Flood Of Endorsements For Obama As McCain Steps Up Ugly, Vicious Robo-Calls

Even newspapers that endorsed George Bush are swinging over to Obama! This morning the Atlanta Journal-Constitution joined almost every big city newspaper in the country-- except, of course, Murdoch's Völkischer Beobachter New York Post-- in endorsing Obama. Mostly they talk about what a great president Obama will make but, like most editorials, they delve into how McCain disqualified himself:

In fact, the competence of McCain’s campaign staff is itself cause to question the candidate’s executive abilities. To some degree, the rigors of creating and running a campaign organization can be a test of the skills needed to create and run an administration. And even many Republicans acknowledge that the McCain campaign has been poorly organized and erratic, lurching from one crisis to another without the sense of a strong hand at the tiller.

Columnist William Kristol, a longtime McCain backer, calls the McCain campaign “close to being out–and–out dysfunctional,” concluding that “its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic.”

And of course, the most unfortunate evidence of that “strategic incoherence and operational incompetence” was McCain’s selection of Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate, a person utterly unprepared for the high post in question.

Even beyond injecting an ugly strain of fascism into mainstream politics via the cynical and dangerous-- many say "unpatriotic"-- Palin selection, McCain's campaign went completely off the rails with his latest deluge of negative robo-calls, annoying millions of Americans in their homes with his swinish distortions and widely rejected erratic claims about Obama's "connection" to the Republican's greatest bugaboo: Terrorism. For people being bothered by these calls, McCain is the terrorist. And it isn't only Democrats who are noticing. Harry Reid is shocked that McCain has stooped to such "scummy" tactics and even Republican rubber stamp-- and close McCain ally-- says McCain's robo-calls "have no place in Maine politics." Wisconsin Governor Jim Doyle told reporters that McCain's tactics are not just outrageous and false, but also a distraction from issues that people really care about like the economy. "We are seeing now in Wisconsin the sort of dying gasps of the McCain campaign. It has really run out of steam on the issues that matter to people. It's pretty obvious now that he doesn't have any ideas about the economy. He knows he's out of ideas and out of time."

Newspapers and television stations across the country have registered disgust with McCain's newest tactics. Brain Mooney hit the nail on the head in yesterday's Boston Globe: "With 17 days until the election, John McCain and his Republican allies are stepping up their character assaults, which paint Barack Obama in television ads, mail, and now, automated phone calls, as a shifty coddler of terrorists. McCain's candidacy has stalled as the nation's economic problems have deepened, and his campaign has increasingly focused on raising questions about Obama's character and background."

Republicans Rain Negative Automated Calls on Voters in Swing States was the NY Times headline.

Voters in at least 10 swing states are receiving hundreds of thousands of automated telephone calls-- uniformly negative and sometimes misleading-- that the Republican Party and the McCain campaign are financing this week as they struggle to keep more states from drifting into the Democratic column. Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee for president, has denounced such phone calls in the past: In the 2000 primaries, Mr. McCain was a target of misleading calls that included innuendo about his family, and he blamed them in part for his loss to George W. Bush. This January, too, in South Carolina, Mr. McCain described the calls against him as "scurrilous stuff," and his campaign set up a "truth squad" to debunk them.

This helps explain the huge disparity between editorial endorsements between the two campaigns-- and the overwhelming rejection of McCain, even by Republican papers.

The Obama-Biden ticket maintains its strong lead in the race for newspaper endorsements, picking up 17 more papers in the past day, including the giant Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune on Friday afternoon, and the Denver Post, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Salt Lake Tribune, Kansas City Star, Southwest News-Herald (Ill.) and Chicago Sun-Times tonight.

This brings his lead over McCain-Palin by this measure to well over 3-1, at 58-16, including most of the major papers that have decided so far. In contrast, John Kerry barely edged George W. Bush in endorsements in 2004, by about 220 to 205.

McCain was endorsed by the Mountain Valley News in Cedaredge, Colorado (circulation 2,000). The circulation of all his endorsements-- primarily because of Murdoch's Post-- is a million and a half. Obama's endorsements will reach over 7 million readers.


UPDATE: McCAIN GETS AN ENDORSEMENT

The nation's most right-wing big city paper, after Murdoch's and "Rev." Moon's vanity projects, is the Dallas Morning News and, as expected, they came out for Grampy McSame... sort of: "Mr. McCain offers the continuity, stability and sense of authority people want, as well as a decisive break from the Bush years."