John McCain

Betsey Johnson said she once made out with Anna Nicole Smith because she couldn't resist her post-Trim Spa slimmed-down bod and bullet bra covered in roses. [Vogue UK]

The shoppers of Wal-Mart, J.C. Penney, and Kohl's reportedly favor John McCain over Barack Obama. [WWD]

Victoria Beckham is deeply offended at the allegation that her sister is sneaking her diet pills from the U.K. [SF Gate via The Cut]

David Byrne has designed a shoe-shaped bike rack that has been placed outside Bergdorf Goodman. [NYP]  read more »

The McCain campaign just held a conference call with Rudy Giuliani--recently named the Republican National Convention keynote speaker-- ostensibly to talk about an reported meeting between an Obama adviser, Ambassador Daniel Kurtzer, and Syrian government officials.

It didn't go so well.

At one point during the call, Giuliani seemed to suggest that McCain would be open to picking a pro-choice running mate. A follow-up questioner was subsequently cut off by the McCain campaign.

Earlier in the call, a reporter asking Giuliani about his own association with hostile foreign entities seemed to disappear, mid-query, from the call entirely. (The reporter subsequently said that he was dropped.  read more »

A keynote address by Rudy Giuliani at the Republican National Convention signals John McCain's commitment to winning the moderate and independent voters, according to a former senior adviser to Giuliani.

"The battleground is always in the middle, it's not the party regulars on the left or the right but smack dab in the center," said the adviser, speaking on background. "Yes, Rudy will help with the independents, but he'll also rally the troops by his ability to get the convention rocking and rolling."

The adviser noted that Giuliani, while moderate on social positions, was a favorite of the conservative tax group The Club for Growth.  read more »

Barry Wynn, an important Rudy Giuliani supporter and former Bush campaign finance chair from South Carolina, thinks that Giuliani's selection as the Republican National Convention's keynote speaker is more the result of a close relationship with John McCain than a desire to reach out to independent voters.

"It just says that that John McCain's his own guy and beats to his own drum," said Wynn. "They have been friends for twenty years and somebody is not going to tell John McCain not to have one of his longstanding best friends, who does have a star quality, not to be the keynote speaker.  read more »

The AP reports that Rudy Giuliani will give the keynote at the Republican National Convention next month. In addition to the fact that Giuliani has been a strong supporter of McCain since his own primary campaign fizzled, McCain is close with top Giuliani aide Tony Carbonetti, who has been accompanying the presumed nominee on many of his campaign stops.

Not surprisingly, a column in Sunday’s Washington Post by Deborah Howell, in which the paper’s ombudsman (ombudswoman?) wrote of the considerable disparity in the volume of her paper’s coverage of Barack Obama and John McCain, is causing a stir on the right.

Conservative media watchdog groups like the Media Research Center and NewsBusters have hyped Ms. Howell’s column, particularly her conclusion that the disparity in The Post’s coverage of both candidates “is so wide that it doesn’t look good,” as have numerous conservative cable and talk-radio shows. It’s all further proof, in their minds, that the liberal media is in the tank for Mr.  read more »

The Presidential nominating conventions are now approaching, first the Democrats' and then the Republicans'. The President hangs out at the Olympics, stomps his feet over the Russian invasion of Georgia and then makes another pass at gutting the Endangered Species Act by reducing the time and scientific analysis needed to assess the environmental impact of federal projects. The energy and climate issue have provided some environmental content to this campaign, but the folks running the country still don't see the stake we have in environmental sustainability.

What does an extinct frog have to do with human well-being? What does the environment have to do with economic wealth? Can't our technology solve any environmental problem we make? The short answer, as we learned nearly half a century ago from Rachael Carson and Barry Commoner, is that everything is connected to everything else.  read more »

John McCain isn’t the first presumptive presidential nominee to announce ahead of time when he will announce his running-mate.

Just as speculation over Barack Obama’s imminent V.P. selection reached fever pitch yesterday, McCain’s campaign not coincidentally leaked to the Politico news that the G.O.P. candidate will make his own choice public on August 29 – the day after Obama’s acceptance speech (and McCain’s 72nd birthday). The goal is to shift the focus away from Obama as soon as his speech ends, denying him (in theory, anyway) a post-convention bounce.

