Continuing with our effort to present how the rest of the world is sizing up John McCain’s vice presidential pick, Sarah Palin, this is the latest prognostication by one of Germany’s leading columnists, Thomas Klau.
“We knew from his biography that John McCain was a daredevil: since his childhood days, his mother Roberta assures us, rebellion and risk have been his elixirs of life.”
“With a single stroke last week, McCain demonstrated that his apparent prudence was just a shell, and that his penchant for risk-taking and all-or-nothing gambles would provide the real background music for his presidency.” Read the rest of this entry »
September 7th, 2008 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
The 2008 Presidential race is now officially off to its two-ticket start — and it’s now officially potentially as close a race as 2000 and 2004 with the latest Gallup Daily tracking poll now putting Republican Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain three points ahead of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama:
The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking update shows John McCain moving ahead of Barack Obama, 48% to 45%, when registered voters are asked for whom they would vote if the presidential election were held today.
These results are based on Sept. 4-6 interviewing, and include two full days of polling after the conclusion of the Republican National Convention last Thursday night. McCain has outpolled Obama on both Friday and Saturday, and is receiving a convention bounce just as Obama did last week.
And it’s a record number for McCain in this poll:
McCain’s 48% share of the vote ties for his largest since Gallup tracking began in early March. He registered the same level of support in early May. This is also McCain’s largest advantage over Obama since early May, when he led by as much as six percentage points. Obama has led McCain for most of the campaign, and for nearly all of the time since clinching the Democratic nomination in early June.
Meanwhile, Rasmussen has the race at a dead heat — with McCain now getting more support from Republicans than Obama is getting from Democrats:
The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Sunday, September 7, shows the race for the White House is tied.
In the first national polling results based entirely on interviews conducted after Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech, Barack Obama gets 46% of the vote and so does John McCain. When “leaners” are included, it’s all even at 48%.
…McCain earns the vote from 89% of Republicans while Obama is supported by 81% of Democrats. McCain also manages to attract 15% of Democrats while Obama gets 9% of the Republican vote. Voters not affiliated with either major party remain fairly evenly divided between the two men.
Once again: it’s a sharply-divided nation with independent voters (and some displeased Democrats) who’ll be aggressively wooed by both campaigns.
September 7th, 2008 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Yes, the phone finally rang at 3 a.m. next to Senator Hillary Clinton’s bed and she answered it and responded — but not yet in the way the caller perhaps had in mind. The call went out because now some things have clearly changed in the wake of the Republican convention.
The caller: Democratic Senator Barack Obama who wants Clinton out on the stump to shore-up Democratic voters and also counter the political and political-rock-star appeal of Republican John McCain’s controversial running mate Gov. Sarah Palin, a crowd-drawing new celebrity for the Republicans who have gone after Obama for being a crowd-drawing celebrity.
Clinton has started responding but, as the L.A. Time’s blogger Andrew Malcolm notes, in an eyebrow-raising way: She is refraining from going after Palin and pulling her political punches when it comes to her Senate friend McCain.
A very interesting thing didn’t happen Saturday.
Appearing at a labor rally and stumping for congressional candidates in New York, Sen. Hillary Clinton uttered her most popular line from the recent Democratic National Convention in Denver: [Senators John McCain Republican nominee for president and Hillary Clinton Democratic loser for her party’s top nomination share a close friendship] “No Way. No how. No McCain.” This time she added, “No Palin.”
But despite some soft lobs by media with her, that’s as far as the female candidate who got closer to a major party’s top nomination than any other in American history would go in criticizing Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the first female top ticket member in Republican Party history.
Despite continued grumbling among her supporters about a less-than-diligent effort by the Barack Obama crowd to help the New York senator retire her immense campaign debts, Clinton has been living up to her promise to fund-raise and campaign for the Democratic ticket all over.
She has repeated the “No way. No how” line about John McCain many times and warned against four more….
…years of a Bush-like administration.
But she’s been very careful to avoid saying harsh things against her good friend from Arizona, who was among the first to welcome and show the former first lady around the old-boys club of the Senate on her arrival in 2001.
Hillary Clinton may be the most obvious choice to throw into the ring against the new darling of American politics, Sarah Palin, but the failed Democratic presidential candidate is refusing the job.
“We’re not going to be anybody’s attack dog against Sarah Palin,” a Clinton insider said yesterday.
