With apologies to Teddy...
THE DREAM SHALL NEVER DIE!!!!!!!
McCain May Give Convention Speech From Disaster Zone
President Bush is unlikely to make it to the Republican National Convention, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) may deliver his acceptance speech via satellite because of the historically huge hurricane threatening New Orleans, top officials said.
Late Saturday night, the RNC was planning to issue a release announcing the formation of a "working group of representatives from each of the states in Hurricane Gustav's path. The group will ensure that all affected delegates have information and assistance in real time.
"The Affected States Working Group is led by all five state party chairs from the affected area, along with other delegation officials. The purpose of the group will be to regularly brief their delegates and convention planners, provide access to timely information and assistance, and give input on appropriate steps that can be taken from Minnesota."
Officials insisted that the convention, scheduled to open here on Monday, will go on - albeit in a more limited and sedate form - even if Hurricane Gustav stays on its projected path. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation beginning at 8 a.m. Sunday after federal officials said Gustav could grow to a catastrophic Category 5 and hit Monday afternoon somewhere between eastern Texas and western Mississippi.
McCain made plans to travel to a threatened area of the Gulf Coast on Sunday, accompanied by his wife, Cindy, and running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. They planned to meet Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) in Jackson, Miss., aides said.
McCain was scheduled to deliver his acceptance speech Thursday but now may do so from the devastation zone if the storm hits the U.S. coast with the ferocity feared by forecasters.
At the start of his remarks at a rally in Washington, Pa., on Saturday night, McCain said: "I would like all of us, obviously, to keep in our thoughts and our prayers the people of the Gulf Coast, especially New Orleans, that are threatened by this terrible natural disaster, the hurricane. They need to know - and I know that they know - that they are in our hearts and prayers as this impending hurricane approaches.
“The great God, that he could spare - at a minimum - the loss that might result from this natural disaster. So my friends, as we enjoy this great rally, we will keep them in our thoughts and our hearts and our prayers.”
Officials of the convention, the Republican Party, the White House and the McCain campaign were all scrambling this weekend to rewrite more than a year of planning for what they had hoped would be a joyful four days starting Monday.
McCain told Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday” in an interview taped for broadcast Sunday that the convention could be rescheduled. “It just wouldn't be appropriate to have a festive occasion while a near-tragedy or a terrible challenge is presented in the form of a natural disaster,” McCain said. “So we're monitoring it from day to day, and I'm saying a few prayers, too.”
Organizers confronted a plate of unhappy options, wanting to appear in touch and sympathetic while still carrying out their necessary business of officially nominating the party’s presidential candidate.
One top convention planner said Saturday night to expect a more definitive plan by mid-afternoon Sunday. The source indicated that organizers had held off on making any firm pronouncements because of the uncertainty as to when Gustav will make landfall, and because they wanted to get a better sense of its impact before making decisions. Convention planners were preparing contingencies for making the nomination official even if delegates from the threatened area were missing.
Officials were considering a video link for Bush, among other possibilities that they would not specify.
The Red Cross may come in to the Xcel Energy Center to mobilize the delegates in a giant service project, preparing care packages for the hurricane zone, organizers said.
The White House announced that Bush on Sunday morning will visit the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a briefing by federal, state and local officials.
Bush was scheduled to speak to delegates Monday in what was to be one of his last hurrahs as president. But a top Republican now said he is unlikely to attend. Vice President Cheney and first lady Laura Bush are also scheduled to speak Monday.
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino told reporters on a conference call Saturday that the government was preparing for one of the most potentially devastating storms in the nation’s history.
Last Friday was the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall, and the government’s tardy response still haunts the Bush administration.
This time, the federal government has been very proactive, with Bush talking by phone on Saturday with governors in the affected area.
Republican officials here are preparing for radical changes to every element of the convention. If the storm is as bad as feared, they will dramatically alter the tone of the speeches, cut way back on the partisan red meat, eliminate the glitzy entertainment and, if they can do so legally, use the gathering for a massive fundraising drive that may even feature a passing of buckets on the convention floor to benefit the Red Cross, according to a top GOP source.
“We’ll have to acknowledge that Americans are hurting,” said this Republican.
Much can be changed or altogether dropped from the convention, but it emphatically must take place in some form, because McCain needs to be nominated to be legally placed on the ballot in all 50 states. “There are no exceptions to that,” said the source.
For now, though, they’re hesitant to act too quickly.
But as the hours pass, the television networks, which have already invested considerable cash in the made-for-TV quadrennial ritual, are becoming increasingly impatient and are pressing party officials to firm up plans.
The networks are stretched thin, in terms of both personnel and equipment, between here and the Gulf region and need to make their own decisions. But Republicans are reluctant to react too quickly under pressure.
“We don’t want to be pushed into a herd mentality by the television media,” said a senior GOP source.
Maria Cino, the convention’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement to Politico: "Like all Americans, our prayers are with those who will be affected by Hurricane Gustav. We continue to closely monitor the movement of the storm and are considering necessary contingencies.
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Romney readies for White House run if McCain fails
Like his father, Mitt Romney ran for governor and won. Like his father, Mitt Romney ran for president and lost.
The question now is whether Mitt Romney once again follows in the footsteps of George Romney and serves the president in a Cabinet position.
By all accounts, he hopes not.
Since ending his own bid for the Republican presidential nomination in February, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has played the role of supplicant, doing everything asked of him to advance the candidacy of his former rival, the presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.
He played attack dog in media interviews arranged by the McCain's staff, even enduring hoots and hollers last week as he visited news sets on the floor of the Democratic National Convention. He commended to the Arizona senator one of his best advisers, former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman. And he and his team raised over $20 million for his once cash-strapped rival, all of which prompted McCain's top advisers to chatter about Romney as a topflight running mate.
Yet on Thursday, as Romney flew up and down the California coast urging supporters to give even more money to the McCain campaign, McCain offered the vice presidential nomination to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, unknown on the national stage and someone he had met face-to-face only once previously.
McCain called to tell Romney the news Friday just before Romney boarded a flight back to Boston. In one sense, it was a crushing blow. But in another, it was liberating.
While Romney wished McCain and Palin well, his friends and advisers say if they fail in the general election, Romney is primed -- even anxious -- to mount a second bid for the White House.
