Bush's Last Conference

George Bush gave his final press conference today, and you can watch all 47 minutes of misunderestimated glory on CSPAN.

Bush has famously hated press conferences, and it's been months since his last one. Hating the press really isn't a good trait for a national leader, but it's funny watching Bush come to terms with his impending departure- strangely, he's really never looked more presidential than he did today. With nothing left to prove, and with his policy opinions on the verge of becoming irrelevant, he has finally relaxed. You can see it in his shoulders. He actually knew everyone's name in the press room, and some of his off the cuff remarks were actually humorous.

On the other hand, he still can't speak English very well, and his insights seem a little underwhelming. "We haven't we got peace in the Middle East? Well, it's been a long time since we had peace in the Middle East." Hmm.

Of similar interest, Dana Perino was on The Daily Show a couple of days ago. She holds the company line, and gives some sense of what it's like in the bunker in these closing days of the administration.

Is it January 20th yet?

On The Media in China

In the general blitz of China reporting earlier in the year, I completely missed this series of stories rebroadcast this afternoon by On The Media. I hate to think how many other stories of this quality I overlooked in the wider flood of material- this stuff is NPR at its finest. As the show title implies, the broadcast focuses on various aspects of the media, so these three pieces on the internal PR machine, investigative journalism, and publicity leave this listener wishing they'd been given wider scope.

Download to your ipod and enjoy!

Bullying 2.0

A jury in Los Angeles has convicted a woman for accessing information on a website in violation of its terms of service. She was convicted of three misdemeanor charges, reduced by the jury from felonies. The woman convicted, Lori Drew, was charged because she created a MySpace account and used it to convince her daughter’s nemesis, Megan Meier, that a made up boy liked her. When Drew sent Megan a message that said, “The world would be a better place without you,” Megan hung herself.

Other than the substantial “ick” factor of the whole sordid affair, the prosecution claims Drew “violated federal laws that prohibit gaining access to a computer without authorization.” I’m not convinced that this actually is applicable to what happened here. The whole thing underlines the fact that technologies have been moving faster than the laws that should govern them. What Drew did is certainly wrong, in a moral sense, but I don’t know that it violates any specific law, let alone the one she was charged with:

Legal and computer fraud experts said the application of the federal Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, passed in 1986 and amended several times, appeared to be expanding with technology and the growth of social networking on the Internet. More typically, prosecutions under the act have involved people who hack into computer systems.

I’m not a lawyer, and Drew’s defense would seem to rest on a kind of backseat, “I’m not touching you,” finger a centimeter away kind of argument. Instead of trying to shoehorn people into violating laws that don’t really apply, we need to work on sensible laws for crimes as they arise. Besides, I can’t imagine that the Drew family’s trips to the supermarket are a whole lot of fun just at the moment. The whole thing just leaves a bad taste in my mouth, both of prosecutorial overreach and grandstanding, and of … well, I don’t know exactly what you’d call what Lori Drew did. “Shameful” and “disturbing” don’t quite do it justice.

Gen. Eagle T. “Flag” American

Via Slashdot, it appears that the AP has suspended using Department of Defense photos after they were given an altered photograph of General Ann Dunwoody. You can see a before and after comparison of the photograph here.

This is just bizarre on a number of levels. First off, and from a purely aesthetic level, it’s just a hideous photo. Are generals so busy they can’t head down to Sears to have a couple of headshots taken for this kinda thing without having to send out doctored photos? It looks like a photo somebody bashed out using Microsoft Paint for the family Christmas letter.

Secondly, we’re in a pretty poor state of affairs when the freakin’ Army has to start adding flags to their photos. Are we not able to assume that a general in the Army is a patriot? Do we have to be beaten over the head with it? Like the flag pins, discourse in our country has really sunk to a lowest common denominator level of patriotism. People can’t honestly believe that if we don’t drape ourselves in flags and eagles and meaningless signifiers at all times we’re not really Americans – but because conservatives have made such an issue of this, it has become a part of the political boilerplate. Every statement now has to begin with “I just want to make clear that I love America more than my mother, my wife and my children, and am in no way anti-American.”

And finally, won’t it be nice to have a government that can avoid shooting itself in the foot every other day?

