CAN DAVID BRODER AND OTHER LOVE STRUCK McCAIN PROPAGANDISTS SAVE HIS DOOMED PRESIDENTIAL BID?

The only substantial difference between the Washington Post's chief political journalist and a John McCain campaign press release writer is that there is no proof that Broder takes any money from McCain. I had to laugh this morning when I detected shock in Broder's column, A Not-So-Solid Republican South. Background: McCain spent last week stumbling from photo-op to photo-op that took him to places Republicans don't ever bother with. In other words, he went to visit working class neighborhoods instead of country clubs for well-off white folks. But "on the same day that Pennsylvanians gave Clinton a victory... voters in Mississippi's 1st Congressional District failed to settle who will fill the seat left vacant when Republican incumbent Roger Wicker was appointed to the Senate." Actually voters in MS-01 gave over half their votes to the two Democrats and between the Democrat, Travis Childers, and Greg Davis, the Republican, who will be in the run-off, the Democrat had 49% and the Republican-- who outspent him by more than double-- had 46%.

Broder points out that "As a mayor and former state representative from the district's most populous county, Davis was the early favorite. He had the endorsements of Gov. Haley Barbour, Sen. Thad Cochran, Wicker and the man Wicker replaced, Trent Lott. Davis also outspent Childers by almost 2 to 1 and pummeled his opponent with a flood of negative ads, emphasizing the standard GOP menu of social issues and adding a vivid recital of alleged scandals in Childers's nursing home business."

Childers talked about the policies promulgated by Bush-- and rubber stamped by McCain-- that have resulted in staggering inflation (certainly at the gas pump, even if not in Broder's columns), the reality of catastrophic unemployment, and, of course, the endless Republican Party war in the Middle East. As Broder points out, the last special election resulted in a shock for the GOP and a shock for McCain, when McCain's candidate Jim Oberweis was beaten by a lackluster and previously unknown Democrat for the exurban seat vacated by Denny Hastert in Illinois. "The message to Republicans," Broder advises his boy McCain, "could not be more plain: At a time when the public has soured on President Bush and the GOP, the old appeals are just not enough. To have a chance, Republican candidates have to expand their reach and reframe their message." For some reason, he doesn't mention that they also need to go back into history and change their voting records. McCain's couldn't be clearer. He was on the wrong side... of everything.

Still, Broder sees hope for his candidate. He senses McCain has "grasped that warning. Over the past week, as he toured the South from Selma, Ala., to Little Rock, he clearly was signaling a shift from the traditional GOP way of courting Dixie voters." Although McCain fought for over a decade to sabotage the Martin Luther King national holiday, Broder assumes most Americans-- if not most African-Americans-- don't have enough of an attention span to remember that McCain was consistently on the wrong side of that issue. "In Selma, McCain praised the African Americans who, more than four decades ago, were clubbed and tear-gassed by Alabama state troopers at the start of their anti-segregation protest march to Montgomery. He vowed, in their memory, to bring his campaign-- and the publicity it attracts-- to the "forgotten places" of America, and to help the families in those communities if he becomes president." Those places have only been "forgotten" by McCain's party and not by the people who live there. Broder neglects to mention-- unlike the Wall Street Journal-- that almost everyone who came out to greet McCain at these stops was white-- and rich. "The first rally of the week, here in the heart of central Alabama’s Black Belt, attracted a crowd of about 75 people. And although Selma is 70% black, the small gathering was almost exclusively white. Although a third of the town lives below the poverty line, the people in attendance looked affluent." Broder is hoping that by making ritual denunciations of the poor schnook who fronted the regime-- and the policies-- he has supported, he can hoodwink people into thinking he represents some kind of change.

At other stops, including the Kentucky hamlet where Lyndon Johnson launched the War on Poverty and in New Orleans's hurricane-obliterated Lower Ninth Ward, McCain condemned the performance of the Bush administration and offered his own free-market ideas for creating more jobs, improved schools and better health care.

...But what is incontestable is the fact that McCain sees the need for Republicans to reach beyond their past comfort level and engage the many Americans who have every reason to doubt they are anywhere on the GOP agenda. To many of those struggling to survive, who are accustomed to being ignored, if not exploited, the Bush administration's blindness to the plight of the residents of New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina hit is all too typical of the Republicans' mind-set.