It’s an extraordinary act of hubris from a woman whose success in exposing Barack Obama’s weakness in working-class Democratic states such as Pennsylvania, Ohio and Indiana may have been the reason that John McCain chose a gun-toting, God-loving mother of five as his running mate.
Although she is 60 and unlikely to have another shot at the White House, Clinton is apparently concerned that she would appear ungenerous to the Republicans’ first female vice-presidential candidate if she were to go after her.
It is a rationale that will fuel the belief - lingering among Democrats since Al Gore’s failed 2000 presidential run - that the Clintons always put themselves before their party.
There has been a big shift since the Republican convention — a shift in the always all-knowing conventional wisdom comprised of pundits, all-wise left and right partisan pundits on radio talk shows and on those proliferating left and right cable partisan talk shows masquerading as news shows that are the equivalent of political infomercials.
SEE UPDATE BELOW
It’s now perceived as a race more-even-than-ever with increasing suggestions that, yes, McCain could well win it due to his base being energized and due to a fact most analysts won’t say bluntly:
The Republicans have proven themselves much better at winning national campaigns and the Democrats have often shown themselves inept at national campaigns, frequently grabbing defeat from the jaws of victory.
Just look at some of the political news on this first weekend after the conventions. It isn’t the same panorama as before the conventions — and most of it should make Republicans smile:
“Attack a woman like Palin, and the result is to make her a victim of machismo, sexism, prejudice, etc. Turn your back to her and you’ll be left with a nice bite on your rear end. And Obama’s must be hurting now: Palin attacked him in a way that not even Hillary Clinton had the audacity to do. She didn’t even spare Obama’s wife Michelle.”
“Irony, sarcasm and good humor are components of a well-organized speech to a chosen public when one is playing at home (as is the case for the Republican convention). It’s difficult to calculate how well Palin will be able handle the pace of the next nine weeks, especially when she’s no longer a novelty. The election isn’t lost for the Democrats, but Obama-Biden is still far from a guaranteed victory on Nov. 4.”
Republicans may not like the type of questioning that the American media is subjecting McCain’s shock VP pick to, but it isn’t only American journalists asking ‘personal questions’ about Governor Sarah Palin, who could soon be a heartbeat away from the Presidency.
“Even if she tries to smile it away and to make it look pretty: The pregnancy of her daughter - in contrast to other pregnant U.S. teenagers in a financially comfortable situation - can be directly attributed to the twisted sex education policies of Sarah Palin and other conservative Christians, which still assert (despite clear statistics to the contrary) that vows of celibacy keep teenagers from having sex.”
August 27th, 2008 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
Ailing conservative columnist Bob Novak is still going to write occasional columns, and he provides us with the quote-of-the-day over the battle within the McCain ranks as to whether Connecticut independent Sen. Joe Lieberman should get McCain’s Vice-Presidential nod:
Reports of strong support within John McCain’s presidential campaign for Independent Democratic Sen. Joseph Lieberman as the Republican candidate for vice president are not a fairy tale. Influential McCain backers, plus McCain himself, would pick the pro-choice liberal from Connecticut if they thought they could get away with it.
But they can’t get away with it — and this has been made clear to McCain by none other than Joe Lieberman himself.
Lieberman surely doesn’t know that much about Republican politics, but he has close Republican friends. One of them prevailed on Lieberman to tell McCain that a McCain-Lieberman ticket would be a disaster for all concerned, and especially for the GOP.
What’s going on? According to Novak, there’s a tug-of-war going on between the Bush people and the McCain people:
McCain’s top strategists argue that the Bush coalition that won the last two presidential elections is dead and must be replaced by a new one that extends to the left, as Lieberman would. Bush strategists disagree, asserting that McCain is getting around 90 percent of the old Bush vote and can win the election with a few moderates added in.
If this is true, it’d be yet one more indication that the Bush faction of the Republican Party has worked to create the antithesis of what many moderate and independent voters have sought from both parties: parties that truly seek and cater to a wider tent, rather than becoming political mechanisms to hit left-and-right hot-buttons and demonize those who aren’t pure enough on either side or in the middle.
Whether you like Joe Lieberman, hate him or feel ambivalent towards him, the larger issue really isn’t Lieberman in this Novak quote. The real issue about how politics will be perceived and practiced. I’ve often said it before and this quote underlines it again: George W. Bush proved to a President of the base, by the base and for the base.
