West Virginia Blue
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Good evening, West Virginia Blue readers. This is your open thread to discuss all things Hill-related. Use this thread to praise or bash Congresscritters, share a juicy tip, ask questions, offer critiques and suggestions, or post manifestos.
Good afternoon, West Virginia Blue readers. This is your afternoon open thread to discuss all things Hill-related. Use this thread to praise or bash Congresscritters, share a juicy tip, ask questions, offer critiques and suggestions, or post manifestos.
As always, this is a crosspost from CongressMatters. This is the important news of the day. Okay, maybe only some of it. So if you disagree, go watch Casual Wednesday suggestion of the public advocacy class covered on CSPAN. Or cross the Eastern Continental Divide in winter to deliver a WVU student. I was in hiding after the Gator Bowl.
You imply this pretty strongly, but I just want to emphasize the point: Obama doesn't have an "Appalachian problem," he has a Southern white problem. You can see this by the fact that he did better among white voters in West Virginia than among white voters in VA or NC - states he won. And he did better among them in AR and TN than in any of the Deep Southern states.
Fortunately, I think you're right to suggest it's not an intractable problem. Four years of familiarity plus an attention to the region's issues and an actual campaign effort in the region could improve his electoral chances throughout the broader South.
As we see the John McCain camp turn on Sarah Palin, it's amusing to go back and read the words of wisdom of fitness gym owner and erstwhile campaign consultant Vic Sprouse:
I was explaining to someone today the difference in my attitude before and after Palin's addition to the ticket.
Before I was definitely for John McCain and would have voted for him.
After the addition of Palin, I feel energized and ready to do anything I can to help the ticket win.
snip
KAPOW! She completely knocked it out of the park. A home run. A grand slam.
She took the podium, took the criticism, and shoved that criticism right back down the throats of her detractors... with as much grace as a seasoned veteran.
Even CNN commented that a "star" was born.
This was a Reagan moment.
This was an Obama 2004 moment. Her speech will literally go down in the history books as one of the most astounding certainly of my generation.
Sarah Palin as a vice presidential pick will certainly be remembered all right.
Republicans: Please run Sarah Palin for president in 2012.
NEWSWEEK has also learned that Palin's shopping spree at high-end department stores was more extensive than previously reported. While publicly supporting Palin, McCain's top advisers privately fumed at what they regarded as her outrageous profligacy. One senior aide said that Nicolle Wallace had told Palin to buy three suits for the convention and hire a stylist. But instead, the vice presidential nominee began buying for herself and her family--clothes and accessories from top stores such as Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. According to two knowledgeable sources, a vast majority of the clothes were bought by a wealthy donor, who was shocked when he got the bill. Palin also used low-level staffers to buy some of the clothes on their credit cards. The McCain campaign found out last week when the aides sought reimbursement. One aide estimated that she spent "tens of thousands" more than the reported $150,000, and that $20,000 to $40,000 went to buy clothes for her husband. Some articles of clothing have apparently been lost. An angry aide characterized the shopping spree as "Wasilla hillbillies looting Neiman Marcus from coast to coast," and said the truth will eventually come out when the Republican Party audits its books.
Audience members escorted out of Sen. John McCain's, R-Ariz., campaign event in Cedar Falls questioned why they were asked to leave Sunday's rally even though they were not protesting.
snip
She said McCain staffers wouldn't tell her why she was being asked to leave and when she got outside, she saw "a group of about 20 people" who had all been asked to leave.
Elborno said after seeing the people who were asked to leave, she was concerned that McCain's staffers were profiling people on appearance to determine who might be a potential protester.
"When I started talking to them, it kind of became clear that they were kind of just telling people to leave that they thought maybe would be disruptive, but based on what? Based on how they looked," Elborno said. "It was pretty much all young people, the college demographic."
Elborno said even McCain supporters were among those being asked to leave.
"I saw a couple that had been escorted out and they were confused as well, and the girl was crying, so I said 'Why are you crying? and she said 'I already voted for McCain, I'm a Republican, and they said we had to leave because we didn't look right,'" Elborno said. "They were handpicking these people and they had nothing to go off of, besides the way the people looked."
So McCain wants to be president of only some Americans, the way Shelley Moore Capito represents only some representatives and allows just handpicked people to join her "open" telephone townhalls.
Bush Republican Rep. Shelley Moore Capito was picked by the McCain campaign to be on the "Palin Truth Squad" tasked with defending Palin from attacks. Apparently after being an ardent supporter of the worst Republican policies and Republican president over the past 8 years they figured Capito would do it.
But has Capito stepped up even once to defend Palin? And what is Shelley Moore Capito going to do now that the attacks on Palin are coming from within McCain's house?
