It’s getting hard to keep track of all the embarrassing things to happen to the McCain campaign. Here are a few from today.
- Joe McCain (John’s brother) agrees with Obama on bin Laden and Pakistan. Here’s Joe, in the same mortifying appearance in which he referred to northern Virginia as “communist”:
“I do know that if he finds out where Osama is and I think we probably know, although I don’t know personally — he’s just gonna go up to that country and say, `you have a murderer of thousands of Americans. I hope you help us get him. If not, just stand back, because we’re coming in after him.’ And that man will be brought to justice.”
You’ll recall that McCain already had to disavow similar comments by Sarah Palin.
- The lawyer deputized by Team McCain to handle the new focus on the Keating Five scandal, John Dowd, committed quite the gaffe on a conference call with reporters today. He claimed that McCain knew nothing about the fact that his wife and her father had invested in a strip mall (Fountain Square) owned by Charles Keating. Dowd today: “It was part of the inquiry, but it did not — John was unconnected to that and unaware of it at the time, and did not participate in it.” But McCain himself testified otherwise at the time. Here’s the video. And, awkwardly, Mr. Dowd himself is the lawyer examining McCain.
- This, by the way, is the same John Dowd who said in 2007 (in backing Fred Thompson):
“I am very sorry to see what’s happened to John,” Dowd said in an interview. “I don’t think his campaign is being well run. It’s been over-managed. He blew through $8 1/2 million. It’s a difficult thing to leave a friend and go to another friend. But we lost the John McCain I knew.”
- It’s also the same John Dowd who told reporters today that the whole Keating investigation was a “classic political smear-job” against McCain. Even though McCain himself wrote in his 2002 memoir that the Keating business was “the worst mistake of my life.” So, apparently, McCain was among those smearing McCain. In other news, black is white and up is down.
- Meanwhile, the polling gets worse and worse for McCain. Today is the first day in which polls consist entirely of data taken post-VP debate. They all show Obama’s lead continues to expand — and TPM’s composite shows that Obama has cracked 50%.
Gallup: Obama 50%, McCain 42%, with a ±2% margin of error, compared to a 50%-43% Obama lead yesterday.
Rasmussen: Obama 52%, McCain 44%, with a ±2% margin of error, compared to a 51%-44% Obama lead yesterday. This is Obama’s biggest lead ever in the Rasmussen poll.
Hotline/Diageo: Obama 47%, McCain 41%, with a ±3.2% margin of error, compared to a 47%-41% Obama lead yesterday.
Research 2000: Obama 52, McCain 40%, with a ±3% margin of error, unchanged from yesterday.
Adding these polls together and weighting them by the square roots of their sample sizes, Obama is ahead 50.5%-42.1%.
- And this is just funny:
My opponent’s touchiness every time he is questioned about his record should make us only more concerned…. Who is the real Barack Obama? But ask such questions and all you get in response is another barrage of angry insults.
Touchy? Angry? LOL! Said Mr. Pot to Mr. Kettle!