Recently, my partner and I were walking around the Twin Cities Gay Pride Festival enjoying the day. We stopped at the Log Cabin Republicans booth just to say hello to folks. (I have been part of Log Cabin for years and staffed the booth at Pride for several years.) I ended up talking to this guy who had stopped at the booth to complain about the GOP. I expressed my support for McCain and he expressed his frustration with McCain and the GOP. He kept saying that he was undecided, but as he expressed his thoughts various issues, it became clear that there was a candidate out there that represented his beliefs and it wasn’t McCain.
After a few minutes of this, I finally told him: if you have these views, then there is a candidate out there that you should support: Senator Obama.
I told him this because I wanted to get back to enjoying the day with my partner, and two because this was a waste of time when it was obvious who really supported.
Obvious, to everyone but himself.
That experience taught me something. Our words are pretty meaningless: it’s our actions that matter.
I’ve been wondering lately about the use of words like “centrist” or “moderate” or “independent.” Being that I am a part of the Centrist blogosphere, I’ve seen those words used a lot. I’ve used those words. Centrists like to fancy themselves as above the fray, not like the hard partisans of the left and right. We are more interested in the greater interest of the nation than we do partisan interests.
I am beginning to doubt that. For a long time, I’ve thought that my centrist views were of a higher purpose than my more conservative or liberal friends. They had selfish interests: they wanted to support policies that favored their interests.
But the fact is, I am just as self-interested as conservatives and liberals. I have views on issues and I want my candidate to favor them. Oh sure, I dress them up in language that talks about the “common good” but hell, I am just as self-directed as anyone else. That doesn’t make me a hypocrite: it makes me human.
Republican presumptive Presidential nominee Sen. John McCain’s interview with the New York Times is sparking much online discussion — and derision — for his comments about not being a computer user or big computer fan. But it skirts the interview’s key point: in this interview McCain answered the question about what kind of Republican he wants to be — and it is NOT in the mold of President George W. Bush.
In fact, McCain has noted what other journalists and biographers have long noted: his role model is early 20th century political maverick President Teddy Roosevelt, the GOPer who for a while redefined his party with his trust-busting and pro-environmental, conservationist policies.
This is no throw-away bit of information, because the American public has now seen several versions of McCain. The 2000 maverick McCain, the pre-campaign 2008 McCain who sought to win over Republicans who scuttled his 2000 chances, and now the McCain running for election who’s trying to appeal to several often conflicting constituencies at the same time while facing a different kind of Democrat.
It’s worth looking at a chunk of these quotes where McCain talks about TR:
Independents, centrists and moderates take note: Party of One: Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Rise of the Independent Voter by Sacramento Bee columnist Daniel Weintraub is a must read that needs to be added to your personal libraries. Even with the rises and falls of Arnold’s political fortunes (now on the descent again) it’s required reading for anyone interested in the political center and independent voters.
The reasons: it raises the question about whether the Schwarzenegger model of a more bipartisan style government can ever realistically be applied at a national level. And Weintraub’s writing and reporting about the man who is arguably the nation’s most successful and famous Republican governor is a sheer joy to read and a prototype for anyone who enjoys excellent, fact-based reportage.
First a disclosure. I knew Weintraub when he was a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and I was a reporter for the San Diego Union. When he discovered this blog, The Moderate Voice, he did a phone interview with me for this book. I’m quoted on one page (he concludes that due to my stages of support and nonsupport and support again for Schwarzenegger I am the quintessential California independent voter).
Schwarzenegger’s political story by now is a familiar one and Weintraub chronicles it, not with overkill but solid factual and anecdotal back up. It’s the story of movie star and self-made businessman who won the California governorship, but who probably could never have won the Republican nomination for governor if he had run in primaries due to his liberal stands on environmental and social issues. He got his “big break” when voters got disgusted enough to boot the Democratic governor out in a recall. And he was primed for it.
It’s all there: how Schwarzenegger won the recall, took office amid soaring popularity, then saw his popularity evaporate as he moved right and seemed to become just one more partisan-attack-mode Republican governor. Weintraub reports and explains the Governor’s sagging political fortunes and how Arnold pulled himself out of it by veering back to a more moderate bipartisan course — and upsetting Republicans in the process. But it was never entirely so. Schwarzenegger has never been a cookie cutter politician and he remains hard to completely define.
The questions have always lingered: just who was this guy some Californians mockingly call “Ahnold?”
