Latest (angry) McCain ad: (Black guy) Obama doesn't care about hispanics.

For any reporters interested in digging. Remember that Times story back in February about whether Sen. McCain did special favors for Lowell Paxson and his lobbyist Vicki Iseman? Someone needs to ask some questions about whether McCain threatened to block the reappointment of one of the then-commissioners if Paxson didn't get his way.

Stop what you're doing and read this article. Very acute take on the latest turn of the campaign.

From the ChiTrib ...

Ed Rollins, a longtime Republican strategist, said McCain sometimes appears frustrated and angry when he talks about Obama, especially when complaining that the press does not treat him fairly. "John needs to be the deliberate, experienced veteran and not the grumpy old man," Rollins said. "If he's the grumpy old man, angry that the media is not in love with him anymore because they're in love with Barack Obama, that's not going to play well with the public."

I guess it falls to someone like Ed Rollins to cut to the quick of this. As a number of articles have reported over the last few days, there's a palpable sense of contempt for Obama within McCain campaign -- one that positively drips out of this new run of commercials. Not that we expect presidential campaigns to like each other; the intensity and stakes make that almost impossible. But in his affect and words, the message from McCain is more like, "Why do I even have to run against this guy?" That anger and frustration that someone like Obama might be overshadowing him is his achilles heel in this campaign.

"McCain for President: Because You Know He Should Be"

I'm amused to hear the McCain camp's deep sense of "grievance" over any suggestion that McCain is running a xenophobic and often race-tinged campaign against Barack Obama. It's amazing how you can be pushing a message that your opponent is in league with foreign terrorists and comparing him to twenty-something white women best known for their 'behind the music' episodes and so many people can get the wrong idea.

McCain camp aggrieved over being called on racialized campaign message. From the Post ...

the sense of grievance over this issue within McCain's high command is deep and palpable. Those emotions led to the decision to have Davis call out Obama on Thursday with his extraordinarily provocative statement: "Barack Obama has played the race card and he played it from the bottom of the deck," he said. "It's divisive, negative, shameful and wrong."

Before all this happened, McCain advisers believed that the Obama campaign successfully pinned a racist label on Bill Clinton during the during primaries -- for comments that drew protests from some leading African American politicians -- and were determined not to let the same happen to McCain. Also, they take personally any suggestion from the Obama campaign that they are part of a campaign that would play the race card and are indignant about it.

Ironically, the McCain camp's celebrity ad comparing Obama to the vapid pair of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears drew some criticism as a subtle attempt to play the race card in the same way Republicans did against Harold Ford in the 2006 Senate race with the ad that concluded with an attractive young blonde woman saying, "Harold, call me." McCain advisers are as incensed over those suggestions as Obama advisers are over Davis's charge.

To hear the accepted account, John McCain was with the surge from the beginning, not just after violence started to decline in mid-2007. Actually for most of the first half of the year, he was hedging his bets, saying he doubted it would work because there weren't as many troops as he said there should be. In other words, he was having it both ways.

Let's see how this works. McCain runs his Britney/Paris ad on the alleged but improbable basis that they're the #2 and #3 celebs in the world, according to Rick Davis. McCain camp seizes on Obama statement that Obama has made multiple times before, accuses him of playing "race card". Now McCain repeats Race Card, Race Card, Race Card a hundred times.

McCain has made the strategic decision that he can only win the election on the basis of Obama as friend of terrorists, unpatriotic suspicious outsider and radical, black guy who's really more a flashy showbiz star (call it playing the Diddy card) than someone with the heft to be president. He's probably right. That's his only chance. And it may work.

ABCNews is now running a handline that reads: "Obama Camp Admits Playing Race Card"

Ron Fournier officially appointed AP Washington bureau chief.

John McCain has a big ego. And if there's one thing John McCain prizes it's the high regard many prestige Washington reporters hold him in. Or did. People like Joe Klein, who now says he was wrong to think McCain was an "honorable man." Now he has a new post about McCain with the word "scum" in the title. Klein's out in the lead on this. But he's not the only one-time McCain fan thinking the same thing. And you're already starting to see some editorials in regional dailies calling him sleazy and a liar. So given McCain's temper, when can we get some questions posed to him about that?

TPM Reader YF shares his thoughts ...

I think the whole "McCain's going negative" snit is a really defensive and weak position for the Obama camp. Sure- mention that McCain went negative, contrary to all his stated values- "All it take is a little dip in the polls for John McCain to cast aside his values." But it seems to me there is very simple way to turn this around on McCain, and be on the offensive: "How bad does John McCain want to avoid talking about real issues? He's running ads with Britney and Paris. Is that what American's are concerned about? Britney and Paris? Do you want to know how we are going to right the ship of our economy? Or do you want to hear about Britney and Paris? Want to talk about how we are going to extract our troops from Iraq? Or do you want to hear about Britney and Paris?" Just pound away at this. This is what John McCain wants to talk about. Point out how frivolous it is to even spend any time developing this ad when there are so many important issues to address. Bitching about it being unfair or over some imaginary line that Karl Rove can't even see is going to get them nowhere.

And what was the logic of choosing Britney and Paris again? Yet more ..

As I wrote below, it seems we're now in for another round of that biennial bit of sad-sackery, Republican ad makers who are just trying to create a good old fashioned smear ad but just can't help stumbling into racialized imagery and code-words. Now, I note that the McCain/Britney/Paris ad seems to be getting panned pretty widely, quite apart from any suggestion that it's pushing any offensive race-laced messages about Obama. And we've gotten a few emails from regular readers who write in and say, in so many words, 'Yes, that's a trashy ad. But the Britney and Paris stuff isn't about race. They're just trying to say Obama is frivolous and insubstantial like so much else in our celebrity culture.'

Meanwhile, Robert George says that in addition to the racial angle, he believes the ad is even more clearly "designed to politically emasculate Obama." And I think, albeit implicitly, Robert gets at the fallacy inherent in how many people think about the way race is used in political messaging -- which is to see it in operating in some hyper-linear, almost Newtonian fashion. Is the ad designed to say Obama is a frivolous part of the celebrity culture? Or is it meant to associate him with white women half his age, most of whose public notoriety is tied to their sexuality? If it's one ... well, it obviously can't be the other.

And in this case, if all McCain's ad guy is trying to do is make the apparently unobjectionable argument that Obama really isn't a politician but more like a flashy showbiz act then it's not his fault if he also happens to hit Obama with a handful of themes and bits of imagery that have been used about black men for a century or two. Because that's not what the ad is about ... it's about saying he's a frivolous dandy. And if it's one, it can't be the other any more than 2 + 2 equals 4 and not 5.

But the truth is that when you're trying to understand how race is injected into a political campaign, if you're looking for a physics analogue, it's not Newtonian mechanics but quantum theory. It's not one or the other. Effective messages hit multiple themes, different messages in different people's minds and even read differently on the first or the third reading. So is the Britney ad about emasculating Obama, as Robert George says? Yes. Is it also about simply pairing Obama up with Britney and Paris? Absolutely. It's both. And a lot more. In many cases, this game is simply a matter of taking charged images out into the public consciousness. They don't necessarily 'mean' one thing or another. You just push them out and they take on a life of their own.

In this case, if the point is to say that Obama's a celebrity, how exactly do you get from there to Britney Spears? Paris Hilton? Mull on that for a second. Are those the most logical analogues to Obama? Play it any way you want but somehow at the end of the day we end up with a campaign message based on promoting Obama as a song and dance man and paired with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. How'd we get here? It's the GOP race and sex equivalent of all roads lead to Rome.

To understand the dynamics of this campaign you have to understand the role of Karl Rove and his proteges who've taken over McCain's campaign. Rove himself previewed the key messages of the campaign early in the year in two vignettes about Obama -- first, Obama as the "trash-talking" basketball player who's both cocky and "lazy", and second, Obama as the cocky black guy at the country club with a hot chick on his arm who's looking down at you.

These are the themes that are going to be returned to again and again in this campaign. They're what McCain is running on. Obama as a flashy entertainer, the guy reaching above his station, the guy who ends up in video montages with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. The Rove-McCain line is that none of this stuff is beyond the pale. How are they supposed to help it if they're running against a guy who's more suited to be an entertainer than a leader and uppity and lazy to boot?

It seems we're in for another bout of that great biennial bit of sad-sackery just can't help unwittingly stumbling into racialized imagery and code-words when all they're trying to do is create a good old fashioned smear ad. I feel their pain. Love is a battlefield. But before returning to that subject I wanted to hit briefly on a related matter.

Yesterday at TPMCafe, Theda Skocpol wrote that whatever the McCain camp is doing, the Obama campaign, writ large and small, will only play into his hands by getting into an argument about race. That after all is one of the things the McCain camp is trying to do. What they need to do is go on the offense, hitting McCain with vivid ads on his numerous vulnerabilities. Like the fact that he embraces all of George W. Bush's policies and his own evident desperation.

It may surprise you. But I completely agree. As a matter of messaging and campaigning, parrying this sludge requires a deft hand, and the Obama campaign can't let itself get sucked into a debate about race and racialized campaign messages. But that's their issue. Not ours. My interest is on shining a spotlight on what McCain's doing.

It was always clear that it was going to be hard for John McCain to emerge from this campaign with his reputation and the presidency, simply because of the rough terrain any Republican faces this year. At this point, it's clear that by the end of this, the reputation is going to be shot. There's just been too much demonstrable lying on the candidate's part, too much sleazy campaigning, too much outsourcing his campaign to Karl Rove. More and more editorialists and even some of the prestige pundits are starting to see it.

So that means, he has to win. Because if he doesn't, he's got nothing left. All he is is a four term senator from a medium-sized state with no legislative record. It's an eminently worthwhile task to chronicle his descent.

Jake Tapper says Obama's is being 'inflammatory' for hinting that McCain is doing what he's doing.

Late Update: Jake responds.

This is definitely inside baseball. But sort of like a person with a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other, John McCain had his reform/Dem-leaning advisors and others who were more conventionally Republican. John Weaver through most of the last decade was McCain's inner-Reformer, inner-Dem. I think at some point in the early part of this decade he switched his own party registration to Democrat. In any case, he was dropped in the big house-cleaning McCain did late last year. He's bitten his lip until now. But apparently, with McCain's Britney-Paris-Obama ad, he's finally had enough.

The Post's Dana Milbank jumps on the presumptuousness bandwagon and manages to confuse the British Prime Minister (Gordon Brown) with the Leader of the Opposition (David Cameron). (Correct account here.)

Dana, Brown's the guy who's been patiently waiting his turn. Cameron's the young-man-in-a-hurry. He even has a vlog.

Late Update: Todd Gitlin has more.

Dana-RNC Tag Team Update: Greg has more.

I note with interest today, John McCain's new tactic of associating Barack Obama with oversexed and/or promiscuous young white women. (See today's new ad and this from yesterday.) Presumably, a la Harold Ford 2006, this will be one of those strategies that will be a matter of deep dispute during the campaign and later treated as transparent and obvious once the campaign is concluded.

But what I'm most interested in today is the new meme the McCain campaign has been pushing for the last few weeks that Obama is presumptuous, arrogant and well ... just a bit uppity. Ron Fournier picked the ball up early in his reporting for the AP. And John King was pushing it over the weekend on CNN. Is it arrogant or above Obama's station for him to meet with the Chairman of the Federal Reserve? If I'm not mistaken he is a sitting United States senator and also the presidential candidate of the Democratic party. Such meetings are actually the norm.

Now, I note that the Post, which has generally been in McCain's camp, has a front page story today that comes about as close as they feel able to confirming that McCain campaign and McCain personally have spent most of the last week peddling what they knew was a lie about Obama's called-off trip to the US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. And there's also this piece in today's Times noting 'concern' among some Republicans over McCain's increasing use of personal attacks on Obama with what are often demonstrably false claims. How many demonstrable lies does the McCain campaign have to push before it colors the portrayal of his campaign?

As I alluded to at the top of this post, it is the norm that obvious campaign tactics that are treated as obvious after a campaign is over are nonetheless treated by most reporters as ambiguous or unclear during a campaign. But in this case it would be nice if that were not the case. Because here we have a candidate, John McCain, who is running on a record of straight talk and honorable campaigning running a campaign made up mainly of charges reporters are now more or less acknowledging are lies. But there's precious little drawing together of the contradiction. What's more, as everyone will acknowledge after the campaign, the McCain campaign is now pushing the caricature of Obama as a uppity young black man whose presumptuousness is displayed not only in taking on airs above his station but also in a taste for young white women.

So please keep an eye out for references to Obama's presumptuousness, arrogance, etc., from John King and other reporters. Let us know when you see them and send us in examples -- in text or video. McCain gets to run the campaign he wants. Remember, he hired the operative who put together the Ford/Bimbo ad. But I want to keep tabs on which reporters are helping him retail the message.

Can we note that Karl Rove is now working as an outside advisor to John McCain? So shouldn't McCain be asked about today's developments?

Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX), who once bashed Janet Jackson and that Justin guy for their "liberal values" as displayed in the wardrobe malfunction is now holding fundraisers at Las Vegas strip clubs.

Here's one of the employees at the establishment crawling on all fours wearing a belt and a leather bra. Not that there's anything wrong with that ...

The literary critic in me senses certain Godzilla v. Mothra dimensions to the controversy. But good for Joe Klein for taking these folks on.

From the Politico ...

Before Ron Fournier returned to The Associated Press in March 2007, the veteran political reporter had another professional suitor: John McCain's presidential campaign.

In October 2006, the McCain team approached Fournier about joining the fledgling operation, according to a source with knowledge of the talks. In the months that followed, said a source, Fournier spoke about the job possibility with members of McCain's inner circle, including political aides Mark Salter, John Weaver and Rick Davis.

Salter, who remains a top McCain adviser, said in an e-mail to Politico that Fournier was considered for "a senior advisory role" in communications.

A while back the McCain put a new rule in place that no one involved in their campaign could be a federal lobbyist or foreign agent. But CBS has an interview out with McCain campaign manager Rick Davis that appears to say that rule is no longer in effect. Asked how many lobbyists work on the campaign, Davis tells Katie Couric: "We don't make it a litmus test for employment at the McCain campaign."

The Obama camp is flogging this tonight. But how is this not a reversal of their rule?

It got some notice yesterday when Sen. McCain had what was described as a "mole-like" growth removed during a routine exam. Turns out to have been benign. This statement just out from the campaign ...

"Senator McCain visited the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Arizona, yesterday for a routine check of his dermatological health. The biopsy that was performed did not show any evidence of skin cancer. No further treatment is necessary."

Yglesias does a micro-bio on one of DC journalism's rapidly-rising young bullshit artists.

How 'ambivalent' is John McCain about running on his POW record, as claimed by the Times. Check out this from December in the Post ...

Most presidential campaigns warm up the crowd for their candidate with some pop music, some remarks by a local supporter, or instructions by a staffer on how to go about volunteering or getting to the polls on election day.

