New media meme: candidate flip-flops no longer matter

In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign decided early on in the race exactly how they’d define John Kerry: “flip-flopper.” The charge was quickly parroted by the media, and reinforced the Republican campaign’s narrative: in the first post-9/11 election, in a time of war, we don’t want someone who’s inconsistent.

Four years later, it’s the Republican who has reversed course on literally dozens of issues. And now, the media has decided that the dreaded flip-flops really don’t matter after all.

Time’s Michael Scherer sounds bored with all the talk about policy reversals.

[T]he legacy of Bush/Cheney ‘04 remains, and Democrats have apparently learned their lesson. The core message of the Obama/DNC campaign is that McCain has flip-flopped on all his old maverick image. The key message of the McCain/RNC campaign is that Obama is an opportunist who will flip-flop when it helps him politically. And so it goes. Every day, flip-flop charges bang up against the political press like moths on a screen door. And we let some of them in, sometimes with the unexamined conceit that any shift in position is a window into the candidate’s lack of character, toughness or principle.

Andrew Sullivan agrees that flip-flops no longer mean much.

It’s often a completely idiotic way to analyze a candidate. Sometimes a flip-flop is a sign of real maturity in a politician responding to new events or facts. And sometimes, rigid consistency is disastrous.

The Washington Post’s Ruth Marcus argued today that these policy reversals may actually be a good quality in a candidate, a sign of “welcome pragmatism,” and “evidence of open-mindedness.” Marcus encouraged us to “not flip out too much about flip-flops.”

CNN’s Wolf Blitzer came to a similar conclusion a couple of weeks ago, “There’s nothing wrong with people changing their minds. We all do it – all the time.”

What a remarkable coincidence. When Kerry is charged as a flip-flopper, policy reversals become the central focus of the presidential campaign. When McCain is exposed as having reversed course dozens of times, leading media voices announce, “On second thought, all this flip-flop talk is kind of annoying.”
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Earlier this year, in a nationally televised debate, Tim Russert confronted John McCain with some of his inconvenient admissions: “You have said repeatedly, ‘I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues.’” McCain was incredulous and dismissive, “Actually, I don’t know where you got that quote from.”

Soon after, McCain appeared on “Meet the Press,” and Russert returned to the subject and responded to McCain’s slight — “I got [the quote] from John McCain” — and highlighted McCain’s record of admissions about economic ignorance. “OK,” McCain said, no longer able to deny reality, “Let me tell you what I was trying to say and what I meant.”

This morning, in a disconcerting example of dishonesty, McCain went back to pretending his quote collection doesn’t exist.

For those who can’t watch clips online, ABC’s Robin Roberts prefaced a question about economics, telling McCain, “You have admitted that you’re not exactly an expert when it comes to the economy and many have said…” At that point, McCain interrupted: “I have not. I have not. Actually, I have not. I said that I am stronger on national security issues because of all the time I spent in the military. I’m very strong on the economy. I understand it.”

I know it’s best to be cautious about throwing around words like “lie,” but McCain has been confronted with his own remarks on multiple occasions. He knows what he’s admitted, and has been asked to explain his comments. What Roberts said was obviously and demonstrably true — McCain has admitted that he’s “not exactly an expert when it comes to the economy.”

Why would McCain appear on national television and say something he knows to be false? Given his emphasis, especially lately, on honesty in the campaign, why take the risk by lying like this?
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Today’s installment of campaign-related news items that wouldn’t generate a post of their own, but may be of interest to political observers:

* If the McCain campaign wants to do more to distance McCain from Bush, it probably shouldn’t send out pictures of McCain and Bush standing side by side.

* McCain blasted Barack Obama yesterday for not having voted to confirm Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito. When McCain learned that Joe Lieberman had also voted against Alito’s confirmation, McCain decided it was time to change the subject. Imagine that.

* Was Obama hinting about his VP intentions yesterday? “I love Kathleen Sebelius,” Obama said. “I think she is as talented a public official as there is right now. Integrity. Competence. She can work with all people of all walks of life, but I promised that I am not going to say anything about my vice president until I actually introduce my vice president.”

* Why is McCain accepting major financial support from an accused sponsor of terrorists? “The co-host of a recent top-dollar fundraiser for Sen. John McCain oversaw the payment of roughly $1.7 million to a Colombian paramilitary group that is today designated a terrorist organization by the United States.”

