "It is a free country and if chooses to not have his name on the ballot he has every right to do so."
Campbell acknowledged this possibility and said he would not feel slighted if the mayor, simply by asking for his name to be removed from the ballot, were to undermine months of efforts.
"Yes, Bloomberg must consent to this and it will be up to the Board of Elections," he told the Huffington Post. "But we made a promise and we wanted to keep it and we have."
UPDATE: Bloomberg's spokesman Stu Loeser emails: "He hasn't made any decisions and hasn't had a chance to speak with [party chairman Carey] Campbell yet... But this is a call for post-partisanship that Mayor Bloomberg hopes the major parties will hear."
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(Bloomberg's lawyers are now suggesting he'll stay on the ballot.)
Veepstakes: Biden up, Romney down
All the CW buzz seems to be pointing in Biden’s direction right now. The New York Times profiles him today. “Mr. Biden’s strengths and weaknesses as a vice-presidential nominee are glaringly obvious and in many cases overlap. At age 65, he would bring heft, knowledge and nearly four decades of experience in Washington to a ticket headed by a relative political newcomer. But that experience -- he was first elected to the Senate at age 29 and has served for nearly four decades -- would undercut Mr. Obama’s image as an agent of change.”
"Mr. Biden is among the best-informed lawmakers on international affairs, a gap in Mr. Obama’s résumé. But Mr. Biden’s broad knowledge, his committee chairmanship and his longtime membership in the most exclusive debating club in the nation also feed his biggest flaw: a verbosity and love of his own voice that drive many, including, by some accounts, Mr. Obama, nuts.”
Meanwhile, Romney’s buzz appears to be waning. "An apparent effort by former presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee to diminish the chances of former rival Mitt Romney becoming the Republican vice presidential nominee is reviving questions about whether Romney's prospects are being damaged by opposition from evangelicals and religious conservatives. Gary Bauer, an evangelical leader who is an informal adviser to John McCain's campaign, said in an interview yesterday that evangelicals are divided, but discounted the idea there is an organized effort to stop McCain from picking Romney.”
“Bauer said he personally believes that Romney ‘would be a great running mate’ and said he has conveyed that message personally to Romney. Bauer, chairman of the Campaign for Working Families political action committee, said he was not allowed to say whether he advised McCain to pick Romney."
Several potential veeps made the Sunday show rounds. "Ridge said yesterday he thinks Republicans would accept a vice presidential candidate who supports abortion rights. But, he said, whomever John McCain picks as a running mate should defer to McCain on the issue." Bill Richardson, Tim Kaine and Bobby Jindal all made the rounds as well.
More compiled by NBC/NJ’s Matthew E. Berger and Carrie Dann…
DEMOCRATS: Sen. Joe Biden made a trip to Georgia this weekend, at the request of the Georgian government. That came after Sen. Joe Lieberman went as a McCain envoy. Says the Washington Post: “Biden and Obama staffers discussed the proposed trip and Obama officials said they were glad Biden was considering it. One source familiar with the discussions added that had the Obama team opposed the idea, the senator would likely not have gone.”
Mark Warner endorsed Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine for VP while speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in Richmond. Kaine campaigned for Obama in his state Saturday, praising him for his “excellence” in his aspirations for the country, judgment and character.
Sen. Evan Bayh disputed McCain’s claim that “we’re all Georgians now,” noting that might put the region in a state of war. “And John sometimes, he's a good person, but he's a little bit given to this kind of bellicose rhetoric, which has a tendency to inflame conflicts rather than to diffuse them, and that's not what you want in a president,” he said on “Face the Nation.”
Sen. Hillary Clinton campaigned for Obama Sunday at Northern New Mexico College. She also attended fundraisers to retire her debt with Gov. Bill Richardson.
REPUBLICANS: Romney said the situation in Georgia “shows one more time that, in a dangerous and troubled world, it's helpful to have a leader of the nation that knows these places, knows the people, understands the setting.”
John Podhoretz makes the case for Lieberman, arguing McCain no longer needs to shore up his base and can win over moderates with the former Democratic veep nominee. Lowry likes the Lieberman idea too, if both he and McCain pledge to serve only one term.
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Shhh... nobody tell McCain that the end of the week's when you're supposed to bury the news. You know, the Friday news dump? I guess when you shun reporters, nobody fills you in on these things.