The former CEO did not want to run with McCain so he could be No. 2 under a man who had ridiculed the role of the vice president as someone who attended funerals and "inquired daily about the health of the president." If they were successful this fall, Romney would have been a heartbeat away from the presidency under a man who would be the oldest person ever to begin service in the White House.
Now, with his vice presidential hopes dashed, Romney can again concentrate on the presidency, even as he buffs a veneer of support for the McCain-Palin ticket in statements and the speech he is due to deliver at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday -- the same night Palin accepts her surprise nomination.
While Romney was helping McCain in recent months, he also was working to maintain his future political viability.
A man of manners who neither drinks nor smokes, Romney knew it would be considered rude to be viewed as a sore loser. So, despite feeling he endorsed McCain in the Feb. 7 speech in which he ended his own presidential bid, he submitted to cameras and questions a week later to reiterate his support for the rival he once said lacked the background in economics needed to be president.
Romney also established the Free and Strong America PAC, a political action committee dedicated to helping McCain, as well as like-minded congressional and state political candidates. But the PAC also gives Romney a vehicle to raise money and travel the country, promoting himself as much as the candidates he wants to endorse.
He used a similar committee, as well as his 2006 chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association, to build the network of advisers, contributors and supporters he tapped the day he left office in 2007 to launch his presidential campaign.
The Free and Strong America PAC also allows gives Romney a headquarters where he can remain in contact with his inner circle of advisers: former business partner Bob White, campaign manager Beth Myers, conservative outreach coordinator Peter Flaherty and spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom. It is located in the same suburban office complex as the private equity firm of Romney's eldest son and political confidant, Tagg, and his top fundraiser, Spencer Zwick.
For the remainder of the campaign, Romney will focus on helping McCain and Palin win the White House. If the Republicans succeed, McCain could recognize Romney's dedication with an ambassadorship or a Cabinet post, just as President Nixon did when he appointed former Michigan Gov. George Romney to be his Housing secretary following their clash in the 1968 campaign.
Romney would be wise to accept such an offer: a year or two as vice president -- let alone even a day as president -- would give Palin a vast advantage in clout, exposure and fundraising over any potential rival for the 2012 Republican nomination.
But should they fail in a year McCain has implicitly conceded is a "change" election with his pick of Palin, it's no stretch to see Romney hitting the trail again on Nov. 5 in pursuit of the job he wanted from the start.
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Agreement on U.S. withdrawal from Iraq said to be in peril as Maliki ousts negotiators
At the "make-or-break" stage of talks with the U.S. on the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has swept aside his negotiating team and replaced it with three of his closest aides, a reshuffle that some Iraqi officials warn risks sabotaging the agreement.
The decision on the team negotiating the pact, which the Americans have described as the basis of a long-term strategic alliance between the United States and Iraq, remains so sensitive that it has not been announced. In disclosing the switch to the Los Angeles Times this weekend, a senior Iraqi official close to Maliki also suggested that the two sides remained deadlocked on key issues.
The shake-up comes just four months before the expiration of the United Nations mandate that authorizes the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the country recently, expectations rose that an agreement was imminent. But Iraq and the United States remain far apart on the matter of immunity for U.S. forces in Iraqi courts, the official said.
"People gave the impression we were close when Rice was here, but it's not over. We would have a serious problem if we took it to the parliament right now," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue.
The official insisted that if U.S. troops remained exempt from Iraqi rule of law, the pact would never get passed by the lawmakers.
The sides also are still negotiating a withdrawal date, the official said.
The latest version of the agreement, which was read to The Times by the Maliki confidant, says all U.S. forces will leave Iraq by the end of 2011, unless Iraq requests otherwise. It also says the Americans will withdraw from cities in June 2009, unless the Iraqis ask them to stay.
The new wording is a departure from the White House's insistence on a conditions-based timeline for a pullout. Under the new language, Iraq, not the U.S. military, decides when the troops will leave. U.S. officials have gone back to Washington to consult on the language, the Maliki confidant said.
Some Iraqi lawmakers have reacted angrily to the dismissal of the original negotiating team.
"These are diversionary tactics to avoid a decision. It's not a question of negotiating teams. It's a matter of, do you want it or don't you?" said an Iraqi familiar with the talks. "They are avoiding the issue. They don't want a status of forces agreement. They don't want a security agreement."
Maliki's confidant defended the shake-up, saying the prime minister needs those closest to him to lead the talks because they have the authority to make decisions that the original team did not possess.
Iraqi and Western officials monitoring the talks have said Maliki is afraid of accepting terms that could brand him as an American puppet. Iran, which is fiercely opposed to an agreement, has also exerted intense pressure.
Shiite Muslim lawmakers have also said some members in the prime minister's Islamic Dawa Party believe that Iraq can survive without the Americans if the White House doesn't meet Maliki's demands.
In the reshuffle last week, Maliki dismissed the delegation headed by the Foreign Ministry and picked his national security advisor, Mowaffak Rubaie; his chief of staff, Tariq Najim; and political advisor Sadiq Rikabi to conduct the negotiations' final stage, the Maliki confidant said.
"The talks have reached a critical point now. They need a political decision, not a technical one," the official said. "The discussions have reached the make-or-break stage."
Rikabi, Rubaie and Najim report directly to the prime minister; Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Haj Hamoud, who led the original negotiations, has been removed, the official said. Western diplomats previously have criticized the prime minister for governing through his inner circle and shutting out other factions.
"Hamoud had to deal with too many people and then comes to a meeting with the prime minister," the official said. "It was a big process."
Iraq's politics are often turbulent, with the country's Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish politicians regularly plotting against one another. Until he took on the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia, in the southern city of Basra in March, Maliki was considered politically weak and had been accused by Sunni Arab and Kurdish officials of hoarding power and executing a sectarian agenda.
U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Susan Ziadeh declined to comment on the shake-up, saying the Iraqi government had the right to choose the negotiators that it wanted.
A State Department spokesman in Washington told reporters last week that the United States hoped to finish an agreement by December. The sides had aimed to complete it by July. The Iraqi official close to Maliki said Iraq could always request an extension from the U.N. if they did not reach a deal before the end of the year.
