Maybe the move by a company that's worked closely with the former first lady is just what it seems: yet another step by Hillary Rodham Clinton to prepare for another run for the Senate from New York in four years. Or another run for the White House. We won't know, of course, for some time.
But that comes with the news, as reported in The Ticket early the other morning, that Clinton has urgently requested her 2008 general election supporters to approve transfer of their unusable donations for this year's presidential race over to her 2012 Senate campaign.
(And then, potentially, into a new presidential campaign fund, as she did with $10 million of her surplus 2006 Senate campaign funds).
If this year's donors don't approve that transfer soon, Clinton must return the '08 money by Aug. 28.
The respected blogger Marc Ambinder of TheAtlantic.com is reporting tonight that a company associated with Clinton's top advance team leaders, the Markham Group, purchased that domain name on June 8.
June 8th? Why does that ring a bell? Why, that's the very next day after her "I-give-up-and-heartily-support Obama" speech where her family was dressed for a funeral.
Clinton sources told Ambinder the New York senator was committed to helping elect Obama on Nov. 4, but she wanted to keep her options open for later. Imagine that in a seasoned politician.
Come 2012 Clinton would have to choose which race she'd enter. Two years ago in her first Senate reelection bid, her main website was HillaryClinton.com, which she still has. Plus HillPac.com for her political action committee and another one for her '08 campaign debt donations.
So why would she need another website with 2012 in it, unless.... Her disappointed presidential campaign supporters may take heart. But will they still help elect another Democrat this November? Or sit it out and let '12 fall to her?
We are just six weeks out from Clinton's '08 surrender to Barack Obama. And, surely, everyone knows exactly what that means: only 223 weeks left until the 2012 election.
By the time Sen. John McCain gets on NBC's "Late Night with Conan O'Brien" tonight, it's gonna look like it's way past the veteran senator's bedtime.
The show was, of course, taped this afternoon, a little bit late due to a very surprising event: air traffic congestion above and around Newark's airport. Imagine that! And on a Friday, too.
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But it's amazing what can happen when you have the Secret Service on your side: the Lincoln Tunnel was closed and McCain's motorcade sped through midtown Manhattan to the NBC studios.
(Oh well, he wasn't gonna win New York's voters over anyway.)
There, the Republican nominee-to-be was well-received, even when Conan begged the 71-year-old war vet and POW to give late-night comedians something other than his age to joke about.
There was a pause. And McCain fell over asleep.
The late-night host acknowledged his colleagues had been unable to find anything to make fun aboutBarack Obama. (One idea: How about those Prince Charles-like jug ears?)
"I say we're tired of this take on you," O'Brien complained. "We....
You can tell a lot about any political campaign by how it invests its most precious resource: the 1,440 minutes in each candidate's day.
UPDATE: An earlier version of this item had an hour-by-hour schedule that was provided to the media for planning purposes and not intended for publication. But even if you examine the broad current schedule for John McCain's campaign, you'll still notice something very revealing:
Yesterday morning the presumptive presidential nominee of the Republican Party flew from Omaha to Kansas City, Mo., for a town hall meeting at Union Station in late morning, and a series of local media interviews, of course, and he left Kansas City right after lunch for -- where else? -- Muskegon, Mich.
No, really. Muskegon, Mich.
At dinnertime he arrived near there in Ferrysburg, Mich., for a 105-minute fundraiser before flying to Detroit to sleep.
Today, he'll visit a General Motors technical center there for a tour and another town hall meeting with employees to be captured for eternity on camera, more local media interviews, of course, and a lunchtime fundraiser before flying out to New York to do another media interview.
And then comes the day's publicity moment, the Big Event, the taping of a priceless national TV interview for "Late Night With Conan O'Brien," the next Jay Leno, if there can be such a thing. An opportunity to be good-natured for a lot of younger voters.
Tomorrow, in New York City, McCain will do more media interviews before ...
The other day here we noted that Republican nominee-to-be John McCainkeeps referring to the country of Czechoslovakia, which hasn't existed since 1993.