McCain Outspending Obama By Hundreds Of Thousands In Many Core Battleground States
The McCain campaign has outspent the Obama camp by hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in some cases by as much as a million dollars or more, in virtually all of the nearly dozen battleground states where both campaigns are up on the air, according to a firm that tracks national advertising.
Evan Tracey, the chief operating officer of TNS Media Intelligence/Campaign Media Analysis Group, confirmed to us in response to our questions that McCain's campaign has racked up a huge ad spending advantage in what he called "traditional battleground states," the states that both campaigns are sinking cash into.
McCain is advertising heavily in 11 traditional battlegrounds; Obama is advertising in those same 11 plus roughly seven more; and McCain holds a heavy advantage in virtually all the 11 shared states.
The comparison is significant, and in one sense it lends comfort to Obama, because McCain has not been able to pull ahead in those states despite vastly outspending him in them. But the flip-side of this is that Obama has not been able to make significant enough headway in many of the seven states where Obama has the airwaves to himself.
Here's the comparison of the two camps' spending on ads up to the present in the 11 states where both are up on the air, according to Tracey:
Iowa: McCain has spent roughly $700,000 more than Obama.
Missouri: McCain has spent roughly half a million more than Obama.
Ohio: McCain has spent approximately one million more than Obama.
Pennsylvania: McCain has spent roughly a million and a half more than Obama.
New Hampshire: Spending is about even.
New Mexico: McCain has spent approximately $300,000 more, and has outspent Obama by roughly two to one.
Nevada: McCain has outspent Obama by $800,000, also roughly two to one.
Missouri: McCain has spent $500,000 more than Obama.
Virginia: Obama has spent a million more than McCain, largely because Obama is advertising statewide while McCain is only up in the northern part of the state.
Wisconsin: McCain has spent roughly a half million more than Obama.
North Dakota: Obama has outspent McCain by around $170,000.
The reason for this is partly that both campaigns are spending at roughly the same rate overall, but Obama is spread thinner and is spending in more states. Tracey says that the campaigns are both spending between $1 million and $1.6 million a day overall.
Meanwhile, Obama is up on the air in all of McCain's states, but also in Indiana, Alaska, Montana, North Dakota, North Carolina, Florida, and Georgia.
"There are two ways to look at this," Tracey says. On the one hand, Obama is pouring significant resources into seven states where McCain is spending nothing at all, and hasn't necessarily gained enough in those states to show for it.
But Tracey adds that the spending disparity in the core battlegrounds also bodes well for Obama in some ways. "The concern for McCain is that he's outspending Obama" in the more traditional battlegrounds at a rate "that's not going to be sustainable," he says. "But he's not building any real leads in these states."
The Obama campaign may be banking on the fact that with enough spending in non-traditional states they can eventually force the McCain campaign to broaden the number of states they're spending in, making it tougher for the McCain team to keep pace with Obama's spending advantage this fall.
Late Update: Some of you rightly note that Colorado isn't on the list even though both campaigns are advertising there. We'll bring you word on Colorado's spending disparity as soon as we get it.
Separately, it's worth pointing out that the total list where both are up is still 11, even including Colorado. That's because Virginia shouldn't really be on the list, because McCain's advertising is very limited there regionally.
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Your Bill Kristol Error Of The Week
In the third sentence of his column today, New York Times “lightning rod conservative” Bill Kristol hilariously calls himself “your diligent columnist.” This, perhaps knowingly, wonderfully set up his weekly error and scandalous cover-up.
From today’s print edition of his column:
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. … What they’re putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”
That’s pretty astonishing, since there seems to be absolutely no basis for the charge.
But oh look, there’s an article in “his” very newspaper today, the New York Times, proving that McCain wasn’t in Jesus’ Silence Cone listening to ABBA, as is his usual Saturday night activity.
Oh brother, it’s time to edit the version online, mmhmm yes it is, throw in some ellipses and shit:
NBC’s Andrea Mitchell reported on “Meet the Press” that “the Obama people must feel that he didn’t do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context. … What they’re putting out privately is that McCain … may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama.”
There’s no evidence that McCain had any such advantage.
No correction is listed.
We now know, for a fact, that McCain heard every question beforehand and deviously planned his answers and dumb jokes - because Bill Kristol said he didn’t.
