Biden’s gaffe
“Barack Obama’s choice of Joe Biden as his running mate prompted a small wave of warnings about Biden’s propensity for gaffes. But no one imagined even in a worse-case scenario such a spectacular bomb as telling donors Sunday to ’gird your loins’ because a young President Obama will be tested by an international crisis just like young President John Kennedy was,” New York Post columnist Kirsten Powers writes.
“Scary? You betcha! But somehow, not front-page news,” the writer said.
“Again the media showed their incredible bias by giving scattered coverage of Biden’s statements.
“There were a few exceptions. On MSNBC’s ’Morning Joe,’ co-host Mika Brzezinski flipped incredulously through the papers, expressing shock at the lack of coverage of Biden’s remarks. Guest Dan Rather admitted that if [Republican vice presidential nominee Sarah] Palin had said it, the media would be going nuts.
“So what gives?
“The stock answer is: ’It’s just Biden being Biden.’ We all know how smart he is about foreign policy, so it’s not the same as when Sarah Palin says something that seems off.
“Yet, when Biden asserted incorrectly in the vice-presidential debate that the United States ’drove Hezbollah out of Lebanon,’ nobody in the U.S. media shrieked. (It was, however, covered with derision in the Middle East.) Or when he confused his history by claiming FDR calmed the nation during the Depression by going on TV, the press didn’t take it as evidence that he’s clueless.
“And Biden is the foreign-policy gravitas on the Democratic ticket, so his comments are actually even more disconcerting.”
Powell and GOP
“Colin Powell attributed his endorsement of Barack Obama on ’Meet the Press’ Sunday not just to the unreadiness of Sarah Palin to serve as president, but also to John McCain’s reaction to the financial crisis, the general rightward tilt of the GOP and comments anonymous senior Republican officials privately made in recent months about Mr. Obama’s faith,” Brendan Miniter writes at www.opinionjournal.com.
“In fact, Mr. Powell’s estrangement from the GOP predates the McCain campaign and goes back to his speech on Feb. 5, 2003, making the case in the United Nations for war against Iraq,” Mr. Miniter said.
“The best reporting on this turning point was done by Karen DeYoung, an associate editor at The Washington Post. In a lengthy article published two years ago, she recounted how at one point Dick Cheney poked Mr. Powell in the chest and told him: ’You’ve got high poll ratings; you can afford to lose a few points.’
“The rest is history: In the months after the invasion, when no stockpiled [weapons of mass destruction] were found in Iraq, Mr. Powell grew disenchanted with the White House and offered at least two dissenting public statements about WMD that drew a rebuke (including calls from Condoleezza Rice asking him how he was going to clean up the mess his comments created).
“When a special prosecutor was appointed to look into who leaked the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame, Mr. Powell never stepped forward with the leaker’s name, even though he knew all along it was his own deputy, Richard Armitage. Instead, Mr. Powell allowed the special prosecutor to spend months questioning White House staffers and journalists, eventually leading to the indictment of Cheney aide Lewis Libby for obstruction and perjury.
“Shortly after [President] Bush won re-election in 2004, Mr. Powell resigned and has spent much of the past year making noises about endorsing Mr. Obama, including praising the speech the Democratic presidential candidate gave on race in Philadelphia and defending his intention of holding presidential-level talks with Iran. When asked about Mr. Powell’s endorsement, John McCain said [Tuesday] it ’doesn’t come as a surprise.’ Given the history, what’s surprising is that it took Mr. Powell so long to leave the GOP.”
Forget the ads
Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann, the outspoken Minnesota freshman who created a political maelstrom last week by calling Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama’s patriotism into question, received more bad news Tuesday when the National Republican Congressional Committee pulled its television advertising campaign for the first-term incumbent, a top Republican official said.
The official wouldn’t say how much the ad buy was worth.
Mrs. Bachmann, while a guest on MSNBC’s “Hardball” on Friday, said Mr. Obama “may have anti-American views” and that “people that Barack Obama has been associating with are anti-American, by and large.”
On Tuesday, Mrs. Bachmann retreated from her statements, saying, “I made a misstatement. I said a comment that I would take back,” the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports.
But the newspaper said Mrs. Bachmann also accused “Hardball” host Chris Matthews of coaxing her to utter her comments.
“I had never seen his show before,” she said. “I probably should have taken a look at what the show was like. … A trap was laid, but I stepped into it.”
The gaffe has threatened to derail a campaign that already was facing a serious challenge from former Blaine mayor and state Transportation Commissioner Elwyn Tinklenberg. Many political analysts now say the race is too close to call.
Crowd inflation
“I only sometimes write about crowd size on this blog,” reporter Christina Bellantoni writes at www.washingtontimes.com.
“It’s a good barometer for enthusiasm, and big crowds help campaigns generate lovely optics, but it’s hard to know the actual number of people who stream into an event,” Ms. Bellantoni said.
“The Obama campaign provides traveling press with crowd counts along with a verifier (usually a police official) and the person’s phone number.
“(The McCain campaign got in trouble last month for vastly inflating crowd counts and not giving verifiers.)
“The campaign told reporters Tuesday the Miami rally had ’30,000+ inside with people lined up outside still trying to get in.’
“So I was surprised to hear Michelle Obama, in a video that was posted Wednesday morning but removed by the campaign sometime before 2 p.m., tell supporters she had just introduced her husband ’to a crowd of 50,000 here in the city.’
“’It’s just phenomenal,’ she said in the get-out-the-vote Web video.
“Thinking maybe 20,000 people had been turned away, I called the verifier sent by the campaign the day before. He told me the count was indeed 30,000 inside and a ’roughly 3,000 or 4,000 that didn’t make it in.’”
• Greg Pierce can be reached at 202/636-3285 or gpierce@washingtontimes.com.
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