By Dan Kennedy • The press, politics, technology, culture and other passions
POLK CITY, Florida (CNN) — At a boisterous Sarah Palin rally in Polk City, Florida on Saturday afternoon, one name was surprisingly absent from the campaign décor — John McCain’s…. [T]he GOP nominee’s name was literally nowhere to be found on any of the official campaign signage distributed to supporters at the event.
Literally! Oh, wait — never mind. (Via Jay Rosen’s Twitter feed.)
Strip away all the side issues (and there are many, and they are important), and the essence of Sarah Palin is this: She is an extraordinarily gifted political performer. And she knows nothing — zippo — about the national and international issues with which any national political figure needs to be conversant.
Which brings me to the latest on the increasingly public mud-slinging between the Palin and McCain camps, written up in loving detail by the Politico’s Ben Smith. Given her freakish and unwarranted self-confidence, it’s not surprising that she believes she could talk her way out of the mess she’s in if only her handlers would let her. And given her long string of boneheaded (and worse) statements, it’s not surprising that the McCainiacs just want her to shut up.
It is nothing short of astounding that Palin’s supporters, according to Smith, point to the Katie Couric interview as something that was mishandled by the McCain forces. We all saw Palin babble about how Alaska’s proximity to Russia has given her foreign-policy experience — a softball do-over from Couric, given that Palin had had time to think about it after answering Charlie Gibson’s identical question the same idiotic way. We all saw that she couldn’t even say what she reads, leading to the not-unreasonable conclusion that she doesn’t.
If Barack Obama wins on Nov. 4, it’s going to be a long winter for the Republican Party. Among the party’s many problems is that Palin has signaled she intends to be a player. Given that she has what’s left of the Republican base in her thrall, and that she is a huge negative among everyone else, Palin, for Democrats, may be the gift that keeps on giving.
Josh Marshall writes: “I don’t think there’s any question that McCain’s is the dirtiest and most dishonest campaign, certainly in the last 35 years and possibly going much further back into the early 20th century.”
By invoking the 35-year rule, Marshall is leaving open the possibility that Richard Nixon’s re-election effort in 1972 was worse. I’d agree with that. Worse than anything since? Yes, I think so. The worst I can remember George W. Bush doing against Al Gore was taking credit for a children’s health measure in Texas that had passed over his veto. George H.W. Bush ran some notably dirty campaigns in 1988 and ’92, but I think McCain has set a new standard.
Last night Mrs. Media Nation and Media Nation Jr. came back from a trip to the in-laws and reported that several members of the family had asserted that Barack Obama is “a terrorist.” Not even that he “pals around with terrorists.”
You can argue all day that neither John McCain nor Sarah Palin has said anything quite that breathtakingly brash. But they set it in motion, and let pre-existings fears about a black man with a Muslim-sounding name do the rest.
Anticipated for weeks, if not months, former secretary of state Colin Powell has finally endorsed Barack Obama. Is this as big as everyone thinks it is? My suspicion is that it will prove to be the single most important endorsement of the campaign, yet still fall short of being a transcendent moment.
Powell is a flawed figure tied to the past, and there are those who will discount this on the grounds that both Powell and Obama are African-American. On the other hand, Powell crystallizes principled conservative discomfort with the McCain-Palin ticket.
But it’s certainly bigger than any newspaper endorsement.
A reporter says he was assaulted by “a large, bearded man in full McCain-Palin campaign regalia” at a McCain rally in North Carolina. The reporter’s offense: Interviewing some Obama supporters who had infiltrated the event. (Via Jay Rosen’s Twitter feed.)
What is really going on at McCain-Palin rallies? The Times Leader of Wilkes-Barre, Pa., reports that the Secret Service can find no evidence that anyone shouted “Kill him!” in reference to Barack Obama at a recent Palin event (via Little Green Footballs).
The story was originally reported by a competitor, the Scranton Times-Tribune, which is standing by its reporter, David Singleton:
Mr. Singleton said the remark came from his right, amid booing that followed Mr. Hackett’s mention of Mr. Obama.
“[I] very distinctly heard, ‘Kill him!’ Male voice,” he said. “It was definitely back in the back.”
Mr. Singleton said other people were in the bleachers he was behind and in similar orange bleachers to the right.
He moved toward the area where he thought the remark came from to see if the person who said it would repeat it. That didn’t happen, and he was unable to identify the speaker, he said.
“I didn’t hear anything else at that point,” he said.
Singleton, by the way, is described by his employer as a wire-service and newspaper reporter with some 30 years of experience. In other words, he doesn’t sound like someone out to make a name for himself. As his editor put it, “He heard what he heard.”
Conservatives bloggers today are excited over the possibility that Singleton got it wrong, pointing to it as evidence that McCain’s and Palin’s crowds would never, ever yell out death threats, and that Obama and his supporters are wrong to level that accusation.
“It’s as if they’re just making stuff up to make McCain and Palin look bad,” says the InstaPundit, Glenn Reynolds, referring to the media.
But not only is the jury out on the Times-Tribune story; there are other facts to sift through as well.
The first report that Palin’s crowds were getting out of control appeared in the Washington Post in early October, when Dana Milbank covered a Florida event at which “Kill him!” was clearly heard. According to Milbank, though, those words were apparently aimed at former Weather Underground radical William Ayers, not Obama. Which I guess makes it OK.
