Not as unusual as crop circles but possibly more compelling…
Posts Tagged ‘Sarah Palin’
Palin Campaign Plane Flies Over Corncut Image
Posted: October 23, 2008 in 2008 Elections, Sarah PalinTags: 2008 Elections, Sarah Palin
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The Tell
Posted: October 23, 2008 in 2008 Elections, John McCain, Media, Sarah Palin, Talking HeadsTags: 2008 Elections, John McCain, Media, Sarah Palin, Talking Heads
Chuck Todd is one of the most influential political observers and commentators in Washington. When he says something, people listen. This is not what the McCain people want the chattering class in the media to be talking about less than two weeks before the election.
Commenting on a new joint interview with John McCain and Sarah Palin, NBC News Political Director Chuck Todd described the Republican ticket as lacking cohesion, chemistry, and (he hinted) trust.
“There was a tenseness,” Todd told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews. “I couldn’t see chemistry between John McCain and Sarah Palin. I felt as if we grabbed two people and said ‘here, sit next to each other, we are going to conduct an interview.’ They are not comfortable with each other yet.”
Todd, who was remarking on the interview conducted by NBC’s Brian Williams (he was in the room), speculated that the candidates had come to the realization that “they are losing” the campaign, and guessed that McCain may have begun to hold his vice presidential choice responsible for his dwindling White House chances.
Quotes of the Day
Posted: October 22, 2008 in 2008 Elections, Quotes, Sarah PalinTags: 2008 Elections, John McCain, Quotes, Sarah Palin
Both about Sarah Palin’s wardrobe.
“Isn’t this the best $150,000 the RNC has spent the entire cycle?”
– Unidentified McCain aide
“I don’t want to tell them how to do their business, but I would have picked a week of TV somewhere.”
– Unidentified Democratic operative
Sarah Palin’s New Wardrobe By the Numbers
Posted: October 22, 2008 in 2008 Elections, October Surprise, Sarah PalinTags: 2008 Elections, Follow the Money, October Surprise, Sarah Palin
Sam Stein at the Huffington Post:
If Edwards had gotten one of his legendary haircuts every singe week, it would still take him 7.2 years to spend what Palin has spent. Palin has received the equivalent of $2,500 in clothes per day from places such as Saks Fifth Avenue (where RNC expenditures totaled nearly $50,000) and Neiman Marcus (where the governor had a $75,000 spree).
…
Indeed, the story could not come at a more inopportune time for the McCain campaign. During a week in which the Republican ticket is trying to highlight its connection to the working class — and, by extension, promoting its newest campaign tool, Joe the Plumber — it was revealed that Palin’s fashion budget for several weeks was more than four times the median salary of an American plumber ($37,514). To put it another way: Palin received more valuable clothes in one month than the average American household spends on clothes in 80 years. A Democrat put it in even blunter terms: her clothes were the cost of health care for 15 or so people.
Update: Marc Ambinder:
That’s one good week of television time in Colorado.
The New 400 Dollar Haircut
Posted: October 22, 2008 in 2008 Elections, John McCain, Sarah PalinTags: 2008 Elections, Follow the Money, John McCain, Sarah Palin
Remember how much fun Republicans had tarring and feathering John Edwards with this?
If that was fair game (I thought at the time – and still do – that it was quite silly) then Sarah Palin and the Republican National Committee just handed the Democrats a whole caseload of ammunition.
The Republican National Committee has spent more than $150,000 to clothe and accessorize vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin and her family since her surprise pick by John McCain in late August.
According to financial disclosure records, the accessorizing began in early September and included bills from Saks Fifth Avenue in St. Louis and New York for a combined $49,425.74.
The records also document a couple of big-time shopping trips to Neiman Marcus in Minneapolis, including one $75,062.63 spree in early September.
The RNC also spent $4,716.49 on hair and makeup through September after reporting no such costs in August.
The cash expenditures immediately raised questions among campaign finance experts about their legality under the Federal Election Commission’s long-standing advisory opinions on using campaign cash to purchase items for personal use.
Politico asked the McCain campaign for comment, explicitly noting the $150,000 in expenses for department store shopping and makeup consultation that were incurred immediately after Palin’s announcement. Pre-September reports do not include similar costs.
Somehow, I think a six-figure shopping spree for a personal makeover is not what Republican donors had in mind when they wrote out their checks. Expect the Democrats and the late night comedians to pounce on this.
Update: Marc Ambinder quotes Republicans, GOP donors and an RNC staffer who are disgusted with the expenditures, although not surprisingly all of them are on background.
Going Off the Rails On the Ayers Train
Posted: October 20, 2008 in 2008 Elections, John McCain, Sarah PalinTags: 2008 Elections, John McCain, Sarah Palin
William Ayers and Sarah Palin have become polling liabilities for John McCain, according to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll. Further proof that what’s good for the Republican base isn’t always necessarily best for the electorate at large.
Update: According to the Huffington Post’s Sam Stein, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said during an interview with Hugh Hewitt he is considering bringing back the ghost of Jeremiah Wright to hit Obama during the final weeks of the campaign.
Why he wants to spend any of the limited time and money he has left trying to beat this dead horse is beyond me. It’s his campaign to run, but if I were advising him, I’d remind him of Rita Mae Brown’s famous quote about insanity.