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tl;dr version of every Kristol column:
The Candidate We Still Don’t Know
AS I went on vacation at the end of July, Barack Obama was leading John McCain by three to four percentage points in national polls. When I returned last week he still was. But lo and behold, a whole new plot twist had rolled off the bloviation assembly line in those intervening two weeks: Obama had lost the election!
The poor guy should be winning in a landslide against the despised party of Bush-Cheney, and he’s not. He should be passing the 50 percent mark in polls, and he’s not. He’s been done in by that ad with Britney and Paris and by a new international crisis that allows McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred. Let the neocons identify a new battleground for igniting World War III, whether Baghdad or Tehran or Moscow, and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts.
Obama has also been defeated by racism (again). He can’t connect and “close the deal” with ordinary Americans too doltish to comprehend a multicultural biography that includes what Cokie Roberts of ABC News has damned as the “foreign, exotic place” of Hawaii. As The Economist sums up the received wisdom, “lunch-pail Ohio Democrats” find Obama’s ideas of change “airy-fairy” and are all asking, “Who on earth is this guy?”
It seems almost churlish to look at some actual facts. No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter’s 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral votes in current toss-up states and still lose the election.
Yet surely, we keep hearing, Obama should be running away with the thing. Even Michael Dukakis was beating the first George Bush by 17 percentage points in the summer of 1988. Of course, were Obama ahead by 17 points today, the same prognosticators now fussing over his narrow lead would be predicting that the arrogant and presumptuous Obama was destined to squander that landslide on vacation and tank just like his hapless predecessor.
The truth is we have no idea what will happen in November. But for the sake of argument, let’s posit that one thread of the Obama-is-doomed scenario is right: His lead should be huge in a year when the G.O.P. is in such disrepute that at least eight of the party’s own senatorial incumbents are skipping their own convention, the fail-safe way to avoid being caught near the Larry Craig Memorial Men’s Room at the Twin Cities airport.
So why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer - and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it - is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is. The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they’re “hearing too much” about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It’s past time for that pressing educational need to be met.
What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.
With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.
McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.
McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.
Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.
While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” - as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”
Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.
To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being “proud” of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about “whitey.” But we still haven’t been inside Cindy McCain’s tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she controls, “lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve public health and safety,” in opposition to groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain’s future role in her beer empire won’t be revealed before the election.
Some of those who know McCain best - Republicans - are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration’s first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama - temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others - are missing in McCain. “He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,” Hauser told me. “If John says ‘I’m going with so and so,’ you can’t count on that the next morning,” she complained, adding, “That’s not the man we want for president.”
McCain has even prompted alarms from the right’s own favorite hit man du jour: Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry as co-author of “Unfit to Command” in 2004 and who is trying to do the same to Obama in his newly minted best seller, “The Obama Nation.”
Corsi’s writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi’s publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author’s “scholarship.” If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi’s research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi’s scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received “strong” financial support from a “group tied to Al Qaeda” and that “McCain’s personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.”
As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there’s one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told.
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Obama Campaign: McCain Is Defying Iraqi Government's Desire For Withdrawal Timeline
Here's the response from Obama spokesperson Bill Burton to McCain's attack today proclaiming that Obama wants us to lose in Iraq out of "ambition":
"All his bluster, distortions and negative attacks notwithstanding, it is hard to understand how Senator McCain can at once proclaim his support for the sovereign government of Iraq, and then stubbornly defy their expressed support for a timeline to remove our combat brigades from their country. The difference in this race is that John McCain is intent on spending $10 billion a month on an open-ended war, while Barack Obama thinks we should bring this war to a responsible end and invest in our pressing needs here at home."
The idea that McCain's Iraq policies are directly at odds with what the Iraqi government wants has gotten scattered mention by Team Obama in statements and ads. Perhaps this is the start of a renewed effort to push it for all it's worth.
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McCain protests NBC coverage
Sen. John McCain's (R-Ariz.) campaign manager Rick Davis asked Sunday for a meeting with Steve Capus, the president of NBC News, to protest what the campaign called signs that the network is "abandoning non-partisan coverage of the presidential race."
Davis made the request Sunday in a letter that is part of an aggressive effort by McCain to counter news coverage he considers critical.