Now, Sam Nunn, a veteran retired senator and an oft-mentioned Democratic vice presidential running mate with Barack Obama, is doing the same thing.
His reference to the former country, which split into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, was the third mention of Czechoslovakia during campaigning this week. A former chairman of the Senate Armed Forces Committee who could know better, Nunn was on the campaign trail in Indiana with Obama.
"We in this country are about to, under this government, under the Bush administration, deploy [a] missile defense system in Poland and Czechoslovakia," Nunn said. For more details and a pretty funny video, check out our colleague Katie Fretland's item over on the Swamp.
If you had three choices regarding the laws governing same-sex marriage, what would you choose?
1. Same-sex couples should be allowed legally to marry.
2. Same-sex couples should be allowed legally to form civil unions but not marry.
3. Same-sex couples should not be allowed to obtain legal recognition of their relationships.
Well, the pollsters at Quinnipiac University posed that question, which is certain to become more prominent as the presidential general election campaign unfolds, to 1,783 Americans across the country.
And they found that:
1. 32% support same-sex marriage.
2. 33% support civil unions.
3. And 29% said no legal recognition should exist for same-sex couples.
Can't get much closer than that. But wait, there's more to this poll, and our colleague Katie Fretland over at the Swamp has the details here.
Al Gore is challenging the next president of the United States, whomever that may be, to embrace an ambitious energy plan that would make the country’s electricity carbon-free within 10 years.
But while he outlined the steps he thinks the future president should take, he says he won’t be beside him as vice president, even if the Democrats win.
Gore dashed the hopes of those pining for an Obama-Gore dream team ticket in an interview with Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News Thursday. The interview was conducted after Gore gave a speech on alternative energy in Washington.
“I have a personal term limit,” said Gore, who served for eight years as Bill Clinton’s vice president. “Only two terms as VP.”
Couric then wondered what Gore would do if Barack Obama came to him and begged, “Al, buddy, listen. I really, really, really need you."
Gore said the answer would still be no.
Speculation about a possible Obama-Gore ticket has bubbled in the blogosphere since last month, when Gore gave Obama a hearty endorsement after the primary struggle with Hillary Clinton had already been settled.
Gore, who won the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to draw the world’s attention to global warming, even used his website to solicit donations for Obama.
But when Couric suggested that Gore was playing coy in denying an interest in the VP spot, Gore shook his head and vowed, “This interview will not come back to haunt me. You can believe me.”
Campaigning for the U.S. presidency has its really unpleasant personal aspects. Criticism of the candidate is hard for family members to take. And criticism of the family is hard for the candidate to take.
That's why, for instance, in 1999-2000 at their request, George W. Bush kept his teenage daughters out of the spotlight. Until their recent "Access Hollywood" interview, the Obamas did the same with their younger daughters and later said they regretted that exposure.
But now Sen. Barack Obama says he wishes what he calls the conservative press would lay off his wife, Michelle, because she's a civilian who "didn't sign up for this."
Today, she campaigned in Washington state where the state Republican Party welcomed here with an ad (see video below the Read more line, with a hat tip to WakeUpAmerica).
Obama says he finds criticism of his spouse "infuriating." And he adds: "If they have a difference with me on policy, they should debate me. Not her."
In an interview this week with Glamour magazine, Obama complained that “the conservative press -– Fox News and the National Review and columnists of every ilk” had been too critical in its coverage of her.
He said he thinks reporters from those organizations “went fairly deliberately at her in a pretty systematic way” and, he asserted, “treated her as the candidate in a way that you just rarely see the Democrats try to do against Republicans.”
Obama would get a real argument about that from some....
A couple of seemingly unrelated political developments struck the Ticket early this morning.
First of all, it was unusually thoughtful of Sen. Barack Obama to give his big foreign policy speech before his big foreign policy trip and announce the results of his findings in advance of the actual fact-finding junket to the Middle East and Europe.
There are a lot of things for average Americans to be doing in mid-summer in the United States. And worrying over exactly what the freshman senator heard from U.S., military commanders in Iraq about the actual situation on the ground should not be high on the list.
