McCain/Palin 2008 Campaign of the Weird and Why It Still Thinks It Can Pull Off a Steal

[McCamy Taylor]

I. Strange Days: Past Presidential Candidates

I have seen a lot of strange presidential campaigns, but none of them have been weirder than the John McCain 2008 campaign. The competition was tough. Nobody has been running for president of the United States every four years since 1964.

http://www.museumofhoaxes.com/hoax/Top/satirical_candidates

In 1968, Pat Paulson ran as a representative of the STAG party (Straight Talking American Government)

Throughout the campaign he repeatedly described himself as the "common ordinary simple savior of America's destiny." Other campaign slogans he used included "We cannot stand pat," "We can be decisive, probably," "United we sit," and "If elected, I will win." He responded to all criticism with the phrase "Picky, picky, picky."

Paulsen declared that "issues have no place in a presidential campaign." However, he did announce a position on a few issues. For instance, on the issue of gun control he favored letting everyone have guns but locking up the bullets.

He campaigned throughout the United States, telling every community that he spoke in that it was his favorite "filled with real people -- not like those phonies in California." When he arrived in California, he declared it to be his real home "not full of phonies like those other places."

And who could forget Pigasus the Immortal who was presented by the Yippies (Youth Party International) in Chicago, 1968 as their Democratic nominee, a president whom the people could eat instead of the other way around. His short lived campaign lead to the infamous Chicago Seven trial.




II. Stranger Days: The McCain Palin Campaign

Americans are easily bored. If you are a candidate who wants to avoid the issues and go for the old gee whiz instead, you can not offer them something as simple as a war hero with a good story, the way that John F. Kennedy could back in 1960. Just look at the freak show of candidates above. And those are the real presidential aspirants. Books, television, movies have given us a former fighter pilot turned president who saves the world from the alien invasion that killed his wife ( Independence Day ), a sexy bachelor president who courts an even sexier lobbyist ( An American President ). Then there is President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho from Idiocracy .



Not to mention all the presidential babes, like Gena Davis and Polly Bergen, and presidential conmen, like Bob Roberts and Wag the Dog and presidential villains like Gene Hackman (in Absolute Power ).

To keep the interests of the all important independent (aka apolitical) voter in the United States, skilled showman and addicted gambler John McCain decided that he would run his campaign like a three ring circus. And so, when the economic meltdown came and Americans changed the cable channel looking for reassurance in a time of crisis, they did not find leadership or strength or answers . When they examined what the Republicans had to offer to solve their no house, no job, no money problems, they just found more of what was being shown on ESPN and the Home Shopping Network and E!.

"Two things only the people actually desire: bread and circuses." Juvenal

John McCain forgot about the bread part.

III. McCain/Palin 2008 Is…

A black jack bet Going into the Republican Convention, gambler John McCain knew was going to lose. To put things in a perspective that he would understand, he was sitting at a blackjack table, and he had been dealt a pair of eights. Sixteen is not likely to beat the dealer. The only proper thing to do when you are dealt a pair of eight is split them. Create two new hands. To carry the metaphor a little bit farther, since Obama had just pissed off a bunch of Clinton supporters, McCain was like a blackjack player who has been counting cards and he knew that the deck was in his favor. Splitting his hand gave him an edge---if he picked someone whose politics were much more reactionary than his own and who was female.

I was talking to my mom. The petrochemical refining plant where my sister works can not stand Obama. They can not stand McCain, either. But they just love Sarah Palin. Many of the workers plan to vote for McCain/Palin in hopes that old John McCain will die in office making Palin---whom they think of as “one of them”---another One of Them President, like Bush.

That is why John McCain’s campaign is like a split blackjack hand. He selected Palin knowing that her base and his base would hate each other. However, he counted upon the people who loved Palin coming out to vote for Palin---- Because she is one of us! . Meanwhile, the people who love John McCain (the way he used to be) were supposed to come out and vote for the straight talking maverick (because who the hell cares who the vice president is?). Since all he had to do was win one hand to win the White House, it did not matter whose base proved to be the most responsive. All that mattered was that the two add up to more than Obama’s total.

