Thursday, June 05, 2008 - Posts
-
sponsorship
Talking Points Memo points to a bizarre little detail on John McCain’s Web site. The front page currently promos four things: the “Decision Center,” the “General Election,” “Obama & Iraq,” and “Golf Gear.” Click on that last tab, and it takes you to the campaign store, where you can buy your old man a “Father’s Day McCain Golf Pack.”
There’s just one problem here. George W. Bush gave up golf out of respect for the troops: “I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf,” he said. “I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal.” (Stories like this may have also influenced his decision.)
Yet here’s McCain, practically shoving golf clubs into our hands during a time of war. Granted, you won’t find McCain playing much golf himself. “I hate golf,” he told reporters on his bus last year. “Churchill said, it’s a good walk wasted.” *
Perhaps this is just another count—like his stances on Katrina and global warming—on which McCain intends to distance himself from Bush.
*Update 6:55 p.m.: A reader points out that McCain misquoted Winston Churchill. Churchill famously said that "Golf is a game whose aim is to hit a very small ball into a even
smaller hole, with weapons singularly ill-designed for the purpose." It's Mark Twain who is quoted as saying that "Golf is a good walk spoiled."
-
sponsorship
If the first day of the general election foretold anything about the rest of the contest, it’s that McCain will be struggling daily to avoid "senior moments."
Yesterday, McCain had not one but two such moments. At a press conference in New Orleans, he claimed to have voted for every investigation into Hurricane Katrina, when in fact he voted twice against establishing a commission to investigate levee failures. "I don’t know exactly what you are describing at this moment," he told the reporter. Then, when asked why he called for divestment from Iran but never signed onto the divestment bill Obama introduced last year, he pled ignorance: "I am not familiar with it at all. I do not know if it passed the Senate or had any hearing or anything else."
Don’t discount superficiality, either. McCain’s age was on display Tuesday as he addressed a few hundred supporters in New Orleans. His speech gleamed on the page, but came off stilted and shaky in the reading. The garish green background and shoddy sound system didn’t do him any favors, either. (A colleague compared it to "bingo night at the hospice.") Compare that with Obama’s honeyed baritone and photogenic mug addressing a crowd of 20,000, and it almost doesn’t matter what either of them said.
McCain’s in a tough spot. There’s guaranteed to be a double standard when it comes to memory lapses, teleprompter snafus, and other stumbles mental and physical, as the media treats McCain’s pratfalls as part of a larger narrative. (No one blinked when Obama once referred to the "57 states"; if that had been McCain, it would be all over YouTube.) The McCain campaign knows this. That’s why his staffers released 1,173 pages of the senator’s health records. Also see Mark Salter’s heated response when Obama said McCain was "losing his bearings." "He used the words ‘losing his bearings’ intentionally, a not-particularly-clever way of raising John McCain’s age as an issue," Salter wrote. "This is typical of the Obama style of campaigning."
But if youth and inexperience are fair game, so should be age and too much experience. This year, the first national estimate on cognitive impairment found that more than one-third of people age 71 and older have some diminished mental function. McCain will turn 72 in August. Recall and mental agility are important qualities for younger politicians, too. But with McCain, everyone's senility-dar will be especially sensitive.
-
sponsorship
Hillary Clinton has finally announced that she will drop out—but not till Saturday. Thus Clinton departs as she campaigned, dragging it out to the last possible moment. After more than two months of daily odds-making, we sink Clinton to her final resting place of 0 percent. So it goes.
The last 36 hours felt like something out of the DSM-IV.
Faced with defeat Tuesday night, Clinton gave a defiant speech with no
recognition that Obama had locked up the nomination. Fans encouraged her to fight on.
Late Tuesday, Clinton staffers were still spinning against the wind.
Hillaryland went from professional campaign operation to alternate
reality in which conventions are contested, skeletons emerge from
closets, and superdelegates experience group epiphanies based on vague
electability arguments.
But after Clinton held a conference call with top supporters Wednesday
afternoon, things wrapped up quickly. That evening, Clinton announced
she would "express her support for Barack Obama and party unity" this
weekend. John McCain called Obama to congratulate him. The spin machine rested. ...
Read more at the Hillary Deathwatch.
Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum
What did you think of this article?