In this case, the campaign is objecting to a statement by NBC's Andrea Mitchell on "Meet the Press" questioning whether McCain might have gotten a heads-up on some of the questions that were asked of Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), who was the first candidate to be interviewed Saturday night by Pastor Rick Warren at a presidential forum on faith.
Warren told the audience that McCain was being held in "a cone of silence" so he wouldn't hear the questions, which were similar for both candidates.
Warren referred again to "the cone of silence" when McCain came onstage, and the senator joked: "I was trying to hear through the wall."
Mitchell reported that some "Obama people" were suggesting "that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well prepared."
A McCain aide said that is not the case: "Senator McCain was in a motorcade led by the United States Secret Service and held in a green room with no broadcast feed."
Mitchell made the comment in the context of saying McCain did better, and that the Obama camp was defensive. In response to the campaign's letter, she pointed out that journalists get criticism from both sides.
"I wasn't expressing an opinion," Mitchell said. "I was reporting what they were saying."
Here is the text of the letter:
August 17, 2008
Mr. Steve Capus
President, NBC News
30 Rockefeller Plaza
New York, NY 10112
Steve:
We are extremely disappointed to see that the level of objectivity at NBC News has fallen so low that reporters are now giving voice to unsubstantiated, partisan claims in order to undercut John McCain.
Nowhere was this more evident than with NBC chief correspondent Andrea Mitchell's comments on "Meet the Press" this morning. In analyzing last night's presidential forum at Saddleback Church, Mitchell expressed the Obama campaign spin that John McCain could only have done so well last night because he "may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama." Here are Andrea Mitchell's comments in full:
Mitchell: "The Obama people must feel that he didn't do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because what they are putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well-prepared." (NBC's "Meet The Press," 8/17/08)
Make no mistake: This is a serious charge. Andrea Mitchell is repeating, uncritically, a completely unsubstantiated Obama campaign claim that John McCain somehow cheated in last night's forum at Saddleback Church. Instead of trying to substantiate this blatant falsehood in any way, Andrea Mitchell felt that she needed to repeat it on air to millions of "Meet the Press" viewers with no indication that 1.) There's not one shred of evidence that it's true; 2.) In his official correspondence to both campaigns, Pastor Rick Warren provided both candidates with information regarding the topic areas to be covered, which Barack Obama acknowledged during the forum when asked about Pastor Warren's idea of an emergency plan for orphans and Obama said, "I cheated a little bit. I actually looked at this idea ahead of time, and I think it is a great idea;" 3.) John McCain actually requested that he and Barack Obama do the forum together on stage at the same time, making these kinds of after-the-fact complaints moot.
Indeed, instead of taking a critical journalistic approach to this spin, Andrea Mitchell did what has become a pattern for her of simply repeating Obama campaign talking points.
This is irresponsible journalism and sadly, indicative of the level of objectivity we have witnessed at NBC News this election cycle. Instead of examining the Obama campaign's spin for truth before reporting it to more than 3 million NBC News viewers, Andrea Mitchell simply passed along Obama campaign conspiracy theories. The fact is that during Senator Obama's segment at Saddleback last night, Senator McCain was in a motorcade to the event and then held in a green room with no broadcast feed. In the forum, John McCain clearly demonstrated to the American people that he is prepared to be our next President.....
We are concerned that your News Division is following MSNBC's lead in abandoning non-partisan coverage of the Presidential race. We would like to request a meeting with you as soon as possible to discuss our deep concerns about the news standards and level of objectivity at NBC.
Sincerely,
Rick Davis
Campaign Manager
John McCain 2008
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Exclusive: McCain to name VP on Aug. 29
Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans to celebrate his 72nd birthday on Aug. 29 by naming his running mate at a huge rally in the battleground state of Ohio, Republican sources said.
That’s a week from Friday, and the day after his rival, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, accepts the Democratic nomination at a 70,000-person spectacular in a Denver stadium.
The campaign has begun building a crowd of 10,000 for Dayton, Ohio, according to an organizer. McCain is scheduled to appear with his running mate at a large-scale event in Pennsylvania shortly thereafter.
Senior Republicans are in the dark about who he’ll name, although they say former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty are prime contenders after a trial balloon by McCain gave him very negative feedback about the idea of picking an abortion-rights running mate such as Tom Ridge, the former governor of Pennsylvania and the first secretary of homeland security.