But wait. On Oct. 8, MSNBC reported that someone shouted “Off with his head!” at a Pennsylvania event when McCain mentioned Obama’s tax plan. That sounds like a death threat aimed at Obama, does it not? I don’t think Ayers has a tax plan.
Finally, the aforementioned Milbank says the Secret Service is now stopping reporters from interviewing people at McCain-Palin rallies — a censorious action that is most definitely not part of the agency’s mission statement, and that makes you wonder about the veracity of its claims about Singleton’s reporting. Milbank puts it this way:
So they prevent reporters from getting near the people doing the shouting, then claim it’s unfounded because the reporters can’t get close enough to identify the person.
I can understand why the Secret Service would do that. More media coverage means more reports of death threats; more death threats mean more nuts reach for their guns. But I also don’t doubt that the agency would rather keep Obama safe than be completely forthcoming with the truth.
Here’s the scorecard, as best as I can tell:
Is this how McCain’s defenders really want to spend their time?
Tucker Carlson asks something I’ve been wondering myself: Why did the McCain campaign choose to go after Barack Obama’s tenuous ties to the former radical William Ayers instead of revisiting Obama’s long association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright?
Sarah Palin’s accusation that Obama has been “palling around with terrorists” is false on at least two levels: her use of the plural, and her insinuation that Obama had anything more than a passing acquaintance with Ayers.
Yet Obama has clearly been disingenuous about his long, close relationship with Wright, whose “God damn America!” exhortation was one of the recurring hits of the primary campaign. You don’t title your campaign book after one of Wright’s sermons and sit in his church for 20-something years without knowing what the man is about.
Given the McCain campaign’s lie-and-deny tactics, it doesn’t seem likely that it was too worried about the Palin family’s own association with the radical Alaskan Independence Party, whose founder’s motto — “I’ve got no use for America or her damned institutions” — exceeds Wright in its anti-American vitriol.
So why Ayers and not Wright? It is a mystery. If you’re going to go negative, at least do it competently.
David Brooks presumably has an idea of what his New York Times column should be about. Apparently telling us what he really thinks is not high on his list of priorities.
In the Times, Brooks has expressed — well, reservations about Sarah Palin. At a public event on Monday, he described her as “a fatal cancer to the Republican Party.” In the Times, Brooks has been skeptical about Barack Obama. On Monday, he said he’s “dazzled.”
Well, at least he’s straight with us when he’s not writing.
Embedded video from CNN Video
Among the many myths that have enveloped the Sarah Palin candidacy is the notion that the rape-kit nastiness of a few weeks ago has somehow been debunked. It hasn’t. What we knew then holds up quite well. As I wrote on Sept. 11:
The man Sarah Palin appointed to run the Wasilla police department thinks that forcing rape victims to pay for their own forensic tests is just a swell idea. He said so himself a little more than eight years ago.
Every word of that is true. Moreover, as mayor, Palin fired the previous police chief in order to put this guy, Charlie Fannon, into office. It strains credulity to believe that she didn’t bother to read her hometown paper, the Frontiersman, the week that Fannon whined about a new state law ordering that the practice be ended, complaining that it could cost Wasilla taxpayers $5,000 to $14,000 a year.
There is no record — none — showing that Palin ever publicly disagreed with Fannon, reprimanded him or said anything whatsoever about this reprehensible policy. Maybe she was too busy reading the Economist.
Fannon also said this: “In the past we’ve charged the cost of exams to the victims’ insurance company when possible. I just don’t want to see any more burden put on the taxpayer.”
Now, we’ve all seen commentary suggesting that because the bills were sent to the insurance company, there was nothing wrong with the practice. But by treating rape as a medical problem rather than a violent crime, Wasilla authorities were sending precisely the wrong message in a state with the nation’s highest sexual-assault rate. Charging a victim’s insurance company is the same as charging the victim.
Neither the victims of non-sexual assaults nor the families of murder victims are forced to deal with their insurance companies for the cost of police investigations. By singling out rape, Fannon was wallowing in ugly old stereotypes.
We know a little bit more than we did a few weeks ago. We know that Wasilla wasn’t the only community engaging in this practice, although there is still testimony that it was among the most egregious offenders. We still don’t know for certain whether Palin knew, but I (dislocating my shoulders in order to give myself a pat on the back) have been careful about that from the beginning.
Rachael Larimore of Slate has supposedly debunked this story in two parts (here and here), as has Jim Geraghty of National Review. Go ahead and read them. They haven’t. Incredibly, Fannon doesn’t even make an appearance in Geraghty’s piece. Larimore trots him out briefly, for the sole purpose of invoking the insurance rationale.
The best summation of what we know and what we don’t know was reported by CNN on Sept. 22. Read it, watch it. And then try to claim there’s nothing to this controversy.
Instant update: Eric Boehlert weighs in on the rape-kit story in quite a bit more detail.
All right, I am assuming far more coherence and meaning in Sarah Palin’s ramblingly incoherent interview with Fox’s Carl Cameron than is warranted. But I do want to call your attention to this amazing passage, flagged by Jake Tapper of ABC News:
As we send our young men and women overseas in a war zone to fight for democracy and freedoms, including freedom of the press, we’ve really got to have a mutually beneficial relationship here with those fighting the freedom of the press, and then the press, though not taking advantage and exploiting a situation, perhaps they would want to capture and abuse the privilege. We just want truth, we want fairness, we want balance.
To which I say: “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.”
Thanks to Media Nation reader MTS, who found it on Daily Kos.