Actually, the announcement-of-an-announcement strategy has been used before – by Al Gore in 2000. Lagging behind George W.  read more »

Picture this: It’s after midnight on election night and the familiar red-blue divide that defined the last two presidential elections has reared its head again. Barack Obama has held all of John Kerry’s 2004 states and John McCain has held all of George W. Bush’s – with two exceptions: Iowa and Colorado. One state – Virginia – has yet to go final, and with both candidates just short of the magic 270 electoral vote mark (Obama 268, McCain 257) the Old Dominion is set to pick the next president. Finally, somewhere around two A.M. the networks simultaneously strike up their we-are-about-project-a-state music and call it for…Michael Bloomberg.  read more »

O.K., so this may prove to be one of those flare-ups that’s extinguished and forgotten before anyone really notices, but there’s plenty of chatter in the blogosphere today about the striking similarities between the moving personal anecdote from his Vietnamese captivity that John McCain recounted at Saturday’s Saddleback forum and one that the late Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn told from his gulag days.

Here’s what McCain said on Saturday night, to a question about what his faith in Christ means to him personally:

It was Christmas Day. We were allowed to stand outside of our cell for a few minutes, and those days we were not allowed to see or communicate with each other, although we certainly did.

 read more »

There’s plenty of of noise coming from the right these days, dire warnings to John McCain about the terrible consequences that will befall him if he fails to appease the Republican Party’s base with his VP selection. These voices come in response to McCain’s apparent openness to choosing a pro-choice running mate – possibly Tom Ridge, but more likely Joe Lieberman.

His dilemma calls to mind the one faced by George H. W. Bush 20 years ago. Bush, much like McCain now, was not particularly liked or trusted by the right (although, unlike McCain, he had spent the previous eight years bending over backward to alter this reputation).  read more »

The problem with the post-season in most sports is that one league or conference is often much stronger than the other league or conference. When this happens, the playoffs become anticlimactic, with the actual championship series or game becoming a foregone conclusion once the stronger conference crowns its champion.

A good example of this came in 2004, when the Red Sox and Yankees slugged it out in seven memorable games in the A.L.C.S. They were clearly the two most talented teams in baseball and massive audiences tuned in for each game, knowing that it was the de facto World Series. Which it was.  read more »

There’s really no other way to put it: John McCain stole the show at the Saddleback church.

He was quick, confident, and often funny, even if most of his seemingly off-the-cuff quips are staples of his stump speech. He connected effortlessly with the live church audience, to judge from their loud and sustained ovations, and evidently with the media, which has largely pronounced the event a win for Sen. McCain.

To considerable effect, McCain also mixed heavy doses of patriotic and religious themes, twice invoking, in some detail, his experience as a prisoner in Vietnam. The crowd ate it up.

Barack Obama, by contrast, was treated politely by the crowd, but not much better than that.  read more »

Hillary Clinton must be feeling John McCain's pain. For months and months she battled against Obamamania -- the lofty rhetoric, the swooning girls, the giant crowds and the massive turnout of young people. She tried to mock and belittle his language. (Who can forget the cringe-inducing "Change you can Xerox"?) She tried to raise doubts with the " 3 a.m." ad about Barack Obama's readiness to serve as commander in chief. But in the end she lost. Now McCain is trying his hand, using some of the very same arguments.

His Celebrity ad and a subsequent one dubbed the "Fan Club" go straight at Obama's mass-movement popularity.  read more »

You may have seen that Barack Obama and John McCain will both participate in a presidential forum on Saturday night at an evangelical conference in California. It’s receiving heavy publicity and will be televised live by CNN and MSNBC, but it is not actually a debate.

McCain and Obama will be interviewed separately by Rick Warren, each for one hour. Warren is promising wide-ranging discussions and tough questions but is also stressing that the tone will be civil (perhaps why both candidates were so agreeable to taking part). Actually, the most interesting moment will probably come in the middle of the broadcast, when both McCain and Obama will briefly share the stage – one coming, one going – a scene that should evoke memories of the in-between moments of the back-to-back Democratic and Republican debates in New Hampshire back in January, when ABC's Charlie Gibson invited all of the candidates to mingle together onstage (although Ron Paul ended up standing by himself for much of the time).

NBC’s First Read claims that Joe Lieberman’s chances of landing on the G.O.P. ticket effectively ended yesterday, when the leaders of various social conservative groups reacted with fury to John McCain’s suggestion that a pro-choice stand wouldn’t disqualify any potential running-mate. According to First Read:

That thud you just heard was the Ridge/Lieberman VP trial balloon that social conservative activists quickly popped. They couldn't find reporters fast enough to denounce the prospect of McCain adding a pro-choice pol to his ticket.

I disagree.

First, of course social conservative “leaders” are going to react this way. Their status in the world of Republican politics (i.  read more »

In an interview on Fox News today, Mike Huckabee registered his objection to the idea of Mitt Romney joining this year’s Republican ticket.

“Mitt Romney has had very definite swings of positions— not just one or two little things, but on many of the issues,” Huckabee said.  He later added: “I think that there are better choices for Senator McCain, that would have the approval of values voters.”

Huckabee’s concerns, it’s probably fair to assume, have a lot more to do with 2012 then with 2008. Both Huckabee and Romney saw their reputations enhanced by their campaigns this year, and each now has high name recognition and a sizable following within the G.  read more »

John McCain campaigned in Michigan on Wednesday, which probably makes this a good time to examine just how crucial the state is to his fall prospects. Michigan hasn’t voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, and if McCain doesn’t break that streak it will be very difficult for him to assemble 270 electoral votes.

The basic problem for McCain is that there aren’t many real opportunities for him to expand the electoral map, meaning that the 286 electoral votes that George W. Bush racked up in 2004 essentially represent his ceiling. By contrast, Barack Obama has multiple opportunities to flip over states that voted for Bush in both 2000 and 2004.  read more »

The bottom-line of the rather extensive survey released on Wednesday by the Pew Center for the People and the Press is no different from that of just about every other poll released this summer: a slim (three points in this case) lead for Barack Obama.

But a few of the specific findings of the Pew survey would seem to offer guidance to Obama and John McCain as they make important strategic decisions for the fall.

On the whole, the poll is better news for McCain than it is for Obama, as is any poll that has the race within the margin of error right now (since the expectation at the start of this summer was the Obama would be nursing a healthy lead by mid-August).  read more »

The discovery that John McCain’s remarks on Georgia were derived from Wikipedia, to put it politely, is disturbing and even depressing—but not surprising. Under the tutelage of the neoconservatives, who revealed their superficial understanding of Iraq both before and after the invasion, he favors bellicose grandstanding over strategic thinking. So why delve deeper than a quick Google search?

Worse still, neither he nor his advisers yet grasp how our misadventure in Mesopotamia has diminished American power and prestige. In fact, the Wikipedia episode—an awful embarrassment that would have devastated the presidential campaign of Barack Obama or any other Democrat—revealed an underlying weakness in Senator McCain’s vaunted grasp of foreign policy.  read more »

The energy issue has become central in the presidential campaign and we see little to suggest that either candidate will engage in a real discussion about the real choices we have. The fact is that the era of fossil fuels is coming to an end. There are too many people and too much need for energy for this to continue for very long. How long? More than a decade and less than a century. Why should we care? Because we probably can think of better things to do with petrochemicals than burning them for fuels. Because we shouldn’t be handing this problem to our children to solve.  read more »

A weekend report in the Financial Times stated that Joe Lieberman is being vetted as a potential running-mate by John McCain's campaign and is now on the Arizonan's "short list."

Still, conventional wisdom says this has a snowball's chance in hell of actually happening. Lieberman is pro-choice, still pro-gay rights and votes with the Democrats on more issues than not in the U.S. Senate. How could any Republican nominee, least of all McCain, motivate the conservative base to place him a heartbeat away from the presidency?

Even if this weekend's report actually is an intentional leak from the McCain campaign- a questionable assumption to start with - it could easily be a simple thank you gesture to Lieberman, a staunch and valued McCain ally, and not a real trial balloon.  read more »

Earlier this year, at the Arab League Summit in Damascus, when Muammar Qaddafi’s turn came at the lectern, he launched into a spirited and fiery criticism, a rant, really, directed at his fellow Arabs, specifically on the issue of Palestine and Israel. “Whatever happened to the cause (Palestinian) we had before 1967?” he asked his audience. “Were we lying to ourselves or to the world?” he continued. “How can you say that Israel must return to the pre-1967 borders? Does Palestine consist only of the West Bank and Gaza? If so,” he added with a air of disgust, “it means that the Israelis did not occupy it in 1948.  read more »

Who would look best in a black rubber suit? The candidates will have to duke it out after Entertainment Weekly asked both John McCain and Barack Obama about their pop culture favorites. No surprise that they'd want to take a spin on the Bat bike...

McCain:

He does justice sometimes against insurmountable odds. And he doesn't make his good works known to a lot of people, so a lot of people think he's just a rich playboy.

Obama:

I was always into the Spider-Man/Batman model. The guys who have too many powers, like Superman, that always made me think they weren't really earning their superhero status.

 read more »

Appearing on WNYC's Brian Lehrer Show (hosted today by Amy Eddings), Chuck Schumer praised Barack Obama and said he isn't worried about Obama's lack of progress in the general election polls because he's still an unknown figure to voters.

Schumer said the polls will swing to the Democat "as people get to know Obama--and particularly if he campaigns on issues. " Then he added, "With one caveat: they do have to hit back."

The message behind McCain's "Celeb" ad, Schumer said, was, "He's not one of us, he's a celebrity, he's an elitist".

"That's what they did with John Kerry," Schumer said, adding, "I would have been a little tougher."

Asked if he had any suggestions for Obama's V.P. pick Schumer replied, "Not publicly."

It was pretty clear back when Hillary Clinton first used the line, "I know Senator McCain has a lifetime of experience he will bring to the White House. And Senator Obama has a speech he gave in 2002," that no matter who won the Democratic primary, her praise for McCain would return at some point in the general election.

Here's McCain's new Web ad.

Conventional wisdom holds that members of the House of Representatives, many of them elected by just a sliver of their home state's electorate, are too anonymous, too untested, and just too risky to warrant serious vice-presidential consideration. A running mate, especially with the suffocating media scrutiny that defines politics these days, needs to bring a higher profile and deeper resume to the table.

In many ways, this is true. As anyone who's spent more than a few minutes in the Speaker's Lobby of the U.S. House can attest, the average House backbencher is less suited to and equipped for the national stage than even Dan Quayle was in 1988.  read more »

Democrats are frustrated and Republicans are amazed: Barack Obama is not running away with the presidential race.

This is the presidential election, we have been told, that a Democrat can’t lose. The economy is in decline, with unemployment on the rise, President Bush’s approval ratings in the basement and virtually everyone convinced that America is “on the wrong track.” But the race remains tight, at least according to the polls.

The McCain camp would no doubt like to keep the focus of the coverage where it was for most of last week, on story lines far from the economy. The narratives were the ones they dictated: Obama’s presumptuousness, the success of the surge and the Democrats’ opposition to offshore drilling (which has popularity ratings approximately double that of Bush and Congress combined.  read more »

In bleak news, the three-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina is approaching, which might have you feeling a bit concerned about the future of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast. But don’t worry. The commercial alternative rock bands of the mid-1990s have it covered! Pitchfork reports that a slew of musicians, including R.E.M., Nine Inch Nails, Pearl Jam, the Indigo Girls and—wait for it—311, have signed a letter calling upon Barack Obama and John McCain to attend a Google- and YouTube-sponsored presidential forum in New Orleans on Sept. 18.

"Due to the nation's need for energy and dependable shipping lanes, we are losing a football field's worth of wetlands every 45 minutes to erosion.  read more »

Barack Obama's fund-raising and registration drive has caught the attention of the Republican opposition.

The R.N.C. is sending mail soliciting donations of $100 for a "Two-Month Emergency Pledge" to help John McCain. Saying the next two months will determine the winner of the election, the mail comes with a letter from McCain, who writes "The Obama Democrats have launched a massive 50-state registration drive which will result directly in dramatically increasing Democrat voter turnout on November 4th."

"With enormous fundraising resources at their disposal – including wealthy special interests, Big Labor, and unregulated "527" soft-money groups – they have already registered more than 200,000 new Democrats in Pennsylvania, more than 165,000 in North Carolina, and more than 150,000 in Indiana.  read more »

The Democrats are supposed to own the issue of energy, if only because they've mastered the art of tarring Republicans as the party of Big Oil. It's a caricature that the G.O.P., with its mocking scorn for conservation, addiction to corporate tax cuts and unkickable habit of nominating oil men for national office, has done nothing to refute.

Of course, the Democrats are also (supposedly) the masters of the blown political save, experts at devising new and ever more elaborate means of snatching electoral defeat from the jaws of victory. So it's only fitting that now, just as energy assumes unprecedented prominence in a presidential campaign, they've gone and adopted a maddeningly incomprehensible message that threatens to forfeit the powerful emotional advantage they've enjoyed on the subject for decades.  read more »

Paris Hilton has filmed a mock campaign ad responding to John McCain's references to her in his latest campaign ad. In it, she calls the Republican candidate "the oldest celebrity in the world. [NY Daily News]

Writer Jay McInerney says John Edwards's reported mistress, Rielle Hunter, is "a nice girl"; she was the inspiration for the character of Alison Poole in Mr. McInerney's 1988 novel Story of My Life. [P6]  read more »

This is the week that Barack Obama got sick of the high road.

“And while Senator McCain’s plan won’t save you at the pump anytime soon, I have to say this, it sure has done a lot to raise campaign dollars,” said Mr. Obama, speaking at the Austintown Fitch High School in Youngstown, Ohio, on the morning of Aug. 5. “Senator McCain raised more than one million dollars from the oil industry just last month, just last month, most of which came after he announced his plan for offshore drilling to a room full of oil executives.”

The crowd booed. Mr.  read more »

Touring America’s oil rigs and nuclear plants, John McCain sometimes sounds as if he will produce enough wind to power the nation all by himself. So strongly does his current rhetoric smell of methane, the gas emanating from manure, that he might even qualify for a renewable energy tax incentive.

The former straight talker, who could not help telling the truth, has found the voice of the demagogue within him. As Senator McCain seeks to exploit public anger over the price of gasoline, first with his dubious “gas tax holiday” and now with his campaign for offshore oil drilling, the thoughtful legislator who defied his own party on issues such as global warming and Alaskan oil leasing has been replaced by that much more familiar Congressional figure—a rented mouthpiece for the energy industry.  read more »

YOUNGSTOWN, Ohio -- Speaking now in the Austintown Fitch High School, Barack Obama talked about how John McCain had demanded just a day before to start off shore drilling.

“‘I want to drill here, I want to drill now,’” said Obama, channeling his opponent.

“I don’t know where he was standing. I mean think he was in a building somewhere.” He paused to chuckle with the crowd. “This plan,” he continued, “will not lower prices today -- it won’t lower prices in the next administration.”

“It’s not a real solution,” he added. “It’s a political answer.”

Then he extended his new anti-McCain offensive.  read more »

Over the past weekend we got to hear President Bush, Senator McCain and then Senator Obama all supporting drilling for oil off our coasts. Both Bush and McCain maintain that the way to reduce gasoline prices is to develop more supplies of oil. They argue, and polling shows people believe, that drilling for more oil will lower prices. Although Obama is not crazy about drilling in fragile environments, he's willing to allow some drilling in exchange for a bill that would promote alternative energy.

For a brief moment I admired the artfulness and subtly of Obama's perspective-a little carefully controlled drilling can't do much harm, as long as our policy encourages renewable energy.  read more »

After what was widely recognized as a tough week, Barack Obama's campaign is trying to get back on the offensive, releasing a negative television ad, hosting a morning conference call, and now, in an energy speech, sharply attacking John McCain.

From the prepared comments:

"You won’t hear me say this too often, but I couldn’t agree more with the explanation that Senator McCain offered a few weeks ago. He said, ‘Our dangerous dependence on foreign oil has been thirty years in the making, and was caused by the failure of politicians in Washington to think long-term about the future of the country.  read more »

The Huffington Post's media vertical (don't you love when we talk nerdy to you?) tips us off to a breezy, quote-heavy article ("quoticle"?) about would-be first daughter Meghan McCain in this month's Glamour. Writer E.A. Hanks (who knows a thing or two about having a well-connected father) quotes the feisty, Hills-star-befriending Ms. McCain on her choice in men:

I don't want to be an accessory to a guy's impending political career, and unfortunately I get that a lot. I'm not attracted to guys with political action committees, I'm sorry.... I'm attracted to men whose realities are different [from mine]. You'll get a lot further with me talking about art and music than you will talking about politics.  read more »

Every four years, just as the speculation over potential running mates reaches a fever pitch, contrarian voices speak up to dismiss it all as much ado about nothing. They are wrong.

Take, for example, this Sunday’s Meet the Press. After discussing this year’s usual VP suspects with the shows’ other two panelists, moderator Tom Brokaw turned to Judy Woodruff, cited the example of 1988 – when the Democratic ticket received no tangible Election Day boost from Lloyd Bentsen’s utter dominance of Dan Quayle in the VP matchup – and asked: “In the final analysis, Judy, how much difference does it make?”

Woodruff took the cue.  read more »

Demonstrating the potential perils of making fun of other people's speeches, John McCain has this new Web ad that criticizes Barack Obama for not mentioning any Latin American countries during his Citizen of the World address in Berlin.

The script, sent out by the campaign, includes this line:

"CHYRON: Y Donde Qued Amrica Latina?"

Which I'm pretty sure is not a phrase in any language. (Although the spelling is fine in the actual ad.) What happened, clearly, is that somewhere along the line the accented letters dropped out. A technical issue.

But there's also this:

CHYRON: Maybe He Forget About Us?

Here's the full script, from the release:

Spanish Script For "Barack Obama Olvid Amrica Latina" (WEB 1:00)

CHYRON: El Mundo De Acuerdo A Barack Obama

BARACK OBAMA: Esta noche no les hablo como un candidato para Presidente, sino como un ciudadano; un orgulloso ciudadano de los Estados Unidos y un ciudadano ms del mundo.  read more »

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