Some Western and Iraqi officials blame the Americans for sending a team in the spring that demanded more than 50 long-term bases, the ability to launch operations without permission from the Iraqi government and immunity for security contractors and U.S. troops. Their opening stance played into the hands of Shiite lawmakers in Maliki's coalition, who want the Americans to leave, officials said.
Mithal Alusi, an independent Sunni lawmaker who has advised Maliki in the past, accused the prime minister of trying to wreck the talks.
"Why does he have to change the leaders of the negotiating team, and now? Why? We had reached the last part. Why does he have to change it?" Alusi asked. "He doesn't want it."
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Undecideds Don't Like The Palin Pick
The headlines are about the broad polling reaction to Palin. But the most fascinating part of the first Rasmussen poll on the matter is how those who are currently undecided in the election feel. They, after all, are the votes both campaigns are trying to win over with their veep picks. The key data is in the cross-tabs, which have been missed in some of the coverage so far.
On the critical question, "With Palin As Vice-Presidential Nominee, Are You More Or Less Likely To Vote For McCain," there's a striking result. Among those already for McCain, 68 percent say it makes them more likely to vote for him; only 6 percent say less; and 23 percent said no impact. Among those already for Obama, Palin made only 9 percent of them more likely to switch to McCain, 59 percent less likely, and 30 percent said it would make no difference.
But among the critical undecideds, the Palin pick made only 6 percent more likely to vote for McCain; and it made 31 percent less likely to vote for him. 49 percent said it would have no impact, and 15 percent remained unsure. More to the point: among undecideds, 59 percent said Palin was unready to be president. Only 6 percent said she was. If the first criterion for any job is whether you're ready for it, this is a pretty major indictment of the first act of McCain's presidential leadership.
One other striking finding. If McCain thought he could present Palin as a moderate, he was wrong. A whopping 69 percent view her as conservative (37 percent as very conservative), and only 13 percent see her as moderate.
From this first snap-shot (and unsettled) impression, Palin has helped McCain among Republicans, left Democrats unfazed, but moved the undecideds against him quite sharply. I totally understand why.
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Obama Outwits the Bloviators
STOP the presses! This election isn’t about the Clintons after all. It isn’t about the Acropolis columns erected at Invesco Field. It isn’t about who is Paris Hilton and who is Hanoi Hilton. (Though it may yet be about who is Sarah Palin.) After a weeklong orgy of inane manufactured melodrama labeled “convention coverage” on television, Barack Obama descended in classic deus ex machina fashion - yes, that’s Greek too - to set the record straight. America is in too much trouble, he said, to indulge in “a big election about small things.”
As has been universally noted, Obama did what he had to do in his acceptance speech. He scrapped the messianic “Change We Can Believe In” for the more concrete policy litany of “The Change We Need.” He bared his glinting Chicago pol’s teeth to John McCain. Obama’s still a skinny guy, but the gladiatorial arena and his eagerness to stand up to bullies (foreign and Republican) made him a plausible Denver Bronco. All week long a media chorus had fretted whether he could pull off a potentially vainglorious stunt before 80,000 screaming fans. Well, yes he can, and so he did.
But was this a surprise? Hardly. No major Obama speech - each breathlessly hyped in advance as do-or-die and as the “the most important of his career” - has been a disaster; most have been triples or home runs, if not grand slams. What is most surprising is how astonished the press still is at each Groundhog Day’s replay of the identical outcome. Indeed, the disconnect between the reality of this campaign and how it is perceived and presented by the mainstream media is now a major part of the year’s story. The press dysfunction is itself a window into the unstable dynamics of Election 2008.
At the Democratic convention, as during primary season, almost every oversold plotline was wrong. Those Hillary dead-enders - played on TV by a fringe posse of women roaming Denver in search of camera time - would re-enact Chicago 1968. With Hillary’s tacit approval, the roll call would devolve into a classic Democratic civil war. Sulky Bill would wreak havoc once center stage.
On TV, each of these hot-air balloons was inflated nonstop right up to the moment they were punctured by reality, at which point the assembled bloviators once more expressed shock, shock at the unexpected denouement. They hadn’t been so surprised since they discovered that Obama was not too black to get white votes, not too white to win black votes, and not too inexperienced to thwart the inevitable triumph of the incomparably well-organized and well-financed Clinton machine.
Meanwhile, the candidate known as “No Drama Obama” because of his personal cool was stealthily hatching a drama of his own. As the various commentators pronounced the convention flat last week - too few McCain attacks on opening night, too “minimalist” a Hillary endorsement on Tuesday, and so forth - Obama held his cards to his chest backstage and built slowly, step by step, to his Thursday night climax. The dramatic arc was as meticulously calibrated as every Obama political strategy.
His campaign, unlike TV’s fantasists, knew the simple truth. The New York Times/CBS News poll conducted on the eve of the convention found that the Democrats were no more divided than the G.O.P: In both parties, 79 percent of voters supported their respective nominees. The simultaneous Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll also found that 79 percent of Democrats support Obama - which, as Amy Walter of National Journal alone noticed, is slightly higher than either John Kerry and Al Gore fared on that same question (77 percent) in that same poll just before their conventions.
But empirical evidence can’t compete with a favorite golden oldie like the Clinton soap opera. So when Hillary Clinton said a month ago that her delegates needed a “catharsis,” surely she had to be laying the groundwork for convention mischief. But it was never in either Clinton’s interest to sabotage Obama. Hillary Clinton’s Tuesday speech, arguably the best of her career, was as much about her own desire to reconcile with the alienated Obama Democrats she might need someday as it was about releasing her supporters to Obama. The Clintons never do stop thinking about tomorrow.
The latest good luck for the Democrats is that the McCain campaign was just as bamboozled as the press by the false Hillary narrative. McCain was obviously itching to choose his pal Joe Lieberman as his running mate. A onetime Democrat who breaks with the G.O.P. by supporting abortion rights might have rebooted his lost maverick cred more forcefully than Palin, who is cracking this particular glass ceiling nearly a quarter-century after the Democrats got there first. Lieberman might have even been of some use in roiling the Obama-Hillary-Bill juggernaut that will now storm through South Florida.
The main reason McCain knuckled under to the religious right by picking Palin is that he actually believes there’s a large army of embittered Hillary loyalists who will vote for a hard-line conservative simply because she’s a woman. That’s what happens when you listen to the TV news echo chamber. Not only is the whole premise ludicrous, but it is every bit as sexist as the crude joke McCain notoriously told about Janet Reno, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
Given the press’s track record so far, there’s no reason to believe that the bogus scenarios will stop now. The question of why this keeps happening is not easily answered. Ideological bias, unshakeable Clinton addiction and lingering McCain affection may not account for all or even most of it. Journalists are still Americans - even if much of our audience doubts that - and in this time of grave uncertainty about our nation’s future we may simply be as discombobulated as everyone else.
We, too, are made anxious and fearful by hard economic times and the prospect of wrenching change. YouTube, the medium that has transformed our culture and politics, didn’t exist four years ago. Four years from now, it’s entirely possible that some, even many, of the newspapers and magazines covering this campaign won’t exist in their current form, if they exist at all. The Big Three network evening newscasts, and network news divisions as we now know them, may also be extinct by then.
It is a telling sign that CBS News didn’t invest in the usual sky box for its anchor, Katie Couric, in Denver. It is equally telling that CNN consistently beat ABC and CBS in last week’s Nielsen ratings, and NBC as well by week’s end. But now that media are being transformed at a speed comparable to the ever-doubling power of microchips, cable’s ascendancy could also be as short-lived as, say, the reign of AOL. Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which monitors the intersection of politics and technology, points out that when networks judge their success by who got the biggest share of the television audience, “they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives.” The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.
The Obama campaign has long been on board those digital locomotives. Its ability to tell its story under the radar of the mainstream press in part accounts for why the Obama surge has been so often underestimated. Even now we’re uncertain of its size. The extraordinary TV viewership for Obama on Thursday night, larger than the Olympics opening ceremony, this year’s Oscars or any “American Idol” finale, may only be a count of the horses. The Obama campaign’s full reach online - for viewers as well as fund-raising and organizational networking - remains unknown.
None of this, any more than the success of Obama’s acceptance speech, guarantees a Democratic victory. But what it does ensure is that all bets are off when it comes to predicting this race’s outcome. Despite our repeated attempts to see this election through the prism of those of recent and not-so-recent memory, it keeps defying the templates. Last week’s convention couldn’t be turned into a replay of the 1960s no matter how hard the press tried to sell the die-hard Hillary supporters as reincarnations of past rebel factions, from the Dixiecrats to the antiwar left. Far from being a descendant of 1968, the 2008 Democratic gathering was the first in memory that actually kept promptly to its schedule and avoided ludicrous P.C. pandering to every constituency.
Nor were we back at Aug. 28, 1963. As a 14-year-old in Washington, I was there on the Mall, taken by my mother, a tireless teacher, with the hope that I might learn something. At a time when the nation’s capital, with its large black population, was still a year away from casting its first votes for president, who would have imagined that a black man might someday have a serious chance of being elected president? Not me.
But even as we stop, take a deep breath and savor this remarkable moment in our history, we cannot linger. This is quite another time. After the catastrophic Bush presidency, the troubles that afflict us on nearly every front almost make you nostalgic for the day when America’s gravest problems could still be seen in blacks and whites.
As Obama said, this is a big election. We will only begin to confront the magnitude of our choice when and if we stop being distracted by small, let alone utterly fictitious, things.
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Cindy McCain on ABC Today: Palin Has National Security Experience Because Alaska Is Close To Russia
When a Fox News morning host, Steve Doocy, testified to Sarah Palin's national security experience on Friday by saying that her state, Alaska, was so close to Russia, it drew hoots across the media and blogosphere (and even, no doubt, from a few Fox viewers).
This morning, on ABC in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Cindy McCain endorsed this very view.
Asked about Palin's national security experience, Cindy McCain could not come up with anything beyond the fact that, after all, her state is right next to Russia -- so she surely knows a lot about that country. She added that Palin has "more experience than...." but Stephanopoulos cut her off before she could say, for example, "Barack Obama" or maybe "others give her credit for."
Earlier, she actually said that Palin was "heavily experienced" in general, citing her going from the PTA to mayor to governor -- and having a son headed for Iraq. She said she met her just before Palin's meeting with McCain on Thursday and came away impressed that she too was a "reformer."
Meanwhile, Palin's mother-in-law, Faye Palin, told a New York Daily News reporter that she didn't agree with Sarah on everything and hadn't yet decided how she would vote. She added: "I'm not sure what she brings to the ticket other than she's a woman and a conservative. Well, she's a better speaker than McCain," Faye Palin said with a laugh.
But this actually isn't as appalling as a phone interview Palin herself gave yesterday to reporter back home, at the Anchorage Daily News.
The reporter, Kyle Hopkins, asked, according to the transcript posted today, "Are you ready to be President Palin if necessary?"
"I am ... I am up to the task, of course, of focusing on the challenges that face America," she answered, and that was all she could say on her behalf on this question. Then she abruptly shifted to how her candidacy would help Alaska. "And I am very pleased with the situation that I am in, when, when you consider the situation now that Alaska will be in.
"And that is Alaska, and Alaskans will be allowed to contribute more to our great country and they'll be allowed to do that because I -- if we're elected -- will be in a position of opening the eyes of the country to what it is that Alaska is all about and what Alaska has to offer. So, I am happy to and very honored to be asked to do this. I know it's going to be great for Alaska."
Who said the woman was against earmarks?
The early returns are not good, with most in the media still stepping lightly around the issue of John McCain's hypocrisy in asserting, for months, that Barack Obama is "dangerously" inexperienced in facing international threats -- and then appointing Sarah Palin as his running mate. If you don't believe it, just keep reading the Alaska newspapers.
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I dedicate this joint to bluetooth16 b/c she is a Mittensphile :)
McCain May Give Convention Speech From Disaster Zone
President Bush is unlikely to make it to the Republican National Convention, and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) may deliver his acceptance speech via satellite because of the historically huge hurricane threatening New Orleans, top officials said.
Late Saturday night, the RNC was planning to issue a release announcing the formation of a "working group of representatives from each of the states in Hurricane Gustav's path. The group will ensure that all affected delegates have information and assistance in real time.
