Politics
Out of context: Reply #2116
- Started
- Last post
- 33,770 Responses
- hallelujah0
Bob Herbert:
For the nitwits who vote for the man or woman they’d most like to have over for dinner, or hang out at a barbecue with, I suggest you take a look at how well your 401(k) is doing, or how easy it will be to meet the mortgage this month, or whether the college fund you’ve been trying to build for your kids is as robust as you’d like it to be.
David Brooks: No way to deny it. The current Republican party hates intelligence and competence. It's become a Know Nothing spectacle led by Sarah Palin. I will ignore my own years of neglect of this topic, and instead concentrate on where the GOP is heading. Neither subject, btw, is pretty.
Gail Collins:
Remember how we used to joke about John McCain looking like an old guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn? It’s only in retrospect that we can see that the keep-off-the-grass period was the McCain campaign’s golden era. Now, he’s beginning to act like one of those movie characters who steals the wrong ring and turns into a troll.
Dana Milbank:
The country desperately needs strong leadership now, but there's none to be found at the White House. The president is voicing the right sentiments, even if his words (Thursday's "we'll get through this deal") are characteristically clumsy. He's even affecting the right demeanor, between concern and confidence. But nobody seems to care.
Marc Ambinder:
He mentions Ayers in a speech or interview, or gives the tough talk to Sarah Palin. He neglects to speak about Ayers in a debate. He says that Ayers isn't relevant. Anger mounts. McCain is trapped. Some in campaign blame the media, again, for putting McCain into a box -- when something doesn't work, the media gets the blame. But that hoary old axiom in politics -- timing is everything -- applies. Suddenly dumping on Obama's character and associations in the middle of the worst economic crisis since the great depression smells cheap and desperate. And it creates a spectacle that is becoming easy for the media to dismiss McCain is aware of this -- he's flinched at times and reminded his audiences that he has to be optimistic, but his campaign advisers don't agree on the wisdom of angry crowds becoming the story; some hate the effect this is having on independents and others are trying to pump liquidity into the Republican base.
Hugh Bailey:
Palin was in a position to be, in the event of a McCain loss, the leading contender for the 2012 Republican nomination. But she's turned off so many voters in the last month that her party may decide she's too toxic to take a chance on. They don't nominate rabid partisans; George W. Bush ran from the Republican brand as a "compassionate consevative" -- he wasn't one, but he pretended to be -- and McCain has based his entire candidacy on a willingness to go his own way.
What seems likely is that Palin, her relative youth aside, knows that this, too, is her best and only shot at bigger things. The more people find out about her, the less popular she gets. Her favorability rating dropped from plus-20 a month ago to around minus-10 today.