So now that we know he's going to stick to his 16-month end-the-war-no-matter-what pullout, not just the MoveOn.org crowd but all of us can put on our own flip-flops and start focusing on the upcoming NFL roster cuts.
No, he's never been to Afghanistan, but Obama already knows it is the true central front in the war on al-Qaeda. Which is equally good.
And because the results of Obama's trip are already known and because Obama's staff has been practically begging them, all three network anchors are going to traipse along and seek three non-exclusive exclusive interviews along the route, as will top reporters for print media.
A whole planeload apparently. In marked contrast to the limited press coverage afforded the three foreign trips of Republican Sen. John McCain this year. But that probably has to do with something.
Without worrying over content, Obama's five-nation, 12,000-mile "tour" can be the rock star event Chicago HQ wants. Of course, if he does another one of those "Thank you, Sioux City" things and it gets reported, that might be another thing.
Speaking of change to believe in, ABC's Jake Tapper is reporting that Hillary Clinton has changed her hair and is now parting it on the right, which as believers in the actual little-known hair-part theory understand, is the more feminine side.
We'll leave it to Jake to explain all the details, but right hair parts are believed to connote strength, leadership and masculinity, which explains Jimmy Carter's troubled presidency and Margaret Thatcher's success but not Ronald Reagan's.
The other good news is that -- finally -- after nearly six weeks of not campaigning for a presidency somewhere Clinton has launched her fund-raising for the 2012 election. She says the money drive is for a New York senate reelection effort that year.
But someone just pointed out that 2012 also happens to be the same year as the next U.S. presidential election. What a coincidence, eh?
Sen. Barack Obama's campaign raised $52 million in June, his campaign manager said this morning -- not quite a campaign record. The Illinois Democrat's White House bid raised $55 million in February, during the party primaries.
But it's still more than twice the $22 million that Republican rival Sen. John McCain raised during June.
However, the Republican National Committee, which is backing the party's presidential candidate with its own resources, also had nearly $68 million in the bank -- a combined treasury that the Obama campaign was mindful about today in reporting its own June haul -- and immediately asking for more from its 1.5 million-plus donors.
Former Gov. Mitt Romney, who's increasingly visible on the campaign trail on behalf of the man who beat him for the Republican presidential nomination, Sen. John McCain, is about to forgive the $45 million he loaned himself for the primary struggles.
The legal move of filing papers with the Federal Election Commission re-declaring Romney's loans as contributions is imminent, according to a report by Michael Kranish on the Boston Globe's website, Boston.com. It would clear the legal deck for Romney to become a candidate again as, oh, say, the vice presidential Republican running mate of McCain.
Romney, whose personal fortune is estimated north of $190 million, is already marshalling on McCain's behalf his vast national donor network, which supplied another $65 million to Romney's unsuccessful campaign.
Although there appeared to be some personal frictions between the two men during primary debates, especially over campaign finance reform, which the senator has championed, McCain has more recently been openly appreciative of Romney's vigorous campaign grunt work in the months since the Arizonan clinched the GOP nomination.
"I'm appreciative every time I see Mitt on television on my behalf," McCain said earlier this week. "He does a better job for me than he did for himself, as a matter of fact."
Romney's successful career in business and resuscitating the troubled Salt Lake City Olympics plus his economic expertise and non-Washington executive experience as Massachusetts governor could help a McCain ticket.
The 61-year-old father of five boys has been married to Ann for 38 years. He's also already well-known and heavily vetted, lessening the chance of any embarrassing revelations. And Romney's family connections to Michigan, where he won the GOP primary, and his Mormon links in the West could help in both places on Nov. 4.
The Boston.com article quoted legal experts who said it appears that if McCain, like the Democratic candidate Barack Obama, reversed his position and opted out of federal campaign financing, Romney as a running mate could donate or loan the campaign an unlimited amount of his own fortune.
The Obama campaign this morning announced that it had collected $52 million during the month of June.
This space is supposed to be reserved for serious political material like foot-tapping senators, planted public forum questions, broken candidates' buses -- or make that candidates' broken buses -- satirical magazine covers that most people don't get and Rep. Ron Paul's chances of stealing the Republican nomination from John McCain.