* It looks like reports of Obama’s difficulties with Latino voters have been greatly exaggerated: “Hispanic registered voters’ support for Barack Obama for president remained consistent and strong in June, with Obama leading John McCain by 59% to 29% among this group.”
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Anyone with even a passing familiarity with this year’s presidential campaign is no doubt familiar with the smears directed at Barack Obama. His detractors have gone after him — and in multiple instances, simply made up trash — on any number of subjects, including his faith, his family, and his patriotism. What’s worse, there’s evidence that these smears have taken root in the minds of some voters, and the attacks may very well undermine Obama’s chances on Election Day.

But The New Republic’s James Kirchick, in a rather odd piece, insists we have it backwards. Republicans, Kirchick argues, haven’t been smearing Obama, but rather, it’s Democrats who’ve been smearing John McCain.

Thus far, no one with any serious affiliation to John McCain’s campaign has resorted to the alleged “scare” tactics in which Republicans — and, apparently, only Republicans — have been perfecting since Richard Nixon was first elected. On the contrary, if the past few months have showed us anything, it’s that the Obama campaign is the one dealing in crude smears.

From there, Kirchick points to a variety of instances in which “high-ranking Obama supporters” — Sen. John Rockefeller, Wesley Clark, Rand Beers, and Sen. Tom Harkin — have questioned whether McCain’s military experience necessarily qualifies McCain for the presidency. Kirchick believes they’re guilty of making “outlandish remarks” and “morally offensive … smears.”

Kirchick then reinterprets the Democrats’ remarks, arguing that the underlying allegation is that “McCain is an unhinged, mentally unstable warmonger who would deploy soldiers capriciously because he hasn’t truly experienced the horrors of ground battle.” He then suggests, without proof, that these “smears” may have been “coordinated by the Obama campaign.”

It’s hard to even know where to start.
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In recent weeks we’ve seen some controversies, most notably surrounding Sens. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) and Kent Conrad (D-N.D), in which certain politicians received dubious mortgage discounts, thanks to personal connections.

Based on the evidence, it looks like this is far more benign.

Shortly after joining the U.S. Senate and while enjoying a surge in income, Barack Obama bought a $1.65 million restored Georgian mansion in an upscale Chicago neighborhood. To finance the purchase, he secured a $1.32 million loan from Northern Trust in Illinois.

The freshman Democratic senator received a discount. He locked in an interest rate of 5.625 percent on the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage, below the average for such loans at the time in Chicago. The loan was unusually large, known in banker lingo as a “super super jumbo.” Obama paid no origination fee or discount points, as some consumers do to reduce their interest rates.

Compared with the average terms offered at the time in Chicago, Obama’s rate could have saved him more than $300 per month.

The Washington Post clearly wants to characterize this as a serious story. It even adds a superfluous non sequitur, noting that the former Fannie Mae chief executive briefly served on Obama’s VP search committee in June, as if that has some relevance to the mortgage rate Obama received in 2005.

In this case, there’s less here than meets the eye. Nearly four years ago, Obama received a 30-year fixed rate of 5.625%. The average at the time was 5.93%. As such, it was a good deal, but not a sweetheart deal. Obama had received competing offers from another lender, and as a result, got a more competitive rate. As Oliver Willis, who used to work for a mortgage company, put it, “[T]he idea that the lender gives a few fractions of a percent to a borrower of a jumbo loan is about as common as breathing air.”

As controversies go, this is pretty thin. Obama got a legitimate mortgage, at a competitive rate. He didn’t try to conceal anything, and even posted the records related to his house purchase on his website.
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The congressional campaign committees for both major parties create target lists of key, competitive campaigns. The idea, of course, is to find the defining contests that the parties see as vital to the strength and size of their caucuses.

The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) has its “Red to Blue” initiative. The National Republican Congressional Committee (NRCC) launched a “Regain Our Majority Program,” or “ROMP.” As of now, there 236 Democrats and 199 Republicans in the House, and if either side is going to improve their numbers, it’s going to start with these targets.

But you can learn a lot about the political landscape by taking a closer look at the parties’ lists. The DCCC’s “Red to Blue,” as the name implies, features 38 House campaigns in districts currently held by Republicans. The goal, obviously, is for Dems to build on their House majority.

So, Republicans are thinking along the same lines? Not so much.

A leading GOPer in the House, whip Roy Blunt, sent out a release [yesterday] touting a new fundraising effort on behalf of Republican candidates. The program has this rather optimistic title: “Regain Our Majority Program (ROMP) II”

But in the same release, it also contains a list of all the GOP House candidates that will benefit from this program designed to regain the GOP’s majority. […]

Get this — only two of the names on this list are challengers running to unseat House Dems — [Chris Hackett (PA-10)] and [Pete Olson (TX-22)]. The rest are incumbents, with the exception of [Steve Stivers (OH-15)], who’s running for an open GOP-held seat.