Rather Litigious

Dan Rather is suing CBS, according to the New York Times. The basics of his case is that, in the fall out of his 2004 National Guard story about George W. Bush, CBS News deliberately put together a panel of GOP and conservative ringers to investigate Rather’s story, hoping to get conservative detractors off their backs.

The constant cries of “liberal bias” that surround anything conservatives don’t care for has always confused me. As we’ve seen in recent days, conservatives continue to dominate our Sunday talk shows, there is an explicitly conservative cable news network, conservative papers abound and talk radio is dominated by conservative voices. In short, it is not difficult to find someone advocating for conservative policy positions and the conservative worldview.

All of this is not to argue that there is, in fact, a conservative bias in the media. In fact, if anything, there is an establishment bias to most of our major news organizations. The cult of centerism has a long and storied history in our political culture, and I doubt that it’s going to go away anytime soon. I do believe that there is a gravitational pull to a lot of our media that favors conservative ideas – someone like Glen Beck or Sean Hannity regularly espouse lunatic ideas on their programs while wholly lacking in a liberal counterpoint. No one has offered Ward Churchill a TV show that I’ve noticed. The most successful thing that conservatives have done in domestic politics in this century is to convince people that the media has a liberal bias.

Rather’s story and the network’s reaction to it represented the high water mark for the mainstream media’s conservative pandering. September 11th kind of deranged a lot of US media organizations into being even more establishmentarian than usual, which is saying something. The government, of course, being run by conservatives at that moment in time. It also happened to coincide with the bitter fight over the Iraq War, when a lot of progressive voices argued that the anti-war position couldn’t get much of a hearing in the US media.

Social conservatives came of age in the shadow of a largely Democratic establishment, and a lot of their attitudes reflect that legacy. Unfortunately, we’re quite a ways from the Roosevelt coalition in American politics. Conservatism has perfected a form of victimhood and a persecution complex that seemed somewhat at odds when they were in power during the Bush era. Remember Rush Limbaugh’s “America Held Hostage” tag? Now that they have been (pretty resoundingly) kicked to the curb, at least for a few years, conservatives will be able to go back to doing what they do best: working the refs, implying that the United States is a center-right nation and complaining about how progressives are traitors and terrorist-coddlers. It’s nice to have them back.

Welcome Back, My Friends, to the Show That Never Ends

A Democrat wins a presidential election, and the media begins the usual chorus for governing from the center. How many times do we have to sit through this same old song and dance? Obama doesn’t need to work with Republicans to win the public’s trust if “working with Republicans” means “giving up on a progressive agenda.” He just needs to make sure that the progressive policies he implements work. After the last eight years, it’ll be such a nice change of pace to see government that can walk and chew gum at the same time, I don’t think people will much mind if Republican backbenchers are complaining.

Sticks and Stones

Joe Klein has been banned from the McCain and Palin planes. This is, of course, of a piece with the Republican attitude towards the press: if they’re not with us, they’re against us. This is a meme that has been floating around in Republican circles for a long time. It reached its fullest flower with the pre-surge Iraq War. Republicans and conservatives in general seem to be uniquely able to convince themselves that the world is not as everyone says it is, unless there’s an R after their name.

Progressives are not immune to this problem, as well. What they do, however, is a bit more mature. Progressives believe (sometimes wrongly, often rightly) that commercial news media often prize the horserace and contrast above actually in depth reportage. I think there are a lot of reasons for this, some of them more reasonable than others. But what differentiates progressives from conservatives is a willingness to accept an external reality outside of the media and the idelogical echo chamber (blogs on the left and talk radio on the right). This is one reason why so many progressives were willing to look at evidence that contradicted the government line when Republicans and establishment Democrats were not. Republicans were disinclined to listen to Hans Blix and other European counterarguments for ideological reasons, and congressional Democrats were all-too-willing to stick with the government line for fear of seeming “weak.”

What I find so exceptional about the McCain campaign’s relationship with the press is how petty it seems. McCain seems to regard negative coverage as a personal slight. In all fairness, if I were on the receiving end of it, I probably would, too. The problem is, I’m not running for president. To react to perceived slights in the childish way he has reveals a shocking lack of maturity and character on the part of McCain’s campaign and McCain himself. This campaign has revealed a lot about McCain as a person, and it’s confirmed a lot of them mythology he’s built up about himself. He really is the flyboy, the jock and the frat brother. And, as is so often the case, he can dish it out, but he can’t take it.

