In response to McCain ducking out of the coming debate I'm surprised no Obama surrogate has said something to the effect of "We all know McCain is an honorable man who has never run from a fight in his life".
Getting him to backtrack on his suspension only reinforces his poor approach to crisis management and overall decision making. I really think someone should be goading him NOT to step up...
Plouffe laid out the theory: the Obama camp isn't that panicked about news cycles, we're looking longer term, he said. Team Obama has sunk massive amounts of money into a huge number of field offices in competitive states (some conservative states aren't worth fighting in and liberal states are in the bag already). At the last comprehensive count, the Obama campaign had 336 field offices around the country, and McCain 101. McCain has probably opened more recently, but the disparity is still striking.Some state-by-state comparisons are useful. In Ohio, Obama has 33 offices, and McCain nine. In Michigan, it's 22-11. Virginia, 28-6; Iowa, 23-6; New Mexico, 18-1; Missouri, 27-7. You get the picture. Florida is the only competitive state where McCain has more offices, 35-25. That 35 is deeply uncharacteristic for McCain, probably explained by the fact that much of the McCain vote in Florida will be elderly and will need to be driven to the polls on election day.
In addition, the Obama campaign is counting on a large voter-registration effort that's been ongoing in key states since 2006. Twenty-eight of the 50 states enroll voters according to party affiliation, and in those states, Democrats have gained 2 million voters in the last two years, while the Republicans have lost 334,000. Numbers for 2008 alone look like this in some important states: Colorado, 66,516 Democrats to 13,352 Republicans; Florida, 209,422 Democrats to 77,196 Republicans; Iowa, 69,301 Democrats to 7,515 Republicans; Pennsylvania, 98,137 Democrats to just 289 Republicans.
It takes a lot of time and money to register all those people and set up all those offices. The Obama people are betting that the investment will pay off. It is their belief, Plouffe said in Denver, that most people pay more attention to their co-workers and neighbours than they do to television talking heads. And with all those neighbours and co-workers spreading the word on election day, they say they feel good about the situation they've created. Field, they say, will trump news cycle.
So there you have it. Are the Obama people right? The problems with their theory are that all this field-tilling is invisible to pundits, and that there's no way to measure its success until the votes start coming in. In the meantime, McCain is very much winning the visible war, which can be measured day-to-day. And, since he named Palin, enthusiasm on the right is sky high, so he'll have his army of volunteers now, too.
One doesn't doubt that the Obama turnout will be impressive. But there are 51 daily news cycles between now and November 4. Obama certainly needs to win a few of them. So let's sort all that out first. Then we'll talk about the big picture.
This is via a great post by Adam Serwer at Tapped. Here's something McCain said yesterday:
"...[D]uring the primary [Obama] told a liberal advocacy group that he'd cut defense spending by tens of billions of dollars. He promised them he would, quote, 'slow our development of future combat systems.'"
Ooh, sounds awful. What kind of terrorist-loving commie Muslim would slow "future combat systems?"
It turns out that future combat systems are really, Guardian rules on capital letters aside, Future Combat System -- that is, a specific thing, a specific procurement program.
Now, guess who else said he was against funding FCS? Yep. Here's the relevant graf from the Wash Post from just a month ago, when McCain budget advisor Doug Holtz-Eakin provided detailed answers to the paper on McCain's budget plan:
-- Balance the budget requires slowing outlay growth to 2.4 percent. The roughly $470 billion dollars (by 2013) in slower spending growth come from reduced deployments abroad ($150 billion; consistent with success in Iraq/Afghanistan that permits deployments to be cut by half -- hopefully more), slower discretionary spending in non-defense and Pentagon procurements ($160 billion; there are lots of procurements -- airborne laser, Globemaster, Future Combat System -- that should be ended and the entire Pentagon budget should be scrubbed) and reductions in mandatory spending ($160 billion) from a mix of excessive agricultural and ethanol subsidies, slower health care cost growth, Medicaid savings from the expansion of private insurance, and other reforms.
End the FCS. He said it. And now, not only is he ignoring that he said it (he and his campaign are the same thing), but he's making FCS sound like the generic entire defense structure of the United States of America!
What kind of "honorable man" is this? Give me a break. Think about this. It's just a deliberate and cunning lie. Add the plural "s" so it sounds like Obama wants to weaken America's defenses, and carry on with the laughter and forgetting.
Can people really just lie so blatantly and never be called on it? I guess we're finding out. You'd think the press would at some point get a little peeved about all this.
Behind the scenes, aides are prepping Gov. Palin for her next big tests: questions from the press, and, early next month, the vice-presidential debate. When she isn't on the stump, Gov. Palin has been cramming. She carries briefing books with tabs on "foreign relations," "budget" and "energy," and index cards with talking points to study between appearances. Advisers counsel her on whether her hair should be pulled up or left down at her shoulders.
http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB122105857610019491.html?mod=special_page_campaign2008_topbox
An Obama adviser privy to the campaign's internal thinking on the matter says that,with less than two months before the election and with the realization that Republicans have achieved financial parity with Democrats, they hope that Democratic allies -- what another campaign aide termed "the cavalry" -- with come to Obama's aid.
Obama, on the other hand, was snubbing Murdoch. Every time he reached out (Murdoch executives tried to get the Kennedys to help smooth the way to an introduction), nothing. The Fox stain was on Murdoch. It wasn’t until early in the summer that Obama relented and a secret courtesy meeting was arranged........A tentative truce, which may or may not have vast historical significance, was at that moment agreed upon.