Sarah Palin and SOFA
Posted: October 19, 2008 in 2008 Elections, Foreign Policy, National Security, Sarah PalinTags: 2008 Elections, Foreign Policy, Iraq, National Security, Sarah Palin
John McCain, Barack Obama and Joe Biden get calls from Bob Gates and Condoleezza Rice about the ongoing Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) being discussed with the Iraqi government because of their respective roles on the Senate Armed Services and Foreign Relations committees. Sarah Palin… not so much.
According to the State Department, Palin is a governor with no relevant jurisdiction or oversight of the State Department or Department of Defense, but as this briefing shows, some people aren’t going to be able to help but interpret it as a snub of the Republican vice presidential candidate. From Friday’s daily State Department briefing:
QUESTION: You called Senator Biden, you called McCain, you called —
MR. MCCORMACK: Chairman Biden, I guess I should have said.
QUESTION: Yeah. Did you also call Governor Palin?
MR. MCCORMACK: No, no. She – if you hadn’t noticed, she’s a governor, not a senator or congressman.
QUESTION: She’s a vice presidential candidate.
MR. MCCORMACK: Right.
QUESTION: She also has extensive foreign affairs experience. (Laughter.)
MR. MCCORMACK: Look, I explained to you the reasoning behind the phone calls.
QUESTION: Anything that has to do with Russia, you would have called her?
Regardless of the substantive issue of whether or not a governor has jurisdiction of foreign policy, as vice presidential candidate, she or any other candidate – regardless of gender or political affiliation – are entitled to get a briefing or courtesy call on this subject so they can be informed as candidates. If she is entitled to receive classified intelligence briefings from the DNI, I see no reason why she shouldn’t be filled in on SOFA.
The headline does not reflect the lead of the story, a rare mistake for my alma mater.
(CNN) – Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin told supporters at a North Carolina fundraiser that her aides discouraged her from watching campaign news because they thought she would get “depressed.”
“At those times on the campaign trail when sometimes it’s easy to get a little bit discouraged, when you know, when you happen to turn on the news when your campaign staffers will let you turn on the news,” she said Thursday night, to laughter from the crowd. “Usually they’re like ‘Oh my gosh, don’t watch, you’re going to, you know, you’re going to get depressed.’
“But yeah, sometimes you do get depressed watching what it is that they’re reporting and the spin and some of the distortion of what our message is and what we stand for, sometimes that, that gets draining,” she added. “But it’s at events like these and our rallies that we are so energized and inspired and we know that we are not alone. We feel your strength and we feel the power of prayer, so many of you tell us that you are praying for us and praying for our country, and that’s why we so appreciate you being here.”
The view isn’t all glum from the trail. “We even saw today, thank the Lord, we saw some movement,” looking upwards and making a fist. Another bright note for her, she said later, was visiting “pro-America” areas of the country.
My next question is what are the “anti-America” areas of the country, according to Sarah Palin?
Update: As expected, Joe Biden pounces on Palin’s “pro-America” comment.
Andrew Sullivan: Joe the Plumber has now had more press conferences than Sarah Palin.
Circular Firing Squad
Posted: October 16, 2008 in 2008 Elections, Beltway Drama, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Talking HeadsTags: 2008 Elections, Beltway Drama, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Talking Heads
A few days ago, I made note of the back and forth sniping going on between the McCain campaign and conservative pundit Bill Kristol. It’s gotten a bit personal lately, with McCain campaign manager Rick Davis personally taking Kristol out to the woodshed on national television. The key soundbite:
DAVIS: Yes, well, you know, it’s a good thing Bill Kristol has never run a political campaign because he’d probably have to fire himself at least two or three times.
This may be beyond standard political sniping. Scott Horton of Harper’s has written extensively about Bill Kristol’s role in promoting Sarah Palin for the VP slot. But in a recent interview with Glenn Greenwald, Horton reveals evidence of discontent behind closed doors at the McCain campaign.
SH: I’d say, of course the McCain campaign isn’t doing too well right now, and one of the consequences of that is we’ve got a lot of finger-pointing going on within the camp, and I’d say there’s a pretty broad agreement amongst a number of the senior-most advisors to McCain that the Palin pick is worse than disappointing. It’s a total disaster, as one describes to me. And there is a sort of blame game going on there.
Now, one of them described to me quite recently in some detail, who it was who introduced and pushed the Palin nomination, and he says it really boils down – there were a number of people behind the nomination, but there’s one person who was essentially the person who introduced her as a candidate and pushed her consistently and firmly all through the summer primary she was elected – and that person is Bill Kristol. And the interesting thing is of course, if we look across the whole horizon of conservative columnists, prominent conservative columnists, pretty much all of them are expressing reservations or concerns or they’re outright opposing Palin as a pick, with one really striking exception, and that’s Bill Kristol. And Bill Kristol, in none of his columns has acknowledged that he in a sense is the author of Sarah Palin. He discovered her, he promoted her, and he pushed her through to the vice-presidential nomination.
If this is true, that makes Kristol’s recent criticism of Palin much more self-serving. It’s become full-on cover your ass mode. When the post-mortem of this campaign is written, there will be a lot of people pointing fingers at each other, and I think quite a few of them will be pointed at Bill Kristol.
Icepicks and Nukes 