Was all his talk about bipartisanship, wanting to listen to differing ideas and his all-over-the-place political stands Machiavellian positioning or for real?
Is Schwarzenegger for real or is this yet one more phony show biz or political facade?
As a follow up to Patrick’s previous post, I thought I’d post the graphical representation of the Political Compass scores of the first ten people to respond to Patrick’s post. As I explained in my response to Patrick’s post, I personally feel that Political Compass is a highly subjective tool that suffers from a number of limitations and that the results are somewhat misleading. However, what numerical data we’ve obtained might as well be displayed in graphical form.
For purposes of space, I’ve abbreviated each members name to just the first three letters/numbers. Should more people reply to Patrick’s post (or my own), I’ll be sure to update the graphic above.
UPDATE: The original graphic has been altered to incorporate additional scores obtained since this article was posted.
Over recent weeks there have been several posts which have gotten into the debate over what moderate or liberal or conservative truly mean. As several people correctly pointed out there is a natural tendency for people to assume that mainstream means their own viewpoint.
I myself have fallen into the trap before and so to test myself for real I have gone to several of the political ideology tests on the web to find out where I really stand. I thought it might be fun for the rest of you to do the same.
One of the best sites I have found is Political Compass. This site looks at political ideology both from an economic viewpoint and also from the aspect of government and authority. It assigns you scores ranging from -10 to + 10 for each viewpoint and shows you where you stand.
In terms of interpretation of the scale I’d say that scores from 0 to 2.5 in either direction place you in the category of moderate, scores from 2.5 to 7.5 in either direction place you in some form of mainstream liberal/conservative and anything beyond 7.5 puts you in the extreme category (since by definition of the scale -10 or +10 are as far over as you can get and include folks like Hitler/Stalin/etc). It is an international quiz so you are able to compare yourself to people around the world.
If course most of the questions are subject to interpretation and so if you take the test 3 or 4 times in a week you are likely to get slightly different scores each time. But it seems that there is a fairly small range to your scores.
The second test is Vote Match and is geared more to US politics. You answer a series of questions and it matches you to Presidential candidates or members of the Senate. Again, there is a degree of interpretation but it is also a fun quiz.
So take the tests and post your scores.
Just to start the ball rolling, when I took the Compass test I ended up with a small range of scores but my economic results tended to be in the 1-3 range while my authority result ranged in the 0 to -2 range. So in all cases I ended up as a moderate but with a slight left tilt on authority and a slight right tilt on economics.
In the Match quiz I looked to Senate members (there is a choice to show your top and bottom 10 Senate matches) and interestingly ended up with an equal match of GOP and Dems in my top 10 but mostly GOP in the bottom. My best matches tended to be Evan Bayh, Arlen Specter and the like.
The Huffington Post’s Arianna Huffington has a list of seven things she feels Democrat Senator Barack Obama should do “to keep from blowing it” in the Presidential election. Some of the key ones touch on whether he should win over the center — a segment of the electorate past elections have shown is important but a segment which is often talked about with disdain by people on the right and left.
Here’s the section where Huffington advises on what stance to take with the center:
3) Get your campaign to give you a printout of the names of the over 1.5 million people who have donated to your campaign (at an average of $197 each). Give that list a read every day; feel the heft. And remember — sorry, Stu Rothenberg — that the tried-and-untrue swing voter strategy is what has led to the Democratic Party’s prolonged identity crisis. Forget the fence sitters. Instead, continue to speak to those who have turned their backs on the electoral process — those who are struggling without health care, without decent schools, without jobs, without hope.
That’s not an accurate depiction of the center.
The issue for the Democrats has not been that they tried to pander to the center and that Democrats don’t turn out to vote.
The issue for the Democrats is that in some past elections they offered inept or lead-footed candidates who were outclassed or outsleazed in (a) political nimbleness by Republican candidates, (b) the Democrats’ inability to get a cohesive message out on many fronts (just blaming it on Rush Limbaugh, weblogs or media coverage won’t do) and (c) falling into traps set by top Republican strategists and being unable to respond to and obliterate GOP charges against them.
What do Democratic Senator Barack Obama and Republican Senator John McCain have in common? Both presumptive Presidential nominees are trying to appeal to the center while they try to consolidate support from their parties’ bases.