John McCain's campaign is looking for a scapegoat. It is looking for someone to blame if McCain loses on Tuesday.
And it has decided on Sarah Palin.
In recent days, a McCain "adviser" told Dana Bash of CNN: "She is a diva. She takes no advice from anyone."
Imagine not taking advice from the geniuses at the McCain campaign. What could Palin be thinking?
Also, a "top McCain adviser" told Mike Allen of Politico that Palin is "a whack job."
Maybe she is. But who chose to put this "whack job" on the ticket? Wasn't it John McCain? And wasn't it his first presidential-level decision?
So John McCain has reached the same conclusion West Virginia Blue reached months ago: Palin was a rushed pick and a bad, unqualified pick. But as a member picked to defend her, shouldn't Capito step up and denounce the attacks from McCain's campaign? Was that "truth squad" role as fake as Capito's "civility caucus"?
Previously, on the GOP side, only the RNC was spending money on ads in West Virginia. That the McCain camp is now spending on ads in the state is yet another sign that the broadening map is putting McCain on defense in multiple states that went for Bush last time, sometimes by significant margins, and forcing him to spend money in them with time running out.
The employee, who's with WCHS in Charleston, tells us that McCain is running this spot on the station geared specifically to West Virginia that attacks Obama on coal, charging that while clean coal means "thousands of jobs" for West Virginians, it's opposed by "Obama, Biden, and their liberal allies"...
Barack Obama supports clean coal, one of our disagreements with him by many here at this site.
The WCHS employee also confirms that the West Virginia station is running another McCain ad that stars Hank Williams, Jr., hitting Obama over the "bitter" line, a spot that had only been previously heard in Montana.
The other ad they're running focuses on Obama's remarks about people being "bitter." They've got Hank Williams Jr., an international celebrity, talking about how Obama doesn't "understand small towns" so we should support the Republican, John McCain, who is so rich that he can't remember how many homes he owns and he got rich by cheating on his first wife and marrying a beer heiress.
Perhaps Hank Williams Jr. is wealthy enough that he's not worried about the economy, but you can bet those of us living in small towns throughout West Virginia are pretty damn bitter about what the Republicans have done to our nation for the past eight years.
When Hank Williams Jr. says Obama doesn't understand "our way of life," is Williams referring to a life like his that includes a long history of heavy abuse of alcohol and drugs and four divorces and jetsetting to concerts? Because many of us in small towns aren't familiar with Hank Williams way of life and it's ridiculous for Williams to pretend to be one of us.
But all my rowdy friends know Barack Obama is the candidate who understands how to enact policies that'll be better for those of us living in small towns and come Nov. 5 Hank Williams Jr. is just going to have a tear in his beer.
Now here's a video from a genuine country star who was proud of being liberal and yes this song is bitter. So while Hank wraps himself pretentiously in the red, white and blue, I'll stick by the Man in Black.
Here's a more uplifting spoken word, Johnny Cash's I Am the Nation
Memories. It seems like only yesterday I read John McCain's state director say the campaign was not worried about West Virginia. Oh, wait! It was only yesterday.
Ben Beakes, McCain's state director, said the Republican's campaign isn't worried.
7 days -- One week out -- Republicans expect to be crushed in historic landslide: buy emergency time in Montana and West Virginia
Good Tuesday morning. The Republican National Committee buys TV time in deep-red MONTANA and WEST VIRGINIA, a sign the party is scrambling to stave off a historic landslide a week from today. "Tough environment," one Republican official says sardonically. The McCain campaign has not officially given up on VIRGINIA but a top official concedes it is LOST, while maintaining that a PENNSYLVANIA miracle can still get Senator McCain to 270. He and Governor Palin will be there repeatedly before Election Day. But should they also be shoring up Nevada, now a must-win?
Win or lose, we've played our role in securing a national victory for Barack Obama by making John McCain spend his scant resources to defend the state they've taken for granted. Now let's go out there and win this thing for West Virginia!
There's a yard sign in Martinsburg that looks like an official yard sign from the McCain-Palin campaign though I searched for it on the campaign web site without success. I'll have to take a picture of it.
It says: "Sarah!" in beg letters with McCain Palin underneath.
Apparently that sign tells the story of their campaign. In case you missed this, the Republicans have the knives out to stick in each other's backs.
ALBUQUERQUE, New Mexico (CNN) - With 10 days to go until election day, long brewing tension between Sarah Palin and key aides to John McCain has become so intense, it is spilling out into the public.
Several McCain advisers have suggested to CNN they have become increasingly frustrated with what one aide described as Palin "going rogue" recently, while a Palin associate says she is simply trying to "bust free" of what she believes was a mishandled roll-out that damaged her.