We're going to make an exception under popular demand and publish late the latest JibJab cartoon video. It's just great. Wonderful. Don't miss it if you can.
The best part is what Hillary does toBill when he says a certain word.
We hope you die laughing. If you need more information on this stuff, our colleague Mark Milian over at Web Scout has more than you need. Go there. But do come back; they don't know anything about the electoral college over there.
No presidential campaign -- not even Barack Obama's, which seems able to print its own money -- can afford all the publicity to get its message out and, more important, planted in the minds of sufficient voters to ensure victory.
So they use surrogates -- famous people, usually fellow politicians -- who are trotted out to meet with news-hungry media with four or five specific positive talking points to make about the candidate in a kind of created news scenario.
Sometimes the media representatives buy the points. Sometimes, like today, they don't. Here comes Democratic dignitaries like Sen. Evan Bayh and ex-Sen. Sam Nunn today to talk up the military and security credentials of the freshman senator from Illinois.
But the media wanted to talk about the vice presidential running mate possibilities for each man. So with reluctance they did.
"I have never aspired to that office," said Nunn, who served in the Senate from Georgia for 25 years. "It is always nice to have your name mentioned -- it is an honor -- but I have no expectation of being offered any office, and I am not in any way sitting on the edge of a chair ready to go back into government."
Nunn is a perennial VP prospect because of his strong national security credentials -- not all that common in his party -- and his Southernness. But at 69, he's only 23 months younger than McCain, which might detract from Democrats' ability to drive that issue.
Bayh, whose father, Birch, ran unsuccessfully for the White House 32 years ago, is younger at 52 and supported Hillary Clinton. So adding him might reach out to some of her supporters.
"I love serving the people of Indiana," Bayh said. "And I think any questions about the vice presidential thing are understandable, and it’s good for my ego. But I should probably let Sen. Obama and his campaign address those kind of questions."
Still, typically, he didn't want to totally quash such an opportunity. As CNN's Alexander Mooney points out, Bayh was then asked if he was taking his name off the VP list like Sen. Jim Webb and Gov. Ted Strickland have done.
Bayh's coy answer: "I've got a plane to catch."
-- Andrew Malcolm
Photo credits: Diet Nagl / AFP-Getty Images (top); Office of Sen. Evan Bayh (bottom)
Next month, more than 50,000 politicos, protesters, journalists and security types will invade downtown Denver for the Democratic National Convention.
Good news for local businesses. Bad news for the city’s large homeless population, which has long claimed the Mile High City's downtown as its turf.
So while the delegates are reveling and the protesters are rabble-rousing, what will the nearly 4,000 homeless be doing?
Well, according to the Rocky Mountain News, some will be kicking back in a local movie theater to take in the latest Hollywood blockbuster.
Others will be strolling around the Denver Zoo or the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. And others will be playing bingo.
All the events will be free to them, funded by Denver Road Home, a branch of the mayor’s office dedicated to ending homelessness in the city. The organization got the money for the convention events from the United Way.
So is this a Democratic Party ploy to sanitize the streets during the quadrennial political pep rally and nomination of....
The mystery has been cleared up about what else Jesse Jackson said last week when he made his crude remarks about Barack Obama.
The previously unreported comment, disclosed Wednesday morning by the TVNewser blog, was:
“Barack ... he’s talking down to black people ... telling [black people] how to behave.” Only Jackson used the plural form of the “n-word,” not “black people,” in the second part of his comment.
Initially, the firestorm was over comments Jackson made to a guest before a July 6 interview on "Fox & Friends."
The civil rights leader whispered that Obama was "talking down to black people" and that Jackson wanted to "cut his nuts off."
The comments went unnoticed in the control room, Fox News said. But, as reported by The Times’ Matea Gold in a story published Friday, an employee working the overnight shift transcribed the tape, and the remarks that first caused the stir were reported several days later on Fox’s "The O’Reilly Factor." Then, as The Ticket reported, there was a controversy over exactly what Jackson said he wanted to do.