Sources close to McCain say he has wrestled with the choice, torn between a high-stakes, high-reward pick like Ridge or Connecticut Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman - the Democratic vice presidential nominee in 2000 - or a safer and more conventional selection such as Romney or Pawlenty.
Friends say he has yet to make a final decision, and is not expected to do so until after Sen. Barack Obama announces his choice.
McCain friends emphasized that he talks about the decision with almost no one, and could even change the announcement plans and go sooner.
“McCain views this as the one decision that he has total, utter, nonnegotiable control over,” one campaign official said.
The announcement strategy - provided McCain doesn’t change it - calls for naming the pick early Friday morning to try to suppress Obama’s bounce coming out of his convention.
“You’re going to own the weekend,” a McCain official said.
The Republican convention begins the following Monday - Labor Day - in St. Paul, Minn.
McCain advisers say they don’t think it would make sense to name the vice presidential designee earlier because the impact would get diluted by Obama’s selection. And because the GOP convention is second, they have the advantage of knowing the opposition ticket before showing their own cards.
“You can fire the bullet once,” said one key Republican. “You want the most meaningful target.”
Alex M. Triantafilou, chairman of the Hamilton County (Ohio) Republican Party, said in an exuberant post on his blog this weekend: “Sen. McCain is expected to host a rally on August 29 in Dayton and is looking for a BIG venue and for a BIG crowd. He'll get it. This is not yet public. I guess I just made it so.”
The post has been removed without explanation.
PolitickerOH.com reported Monday morning that the event will be at the 10,000-seat Ervin J. Nutter Center, a sports and entertainment complex at Wright State University.
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Bloomberg (AND RON PAUL) Set To Be On Presidential Ballot In Virginia
The state of Virginia is, for the first time in many decades, a toss up in the presidential election. And with its 13 electoral votes and polls showing a tight race, the commonwealth should host a fierce competition between Barack Obama and John McCain.
This past week, however, a small but potentially significant ripple was introduced to that equation. On Friday, under the radar, the Independent Green Party of Virginia successfully gathered enough signatures to put New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's name on the presidential ballot. They did it all without the mayor's knowledge or consent. Moreover, they wrote in as his number two Texas Rep. Ron Paul, a hero to an impassioned group of libertarians, online activists, and U.S. foreign policy critics.
The "Indy Greens," as they are known, still have a few more hoops to jump through before Bloomberg's name will officially be put into the presidential queue. Some of them, according to state officials, are relatively minor matters, including getting the party's electoral representatives to provide contact and home address information. Others are very much major, like seeing to it that Bloomberg doesn't object and ask for his name to be removed.
If the Indy Greens have their way, however, one of the most widely known Independent politicians in the country -- joined by a running mate with a cult-like following -- will be positioned to siphon off votes from the two major party candidates.
"Indy Greens started the presidential petition drive on January 1, 2008 in Independence, Virginia," explained Carey Campbell, chairman of the party. "Eight months, 15 days later, the cake is baked. The deed is done. We're happy hillbillies. Since January 1st, Indy Greens collected 70,000 petition signatures. Seven successful petition drives to put five candidates on the ballot for U.S. House, and 2 statewide petition drives... and now Michael Bloomberg on ballot for president. We made a promise to Mr. Bloomberg, and now we have kept that promise."
Virginia state law requires that a candidate receive 10,000 signatures of qualified voters, including 400 in each of the state's 11 congressional districts, in order to gain access to the presidential ballot. The Indy Greens, over the course of many months, collected far more than the minimum.
But they also did it without Bloomberg signing off. When contacted over the weekend, an aide to the mayor said his boss was "unaware of the effort." As such, the possibility exists that Bloomberg could publicly ask that his name be removed from the state's ballot, something that Virginia officials say would be cause, at the very least, for an investigation.
"If it is an issue that a candidate is put forth, we assume that the internal communications have happened. But if we were to receive a letter from Mayor Bloomberg that he doesn't want his name on the ballot, we would have to look into the matter to see why the nominee for a party doesn't want to be that nominee," said Matthew J. Abell, the Assistant Manager at Virginia's State Board of Elections. "It is a free country and if chooses to not have his name on the ballot he has every right to do so."