"The Affected States Working Group is led by all five state party chairs from the affected area, along with other delegation officials. The purpose of the group will be to regularly brief their delegates and convention planners, provide access to timely information and assistance, and give input on appropriate steps that can be taken from Minnesota."
Officials insisted that the convention, scheduled to open here on Monday, will go on - albeit in a more limited and sedate form - even if Hurricane Gustav stays on its projected path. New Orleans Mayor Ray Nagin ordered a mandatory evacuation beginning at 8 a.m. Sunday after federal officials said Gustav could grow to a catastrophic Category 5 and hit Monday afternoon somewhere between eastern Texas and western Mississippi.
McCain made plans to travel to a threatened area of the Gulf Coast on Sunday, accompanied by his wife, Cindy, and running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. They planned to meet Mississippi Gov. Haley Barbour (R) in Jackson, Miss., aides said.
McCain was scheduled to deliver his acceptance speech Thursday but now may do so from the devastation zone if the storm hits the U.S. coast with the ferocity feared by forecasters.
At the start of his remarks at a rally in Washington, Pa., on Saturday night, McCain said: "I would like all of us, obviously, to keep in our thoughts and our prayers the people of the Gulf Coast, especially New Orleans, that are threatened by this terrible natural disaster, the hurricane. They need to know - and I know that they know - that they are in our hearts and prayers as this impending hurricane approaches.
“The great God, that he could spare - at a minimum - the loss that might result from this natural disaster. So my friends, as we enjoy this great rally, we will keep them in our thoughts and our hearts and our prayers.”
Officials of the convention, the Republican Party, the White House and the McCain campaign were all scrambling this weekend to rewrite more than a year of planning for what they had hoped would be a joyful four days starting Monday.
McCain told Chris Wallace of “Fox News Sunday” in an interview taped for broadcast Sunday that the convention could be rescheduled. “It just wouldn't be appropriate to have a festive occasion while a near-tragedy or a terrible challenge is presented in the form of a natural disaster,” McCain said. “So we're monitoring it from day to day, and I'm saying a few prayers, too.”
Organizers confronted a plate of unhappy options, wanting to appear in touch and sympathetic while still carrying out their necessary business of officially nominating the party’s presidential candidate.
One top convention planner said Saturday night to expect a more definitive plan by mid-afternoon Sunday. The source indicated that organizers had held off on making any firm pronouncements because of the uncertainty as to when Gustav will make landfall, and because they wanted to get a better sense of its impact before making decisions. Convention planners were preparing contingencies for making the nomination official even if delegates from the threatened area were missing.
Officials were considering a video link for Bush, among other possibilities that they would not specify.
The Red Cross may come in to the Xcel Energy Center to mobilize the delegates in a giant service project, preparing care packages for the hurricane zone, organizers said.
The White House announced that Bush on Sunday morning will visit the headquarters of the Federal Emergency Management Agency for a briefing by federal, state and local officials.
Bush was scheduled to speak to delegates Monday in what was to be one of his last hurrahs as president. But a top Republican now said he is unlikely to attend. Vice President Cheney and first lady Laura Bush are also scheduled to speak Monday.
White House Press Secretary Dana Perino told reporters on a conference call Saturday that the government was preparing for one of the most potentially devastating storms in the nation’s history.
Last Friday was the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's landfall, and the government’s tardy response still haunts the Bush administration.
This time, the federal government has been very proactive, with Bush talking by phone on Saturday with governors in the affected area.
Republican officials here are preparing for radical changes to every element of the convention. If the storm is as bad as feared, they will dramatically alter the tone of the speeches, cut way back on the partisan red meat, eliminate the glitzy entertainment and, if they can do so legally, use the gathering for a massive fundraising drive that may even feature a passing of buckets on the convention floor to benefit the Red Cross, according to a top GOP source.
“We’ll have to acknowledge that Americans are hurting,” said this Republican.
Much can be changed or altogether dropped from the convention, but it emphatically must take place in some form, because McCain needs to be nominated to be legally placed on the ballot in all 50 states. “There are no exceptions to that,” said the source.
For now, though, they’re hesitant to act too quickly.
But as the hours pass, the television networks, which have already invested considerable cash in the made-for-TV quadrennial ritual, are becoming increasingly impatient and are pressing party officials to firm up plans.
The networks are stretched thin, in terms of both personnel and equipment, between here and the Gulf region and need to make their own decisions. But Republicans are reluctant to react too quickly under pressure.
“We don’t want to be pushed into a herd mentality by the television media,” said a senior GOP source.
Maria Cino, the convention’s president and chief executive officer, said in a statement to Politico: "Like all Americans, our prayers are with those who will be affected by Hurricane Gustav. We continue to closely monitor the movement of the storm and are considering necessary contingencies.
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Romney readies for White House run if McCain fails
Like his father, Mitt Romney ran for governor and won. Like his father, Mitt Romney ran for president and lost.
The question now is whether Mitt Romney once again follows in the footsteps of George Romney and serves the president in a Cabinet position.
By all accounts, he hopes not.
Since ending his own bid for the Republican presidential nomination in February, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has played the role of supplicant, doing everything asked of him to advance the candidacy of his former rival, the presumptive GOP nominee John McCain.
He played attack dog in media interviews arranged by the McCain's staff, even enduring hoots and hollers last week as he visited news sets on the floor of the Democratic National Convention. He commended to the Arizona senator one of his best advisers, former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman. And he and his team raised over $20 million for his once cash-strapped rival, all of which prompted McCain's top advisers to chatter about Romney as a topflight running mate.
Yet on Thursday, as Romney flew up and down the California coast urging supporters to give even more money to the McCain campaign, McCain offered the vice presidential nomination to Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, unknown on the national stage and someone he had met face-to-face only once previously.
McCain called to tell Romney the news Friday just before Romney boarded a flight back to Boston. In one sense, it was a crushing blow. But in another, it was liberating.
While Romney wished McCain and Palin well, his friends and advisers say if they fail in the general election, Romney is primed -- even anxious -- to mount a second bid for the White House.