At the time, host Bill O’Reilly told viewers the network had decided to air only portions of what Jackson had said, adding there was "more damaging" material, too. That gave rise to rumors that Jackson had used the “n word” –- and aimed it directly at Obama.
In a Wednesday afternoon interview with fellow Fox host Shepard Smith, O’Reilly said he had withheld the “n-word” remark because, “I’m not in the business of creating some kind of controversy that’s not relevant to the general subject -- one civil rights leader disparaging another over policy.”
But why did O’Reilly mention in the first place that he had “more damaging” material?
In a one-sentence statement offered as a reply, O’Reilly said Wednesday: “We tell the audience the full breadth of everything we report on.” There was no elaboration on why the “full breadth” didn’t include the actual comment.
As for how the “n-word” comment eventually got out, O’Reilly told Smith that “some weasel leaked it to the Internet.”
For those still harboring hopes that California will be hotly contested in the November presidential election, it’s time for a pity party.
The latest statewide poll, conducted by the Field organization, shows Democrat Barack Obama extending his lead in the state and now trouncing Republican John McCain by 24 points, 54% to 30%. In May, Obama’s lead was a smaller 17 points, and in January, an even slighter 7 points.
The Field poll, conducted July 8-14, also demonstrated an enthusiasm gap in California: 51% of Obama’s supporters said they were very enthusiastic about him, whereas only 17% of McCain’s made the same claim.
Obama led strongly among Democrats, and McCain held a less-dominant lead among Republicans. But among the nonpartisan voters highly coveted by candidates, Obama led 64% to 18%.
McCain has repeatedly stated that he will contest the state in the general election. But most political observers believe that vow reflects a desire to keep voters and donors happy rather than any serious intention to compete in California, where running statewide ads costs millions of dollars per week that can be more optimistically spent elsewhere. Only 32.5% of the state’s voters are registered as Republicans, according to the most recent voter statistics.
Until 1992, California was reliably Republican in presidential contests. Bill Clinton that year became the first Democrat to win the state since Lyndon Johnson in 1964. But changes in the state’s voting pool, including a rise in moderate voters that coincided with a conservative streak in GOP nominees, turned the state toward the Democrats.
The state is hardly homogeneous, however, as the Field poll showed again. Coastal voters, for example, favored Obama 62% to 24%, whereas inland residents backed McCain by a 44%-35% margin. Unfortunately for McCain, inland voters make up less than one-third of the electorate.
Still, Obama won almost all demographic groups, including 51% of men to McCain’s 35%, and 56% of women to McCain’s 27%. He won overwhelming margins among Asian, black and Latino voters, and won white voters by 47% to 37%. Women and Latinos had powered Hillary Clinton's victory over Obama in the February California presidential primary.
Barack Obama’s critics often say the Illinois senator is all talk and no action but, in a bit of role reversal, the wordsmith’s own campaign adopted that sort of attack language today.
In a statement responding to Sen. John McCain’s education remarks before the NAACP, the Obama camp lectured the Arizona Republican that "making education the national priority will require more than campaign speeches, or recycled bromides. It will require a genuine and sustained commitment to policies that will strengthen and not undermine our public schools."
The statement went on to promise that Obama would "fix and fund No Child Left Behind, expand access to early childhood education, and make an affordable college education a reality for every student."
McCain, for his part, took a moment to make nice toward his Democratic rival. (You think maybe he sensed that it wouldn’t be too smart to launch a sally against Obama before an NAACP audience?)
As the Times’ Robin Abcarianreported from the Cincinnati gathering, McCain drew his loudest cheers when he said of Obama: "Don't tell him I said this, but he is an impressive fellow in many ways."
McCain added, "Of course, I would prefer his success not continue quite as long as he hopes. But it makes me proud to know the country I've loved and served all my life is still a work in progress, and always improving."
On education, Abcarian reported, McCain advocated better pay for good teachers and new teacher recruitment programs, and he vowed to fully fund No Child Left Behind, the Bush Adminstration’s program for improving school performance. McCain also promoted a cause dear to conservatives’ hearts, school vouchers, noting the distinction between his position on that score and Obama’s.