McCain sources point to several incidents where Palin has gone off message, and privately wonder if they were deliberate. For example: labeling robo calls "irritating," even as the campaign was defending the use of them and telling reporters she disagreed with the campaigns controversial decision to pull out of Michigan.
A second McCain source tells CNN she appears to now be looking out for herself more than the McCain campaign.
I guess that happens when you spend 15 minutes vetting a vice presidential candidate who turns out to make up for her lack of intelligence with an overdeveloped ambition.
But two sources, one Palin associate and one McCain adviser, defended the decision to keep her press interaction limited after she was picked, both saying flatly that she was not ready and that the missteps could have been a lot worse.
They insisted that she needed time to be briefed on national and international issues and on McCain's record.
"Her lack of fundamental understanding of some key issues was dramatic," said another McCain source with direct knowledge of the process to prepare Palin after she was picked. The source said it was probably the "hardest" to get her "up to speed than any candidate in history."
That says more about John McCain and his lack of judgment than it does about Sarah Palin. "Country First" my ass.
I was thinking about Joe Biden in Charleston on my way in to Martinsburg this morning. He wasn't my first pick for vice president yet alone president, but if, God forbid, he had to step into the role of president, he'd do a fine job. He's intelligent and has a good heart and he's experienced enough to be up to the task. He wouldn't need "to get up to speed." Obama made a safe pick with Biden that lacked drama. There's a lot to be said for steadiness and soundness in such decisions. As Clem said the other day, McCain picked his vice presidential nominee the way he gambles, he rolled the dice. Unfortunately the 72-year-old McCain was gambling with the nation's future.
And you know the part I'm really looking forward to? Sarah Palin's role in all this. I expect her to rip McCain absolutely to shreds. On background, of course, but it will be no less vicious for that. Her future, such as it is, lies with the wingnut rump of the party, and she knows what her audience wants: John McCain's blood. And lots of it. They never liked him in the first place, and I expect them to be howling for his head on a platter starting at about 8:01 pm EST on November 4th.
With despair rising even among many of John McCain's own advisers, influential Republicans inside and outside his campaign are engaged in an intense round of blame-casting and rear-covering - much of it virtually conceding that an Election Day rout is likely.
snip
"If you really want to see what 'going negative' is in politics, just watch the back-stabbing and blame game that we're starting to see," said Mark McKinnon, the ad man who left the campaign after McCain wrapped up the GOP primary. "And there's one common theme: Everyone who wasn't part of the campaign could have done better."
"The cake is baked," agreed a former McCain strategist. "We're entering the finger-pointing and positioning-for-history part of the campaign. It's every man for himself now."
Which you see McCain and Shelley Moore Capito, who after eight years of rubberstamp support, 90 percent for McCain and 80 percent by Capito, are trying to throw George W. Bush under the bus.
McCain told the Times that the administration "let things get completely out of hand" through eight years of bad decisions about Iraq, global warming, and big spending.
Former Republican John Cole, always a good source for trying to understand the GOP, wrote:
The best thing about the upcoming circular firing squad is that once former true-believers like Nicole Wallace are screwed over royally by the wingnut fringe of the party, they will start to go all Scott McClellan. Take it from my experience- nothing hardens your resolve like being called a traitor after watching the Mayberry Machiavellis destroy your party.
Still, I'm sure the GOP's Joseph DeSoto will see a "vision" of this as a good thing for the Republican Party.
There's been so many new polls this week, it's hard to keep it all straight. Here's a summary from Pollster.com.
Note: the only changes I made for this user generated graph were to change sensitivity (for trend lines) to low, and to show the undecided % as well.
Obama continues to make gains support in West Virginia whereas McCain support is essentially flat. On the plus side for McCain, his margin has held steady recently (around 5 points) and early voting has already started. Obama is running out of time to close the gap.
Is the McCain campaign worried about West Virginia, a state that Obama is making a play for but that most experts assumed was solidly in the GOP column?
A reader points out to us that McCain appears to have cut a paid radio ad, and posted it on the McCain campaign's YouTube page, that's specifically geared to run in that state...
The ad claims John McCain supports clean coal while Barack Obama and Joe Biden doesn't. Now as opponents of Obama's stance on clean coal, those of us here know Obama does support clean coal. That's one of the reasons why Obama has the strong support of our union brothers and sisters with the United Mine Workers of America.
John McCain sure surprised a lot of people when he came out the other day against mountaintop removal mining. You could almost hear the backpedaling and side-stepping going on in coal operators' boardrooms and Republican party headquarters all the way up Cabin Creek. They thought they had a friend of coal in John McCain, only to find out that maybe he wasn't so friendly after all.