The Hunt for the Illusive Real American

Hilzoy over at the Washington Monthly drops some science on Rep. Michele Bachmann of Minnesota. You may have seen the clip of her on Hardball from last night. It’s a pretty thorough fisking of the first term congresswoman, so if you were as disgusted with her comments as I was, you might want to go over and check it out. Can schadenfreude kill you? And if you haven’t seen the clip, it’s worth checking out just to see what lies underneath all those conservative rocks. It’s not pretty.

Arguments and Expectations

Tonight’s the big debate. I’m looking forward to checking it out, although it’ll be on at about four o’clock in the morning here, so I’ll likely have to wait until tomorrow to see tonight’s debate. There are a lot of issues in play – Gwen Ifill, the specter of the big, old white guy picking on the attractive young(er) woman. I think, however, anyone expecting a kind of nationally televised schadenfruede-fueled meltdown is going to be disappointed. I agree with James Fallows who thinks that the expectations for Palin are so low that any performance she turns in that doesn’t include drooling and pratfalls is going to be treated as a victory over expectations. I don’t think this means Palin is going to deliver anything close to a successful performance – or even a coherent one – but I do think she’s going to do better than every expects.

Palin will get up there, read through her talking points, and that will be the end of it. Republicans will claim that Ifill was being overly harsh on the governor and that, regardless, Palin’s poor performance so far was all liberal media bias to begin with.

Obama and the Defensive Crouch

I think Daniel Larison makes some good points in this post about progressives, Obama and the role of a hawkish pose in this election. He has a very on spot summary of the Democratic “defensive pose” that has dominated Democratic and Republican campaigns since Reagan and how Obama breaks the mold a bit.

Obama has essentially been following in this same tradition: opposed to the war in Iraq, but otherwise in favor of a very active role in the world up to and including new military engagements and very keen to declare his support for military action in places other than Iraq by the U.S. and allied militaries. So when progressives listen to Obama’s answers on foreign policy, they tend to cringe because they recognize perfectly well that Obama sounds just like the opposition on most issues related to U.S. policies abroad.

There are two big reasons that Obama was in a unique position to counter McCain this year. The first one being, of course, that he had opposed the war from the beginning – he was against it before it began, unlike all the other serious Democratic candidates for the candidacy. Obama could legitimately point to that stance and say, “I was correct and John McCain was not,” and not get hit for changing their minds when the winds blew foul. The second is that, as Larison points out, Obama has long supported a rather hawkish, liberal interventionist foreign policy vision. Progressives like myself who would like to see a much more restrained use of US military force outside our borders may cringe a bit at that (and extremely limited interventionists like Larison will of course move from cringing to wincing), but the fact is that Obama has a legitimate history of pro-military opinions.

It’s a sorry state of affairs, but the simple fact is that, in general, Americans like wars. We usually win them and they allow people to feel morally superior to other nations. The stab-in-the-back narrative that conservatives have carefully built up around the failure of the Vietnam War and the rosey-hued paeans to World War II and “the greatest generation” have left Americans with an extremely warped sense of what it means to fight a war, let alone the kind of grinding counterinsurgency that the Iraq War has turned into. Americans are used to wars that resemble videogames – quick, on television, and over when the TV goes off. The Iraq war has not done much to inconvenience people yet. We’re still waiting for the bill to come due. Right now, it’s popular to be on the side of war.

There is a popular narrative surrounding Democrats that says they’re weak and aren’t able to carry through wars, unlike the tough, manly Republicans who can get the job done. There’s a lot of blame for this prevailing attitude, not least of which lands squarely on the shoulders of Democrats themselves for constantly running away from this fight. John McCain himself certainly hasn’t done the nation any favors with his constant reiteration of “country first,” as if the Democrats were intending to put someone else (Iran, maybe? Hollywood?) in front of “real” America. I think that John McCain, as a citizen and a human being, should be ashamed of himself, but I won’t loose any sleep waiting for an apology.