Campbell acknowledged this possibility and said he would not feel slighted if the mayor, simply by asking for his name to be removed from the ballot, were to undermine months of efforts.
"Yes, Bloomberg must consent to this and it will be up to the Board of Elections," he told the Huffington Post. "But we made a promise and we wanted to keep it and we have."
UPDATE: Bloomberg's spokesman Stu Loeser emails: "He hasn't made any decisions and hasn't had a chance to speak with [party chairman Carey] Campbell yet... But this is a call for post-partisanship that Mayor Bloomberg hopes the major parties will hear."
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(Bloomberg's lawyers are now suggesting he'll stay on the ballot.)
Veepstakes: Biden up, Romney down
All the CW buzz seems to be pointing in Biden’s direction right now. The New York Times profiles him today. “Mr. Biden’s strengths and weaknesses as a vice-presidential nominee are glaringly obvious and in many cases overlap. At age 65, he would bring heft, knowledge and nearly four decades of experience in Washington to a ticket headed by a relative political newcomer. But that experience -- he was first elected to the Senate at age 29 and has served for nearly four decades -- would undercut Mr. Obama’s image as an agent of change.”
"Mr. Biden is among the best-informed lawmakers on international affairs, a gap in Mr. Obama’s résumé. But Mr. Biden’s broad knowledge, his committee chairmanship and his longtime membership in the most exclusive debating club in the nation also feed his biggest flaw: a verbosity and love of his own voice that drive many, including, by some accounts, Mr. Obama, nuts.”
Meanwhile, Romney’s buzz appears to be waning. "An apparent effort by former presidential hopeful Mike Huckabee to diminish the chances of former rival Mitt Romney becoming the Republican vice presidential nominee is reviving questions about whether Romney's prospects are being damaged by opposition from evangelicals and religious conservatives. Gary Bauer, an evangelical leader who is an informal adviser to John McCain's campaign, said in an interview yesterday that evangelicals are divided, but discounted the idea there is an organized effort to stop McCain from picking Romney.”
“Bauer said he personally believes that Romney ‘would be a great running mate’ and said he has conveyed that message personally to Romney. Bauer, chairman of the Campaign for Working Families political action committee, said he was not allowed to say whether he advised McCain to pick Romney."
Several potential veeps made the Sunday show rounds. "Ridge said yesterday he thinks Republicans would accept a vice presidential candidate who supports abortion rights. But, he said, whomever John McCain picks as a running mate should defer to McCain on the issue." Bill Richardson, Tim Kaine and Bobby Jindal all made the rounds as well.
More compiled by NBC/NJ’s Matthew E. Berger and Carrie Dann…
DEMOCRATS: Sen. Joe Biden made a trip to Georgia this weekend, at the request of the Georgian government. That came after Sen. Joe Lieberman went as a McCain envoy. Says the Washington Post: “Biden and Obama staffers discussed the proposed trip and Obama officials said they were glad Biden was considering it. One source familiar with the discussions added that had the Obama team opposed the idea, the senator would likely not have gone.”
Mark Warner endorsed Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine for VP while speaking at a Democratic fundraiser in Richmond. Kaine campaigned for Obama in his state Saturday, praising him for his “excellence” in his aspirations for the country, judgment and character.
Sen. Evan Bayh disputed McCain’s claim that “we’re all Georgians now,” noting that might put the region in a state of war. “And John sometimes, he's a good person, but he's a little bit given to this kind of bellicose rhetoric, which has a tendency to inflame conflicts rather than to diffuse them, and that's not what you want in a president,” he said on “Face the Nation.”
Sen. Hillary Clinton campaigned for Obama Sunday at Northern New Mexico College. She also attended fundraisers to retire her debt with Gov. Bill Richardson.
REPUBLICANS: Romney said the situation in Georgia “shows one more time that, in a dangerous and troubled world, it's helpful to have a leader of the nation that knows these places, knows the people, understands the setting.”
John Podhoretz makes the case for Lieberman, arguing McCain no longer needs to shore up his base and can win over moderates with the former Democratic veep nominee. Lowry likes the Lieberman idea too, if both he and McCain pledge to serve only one term.
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Shhh... nobody tell McCain that the end of the week's when you're supposed to bury the news. You know, the Friday news dump? I guess when you shun reporters, nobody fills you in on these things.