The former CEO did not want to run with McCain so he could be No. 2 under a man who had ridiculed the role of the vice president as someone who attended funerals and "inquired daily about the health of the president." If they were successful this fall, Romney would have been a heartbeat away from the presidency under a man who would be the oldest person ever to begin service in the White House.
Now, with his vice presidential hopes dashed, Romney can again concentrate on the presidency, even as he buffs a veneer of support for the McCain-Palin ticket in statements and the speech he is due to deliver at the Republican National Convention on Wednesday -- the same night Palin accepts her surprise nomination.
While Romney was helping McCain in recent months, he also was working to maintain his future political viability.
A man of manners who neither drinks nor smokes, Romney knew it would be considered rude to be viewed as a sore loser. So, despite feeling he endorsed McCain in the Feb. 7 speech in which he ended his own presidential bid, he submitted to cameras and questions a week later to reiterate his support for the rival he once said lacked the background in economics needed to be president.
Romney also established the Free and Strong America PAC, a political action committee dedicated to helping McCain, as well as like-minded congressional and state political candidates. But the PAC also gives Romney a vehicle to raise money and travel the country, promoting himself as much as the candidates he wants to endorse.
He used a similar committee, as well as his 2006 chairmanship of the Republican Governors Association, to build the network of advisers, contributors and supporters he tapped the day he left office in 2007 to launch his presidential campaign.
The Free and Strong America PAC also allows gives Romney a headquarters where he can remain in contact with his inner circle of advisers: former business partner Bob White, campaign manager Beth Myers, conservative outreach coordinator Peter Flaherty and spokesman Eric Fehrnstrom. It is located in the same suburban office complex as the private equity firm of Romney's eldest son and political confidant, Tagg, and his top fundraiser, Spencer Zwick.
For the remainder of the campaign, Romney will focus on helping McCain and Palin win the White House. If the Republicans succeed, McCain could recognize Romney's dedication with an ambassadorship or a Cabinet post, just as President Nixon did when he appointed former Michigan Gov. George Romney to be his Housing secretary following their clash in the 1968 campaign.
Romney would be wise to accept such an offer: a year or two as vice president -- let alone even a day as president -- would give Palin a vast advantage in clout, exposure and fundraising over any potential rival for the 2012 Republican nomination.
But should they fail in a year McCain has implicitly conceded is a "change" election with his pick of Palin, it's no stretch to see Romney hitting the trail again on Nov. 5 in pursuit of the job he wanted from the start.
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Agreement on U.S. withdrawal from Iraq said to be in peril as Maliki ousts negotiators
At the "make-or-break" stage of talks with the U.S. on the withdrawal of American troops from Iraq, Prime Minister Nouri Maliki has swept aside his negotiating team and replaced it with three of his closest aides, a reshuffle that some Iraqi officials warn risks sabotaging the agreement.
The decision on the team negotiating the pact, which the Americans have described as the basis of a long-term strategic alliance between the United States and Iraq, remains so sensitive that it has not been announced. In disclosing the switch to the Los Angeles Times this weekend, a senior Iraqi official close to Maliki also suggested that the two sides remained deadlocked on key issues.
The shake-up comes just four months before the expiration of the United Nations mandate that authorizes the U.S. troop presence in Iraq. When Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visited the country recently, expectations rose that an agreement was imminent. But Iraq and the United States remain far apart on the matter of immunity for U.S. forces in Iraqi courts, the official said.
"People gave the impression we were close when Rice was here, but it's not over. We would have a serious problem if we took it to the parliament right now," said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to discuss the issue.
The official insisted that if U.S. troops remained exempt from Iraqi rule of law, the pact would never get passed by the lawmakers.
The sides also are still negotiating a withdrawal date, the official said.
The latest version of the agreement, which was read to The Times by the Maliki confidant, says all U.S. forces will leave Iraq by the end of 2011, unless Iraq requests otherwise. It also says the Americans will withdraw from cities in June 2009, unless the Iraqis ask them to stay.
The new wording is a departure from the White House's insistence on a conditions-based timeline for a pullout. Under the new language, Iraq, not the U.S. military, decides when the troops will leave. U.S. officials have gone back to Washington to consult on the language, the Maliki confidant said.
Some Iraqi lawmakers have reacted angrily to the dismissal of the original negotiating team.
"These are diversionary tactics to avoid a decision. It's not a question of negotiating teams. It's a matter of, do you want it or don't you?" said an Iraqi familiar with the talks. "They are avoiding the issue. They don't want a status of forces agreement. They don't want a security agreement."
Maliki's confidant defended the shake-up, saying the prime minister needs those closest to him to lead the talks because they have the authority to make decisions that the original team did not possess.
Iraqi and Western officials monitoring the talks have said Maliki is afraid of accepting terms that could brand him as an American puppet. Iran, which is fiercely opposed to an agreement, has also exerted intense pressure.
Shiite Muslim lawmakers have also said some members in the prime minister's Islamic Dawa Party believe that Iraq can survive without the Americans if the White House doesn't meet Maliki's demands.
In the reshuffle last week, Maliki dismissed the delegation headed by the Foreign Ministry and picked his national security advisor, Mowaffak Rubaie; his chief of staff, Tariq Najim; and political advisor Sadiq Rikabi to conduct the negotiations' final stage, the Maliki confidant said.
"The talks have reached a critical point now. They need a political decision, not a technical one," the official said. "The discussions have reached the make-or-break stage."
Rikabi, Rubaie and Najim report directly to the prime minister; Deputy Foreign Minister Mohammed Haj Hamoud, who led the original negotiations, has been removed, the official said. Western diplomats previously have criticized the prime minister for governing through his inner circle and shutting out other factions.
"Hamoud had to deal with too many people and then comes to a meeting with the prime minister," the official said. "It was a big process."
Iraq's politics are often turbulent, with the country's Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish politicians regularly plotting against one another. Until he took on the Mahdi Army, a Shiite militia, in the southern city of Basra in March, Maliki was considered politically weak and had been accused by Sunni Arab and Kurdish officials of hoarding power and executing a sectarian agenda.
U.S. Embassy spokeswoman Susan Ziadeh declined to comment on the shake-up, saying the Iraqi government had the right to choose the negotiators that it wanted.