The problem comes from the fact that before this mentality can change we have to have a strong Democrat to disprove it. This meme has been an unusually hardy one, and just like the one that insists that Republicans are the party of fiscal sanity, it seems to be a pretty hardy weed. It’s taken a long time for both of these to change. I would love to see a candidate articulate a muscular, responsible and non-dogmatic noninterventionism. When that candidate appears on the scene, I’ll be happy to vote for them. But I don’t think anyone running on such a platform could be elected in this United States. The Republicans, while being manifestly more irresponsible, would have a field day. The media would have none of it in their constant quest for a charismatic strongman. And I don’t think the public would take it seriously.

I think Larison is incorrect, however, when he says that Obama sounds just like the other side. As someone even more committed to noninterventionism than I would call myself, I think he too quickly falls into painting both with the same brush. Obama is far more likely to be considered in his application of force, and far more likely to seek out accord in utilizing it. I don’t think that this will in and of itself lead to a more judicious and just use of force – bad wars can certainly be started this way – but I do think it’s far less likely than what John McCain will offer us.

Perhaps Obama isn’t the candidate I’d want in all respects. Maybe the next guy would be. But Obama can’t be worse than the candidate who promises to double down on all of Bush’s mistakes.

Trainwreck

This is just sad. Palin’s responses to Charlie Gibson’s questions were often trite recitations of canned talking points, but largely they were coherent. With Palin’s interview with CBS’s Katie Couric, we seem to have crossed that particular Rubicon. It’s just depressing me to watch her now. I feel sorry for her. She seems like a nice enough woman. McCain, by playing for the evangelical base has really done her a disservice. I don’t think she ever would have been ready for the big time – as has been noted, she doesn’t seem to have any interest in things outside her very narrow, Alaska centered worldview. I guess that’ll be okay when the Rapture drives all the believers from the Lower 48 up into Alaska. But right now, it’s just depressing.

Who is Responsible for Stupidity?

Daniel Larison takes progressives to task:

To the extent that his admirers never really appreciated how damaging being identified as a Muslim would be politically, and to the extent that they refused to accept that an overwhelming majority of the public was going to reject a candidate they perceived to be a Muslim, they share in the responsibility for driving up these numbers who are confused about Obama’s religion.

I find the displacement of this strange. It’s progressives who caused this problem, talking up Obama’s story. No where in there is there any responsibility for conservatives who have mendaciously contributed to this “misunderstanding.” The fact of the matter is that the writers who discussed Obama’s upbringing and praised his understanding of different cultures in no way contributed to people thinking he’s Muslim. If people are so foolish that they can’t read past the first few sentences and walk away with the wrong impression, that’s their own fault – not that of progressives.

What are progressives to do? Act like these aspects of Obama’s character aren’t positive? The whole argument presupposes that a closed minded, insular, bigoted worldview is the standard and people talking about Obama’s past didn’t do enough to court closed minded, insular, bigoted people. I have no doubt that a Muslim running for US president would find very little traction. The fact that a significant number of people think Obama is a Muslim underscores a very scary aspect of our culture.

Perhaps Obama should begin each speech with a tag, like in ads: “I am Barack Obama, and I am not a Muslim.” I would like to know what Larison thinks these writers should have done to prepare the Obama-is-a-Muslim section of the public. What more can the man do, other than, I dunno, profess at every opportunity that he’s Christian?

The New McCain

It’s pretty easy to understand what the political media liked about John McCain. He was available in a way that most politicians are not. While McCain’s “maverick,” go-against-the-party status is largely imaginary, the fact that he was willing to talk with reporters – not just repeat talking points – was not. For people who spend their careers covering politicians determined to stick to a script, to not let anything off the cuff or against message slip out, I’m sure this was an amazingly refreshing change of pace.

There’s something else that must have made McCain popular with reporters: he was a loser. It is much easier to champion an underdog than a winner. McCain ran in 2000 with a real outside chance. The fact that he didn’t win isn’t surprising, nor the fact that Bush ran such a sleazy campaign in South Carolina. What is surprising is the fact that McCain got as far as he did in the first place. Here is a man who married an heiress, ran for Congress in a state he’d never lived in before, doesn’t seem to have any coherent political philosophy and is given to making decisions nearly at whim. The fact that he was willing to sit down and have off the cuff discussions with the media covering him was what his campaign was based on. That kind of pose is novel in the political world for good reason: it’s incredibly dangerous for a politician in the US to do that. Innocuous statements have a tendency to become blown entirely out of proportion to their intent and relative meaning.