But to regain their majority the GOP would need to knock off 19 House Dems. So this program to win back the majority is approximately 17 candidates short of what they need to accomplish its stated goal!

By any reasonable measure, that’s pretty embarrassing. Dems are on offense, eyeing seats currently held by Republicans, and the GOP is on defense, targeting districts they already have.

Given this, “Regain Our Majority Program” is almost certainly the wrong name. I suppose, “We Hope To Avoid Getting Embarrassed Program” doesn’t have a catchy acronym.
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It’s not that U.S. interrogators were winging it with detainees at Guantanamo Bay, without any guidelines or suggested tactics; it’s that the interrogators were given the wrong model to follow. Trainers ended up using, “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War.”

The military trainers who came to Guantanamo Bay in December 2002 based an entire interrogation class on a chart showing the effects of “coercive management techniques” for possible use on prisoners, including “sleep deprivation,” “prolonged constraint,” and “exposure.”

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.

The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

As Matt Yglesias responded, “I’ve seen lots of commentary on the revelation that Bush administration torture techniques have been modeled on the work of the ChiComs but not much specific focus on the fact that the main purpose of these Chinese torture techniques was to elicit false confessions…. [T]o literally rip your techniques off from a study called ‘Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions from Air Force Prisoners of War’ requires some level of obliviousness I wasn’t aware of.”

Indeed, it makes that much more difficult to deny the use of torture when you’re relying on a guide of abusive tactics used by the Chinese during the Korean War — the very tactics the U.S. has always labeled “torture.”

And in the broader context, let’s not forget that Bush administration policy relied on Soviet-style secret prisons, and then utilized Chinese torture techniques, used to elicit false confessions.

How patriotic.
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Ask the typical Democratic consultant to describe John McCain, and you’ll almost certainly hear the same three words: “Bush’s third term.” McCain’s campaign is clearly aware of the problem, and has taken half-hearted steps to argue that the senator may agree with Bush on almost everything, but not literally everything.

Has McCain’s pushback been effective? It doesn’t look like it.

A recent USA Today/Gallup poll finds about two in three Americans concerned that John McCain would pursue policies as president that are too similar to what George W. Bush has pursued. Nearly half — 49% — say they are “very concerned” about this.

Indeed, an additional 19% identified themselves as “somewhat concerned” about McCain pursuing policies that are “too similar” to Bush’s agenda, for a combined 68% of Americans who aren’t entirely comfortable with the notion of McCain being an agent of much-needed change.

There’s an ideological gap here, but a wide swath of the country is nevertheless worried that McCain will simply be more of the same. Among self-indentified independents, 67% are concerned that McCain is too similar to Bush (47% are very concerned). Even among Republicans, 45% are concerned about McCain offering the country a third Bush term.

The Gallup report added, “Although McCain remains competitive in head-to-head matchups with Obama, the poll suggests that McCain may have more work to do to distance himself from Bush.”

That would be an easier task were it not for his record, and his admission, “[O]n the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I’ve been totally in agreement and support of President Bush.”
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Today’s edition of quick hits.

* A sales crash: “June auto sales plunged, according to reports from the nation’s major automakers, as Americans shunned pickups and SUVs in the face of record gas prices and growing concerns about the weak economy. Despite high gas prices, sales of many fuel efficient car models also fell sharply in the month as automakers were caught without the supply of vehicles that people suddenly wanted to buy.”

* How bad was the stock market in June? It was “the worst June for the S&P 500 and the Dow industrials since the Great Depression.” Wow.

* For the second month in a row, more U.S. and NATO troops were killed in Afghanistan than in Iraq.

* This is the kind of headline you get when you go to the well once too many times: “McCain Camp on Military Jabs: It’s a Conspiracy.”

* For what it’s worth, Sen. Jim Webb’s (D-Va.) office doesn’t know why McCain thinks Webb attacked him: “Senator Webb has never, and would never, demean the service of anyone who has stepped forward to serve our country. To the contrary, he was calling on those on all sides of the debate to refrain from implying that their political views are representative of the military writ large.” Oh, don’t go confusing McCain with facts again.

* On a related note, it looks as if a McCain surrogate has started attacking Wesley Clark’s military service. I’d expect a few days of a massive whine-a-thon, were Democrats not already grown-ups.

* Jonah Goldberg, surprisingly enough, apparently isn’t convinced that the United States is great.
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John McCain spoke to the National Sheriffs’ Association conference today, and suggested the Supreme Court might be less conservative if Barack Obama gets elected.