A State Department spokesman in Washington told reporters last week that the United States hoped to finish an agreement by December. The sides had aimed to complete it by July. The Iraqi official close to Maliki said Iraq could always request an extension from the U.N. if they did not reach a deal before the end of the year.
Some Western and Iraqi officials blame the Americans for sending a team in the spring that demanded more than 50 long-term bases, the ability to launch operations without permission from the Iraqi government and immunity for security contractors and U.S. troops. Their opening stance played into the hands of Shiite lawmakers in Maliki's coalition, who want the Americans to leave, officials said.
Mithal Alusi, an independent Sunni lawmaker who has advised Maliki in the past, accused the prime minister of trying to wreck the talks.
"Why does he have to change the leaders of the negotiating team, and now? Why? We had reached the last part. Why does he have to change it?" Alusi asked. "He doesn't want it."
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Undecideds Don't Like The Palin Pick
The headlines are about the broad polling reaction to Palin. But the most fascinating part of the first Rasmussen poll on the matter is how those who are currently undecided in the election feel. They, after all, are the votes both campaigns are trying to win over with their veep picks. The key data is in the cross-tabs, which have been missed in some of the coverage so far.
On the critical question, "With Palin As Vice-Presidential Nominee, Are You More Or Less Likely To Vote For McCain," there's a striking result. Among those already for McCain, 68 percent say it makes them more likely to vote for him; only 6 percent say less; and 23 percent said no impact. Among those already for Obama, Palin made only 9 percent of them more likely to switch to McCain, 59 percent less likely, and 30 percent said it would make no difference.
But among the critical undecideds, the Palin pick made only 6 percent more likely to vote for McCain; and it made 31 percent less likely to vote for him. 49 percent said it would have no impact, and 15 percent remained unsure. More to the point: among undecideds, 59 percent said Palin was unready to be president. Only 6 percent said she was. If the first criterion for any job is whether you're ready for it, this is a pretty major indictment of the first act of McCain's presidential leadership.
One other striking finding. If McCain thought he could present Palin as a moderate, he was wrong. A whopping 69 percent view her as conservative (37 percent as very conservative), and only 13 percent see her as moderate.
From this first snap-shot (and unsettled) impression, Palin has helped McCain among Republicans, left Democrats unfazed, but moved the undecideds against him quite sharply. I totally understand why.
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Obama Outwits the Bloviators
STOP the presses! This election isn’t about the Clintons after all. It isn’t about the Acropolis columns erected at Invesco Field. It isn’t about who is Paris Hilton and who is Hanoi Hilton. (Though it may yet be about who is Sarah Palin.) After a weeklong orgy of inane manufactured melodrama labeled “convention coverage” on television, Barack Obama descended in classic deus ex machina fashion - yes, that’s Greek too - to set the record straight. America is in too much trouble, he said, to indulge in “a big election about small things.”
As has been universally noted, Obama did what he had to do in his acceptance speech. He scrapped the messianic “Change We Can Believe In” for the more concrete policy litany of “The Change We Need.” He bared his glinting Chicago pol’s teeth to John McCain. Obama’s still a skinny guy, but the gladiatorial arena and his eagerness to stand up to bullies (foreign and Republican) made him a plausible Denver Bronco. All week long a media chorus had fretted whether he could pull off a potentially vainglorious stunt before 80,000 screaming fans. Well, yes he can, and so he did.
But was this a surprise? Hardly. No major Obama speech - each breathlessly hyped in advance as do-or-die and as the “the most important of his career” - has been a disaster; most have been triples or home runs, if not grand slams. What is most surprising is how astonished the press still is at each Groundhog Day’s replay of the identical outcome. Indeed, the disconnect between the reality of this campaign and how it is perceived and presented by the mainstream media is now a major part of the year’s story. The press dysfunction is itself a window into the unstable dynamics of Election 2008.
At the Democratic convention, as during primary season, almost every oversold plotline was wrong. Those Hillary dead-enders - played on TV by a fringe posse of women roaming Denver in search of camera time - would re-enact Chicago 1968. With Hillary’s tacit approval, the roll call would devolve into a classic Democratic civil war. Sulky Bill would wreak havoc once center stage.
On TV, each of these hot-air balloons was inflated nonstop right up to the moment they were punctured by reality, at which point the assembled bloviators once more expressed shock, shock at the unexpected denouement. They hadn’t been so surprised since they discovered that Obama was not too black to get white votes, not too white to win black votes, and not too inexperienced to thwart the inevitable triumph of the incomparably well-organized and well-financed Clinton machine.
Meanwhile, the candidate known as “No Drama Obama” because of his personal cool was stealthily hatching a drama of his own. As the various commentators pronounced the convention flat last week - too few McCain attacks on opening night, too “minimalist” a Hillary endorsement on Tuesday, and so forth - Obama held his cards to his chest backstage and built slowly, step by step, to his Thursday night climax. The dramatic arc was as meticulously calibrated as every Obama political strategy.
His campaign, unlike TV’s fantasists, knew the simple truth. The New York Times/CBS News poll conducted on the eve of the convention found that the Democrats were no more divided than the G.O.P: In both parties, 79 percent of voters supported their respective nominees. The simultaneous Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll also found that 79 percent of Democrats support Obama - which, as Amy Walter of National Journal alone noticed, is slightly higher than either John Kerry and Al Gore fared on that same question (77 percent) in that same poll just before their conventions.
But empirical evidence can’t compete with a favorite golden oldie like the Clinton soap opera. So when Hillary Clinton said a month ago that her delegates needed a “catharsis,” surely she had to be laying the groundwork for convention mischief. But it was never in either Clinton’s interest to sabotage Obama. Hillary Clinton’s Tuesday speech, arguably the best of her career, was as much about her own desire to reconcile with the alienated Obama Democrats she might need someday as it was about releasing her supporters to Obama. The Clintons never do stop thinking about tomorrow.
The latest good luck for the Democrats is that the McCain campaign was just as bamboozled as the press by the false Hillary narrative. McCain was obviously itching to choose his pal Joe Lieberman as his running mate. A onetime Democrat who breaks with the G.O.P. by supporting abortion rights might have rebooted his lost maverick cred more forcefully than Palin, who is cracking this particular glass ceiling nearly a quarter-century after the Democrats got there first. Lieberman might have even been of some use in roiling the Obama-Hillary-Bill juggernaut that will now storm through South Florida.