John McCain has the film. At many of his events, his campaign sets up a screen and plays for the crowd a three-minute film called "Service with Honor," telling the story of McCain's more than five years of captivity in a North Vietnamese prison after his Navy plan was shot down in 1967. As sonorous music plays in the background, McCain's mother Roberta recounts her reaction on hearing of his capture, images of McCain in captivity are flashed on screen, and two fellow POW's describe his comportment. "He was offered early release and he told 'em to shove it," says one, Paul Galanti. "He has been there, he's done that, he's been miserable he's been tortured, beaten to a pulp and yet he still comes up with that patented McCain smile."

McCain himself concludes the film with these words: "The only reason I am here today is because I believe a higher being has a mission for me and my life."

How does any reporter with an ounce of dignity get caught retailing this malarkey?

My favorite part of the 2008 presidential campaign is watching normally sentient reporters tell me how John McCain is either reticent about talking about his POW experience, or ambivalent, or reluctant, or one of about a hundred other adjectives meant to tell me he doesn't talk about it very much and doesn't like doing so.

Five years as a POW involved a kind of suffering and terror I think very few of us can even comprehend. McCain has every right to talk about it constantly. But let's get real. He does talk about it constantly.

Where to start? Probably half of John McCain's ads contain photographs of either his time as a POW or his home-coming from Vietnam POW captivity. (That says quite a lot.) Those that don't refer to it explicitly refer to it implicitly by referencing sacrifice, heroism, etc. He and his campaign frequently talk about his days as a POW. The candidate frequently makes pseudo-self-deprecating jokes in campaign appearances about his time as a POW.

Beside his 2000 presidential run, it's been a very long time since McCain was in a competitive election race. And it's not too much to say that McCain's POW status -- both in explicit telling and in implicit references -- is the dominant theme of his entire campaign.

I understand why the campaign pushes this line: having McCain being 'reluctant' to talk about his heroism but then be a hero twice over by overcoming his reluctance to share the story with us is the ultimate spin twofer. But for the reporters, please don't treat us like we have the intelligence of field mice by trying to dump this nonsense on us.

CQ changes Alaska senate race rating from "toss-up" to "leans Dem."

Sen. Ted Stevens indicted on seven counts.

Just to give you a little background on this story. We keep our ears pretty close to the ground on Ted Stevens. And while an eventual indictment was not at all unexpected, I feel pretty confident saying that this indictment coming down now was. There was a pretty broad expectation that Stevens' son, former Alaska state senate president Ben Stevens, would be indicted first.

As you know we've been on the Stevens story for some time. And here's our archive of Stevens coverage going back now almost two years. Here's our TPMtv episodes on the Stevens' case.

This is a story I've been wanting to dig into for a while.

We're regularly told that we should be looking into the background of a presidential candidates key advisors. And in the on-going contretemps over who's got the best judgment and experience on Iraq, John McCain voice and brain is Randy Scheunemann. Look at the key statements from the campaign, the enunciations of policy and so forth and you'll see they're almost all statements from him. So who is it that's speaking for John McCain on Iraq and shaping his views of what our policy there should be?

It comes as no surprise that Scheunemann was a staunch supporter of the war. But he was much more that. He was not only a key behind-the-scenes promoter and architect of the war. He also had a troublingly close relationship with Ahmad Chalabi -- the Iraqi exile we now know fed the US reams of bogus intelligence about phantom WMD and ties to al Qaeda and allegedly also shared highly classified US intelligence with the Iranians. Indeed, something I didn't realize, back when he and other neoconservatives were cooking up the Iraq War in 2002, Scheunemann's lobbying firm, the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq, which he set up with the White House's blessing to gin up support for the Iraq War and Chalabi's handler/spokesman Francis Brooke all shared an address. Almost as if they were different arms of the same operation.

And it's not just what happened before the war. He was also a big time advocate of most of the biggest policy screw ups of the post-war period -- like the aggressive 'debaathification' program that everyone now realizes was a disaster as well as the decision to freeze the UN out of any role in the reconstruction of the country.

