Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-up
Tags: Alaska Permanent Fund, Barack Obama, Bill Ayers, David Frum, Dick Morris, Donald Lambro, Florida, George Bush, George H.W. Bush, Jennifer Skalka, John McCain, Matthew Yglesias, Maureen Dowd, Melissa McEwan, Roger Simon, Ronald Brownstein, Ross Douthat, Sarah Palin, Sudan, William Ayers
Desperate polling numbers call for desperate measures…
McCain needed to win; he did not. He got owned. Say goodnight, Johnny. It’s President That One to you.
Some of John McCain’s friends, from the good old days when he talked straight, feared that his Greek tragedy would be that he would be defeated by George Bush twice: once in 2000, because of W.’s no-conscience campaigning, and again in 2008, because of W.’s no-brains governing.
But if McCain loses, he will have contributed to his own downfall by failing to live up to his personal standard of honor.
Ronald Brownstein: The plural of anecdote is not data. So, let me tell you about some balanced interviews I did in the battleground states that illustrate whatever point I’m trying to make. That it is not reflected in the polls? Feh.
October may see the end of Obama’s surge: He’s peaking too soon.
McCain will make his move November 5. You heard it here first, and remember, I’m never wrong.
Instead of addressing their worries, the McCain campaign — led by Sarah Palin on the stump — has pushed a harder line against the Democratic nominee, linking him to 1960s radical Bill Ayers. During a Palin event in Florida, a Republican surrogate emphasized Obama’s scary Arab-sounding middle name. And the theme of their ads and attacks has been to underscore Obama’s otherness, that he’s not like you and me. He’s consorting with domestic terrorists? Please.
Roger Simon: Republicans fantasize about pulling this off for McCain. “Liberal” and “taxes” are prominently featured.
Fearing Mr. McCain is fast running out of time to structurally change the election’s strategic political focus, Republican strategists say that his only hope now is to make his rival’s judgment, inexperience, liberalism and tax increases the central issues in the campaign’s remaining weeks.
My pals over at the Corner are very excited by the last-minute attempt to transform Bill Ayers into the Willie Horton of 2008. Well, good luck.
But when I listen to Republicans talk about “taking the gloves off” where Barack Obama’s relationship to William Ayers is concerned, I hear the sound of conservative failure - the sound, say, of the 1992 campaign, when George H.W. Bush went to the culture-war well in the midst of a recession and ended up losing to a philandering draft-dodger even so.
So Palin’s “palling around” accusation is no more true than her boast that she “told congress ‘Thanks, but no thanks’” on the Bridge to Nowhere, or that she had the Alaska Permanent Fund divest from Sudan. But it seems to me that pointing out factual errors gives this line of argument too much credit: guilt by association, even when the association happens to be real, is a silly charge.