But the fact remains: McCain is good at it. By all accounts, he’s a very personable and funny guy, quick on his feet when discussing things (as long as it’s not the location of Spain) and willing to give reporters a good sound bite. Anyone who’s seen him on one of his numerous appearances on The Daily Show can attest to that.

Which makes it even more curious that he has decided to forgo that skill – more than anything the skill that has brought him to where he is – in favor of dogged repetition of carefully scripted stump speeches.

Mr. McCain’s once easygoing if irreverent campaign presence — endearing to crowds, though often the kind of undisciplined excursions that landed him in the gaffe doghouse — has been put out to pasture. He takes far fewer chances, meaning there are fewer risqué jokes, zingers at a familiar face in the crowd, provocative observations on policy or politics, or exercises in self-derogatory humor. By every appearance, this Mr. McCain is, or at least is struggling to be, disciplined and on message in a way befitting of American politics today, if not quite befitting of the McCain of yesterday.

There may be a price for all this. After his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, riveted the overflow crowd for 16 minutes on Tuesday at an airplane hangar here, it was Mr. McCain’s turn, and people in his audience began murmuring and drifting away midway through a 14-minute speech that was flat and cheerless. When Mr. McCain made his first appearance without Ms. Palin, on Monday morning in Jacksonville, Fla., he faced an arena that was one-quarter full.

This whole thing makes the Palin boomlet even more understandable. Palin is a charismatic public speaker. She’s able to deliver a speech from a teleprompter without looking like she’s getting ready for a root canal. McCain, as any one of his big set speeches can attest, isn’t able to do that. He’s halting and wavering, weak sounding. His sudden rediscovery of populism in the wake of the Lehman Brothers collapse throws his new, stilted, Republican base-approved style in sharp contrast.

If this is the McCain we’re going to see for the rest of the campaign, it makes sense that McCain is still harping on Obama declining the joint town hall format. It plays McCain’s strengths. Set speeches and message discipline obviously don’t.

Lying Isn't What It Used to Be

So now McCain thinks he can simply ignore direct questions about the lies his campaign is telling? I have to wonder what the media fallout of this is going to be. One other thing I’ve been thinking about: does it matter? It clearly doesn’t seem to matter for Republicans – they like the Palin pick for all sorts of reasons, but one of the main ones definitely seems to be the fact that she drives progressives crazy. This must be some kind of conservative catnip. Perhaps they feel the same way about lies?

One thing I do think, though, is that the media is going to get tired of this. I would really love to see evening news broadcasts discussing how long it’s been since McCain had a press conference. You’d think they would have raised a bigger stink about getting kicked off his tour bus. Perhaps this will let them know that McCain really doesn’t love them and will finally walk out on this abusive relationship. You’ve got to hit rock bottom before you can start getting better.

Perhaps I'm Just Seeing the Darkness Before the Dawn ...

Marc Ambinder is calling McCain’s campaign “Keyser Soze Rules.” He says, “Go further than your opponent is willing to go. So long as you commit to this strategy 100%, it can work.”

I’d just like to echo Matt Yglesias’s comments from the other day. Marc Ambinder is one of a handful of people who can point out that what McCain is saying is not true. And yet he continues to report it like it’s some sort of horserace, with nothing at stake. Like he’s some sort of distant observer, and not a member of the institution that is supposed to inform Americans. This election has made the run up to the Iraq War look like Watergate.

After talking to my mother tonight, who said that Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood were both talking about how Obama called Sarah Palin a pig, I’m no longer sure exactly what to think. I guess my steady media diet of reading newspapers, blogs and the candidates' policy positions is no longer adequate to actually understand the moronic dynamic that actually exists in the United States. Honest to god, if the media doesn’t start to call out the McCain campaign on this stuff soon, is there any hope for it? I’m not a huge fan of corporate news broadcasting to begin with, but if they allow McCain to walk through one of the sleaziest, most fact-free campaigns ever – has there ever been a campaign who has made so much hay out of so little? – I don’t know what to think.