All of this information is contained in Zachary Roth's first installment of his reporting on Scheunemann. John McCain is basing his campaign now on his judgment and experience on Iraq. So why is he still taking the advice of the guy who was the conduit between him and Ahmad Chalabi an who has been wrong about Iraq so many times?

McCain's whole campaign now is based on his judgment on Iraq. So why aren't the campaign reporters telling you more about his top foreign policy advisor's iffy past?

Bob Novak caught a lot of grief for that incident last week in which he struck a pedestrian in downtown DC and then kept driving until flagged by a bicyclist. Novak said he didn't realize he'd hit anyone. And he may have been telling the truth. According to the Associated Press this is sometimes a symptom of a brain tumor ...

Last week, Novak was given a $50 citation after he struck a homeless man with his black Corvette in downtown Washington. Novak kept going until he was stopped by a bicyclist, who said the man was splayed on Novak's windshield.

Dr. Lynne Taylor, a neuro-oncologist at Virginia Mason Medical Center in Seattle, said residents at the hospital are taught to check for brain tumors in patients who report having a recent car accident in which they didn't realize they struck something.

"People get spatial and visual neglect of a certain part of their bodies and they don't realize they've done what they've done," said Taylor, a fellow with the American Academy of Neurology.

US to be place on "heightened terror alert" in response to Republican efforts to maintain hold on presidency.

Nagourney sends Obama a little chin music.

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Bob Novak has been diagnosed with a brain tumor and is now in a Boston hospital awaiting further tests. According to late reports, doctors have not yet determined whether the tumor is malignant, but a biopsy is planned for later today. We wish him the very best.

February 20th, 2007, Salon.com ...

A war veteran and presidential contender for 2008, McCain seemed to be squarely in the president's corner during the Senate debate.

In fact, McCain has increasingly hedged his position on the surge, showing full support for Bush's plan one moment and then pivoting at another moment to point out grievous tactical errors he says are being made by the White House. For example, in front of a conservative audience at the American Enterprise Institute in January, McCain said that while the president was sending the minimum number of soldiers to Baghdad needed to make the plan work, the plan would indeed work. Then, on the Senate floor on Feb. 8, he announced that he was "very doubtful that we have enough troops" there to get the job done. Furthermore, while Bush agreed to an unconventional arrangement in which command for the surge will be split between U.S. and Iraqi military leaders, McCain warned the Senate Armed Services Committee on Jan. 23 that he knew of "no successful military operation where you have dual command." He has also suggested the Iraqis might not contribute adequately in the operation to secure Baghdad.

Political observers say McCain isn't just worried about military tactics. By simultaneously endorsing the surge and harshly criticizing certain aspects of the Bush plan as potentially disastrous, McCain appears to be hedging his bets should the surge fail. "He is looking for an exit strategy if it does not work," said Stephen Wayne, a political science professor at Georgetown University. "It says: 'You just did not do it right, Mr. President.'"

McCain's support for the escalation is consistent with his long-held belief that the United States has been short on troops in Iraq from the beginning. But some political observers have noted that it also buttresses McCain's recent, sometimes awkward efforts to cozy up to the GOP's conservative base before the upcoming Republican primaries.

It could be a risky gambit, pitting him against the broader general electorate, which, polls show, is opposed to the surge. "McCain is really in a tough position at the moment," noted Wayne. "If the surge fails and McCain is attached to it, it is going to be very difficult to run in the general election."

At times, McCain has come across as one of the Senate's harshest critics of the surge plan's tactics, stopping just short of predicting failure in Baghdad. He has certainly been far more critical of its tactical aspects than Bush's other main ally in the Senate, Connecticut's Joe Lieberman, who has stuck to unflagging endorsements of Bush's war policy.

Should Bush's plan fail, observers say, McCain is positioning himself as the man who would have had the right plan to win the war. "That is the way he is going to sell it," explained Michele Swers, a political science professor at Georgetown. "He would have done it right."

From a hundred years to yesterday ...