Posted on 09/28/2008 8:17:49 PM PDT by Chet 99
-snip-
With respect to his campaign, McCain needs to liberate his running mate from the former Bush aides brought in to handle her — aides who seem to have succeeded in importing to the Palin campaign the trademark defensive crouch of the Bush White House. McCain picked Sarah Palin in part because she’s a talented politician and communicator. He needs to free her to use her political talents and to communicate in her own voice.
I’m told McCain recently expressed unhappiness with his staff’s handling of Palin. On Sunday he dispatched his top aides Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis to join Palin in Philadelphia. They’re supposed to liberate Palin to go on the offensive as a combative conservative in the vice-presidential debate on Thursday.
That debate is important. McCain took a risk in choosing Palin. If she does poorly, it will reflect badly on his judgment. If she does well, it will be a shot in the arm for his campaign.
In the debate, Palin has to dispatch quickly any queries about herself, and confidently assert that of course she’s qualified to be vice president. She should spend her time making the case for McCain and, more important, the case against Obama. As one shrewd McCain supporter told me, “Every minute she spends not telling the American people something that makes them less well disposed to Obama is a minute wasted.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
What’s the point in keeping him around? All of his posts are the same left wing drivel.
There won't be any attack against the media. The media is a generality. The media isn't running for president.
I think we're all agreed on the unprecendented level of media bias in this election. I mean, it's blatant and obvious. You think things are ugly now, wait until the last week of THIS election!
Wonderful. Let Sarah be the barracuda she really is.
Thanks for the ping!
You're gonna eat crow for saying that.
Time will tell but it is Bubba we are talking about. If he wants it out there, it will be out there.
He has an axe to grind over how his wife was treated and is increasingly losing his ability to conceal his disdain for Obama.
McCain needs to be careful about this. Before the Wall Street mess hit, he was pulling ahead of Obama by appealing to Independents and swing voters while Palin was nailing down the GOP base. I would go right back to this strategy. If this is a base election like 2000 or 2004, McCain will lose. It's that simple. Obama himself is running mostly a base election (constantly throwing tofu to his rabid left wing base -- those people don't eat red meat) because he thinks that the Democratic base will be bigger than the Republican base and not enough Independents will go to McCain to make up the difference.
Here is the secret to the 2008 race: Obama is wrong about that. In 2004, the ratio of voters was 37D, 37R, and 26I. In the 2006 off-year election, it was 37D, 34R, and 29I. Note that the Democrats did not gain. Instead, several Republicans moved to Independent. And Rasmussen has recently stated that the trend from Rs to Is has continued in the next two years. This is why McCain has done as well with Independents as he has: more of them lean Republican than this group did four and two years ago.
So, if I'm the McCain camp, I would have McCain aggressively going after these Independents (as he was doing prior to the Wall Street meltdown), and have Palin doing the same with base GOP voters but in a manner that won't scare away the voters that McCain is going after. If he does that, McCain can win this election, perhaps by a larger margin than people might think. Among likely voters, there may be more Democrats than Republicans, but (as the 2004 election showed) there are more Republicans and right leaning Independents than Democrats and left-leaning Independents.
I don’t know. He hadn’t posted in 7 years. There’s also a 19 yr old kid on here using his deceased father’s name and 98 sign up. I should think they’d both be gone but they aren’t.
Sarah needs to hammer home the idea of the woman voter. She’s on the ticket because the GOP wants a woman, and her perspective in high office. This has to be her message... we are finally breaking the gender barrier!!
Huh. This sounds very good on the face of it. I only hope that McCain’s “dissatisfaction” doesn’t mean he thinks Palin should be more freely sent into Democrat “mainstream” newsroom ambushes, a la Gibson and Couric.
It's a horrible idea. If I'm Sarah, I would use whoever helped her to prepare for her Alaska governor debates. She was terrific in those debates.
Kristol has sounded the call for another Surge and McCain agrees.
I was stunned by that idea too.
And one more thing. No more mention of the term “maverick.” :)
We don’t need to concentrate time on events that don’t attract moderate women voters. They are the only ones left who aren’t committed, and they aren’t going to be watching a VP debate.
I think that this VP debate will be very widely watched. Moderate women voters HAVE been fired up by this GOP VP nominee.
McCain needs to be miles from the bailout mess.
He needs to attack its core problems .
Let her loose! Generate some passion in this thing. The last debate was like watching paint dry.
You need to be banned. You are a little silly fool. Go back to your radical lefties...we’re not interested in your garbage.
“This part of his Krystal’s comments really trouble me:
“The core case against Obama is pretty simple: he’s too liberal. A few months ago I asked one of McCain’s aides what aspect of Obama’s liberalism they thought they could most effectively exploit. He looked at me as if I were a simpleton, and patiently explained that talking about “conservatism” and “liberalism” was so old-fashioned?”
Mercy.
Biden was out today saying Obama was alerting people to the financial mess long ago, where was McCain (in so many words)
This is just crap and people believe it because they want to and don’t hear a counter to it.
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