It should have come as no surprise. John McCain has been on the attack against the coal industry for years, starting with legislation he proposed in 2003-Senate Bill 139, the Climate Stewardship Act of 2003-that would have just about wiped out the coal industry in southern West Virginia and elsewhere in Appalachia.
The U.S. Energy Information Administration released an analysis of S. 139 in May, 2004, which said the reductions in coal production under the McCain legislation was estimated to be 78 percent by 2025. Since it takes coal miners to produce coal, that would mean a drastic reduction in employment, most of which would have fallen heavily on more labor-intensive mines like we have in Appalachia, especially West Virginia.
But Sen. McCain was just getting warmed up. He teamed up with Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) just last year and proposed climate change legislation-Senate Bill 280-that once again took a meat-axe approach to Appalachian coal. In that bill, McCain specifically targeted Appalachian coal production for cuts of 30 percent or more, while encouraging production of coal from Wyoming, according to an analysis done of the legislation by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
snip
With the coming development of clean coal technologies like carbon capture and storage (CCS), America is on the brink of being able to use coal to generate energy without contributing any more greenhouse gases to the environment. Sen. McCain pays lip service to CCS, but the record shows that coal has a very limited future in John McCain's vision of America. And that's a direct threat to tens of thousands of West Virginia families.
Sen. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is from a coal state and clearly understands the long-term role coal can play in our nation's energy future. He has pledged to fund development of CCS technology so that it can be deployed as soon as possible. He has said that America is the "Saudi Arabia of coal" and that we ought to be working as hard as we can to figure out how to use it for decades to come.
So the choice for coal miners, their families, their neighbors and everyone living in the coalfield communities throughout Appalachia and especially in West Virginia is clear. Barack Obama is for the long-term future of your job and John McCain is not. Keep that in mind when you vote on Nov. 4.
So what does it tell us that McCain not only is worried about the state but also so worried he has to lie about his record and Obama's?
I'll repeat what I said earlier, the only poll that matters is the one in the voting booth...but let's face it, we're political junkies so here's your latest fix.
A previous survey of state voters from West Virginia Wesleyan College for The State Journal conducted Sept. 21-22 by Orion Strategies showed Republican presidential candidate John McCain with an 11-point lead. The latest numbers from an Oct. 20-21 survey of 600 voters now show McCain 5.7 percent ahead.
"What it's showing is the differential has come down 50 percent, from 11 to six in a month," said Robert Rupp, political science professor at West Virginia Wesleyan. "It's still going to be a steep battle for a few reasons.
One of the interesting things is the poll - along with the other state pollster I highlighted earlier today - show West Virginians believe the state is on the right track. That's different than their believing the nation is on the wrong track.
That's a credit to Gov. Joe Manchin and the boost from higher coal prices. But so much for the State GOP's poormouthing of the state's economy which they were counting on. So much for "Unleashing Capitalism."
However, the bad news is Attorney General Darrell McGraw is locked in a tight race with Dan Greear. I've not even heard Greear's own campaign advisor say a positive word about him, so it looks like the negative campaigning by against McGraw is having an effect.
The poll showed 15.2 percent of West Virginians say race is important to them in the election, but unfortunately it appears the pollster or the writer made an assumption whether race was considered a negative factor. However, that 15.2 percent is down from earlier polls and it's also down from the national Newsweek poll earlier this year where 21 percent of respondants said race was a factor in their support. Twenty percent believe Obama is Muslim when he's Christian. My guess is that 20 percent would never have voted for a Democrat any way so I doubt if Obama coming here is going to sway those low information voters anyway.
However, one consistancy throughout the polls has been the soft support for McCain. It appears the pollsters who push leaners the most are the ones who have the better numbers for McCain. But those voters could easily be swayed the other way.
As far as McGraw, he's been in tight races before and won. He's done a good job representing the people of West Virginia. If the people knew how much Greear would represent the coal barons and big corporations over them, Greear's support would be from Don Blankenship and his ilk and no one else.
But no one has shown a positive reason to elect either McCain, Greear or Shelley Moore Capito for that matter. All the Republicans have are smears and attack ads. Will West Virginians be swayed by lies, or will they support the candidates like Obama, McGraw and Anne Barth who support the working people of the state? That question can only be answered at the ballot box.
I'm watching Sarah Palin's interview on CNN right now. Two weeks before election day--well into early voting in many states--she's still introducing herself to the country.
She's done nothing to win over independents. She can't speak credibly on the economy. She's stuck back-peddling on campaign trail rhetoric and explaining away her scandal-ridden past in Alaska.
John McCain, true to his love of the craps table, rolled the dice... and lost.
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