Presidential campaigns are much like a complex traveling circus, with teams assigned to develop messages to voters, teams designed to scout appropriate sites for candidate visits, teams assigned to prepare them and teams assigned to accompany the candidate and ensure a smooth appearance, most notably with the traveling and local media whose experience is reflected in the tone and detail of the coverage they provide to millions.
Sometimes the campaign venues are too small to accommodate the large press packs traveling on the campaign plane, whose numbers jockeying for position would spoil the desired "getting-to-know-you-feel" the campaign wants for the TV cameras.
So pool reporters are chosen by turn to represent print and broadcast media, assembled elsewhere, and share what they see and hear with their absent colleagues in detailed Pool Reports, sometimes several a day and sometimes with professional asides to their colleagues.
From time to time through November, The Ticket is going to publish these pool reports in their entirety to give readers an inside feel for the kinds of detail they may not always see in the formal news coverage and to peer inside the raw material that journalists use to compile their coverage. Sometimes, as last night, the pool reports include details of an unexpected encounter.
This morning's Pool Report is No. 4 from Tuesday evening with Sen. John McCain in St. Louis. It includes a humorous addition at the end:
McCain Pool Report #4 7/15/08
ST. LOUIS—Showing his intimate knowledge of the Show Me State’s culture, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) made a pilgrimage to one of its vaunted institutions Tuesday night: Ted Drewes Frozen Custard.
The local dessert stand, which was founded in 1929, made its reputation on its 'concretes' cups of frozen custard that are so thick the servers flip them upside down before they....
He's been a quick learner. But it's too late this time for the Democrat who wants to move into the White House next January. And then get his kids a dog.
As our Swamp colleagues report,Barack Obama finally commented last night on the highly controversial cover of this week's New Yorker magazine. And he said all the right things. But he was about 54 hours tardy.
Sunday, as soon as the elitist magazine released its provocative cartoon cover, Obama declined to comment, not wanting to elevate it to something important enough for a candidate to speak about. Fine. But, as The Ticket promptly reported here, advisors still sent out his communications director, Bill Burton, to denounce it:
"The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama's right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree."
The McCain campaign immediately (and ultimately self-servingly) issued a similar statement quoting Tucker Bounds as saying: "We completely agree with the Obama campaign. It's tasteless and offensive."
The cover of this week's New Yorker magazine depicts Obama in one-piece Muslim garb and headdress fist-bumping his booted, Afro-wearing wife Michelle in camo clothes with an AK-47 and ammo-belt slung over her shoulder beneath a portrait of Osama bin Laden while the American flag burns in the fireplace -- in the presidential Oval Office. Other than that, nothing particularly ...
A funny thing happened over on the Barack Obama campaign website in the last few days.
The parts that stressed his opposition to the 2007 troop surge and his statement that more troops would make no difference in a civil war have somehow disappeared. John McCain and Obama have been going at it heavily in recent days over the benefits of the surge.
The Arizona senator, who advocated the surge for years before the Bush administration employed it, says the resulting reduction in violence is proof it worked with progress on 15 of 18 political benchmarks and Obama's plan to withdraw troops by now would have resulted in surrender.
When President Bush ordered the surge in January 2007, Obama said: "I am not persuaded that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is going to solve the sectarian violence there. In fact, I think it will do the reverse," a position he maintained throughout 2007. This year he acknowledged progress, but maintained his position that political progress was lacking.
Tuesday, while Obama gave a speech on foreign policy, the New York Daily News was the first to notice the removal of parts of Obama's campaign site listing the Iraq troop surge as part of "The Problem." An Obama spokeswoman said it was just part of an "update" to "reflect changes in current events," as our colleague Frank James notes in the Swamp. The update includes a new section on the rise of Al Qaeda violence in Afghanistan.
But some might see the updating as part of Obama's skip to the political center now that he's secured the Democratic nomination. "Today," McCain said Tuesday, "we know Sen. Obama was wrong" to oppose the troop surge.