Relying on the same old right-wing messages cost the Republicans heavily in 2006 and lost them Hastert's seat this year. Roger Wicker's may be the next "safe" Republican bastion sacrificed by that blindness. John McCain does not want to find himself on the same list.

Broder is the dean of the blinkered Beltway media establishment that will never recognize that their boy McCain is very much a part of that right-wing neo-Confederate Republican Party that makes their skin crawl. The NY Times' Frank Rich doesn't carry the same baggage (McCain's) that Broder carries. His column today points out that McCain was the big political loser last week.

First of all, the message the mainstream media missed in Pennsylvania was not how the bickering Democrats have destroyed their chances to win the presidency in November-- which is relentlessly pushed by right-wing propagandists and endlessly repeated by empty-headed talking heads on CNN, CBS, NBC and ABC-- but how Pennsylvania voters have reiterated that any Democrat is preferable to another 4 years of Bush (i.e.- a McCain presidency).

...27 percent of Republican primary voters didn’t just tell pollsters they would defect from their party’s standard-bearer; they went to the polls, gas prices be damned, to vote against Mr. McCain. Though ignored by every channel I surfed, there actually was a G.O.P. primary on Tuesday, open only to registered Republicans. And while it was superfluous in determining that party’s nominee, 220,000 Pennsylvania Republicans (out of their total turnout of 807,000) were moved to cast ballots for Mike Huckabee or, more numerously, Ron Paul. That’s more voters than the margin (215,000) that separated Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama.

Those antiwar Paul voters are all potential defectors to the Democrats in November. Mr. Huckabee’s religious conservatives, who rejected Mr. McCain throughout the primary season, might also bolt or stay home. Given that the Democratic ticket beat Bush-Cheney in Pennsylvania by 205,000 votes in 2000 and 144,000 votes in 2004, these are 220,000 voters the G.O.P. can ill-afford to lose. Especially since there are now a million more registered Democrats than Republicans in Pennsylvania. (These figures don’t even include independents, who couldn’t vote in either primary on Tuesday and have been migrating toward the Democrats since 2006.)

For such a bitterly divided party, the Democrats hardly show signs of clinical depression. The last debate, however dumb, had the most viewers of any so far. The rise in turnout and new voters is all on the Democratic side. Even before its deathbed transfusion of new donations, the Clinton campaign trounced the McCain campaign in fund-raising by 2.5 to 1. (The Obama-McCain ratio is 3 to 1.)

Frank's reporting about the McCain photo-ops among the "poor folk" isn't blinkered by the same constraints that makes Broder worthless as a journalist when it comes to covering anything McCain-related. His analysis of McCain's attempts to "reach out" to Alabama voters was not based on wet dreams of a President McCain, the ways Broder's was.

The “action” the candidate outlined in the text of his speeches may strike many voters as running the gamut from inaction to inertia. Mr. McCain vowed that he would not “roll out a long list of policy initiatives.” (He can’t, given his long list of tax cuts.) He said he would not bring back lost jobs, lost wages or lost houses. But, as the Birmingham News reported, this stand against government bailouts for struggling Americans didn’t prevent his campaign from helping itself to free labor underwritten by taxpayers: inmates from a local jail were recruited to set up tables and chairs for a private fund-raiser.

The Bush Economic Miracle-- even more so than the Bush foreign policy agenda-- has been completely rubber stamped by John W. McCain. As the economy continues to deteriorate McCain-- and vulnerable Republican incumbents like Norm Coleman, Susan Collins, John Cornyn, James Inhofe, John Sununu, etc-- will find it more and more difficult to run away from their own voting records and from their own complicity in Bush's disastrous presidency. And meanwhile, voters will be watching more and more statements of fact from the DNC, like this one:




UPDATE: McCAIN LOSES NEVADA GOP CONVENTION

The far right's presumptive nominee couldn't keep the Nevada state Republican Party convention from disbanding in confusion as a majority of delegates proved to be loyal to Ron Paul, rather than McCain. The Party establishment closed down the whole shebbang and will probably reconvene in Guantanamo or someplace else where the GOP can keep everything buttoned down and under control. So, as of now, Nevada has no delegates to the Hate Fest in Minneapolis.