You, if you’re reading this, and I, we know what McCain is up to. I’ve spent my twenties on a steady downslide in my opinion of the intelligence of the American public. We’ll soon see if the media can do their job, or if my darkest opinions have turned out to be justified.

Strange Fixations

What can you even say to this? Thomas Friedman in the New York Times today:

This race has a long way to go. It is still Obama’s election to lose. But Obama got where he is today by defining himself as the agent of change and by defining change as the issue in this election. McCain, with Palin’s help, has once again not only made Obama’s experience an issue, but has now moved in on Obama’s strength and tried to define the G.O.P. ticket as the party of “change.”

How, you ask, can two people running with the exact same policies as the party that has been in power for eight years, claim to be the agents of “change?” That’s politics. There’s no shame. But what this has done is to make the word “change” as a campaign slogan meaningless. Obama will need to find another way to connect his ideas — clearly, crisply and passionately.

Has our political culture truly become so debased that candidates are lambasted for sticking to facts, policy proposals and the idea of competent governance? Do Americans truly only care about what they feel “in their gut”? If John McCain is wrong on virtually every issue, if he is running a substance free campaign based upon the constant repetition of lies and well known authors writing columns for the nation’s largest newspaper decide to write about how Barack Obama isn’t “connecting” with people, what, exactly, is Barack Obama supposed to do about that? What are any of us supposed to do?

Perhaps Thomas Friedman should concentrate some more on discussing why people should vote for Obama, instead of bemoaning the fact that people still like the media golden boy, the gamblin’ flyboy John McCain. Obama has to make his case through the media. I’m getting heartily sick of listening to media figures bemoan the fact that Obama isn’t making his case. Well, Obama can only make his case through the media – and if they keep on concentrating on how much more people like Sarah Palin than Barack Obama, it’s going to be awful difficult for him to do that. Perhaps Thomas Friedman should spend some more time discussing why he prefers, especially, Obama’s energy policy. Perhaps instead of writing about why he thinks the candidate he prefers is likely to lose, he should write about why he thinks that candidate should win.

Same Old Song and Dance

E. J. Dionne has a good editorial dealing with a topic that I’ve been thinking about for the past few days: the Republican habit of playing the refs. As Dionne discusses, you can’t say it hasn’t been a successful strategy for them. With the pick of Palin as McCain’s running mate, it’s clear that there were two primary considerations: one, evangelicals love her. They’re all over the moon with the pick, and are more likely than not voting for Palin, not McCain, a man they never really loved and whom they know is not really one of them. So, mission accomplished on that score.

The second issue is that by picking someone that the base loves, and given the sexual and social stereotypes and traditions of our society, McCain and Steve Schmidt can come out and denounce any instance of the media or a Democrat questioning or attacking Palin as not showing the proper “respect and deference.” Questions are too hard? How does it look when big, mean Joe Biden or Barack Obama are attacking a helpless woman? She has five kids! She’s against earmarks! She doesn’t have to go in front of a “hostile” “liberal” media. And why should she? The Republicans only really feel comfortable when they’re on (or appear to be on) the defensive. The gays are attacking marriage – just like your marriage! The ACLU is trying to stop you from teaching your children to be a Christian!

This Bridge to Nowhere nonsense has been debunked time and time again. That certainly hasn’t stopped Palin and McCain from repeating it over and over. What does the media do? They simply throw their hands up and say, “Well, isn’t that an interesting argument?”

Working the refs has been a very successful strategy for Republicans for a long time now. At some point you’d think that media outlets would stop being cowed about helping to disseminate and to obscure completely false claims. They have on Republican and Democrat “analysts” all the time – they pay these people. You’d think that they’d eventually stop throwing money at people who repeat demonstrably false claims. Or would that be bad for ratings?

