Goody two shoes
“Enough with the differences between John McCain and Barack Obama. Let’s talk about what they have in common. And let’s start with their unique ability to create problems where none ought to exist. In this case, the Lobbyist Wars,” Wall Street Journal columnist Kimberley A. Strassel writes.
“Foreign policy, health care, taxes, who cares? What’s any of that compared with the riveting question of who employs what lobbyist, in what capacity, and just how heinous was that lobbyist’s crime? The nominees devoted their first full general-election week to trading accusations over who retained a worse breed of humanity. Mr. McCain’s vice-presidential vetter is a former lobbyist! The co-chairman for the Democrats’ presidential convention is a current lobbyist! The Arizona senator’s campaign manager is a lobbyist on leave! The Illinois senator’s chief strategist is as good as a lobbyist!
“This gotcha game will have no winners, and the candidates can blame themselves. Mr. Goody and Mr. Two Shoes both set the bar early by railing indiscriminately against ’special interests’ and Washington ’insiders,’ which led naturally to the question of why they’d employ such people. The honest answer is that those who know the most about running and funding campaigns have been around and inside Washington a bit. Some even happen to be decent individuals. But don’t expect the candidates to defend them.”
Oil troubles
“For years now,John McCainhas warned of the peril to America in sending $400 billion a year to foreign countries in return for oil. He’s been loud and relentless on the subject - and wise,”Fred Barnes writes at www.weekly standard.com.
“’It’s a national security issue,’ he declared last week at a town-hall meeting in New York City. Much of the money goes to countries that ’do not like us very much,’ he noted. That was McCain’s understated way of saying the beneficiaries include Iran, Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, countries in which anti-American forces find aid and comfort,” Mr. Barnes said.
“So you’d think McCain would favor an unbridled effort to reduce America’s dependence on foreign oil. But he doesn’t. There’s an intellectual and political hole in McCain’s position, a lack of coherence that hurts both his presidential campaign and that of Republican congressional candidates.
“Republicans have seized on public anger over $4 per gallon gasoline and are calling for domestic oil production in federal lands and offshore areas now closed to exploration and drilling. Since polls show the public agrees with them, Republicans believe ’drilling’ - the one-word capsulation of the issue - is their strongest political talking point in 2008. Indeed, it may be their only good domestic issue.
“But they desperately need a champion to carry their message, someone whom the national media cannot ignore. And that should be McCain, the Republican presidential candidate. Except for one thing: He doesn’t go along with their approach in important ways. He sounds, sometimes anyway, like a liberal Democrat or a lobbyist for the environmental movement.”
Obama’s target
Sen. Barack Obama is busy courting religious conservatives, Maureen Callahan writes in the New York Post.
Mr. Obama - despite the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., despite the false Muslim rumors - “has had a far better relationship with the religious right than you might think. The masterstroke comes next week, when the Obama campaign launches The Joshua Generation Project (Sounds both Biblical and sci-fi, no?). Its goal: to solicit, engage, and win the votes of young evangelicals, young Catholics, and ’people of faith,’” the writer said.
“Unsurprisingly, older evangelicals are not thrilled.
“’I don’t want Obama to win,’ saysMike Farris, who says ’the danger’ is in Obama moving the needle slightly enough to do just that. Farris is the founder and chancellor of Patrick Henry College, an evangelical institution that doubles as an incubator for future Republican leaders. He is also the author of a book called ’The Joshua Generation,’ and claims he coined the term five years ago, in a meeting with fellow advocates of home-schooling. He later trademarked it.
“’We have sent the Obama campaign a cease-and-desist letter, and if they don’t cease-and-desist, we will sue them,’ Farris says. ’It’s a kindly letter.’”
Not interested
Former Democratic vice presidential nominee John Edwards said Sunday he would have to “seriously” consider another shot at the job if asked by White House hopeful Sen. Barack Obama.
But the former senator, who unsuccessfully ran for the party’s presidential nomination this year, reaffirmed that he was not actively seeking to be Mr. Obama’s running mate.
“I’d take anything he asks me to think about seriously, but obviously this is something that I’ve done, and it’s not a job I’m seeking,” Mr. Edwards said on ABC’s “This Week.”
Mr. Edwards, who was Democrat John Kerry’s running mate in the 2004 election won by President Bush, has been more emphatic in the past, telling a Spanish newspaper earlier this month, “I already had the privilege of running for vice president in 2004, and I won’t do it again.”
News, straight
Americans dissatisfied with political sound bites are turning to the Internet to get information in a more-direct, less-mediated way, the Associated Press reports, citing a study released Sunday.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project said that nearly 30 percent of adults have used the Internet to read or watch unfiltered campaign material - footage of debates, position papers, announcements and transcripts of speeches.
“They want to see the full-blown campaign event. They want to read the speech from beginning to end,” said Lee Rainie, director of the Pew group. “It’s a push back from the sound-bite culture.”
YouTube and other video sites have become more popular. Thirty-five percent of adults have watched a political video online during the primary season, compared with 13 percent during the entire 2004 presidential race.
The study also found that 10 percent of adults have used online hangouts like Facebook and MySpace for political activity, whether it’s to add a campaign as a friend on their personal-profile pages, discover a friend’s political interests or join an online political group.
The telephone study of 2,251 adults, including 1,553 Internet users, was conducted April 8 to May 11 and has a margin of error of two percentage points.
— Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes.com.
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