John Avlon, a top centrist who worked for both former President Bill Clinton and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, takes a look at this race to scoop up centrist voters in a MUST READ piece on The Politico. Some key excerpts:
In the past, we have seen Eisenhower Democrats and Reagan Democrats, even Republicans for Bill Clinton in 1992. This year, two new terms are entering the political lexicon: Obamacans and McCainocrats. They testify to the way old labels are giving way to new evolutions as the political map edges toward realignment.
A new Gallup poll shows that nearly one-in-four U.S. voters is now a “swing voter” — a higher percentage than at any time in the polarizing 2004 election. Barack Obama and John McCain are each appealing to around 10 percent of the other party’s voters, according to a June Fox/Opinion Dynamics poll.
Even so, there are partisans in both parties who are pooh-poohing the idea that swing voters matter and even have name for them: “the mushy middle.”
But both Obama and McCain share one other thing in common: they do not want to lose and know that they cannot win if they ignore swing voters.
Steven Thomma wonders about the future of Centrists in the article Does Obama’s rise mean less clout for Democratic centrists? They noted that while the Centrist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) was meeting in Chicago Obama did not attend, even though he was home this weekend.
While I favor a Democratic take over of Government in order to correct GOP negligence and advance progressive policy, it stands to reason that the Democrats will also eventually spin out of control and descend into self dealing and other variations of corruption.
And this seems to me an opportunity for the DLC and the moderate Republican Leadership Council (RLC) to merge into one centrist organization to harness the growing ranks of independent and moderate voters. These groups have more in common with each other than they do with the extremists of their own parties.
Since many districts around the country lean heavy Conservative or Liberal it is unrealistic to expect candidates of opposite temperament to be elected. And so we will always have conservative and liberal representatives. But an influential Centrist organization can promote candidates, from either party, with pragmatic and collaborative sensibilities. This could provide the leverage in congress for just enough open mindedness and reasonable compromise to move our country forward through increasingly complex challenges in Health, Immigration, Energy, Environmental Protection…
Many Democrats have had reason to comment lately on the conventional wisdom that Democrats must always tack to the center to win an election in this country.
Count me among those who want to see more challenges to that conventional wisdom (which to me just means ‘last year’s assumptions’). While I understand the reasons why candidates do it, the fact is that eight years of neoconservatism has moved all the goal posts way to the right.
To repair the damage done by Bush and his gang of neocons, what’s needed isn’t a balancing bipartisan approach but immediate corrective action. It’s outmoded ‘conventional wisdom’ to believe that Democratic candidates always have to tack centerwards (meaning shift right) to prevail in a general election or to attract swing voters and independents. I don’t buy it.
What most Democrats I know want now is an entirely different approach. With the Republicans still mechanically spouting policies consistent with Bush-era neoconservatism, what’s needed to achieve balance again isn’t compromise action, but corrective action. What most Democrats I know want is a different choice: in our government’s approach to the economy, national security, civil liberties, health care, energy policy and the environment and on and on.
And back-room deals and trade-offs between our elected representatives just aren’t going to cut it. We want to see changes that will restore to us as a nation and as individuals what we lost during Bush’s failed regime.
Are we seeing so many political positioning moves on the part of Democratic Senator Barack Obama and Republican Senator John McCain that the two of them could open up a special road show of “Riverdance?” NBC’s Chuck Todd, Mark Murray, and Domenico Montanaro note the fancy footwork:
But what we find fascinating is that as Obama has moved to the center on some thorny subjects, McCain keeps on making overtures to the right. At his meeting yesterday with social conservatives in Ohio, according to participants, McCain said that he was open to learning more about their opposition to embryonic stem cell research (which he supports), that he would talk more openly about his opposition to gay marriage, and that he would listen seriously to their requests that he choose an anti-abortion running mate (bad news for Tom Ridge?). In modern politics, the formula has always been the same: You curry favor with your base in the primaries and then you tack to the center in the general election. McCain isn’t necessarily following this path. Then again, McCain didn’t win his nomination by running to the right, either. Nothing he’s done this campaign year has been conventional.
And that has been the case this year. Repeatedly, the mainstream and new media have been wrong about what is “going” to happen or even “very likely” to happen — and not just in the case of McCain.
This includes all the speculation about Senator Hillary Clinton returning to a Senate where Democrats might be lukewarm to her. She was reportedly greeted by interns, Democrats and Republicans like a political rock star.
But what do these shifts by the two presumptive party nominees say about what’s going on? This:
