Looking Ahead

By Ron Beasley

McClatchy reports  the conventional wisdom: Big GOP Loses in Congress likely, even if McCain wins.  But does McCain really have a chance of winning?  The latest Gallup Daily tracking poll has them in a virtual dead heat with McCain receiving 46% to Obama's 45%.  But of course McCain has been out of the news while the country watches the Obama/Clinton cat fight.  Frank Rich points out that McCain's biggest problem may be the administration he wants to replace - the most unpopular President in modern history.

Hard as it is for Mr. McCain to run from the Bush policies he supports, it will be far harder to escape from Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney themselves. When Mr. McCain accepted Mr. Bush�s endorsement at the White House in March, he referred three times to the president�s �busy schedule,� as if wishing aloud that the lame-duck incumbent would have no time to appear at, say, get-out-the-vote rallies. Alas, Mr. Bush and company are not going gently into retirement.

Just look at Mr. Rove. Some Democrats are outraged that he is now employed as a pundit by Newsweek and The Wall Street Journal as well as Fox News. Instead of complaining, they should be thrilled that Mr. Rove keeps inviting Republican complacency by constantly locating silver linings in the party�s bad news. His ubiquitous TV presence as a thinly veiled McCain surrogate has the added virtue of wrapping the Republican ticket in a daily and suffocating Bush bearhug, since Mr. Rove is far more synonymous with his former boss than Mr. Obama is with his former pastor.

And it turns out that the straight shooting "Maverick"  is surrounded by hired guns from K Street who represent all manner of dictators and despots that make Reverend Wright and William Ayers look like all Americans.  Steve Soto has a great post up on the K Street gang and how it can be used against McCain.

McCain has already been forced to fire two campaign advisors this week, who were a little too close to dictators and those who would benefit directly from his energy policy at a time when McCain was trying to sound as green as possible. Now he has lost a senior advisor today who when it came out that national finance co-chair Tom Loeffler is a lobbyist for the Saudis, and had cut a sweetheart deal for another lobbyist that causes legal problems for the campaign. Loeffler is now out, but why stop there? McCain�s senior advisor is none other than GOP uber-strategist and bagman Charlie Black, who has a laundry list of reprehensible clients, such as the Reverend Moon, and assorted dictators and authoritarian regimes around the world.

McCain supports keeping Black and long time henchman Rick Davis on his campaign because they have allegedly suspended their lobbying work while working on his campaign. Nice try Straight Talk. Do you really expect such a moronic dodge like that to pass the smell test?

We already know that McCain is using discredited former HP CEO Carly Fiorina as a mouthpiece on economic policy, even though she ran HP into the ground. And he has Reverend John Hagee as a spiritual advisor, even though Hagee justified Hitler�s slaughter of the Jews as a biblical event. So if McCain is so much a whore to the GOP�s lobbyist and disaster capitalism culture that he needed a new policy on lobbyists that if actually enforced would clean out his entire top management team, then let us hope he really wants to run against Obama on judgment and experience. Because McCain is woefully bereft of integrity, and is in no position to question anyone else about judgment once you look at the company he keeps.

And don't forget Iraq.  McCain has made little effort to distance himself from the mess Bush created in Iraq.  With the economy on the front burner it should be pointed out that the economic problems are a direct result of the occupation of Iraq.  That includes gas prices.  As I pointed out the other day  it's not so much that the price of oil has gone up but that the value of the dollar has gone down at least in part because the Bush administration is borrowing three billion dollars a week to finance the occupation. 

If Obama and the Democrats constantly bring up the above points during the campaign the media will not be able to ignore them.  Obama started the general election campaign this weekend in Oregon hardly mentioning Hillary Clinton.  A good start.