The main reason McCain knuckled under to the religious right by picking Palin is that he actually believes there’s a large army of embittered Hillary loyalists who will vote for a hard-line conservative simply because she’s a woman. That’s what happens when you listen to the TV news echo chamber. Not only is the whole premise ludicrous, but it is every bit as sexist as the crude joke McCain notoriously told about Janet Reno, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.
Given the press’s track record so far, there’s no reason to believe that the bogus scenarios will stop now. The question of why this keeps happening is not easily answered. Ideological bias, unshakeable Clinton addiction and lingering McCain affection may not account for all or even most of it. Journalists are still Americans - even if much of our audience doubts that - and in this time of grave uncertainty about our nation’s future we may simply be as discombobulated as everyone else.
We, too, are made anxious and fearful by hard economic times and the prospect of wrenching change. YouTube, the medium that has transformed our culture and politics, didn’t exist four years ago. Four years from now, it’s entirely possible that some, even many, of the newspapers and magazines covering this campaign won’t exist in their current form, if they exist at all. The Big Three network evening newscasts, and network news divisions as we now know them, may also be extinct by then.
It is a telling sign that CBS News didn’t invest in the usual sky box for its anchor, Katie Couric, in Denver. It is equally telling that CNN consistently beat ABC and CBS in last week’s Nielsen ratings, and NBC as well by week’s end. But now that media are being transformed at a speed comparable to the ever-doubling power of microchips, cable’s ascendancy could also be as short-lived as, say, the reign of AOL. Andrew Rasiej, the founder of Personal Democracy Forum, which monitors the intersection of politics and technology, points out that when networks judge their success by who got the biggest share of the television audience, “they are still counting horses while the world has moved on to counting locomotives.” The Web, in its infinite iterations, is eroding all 20th-century media.
The Obama campaign has long been on board those digital locomotives. Its ability to tell its story under the radar of the mainstream press in part accounts for why the Obama surge has been so often underestimated. Even now we’re uncertain of its size. The extraordinary TV viewership for Obama on Thursday night, larger than the Olympics opening ceremony, this year’s Oscars or any “American Idol” finale, may only be a count of the horses. The Obama campaign’s full reach online - for viewers as well as fund-raising and organizational networking - remains unknown.
None of this, any more than the success of Obama’s acceptance speech, guarantees a Democratic victory. But what it does ensure is that all bets are off when it comes to predicting this race’s outcome. Despite our repeated attempts to see this election through the prism of those of recent and not-so-recent memory, it keeps defying the templates. Last week’s convention couldn’t be turned into a replay of the 1960s no matter how hard the press tried to sell the die-hard Hillary supporters as reincarnations of past rebel factions, from the Dixiecrats to the antiwar left. Far from being a descendant of 1968, the 2008 Democratic gathering was the first in memory that actually kept promptly to its schedule and avoided ludicrous P.C. pandering to every constituency.
Nor were we back at Aug. 28, 1963. As a 14-year-old in Washington, I was there on the Mall, taken by my mother, a tireless teacher, with the hope that I might learn something. At a time when the nation’s capital, with its large black population, was still a year away from casting its first votes for president, who would have imagined that a black man might someday have a serious chance of being elected president? Not me.
But even as we stop, take a deep breath and savor this remarkable moment in our history, we cannot linger. This is quite another time. After the catastrophic Bush presidency, the troubles that afflict us on nearly every front almost make you nostalgic for the day when America’s gravest problems could still be seen in blacks and whites.
As Obama said, this is a big election. We will only begin to confront the magnitude of our choice when and if we stop being distracted by small, let alone utterly fictitious, things.
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Cindy McCain on ABC Today: Palin Has National Security Experience Because Alaska Is Close To Russia
When a Fox News morning host, Steve Doocy, testified to Sarah Palin's national security experience on Friday by saying that her state, Alaska, was so close to Russia, it drew hoots across the media and blogosphere (and even, no doubt, from a few Fox viewers).
This morning, on ABC in an interview with George Stephanopoulos, Cindy McCain endorsed this very view.
Asked about Palin's national security experience, Cindy McCain could not come up with anything beyond the fact that, after all, her state is right next to Russia -- so she surely knows a lot about that country. She added that Palin has "more experience than...." but Stephanopoulos cut her off before she could say, for example, "Barack Obama" or maybe "others give her credit for."
Earlier, she actually said that Palin was "heavily experienced" in general, citing her going from the PTA to mayor to governor -- and having a son headed for Iraq. She said she met her just before Palin's meeting with McCain on Thursday and came away impressed that she too was a "reformer."
Meanwhile, Palin's mother-in-law, Faye Palin, told a New York Daily News reporter that she didn't agree with Sarah on everything and hadn't yet decided how she would vote. She added: "I'm not sure what she brings to the ticket other than she's a woman and a conservative. Well, she's a better speaker than McCain," Faye Palin said with a laugh.
But this actually isn't as appalling as a phone interview Palin herself gave yesterday to reporter back home, at the Anchorage Daily News.
The reporter, Kyle Hopkins, asked, according to the transcript posted today, "Are you ready to be President Palin if necessary?"
"I am ... I am up to the task, of course, of focusing on the challenges that face America," she answered, and that was all she could say on her behalf on this question. Then she abruptly shifted to how her candidacy would help Alaska. "And I am very pleased with the situation that I am in, when, when you consider the situation now that Alaska will be in.
"And that is Alaska, and Alaskans will be allowed to contribute more to our great country and they'll be allowed to do that because I -- if we're elected -- will be in a position of opening the eyes of the country to what it is that Alaska is all about and what Alaska has to offer. So, I am happy to and very honored to be asked to do this. I know it's going to be great for Alaska."
Who said the woman was against earmarks?
The early returns are not good, with most in the media still stepping lightly around the issue of John McCain's hypocrisy in asserting, for months, that Barack Obama is "dangerously" inexperienced in facing international threats -- and then appointing Sarah Palin as his running mate. If you don't believe it, just keep reading the Alaska newspapers.
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I dedicate this joint to bluetooth16 b/c she is a Mittensphile :)