If a political campaign was like blackjack, that might have worked. However, McCain’s base is now wondering if he has lost his mind (and his morals). The Democrats (the dealer in the gambling metaphor) have been able to shuffle the deck, removing the card count advantage, because they despise Sarah Palin with a passion they will never feel towards John McCain. And the press, which used to be John McCain’s base, does not like Sarah Palin and her all the press which is not Fox News is the enemy mantra.

Imagine how bad it would be for the United States if John McCain attempted to use his gambling skills to run out government? He might screw up important economic and foreign policy matters as badly as he has messed up his campaign.

IV. McCain/Palin 2008 Is….

The Importance of Being a POW. I was reading The Importance of Being Ernest a few days ago. It is uncanny how you can change a few words here or there, and Oscar Wilde seems to be commenting upon the McCain 2008 Campaign.

Cecily. You must not laugh at me, darling, but it had always been a girlish dream of mine to love some one whose name was Ernest. There is something in that name that seems to inspire absolute confidence.

Just change “whose name was Ernest” to “who was a POW” and “name” to “history” and you have John McCain. We all remember when Bob Schieffer, bosom buddy of George W. Bush, declared that only a fighter pilot who has been shot down has what it really takes to lead America.

http://www.jedreport.com/2008/06/what-wesley-cla.html

Sorry, W. I know Schieffer said that the package revealing photo of you in the flight suit was “one of the great photos of all time” but it looks like he has a new crush.

http://mediabloodhound.typepad.com/weblog/2008/05/story-of-the-da.html

Put aside the silly image of elderly newsman Bob dressed up as eighteen year old Victorian beauty Cecily for a moment, and consider these other bon mots

Miss Prism. Memory, my dear Cecily, is the diary that we all carry about with us.
Cecily. Yes, but it usually chronicles the things that have never happened, and couldn’t possibly have happened.

Memory and the McCain/Palin 2008 have a troubled relationship. Sometimes, John McCain’s memory lapses are inconvenient---as when he kept mistaking Sunni for Shia:

http://blog.washingtonpost.com/the-trail/2008/03/18/a_mccain_gaffe_in_jordan_1.html

More often, the McCain campaign has convenient lapses of memory, in which they forget that they are guilty of the same unpardonable sin for which they are verbally pillorying Barrack Obama. Keith Olbermann pointed out one instance, when he showed that Palin had taken socialism to an extreme in Alaska by cutting all the citizens in that state monthly checks from the state’s oil revenue as part of her share the wealth program.

Lady Bracknell. That sounds not unsatisfactory. Three addresses always inspire confidence, even in tradesmen.

When the rest of the country is facing the prospect of losing the only (single) home it owns due to foreclosure caused by a mortgage crisis engineered by the economic adviser of one of the major party candidates for president, you would think that candidate would keep track of his own properties. This was surely one of the most absurd moments to come out of the McCain 2008 Campaign. Oscar Wilde could have fashioned a whole play around this one. The Importance of Having Only One Homestead

Algernon. My duty as a gentleman has never interfered with my pleasures in the smallest degree.

This could be John McCain’s motto. McCain has gone on weekend long casino gambling binges once a month for years---something his friends in the press have neglected to tell America. We also learned that he is a ladies' man, who (almost?) had an affair with Vicki Iseman at the same time that he was doing political favors for three of her telecom clients who donated to him or his “charity”. And we learned that he will say anything to get elected president. This is also known as lying if you are not lucky enough to be a “straight talking” decorated war hero whose wife is a beer heiress.

Cecily. You dear romantic boy. I hope your hair curls naturally, does it?

Algernon. Yes, darling, with a little help from others.

Lacy Bracknell has many of the best lines. About John McCain’s divorce from his first wife so that he could marry the beer heiress:

Lady Bracknell. A moment, Mr. Worthing. A hundred and thirty thousand pounds! And in the Funds! Miss Cardew seems to me a most attractive young lady, now that I look at her. Few girls of the present day have any really solid qualities, any of the qualities that last, and improve with time. We live, I regret to say, in an age of surfaces.

And then there is this:

Lady Bracknell. ….the modern sympathy with invalids. I consider it morbid. Illness of any kind is hardly a thing to be encouraged in others. Health is the primary duty of life.