An old quote of Obama's criticizing the "rash war," which helped him with the left wing of his party and helped differentiate his stand from that of Sen. Hillary Clinton, a primary opponent who voted for the use of force in Iraq, has been replaced on his site by one saying that ending the Iraq war will make America safer. That's more of a general election message.
And hat tip to the folks over at the Wake Up America blog for their continuing trenchant analyses of the summer campaigns in general and, specifically, for highlighting the video below that contrasts Obama's pre-surge position with a more recent interview of David Axelrod, his chief campaign strategist, denying Obama's statements. A reminder of how carefully voters must listen during these last four campaign months.
He keeps mentioning Czechoslovakia –- a country that hasn’t existed since 1993 –- as if it still did. In an interview in Phoenix on Monday, McCain told a reporter, “I’m concerned about a couple of steps that the Russian government took in the last several days; one was reducing the energy supplies to Czechoslovakia.”
Oops. It happens to them all.
Czechoslovakia was split into two countries –- Slovakia and the Czech Republic –- 14 years ago, after the communist government was overthrown in the Velvet Revolution.
Three months ago, McCain told Don Imus that he would "work closely with Czechoslovakia and Poland and other countries" to install the European missile defense system in Poland.
And during a GOP debate in October, McCain said, "The first thing I would do is make sure that we have a missile defense system in place in Czechoslovakia and Poland." Our blogging colleague Elizabeth Snead over at Dish Rag has a fun version of this story and a better picture.
Being on the campaign trail seems to do things to your mind, including impose fatigue regardless of age. Not too long ago Barack Obama talked about having visited 57 of the 58 states and then bounced onto a stage in Sioux Falls and yelled, "Hello, Sioux City!"
This week's provocative New Yorker magazine cover featuring Barack and Michelle Obama as armed and Muslim calls attention to a variety of myths floating around the country these days, mainly online, but also openly voiced.
To check on what you hear, the website snopes.com is valuable. It tracks and debunks urban legends of the e-mail variety. It could be the first place you go when that unexpected message pings into your inbox from another e-mail chain.
You can also search Snopes for more myths or alleged truths about others such as Sens. John McCain (he did tell a story once about a fellow POW in Hanoi who got beaten for sewing a U.S. flag on his prison shirt) or John Kerry (his photo does hang in a Vietnamese Peace Museum for being a war protester).
According to the site, here are the top myths about Barack Obama:
He is a "radical Muslim" who will not recite the Pledge of Allegiance.
He was sworn into office on the Koran.
Obama's church has a "nonnegotiable commitment to Africa" that is covertly Muslim and excludes non-blacks.
Obama has been endorsed for president of the U.S. by the Ku Klux Klan.
Obama's presidential campaign is being funded by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chávez.
For the rest of the mythical Obama list, check out our colleague James Oliphant's intriguing story over at the Swamp.
-- Andrew Malcolm
Photo: Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. Credit: Associated Press
Necks craned at a town hall meeting in Albuquerque on Tuesday morning when in the middle of talking to voters, Sen. John McCain said he'd take a question from a reporter.
“When do you plan to announce the selection of your running mate?" asked the scribe, Jacob Schroeder.
McCain played it cool. “As soon as we can,” he replied.
Schroeder persisted: “What qualities are you looking for in a vice presidential running mate?”
“Someone exactly like you: vigorous, talented,” said McCain in a shocking display of pandering to the press.
“That person has to share not only my principles and my values, but also my priorities… Could I also remind you, and I am sure you know this because you study hard, the vice president of the United States has only two duties. One is to cast a tie vote in the Senate. The other duty is to inquire daily as to the health of the president, and I am sure that is a big job for whoever the vice president will be.”
Schroeder seemed satisfied. He works for Scholastic Kids News service, and his web page says he is 8 years old.
The last time a Scholastic reporter made news was back in December, when Chelsea Clinton, campaigning for her mother Hillary, took a different approach to a young questioner. She snubbed the Iowa fourth-grader, Sydney Rieckhoff, who wanted to ask her about her dad.
"I'm sorry, I don't talk to the press," said Clinton. "Even though I think you're cute."
(Chealsea's mother finished third in the Iowa Democratic caucus the next month.)