Ever so briefly, Senator John McCain delivered a back-handed compliment to Senator Barack Obama here today for Mr. Obama’s disagreement last week with a Supreme Court decision that ruled out the death penalty for child rape. But then Mr. McCain got to the point and darkly warned that similar decisions might be forthcoming if Mr. Obama wins the White House.

“It’s a peculiar kind of moral evolution that disregards the democratic process, and inures solely to the benefit of child rapists,” Mr. McCain told the annual conference of the National Sheriffs’ Association. “It was such a jarring decision from the Court that my opponent, Senator Obama, immediately and to his credit expressed his disagreement.”

Mr. McCain quickly moved on. “My opponent may not care for this particular decision,” he said, “but it was exactly the kind of opinion we could expect from an Obama Court.”

I suppose I see the point of the argument here. If Obama’s elected, he’ll nominate left-leaning jurists to the Supreme Court, and those justices may in turn limit application of the death penalty, whether Obama thinks it might apply to a heinous crime or not.

As McCain asked the National Sheriffs’ Association, “Why is it that the majority [in the death penalty ruling] includes the same justices he usually holds out as the models for future nominations?”

This is interesting for a few reasons.
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The WSJ had an interesting item yesterday on the Obama campaign’s registration efforts, and the number of voters Obama’s team can and will bring into the process this year, most notably in the South, where Democrats haven’t carried a single state since 1996.

On a hot afternoon in this southern U.S. town, Tom Wolf, a field organizer for Barack Obama, delivered the fruits of hundreds of hours of staff effort — 130 voter-registration applications — to the Wake County Board of Elections office. They had been filled out by a handful of Republican-leaners, a few dozen young adults and scores of older African-Americans who stopped voting years ago.

Those older blacks were the focus for Mr. Wolf, a foot soldier in one of the most unconventional aspects of the Illinois senator’s presidential campaign. Sen. Obama reckons that a surge in black voters will put in play long-solid Republican regions across the country, lifting Democratic candidates for all offices, from the White House to Congress to state legislatures. “I guarantee you African-American turnout, if I’m the nominee, goes up 30% around the country, minimum,” Mr. Obama said at a campaign event this past winter.

This focus on new voters is unusual. Most presidential campaigns concentrate on firing up their base or wooing independents. Voter-registration drives are treated as an afterthought, overshadowed by fund raisers and door-to-door canvassing. […]

For Sen. Obama, the registration initiative is at the fore, especially since the main reason for low black turnout is low registration. The U.S. Census Bureau says that while registered black voters turn out at a rate generally even with white counterparts, qualified African-Americans register at a lower rate nationally — 68% to 75% for whites. The gap is particularly stark in the battleground state of Florida, where only 53% of eligible blacks were registered in 2004, compared with 71% of whites. In Virginia, it was 58% to 72%.

So, to borrow a cliche, Obama intends to “grow the pie,” instead of just slicing the old one differently. And looking at the landscape, there appears to be a real opportunity for Obama to get hundreds of thousand of voters, especially in the South, into the process.

Will it work?
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With the assistance of a press corps willing to play along, the McCain campaign scored a hit yesterday, feigning outrage and manufacturing a controversy out of Wesley Clark’s questions on McCain’s presidential qualifications. It involved twisting the words of a four-star general a bit, and a pliant press corps willing to redefine the word “attack,” but the McCain/GOP spin machine was in high dudgeon and it got precisely the result it was looking for. Fine.

But sometimes, once a campaign has had some success with a given stunt, it gets greedy, and returns to the same stunt, hoping for another cheap score. This is just such an occasion.

Last night, Sen. Jim Webb (D-Va.) was on MSNBC, and was asked about the right’s flap over Clark. Webb thought this was much ado about nothing, suggested McCain “calm down,” and said it’s time to “get the politics out of the military.”

And in response, the McCain campaign is, once again, outraged by this “attack” on McCain’s military service. McCain spokesperson Brian Rogers told Greg Sargent:

“If you didn’t think this was a coordinated attack on John McCain’s credentials before, it’s clear now that it is. Barack Obama’s surrogates are telling the McCain campaign to “calm down” about attacks on his military record? Seriously? Now somehow Wes Clark’s attacks are John McCain’s fault? It’s absurd. If Barack Obama can’t control his own surrogate operation, how can he be trusted to run the country?”

I find it hard to imagine that Rogers even believes this nonsense himself, highlighting why it’s a mistake to keep going to the same well over and again. Not only did Clark not coordinate with Obama — the most controversial remark in Clark’s interview originated with Bob Schieffer, not the Obama campaign — but Webb didn’t attack McCain.

The whole response comes across as whining, as if the Big Bad Democrats aren’t being nice enough because they question McCain’s qualifications and believe McCain shouldn’t get hysterical over the subject.
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