Posts Tagged Under ‘John McCain’

New McCain Ad: “Love”

Maybe it’s a Pennsylvania thing, but I’ve started to see presidential campaign commercials back here in Pittsburgh. This one has a funny subtext:

“John McCain was a war hero. But there was something even more important than that: John McCain was not a hippie.”

Reading Recs

I recently read and enjoyed the following, so feel free to hook that up for yourself:

• This UK Daily Mail profile of John McCain’s first wife. I had always heard about his first marriage, but knew next to nothing about it. Definitely a sensationalist source, but an unflattering new look.
• An article on the prevalence of skulls by Stephen Marche in Esquire. There’s no link to it on their site, so you can just read this other description of it. Who doesn’t like a memento mori?
• This inspiring article from the Chicago Tribune magazine about a woman in Roseland (a nasty part of Chicago) who started her own anti-violence group for the teens in the neighborhood.

Good on ya.

Congrats to Obama. So Now What?

Quick hits:

• Clinton might not have won, but she certainly gets to play kingmaker. She set the pattern for the fall: black people and people under 40 for the O-man, and everybody else for her. Once you add in the masses of lily-white crotchety Republicans and extrapolate that same pattern, it looks like Obama loses by a lot. But if Hillary decides to swing her weight behind him, then that could change things.
• Does Hillary really want the vice-president slot? I don’t know that she does. From a purely self-interested perspective, things might work out better for her if she sits this year out and then makes a comeback in 2012. By then we’ll either have a McCain presidency and she can argue that the Democrats should have picked her in 2008 and certainly should in 2012, or she can find enough Obama mistakes from four years in office to drop in like Reagan in 1976 or Ted Kennedy in 1980.
• Unfortunately for her in that latter scenario, the Republicans lost the general election in 1976 and the Democrats lost it in 1980. Whoops.
• Back to the first point, your man McCain is no political slouch: he sees what I just pointed out and is trying to win over Team Hillary. Under what other circumstances would a Republican ever dare to say something nice about Hillary Clinton? His best option is for her to sit on the sidelines and be pissed, because if she does, that’s just what her supporters will do too.
• It is weird how the fact that a black man is the major-party nominee for President of the United States isn’t being played up a lot more. But then that tends to happen with all significant moments: no matter how big something seems in your own life, the world won’t bother stopping to congratulate you. There’s always more to be done, so the sooner you get down to brass tacks and do it, the better.

Gay Marriage and the 2008 Campaign

I didn’t think this one would be back again as a campaign issue, but it seems that it will be.

There are a few differences this time around. First, if campaigning were a video game, the G.O.P. already used the one-time, battleground-state-gay-marriage-ballot supermove to defeat the 2004 Democrats, leaving them without the ability to use it again. You can’t write the same amendment to a state constitution twice, so that’s out of the question in important electoral states like Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Missouri and Kentucky It thus can’t be used to quite the same right-wing-voter motivation effect.

Second, Barack Obama doesn’t even support gay marriage. I had no idea that this was the case until I read it tonight. Liberal groups are apparently so excited that a liberal has a decent shot at the presidency that they have swept this normally liberal-upsetting factoid under the rug. (How mature of my fellow bleeding hearts to accept political nuance for a change.) Though Obama has an otherwise pro-gay-rights voting record, he is on the record against gay marriage. So it’s not really something that can be used against him the same way it could against John Kerry, who was more vague on everything.

I do, however, say that even as people continue to buy the Muslim rumor even after weeks of high-decibel tongue-clucking over Obama’s Christian pastor, so figuring out which smears will stick isn’t much of a logical pursuit.

Third, McCain is the candidate who is potentially the most impacted by this. Does McCain come out strongly against the California court in a bid for more religious-conservative support? Or does he stick to his relatively libertarian past talk on gay issues, in which he said he didn’t support a federal amendment banning gay marriage? (That’s libertarian by moralistic-Republican standards; he still opposes gay marriage on moral grounds and supports “don’t ask, don’t tell”.) I don’t think he’ll do anything beyond reiterating the “Marriage is between a man and a woman” boilerplate b.s.

Meanwhile, Godwin’s law has already come into play in this campaign—by the President himself!—and we’re still five months out from the election. While Bush technically compared Obama to Neville Chamberlain, I’m going to say that it still counts because Nazis were explicitly mentioned.