ONE EXPLANATION FOR WHY OBAMA'S LEAD ISN'T BIGGER

The handwringing over Barack Obama’s modest lead in the polls is already rather tiresome — “Why isn’t Obama up by double digits?” the political world demands to know — and there’s no shortage of competing rationales to explain it. But the NYT’s Frank Rich offers one of the more compelling explanations I’ve seen: “[T]he public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is.”
What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image…. With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

Posted August 17th, 2008 at 10:30 am
http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/16585.html


McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.”

By then the growing insurgency was undeniable.

On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party. […]

Most Americans still don’t know, as [TPM’s Josh] Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.”

Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

There’s a very good reason Republicans have worked so aggressively to make this election a referendum on Obama — because if the campaign is about McCain, the Republicans will lose. Badly.