Cindy McCain, prescription drug addict, does not believe in post traumatic stress disorder.

http://www.marieclaire.com/world/news/cindy-mccain-interview-election

MC: But no cold sweats in the middle of the night?
CM: Oh, no, no, no, no, no. My husband, he’d be the first one to tell you that he was trained to do what he was doing. The guys who had the trouble were the 18-year-olds who were drafted. He was trained, he went to the Naval Academy, he was a trained United States naval officer, and so he knew what he was doing.

See? If you come from aristocratic stock---officer material---and keep a stiff upper lip, you will not do anything so low class as have cold sweats in the middle of the night. That is for the enlisted men.

Could Oscar Wilde have written a forgotten play which the McCain/Palin campaign uncovered? One about politics? Is that why John McCain sometimes seems to be participating in a farce?

V. McCain/Palin 2008 Is…

Humphrey /Muskie 1968 . Somebody in the GOP decided that it would be cute to recreate history, with Obama as the George McGovern, the too far to the left Democratic nominee attempting to bring together the tattered remnants of a party divided and conquered by a bunch of CREEPY Republican operatives pretending to be Democratic supporters of the various Democratic candidates. They started way back in early 2007, planting a story in a Moonie run magazine about Obama being a Muslim and attributing the story to Hillary Clinton. The story was denounced as a Donald Segretti type dirty trick straight out of 1972 by Joe Conason at Salon.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/01/26/obama/

That did not stop the Republicans from continuing the tactics—which Pat Buchanan created for Nixon and which Karl Rove helped implement way back when---all the way up until this summer when Rush got into the act with his “Chaos at the Convention” silliness.

The problem is that you can not recreate history. In 1968 and 1972 like now, the big issue was the war, but the Democrats “owned” that war. In 2008, the Republicans “own” the Iraq War. And whoever owns an unpopular war is destined to lose. Rove knew this. That was why he tried to convince the nation that the Senate Democrats decided to invade Iraq. Americans sometimes act dumb, but none of them are that gullible.



The Republicans should have spent less time interfering with Democratic Party primary politics and more time listening to their own voters. If they had they might have noticed that Republicans do not particularly like John McCain. McCain was forced down voters’ throats the way that Humphrey was forced down voters throats in 1968. If they had listened they might have noticed that the war is not popular. Nixon was elected in 1968, because he lied . He claimed he had a secret plan to end the war. His secret plan involved troop escalation and the invasion of two more countries. One more lie would not have hurt the Republican nominee this year, not after all the whoppers McCain and Palin have told.

VI. McCain/Palin 2008 Is...

One response of several in error prone electronic voting systems in tomorrow's presidential election. Election watchdogs have proven that these machines can be hacked and malicious code inserted to cause votes to be switched from one candidate to another. This code can be inserted at a central location so that it infects many machines. The lack of a paper trail makes it impossible to know how people have really voted---especially now that the press has spread the notion that exit polls "lean Democratic", something that has become true only in the days of electronic voting.

With electronic election fraud in play, all John McCain has to do is keep his pre-election poll numbers within the margin of error---just tonight, McCain was bragging that he is "only 3 points behind in Virginia"--- and the illegal code can do the rest. With the disputed Bradley Effect he might get away with stealing a few extra points.

One way to keep polling numbers artificially elevated is use the same strategies that the networks use to keep their ratings up---give the people something to gawk at. It does not matter if the campaign is weird or strange or just plain unAmerican. If it can keep some of the people entertained for a few days, they will give it a thumbs up.

That is why the McCain/Palin 2008 Campaign of the Weird still thinks it can pull off a "win", one that will be an even bigger steal than 2004.

[kid a]

1. how many GOTV calls could you have made instead of writing this "boogieman" tripe

probably about 50.

[Hardrada]

2. Comrade, fulfill your quota!!

[Jim Sagle]

4. How many internet electrons did you waste posting this assholic criticism?

[happygoluckytoyou]

5. see you on the other side, and remember to call him MISTER president

[defendandprotect]

3. Yhey've been doing this since late 1960's so I'd guess they have some expertise at it ---

Keep your fingers crossed for heavy voting by Dems early band late --