Rancor and Frustration

I realize this is a somewhat trite observation, but “McCain Vows to End Partisan Rancor” is a frustrating headline. McCain did cut down on his attacks against Obama – although not on his references to his POW experience – but the others at the GOP convention certainly didn’t. Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin especially set themselves apart with the snide, condescending tone of their remarks about Obama. Which, I suppose shouldn’t surprise me. Ah, well. The article mentions it in a general way, but doesn’t quite make the point that McCain’s party is where the rancor is coming from. But McCain changed his tone for this one speech, and he gets the headlines.

As my friend Jeff just said, “Remember who else was a uniter, not a divider?”

There's a Reason It's Called "Gambling"

Man, your internet goes out off for twenty hours and things go crazy.

This afternoon, I checked out the news only to find that Palin had become embroiled in even more scandals than when I went to bed last night. She’s lawyered up on the trooper firing scandal, she was once a member of an Alaskan secessionist party, the media finally picked up on her (and Alaska in general’s) love of earmarks. That’s a hefty dose of problems for one news cycle.

TPM is discussing whether or not Palin will be seeing the door a la Eagleton. I think this is wildly unlikely. It’s just too late in the season for McCain to pick someone else. He’s made a mavericky gamble and he’s going to have to ride it out. Eagleton was offered the VP slot on July 1st, and withdrew on August 1st. McCain waited until after Obama made his pick, and for obvious reasons, Obama waited to make his pick. This obviously shows weakness on McCain’s part – he is in a reactive mode. The NY Times reports that McCain was ready to go for Lieberman and Ridge, but the people from the base in the know were set to go out of their minds. So, he did the next logical thing – he picked a woman beloved of the base, about whom he knew almost nothing. So far, it seems to have worked out really well for him.

I know what you all are thinking: how is this bad for Obama? After all, everything is good news for McCain. The only downside I can see is that there’s so much coming out all at once, it will be hard for people to absorb it all. They’re likely to simply throw their hands up at it all. How will the stories play?

Palin’s daughter: Like Obama and a lot of other bloggers, I tend to think this kinda stuff has no real relevance to politics, so let’s just drop it entirely. Obama did well in his statement, and I hope his surrogates stay away from it.

Troopergate: Like DP, I think this is an important story. What I’m not sure about, though, is how well it will play over all. The issues are somewhat muddied by the fact that her ex-brother-in-law does, in fact, seem like a real sleaze ball. It certainly seems like she’s abusing her powers, but the optics of it are a bit off.

Alaskan Independence: I think this one is a bit more interesting. It has pretty much everything a Democrat could love in a scandal and nothing to dislike. It has a GOP vice presidential nominee participating with a group that’s committed to having a vote for succession. I think this one is a winner.

And finally, of course, there’s the earmark thing. I think this is the single biggest problem with Sarah Palin. Palin comes from an incredibly corrupt political culture. It’s telling that, by Alaskan standards, she’s considered a reformer. She lied about the Bridge to Nowhere in her very first speech on the national stage. “Thanks, but no thanks” doesn’t mean, “Thanks, but I’m going to keep the money for other stuff.” She was involved in actively lobbying congress for more earmarks, and she had a close relationship with earmark king, Sen. Ted Stevens. I think this is and the Alaskan Independence are the issues the Democrats really need to push. The rest of it, while certainly important, is a distraction.

But What Does McCain Think?

John McCain, Bill Kristol, and Rudy Giuliani all agree, Obama shouldn’t have picked Biden – instead, they should have gone with Hillary Clinton. As McCain and Rudy Giuliani are both well known and long term Clinton supporters, it’s unsurprising the media would turn to him for an opinion on the race.

At least Kristol came around to his new-found support of Sen. Clinton in his own magazine. I find it strange that the Washington Post would open a 1,000 word article on reactions to Obama’s pick with a quote from a Republican. Of course McCain and Giuliani think Obama picked the wrong person. They’d hardly be likely to say, “Man, what a great pick. We might as well pull up stakes, ‘cause this one’s all over.” It would be like asking a vegetarian what they think of your Steak Roquefort. The only reason they’d offer a comment is if they thought they could cause Obama some damage – in this case, of course, trying to stir up disaffected Clinton supporters. It’s absurd that the media would give a forum to such obviously prejudiced voices.

It’s also quite interesting that they spend so much time on whether or not Clinton supporters will be upset with Obama’s decision without mentioning Clinton’s support of Biden.