McCain: Can't catch a break?
Posted: Thursday, July 24, 2008 9:19 AM by Mark Murray
Using the fact that McCain's oil rig event had to be cancelled due to Hurricane Dolly, the Washington Post takes a look at the fact that if it wasn't for bad luck, McCain wouldn't have any luck at all. “It seemed like a great way to counter Obamamania. Sen. John McCain would board a helicopter in New Orleans today, skim quickly over the Gulf of Mexico and land on an oil rig -- a made-for-TV moment to highlight his call for offshore drilling, an issue that Republicans believe will be a big winner in November.”
Then came Hurricane Dolly, a Category 2 storm that made a helicopter ride impossible. And then, improbably, a 600-foot oil tanker collided with a barge on the Mississippi River, creating a 12-mile oil slick and causing diesel fumes to waft over the city's French Quarter. The trip was off. In this campaign, it seems, McCain just can't catch a break.”
VIDEO: A Race for the White House panel discusses whether John McCain is starting to lose his cool when attacking Barack Obama.
The
Boston Globe front pages McCain's "deficit" with young voters. "McCain's campaign, lagging far behind Obama among young voters, is trying to catch up. It will soon roll out new MySpace-style social networking features on its website -- which at the moment has special sections for women, veterans, and even lawyers, but not young people. It is also increasing its youth grass-roots organizing across the country and honing a new message aimed at young voters - 'service to a cause greater than your own self-interest' -- designed to dovetail with the 71-year-old's biography. Still, McCain is late to the game."
And an interesting point: "Ronald Reagan proved that a conservative with the right message and outreach strategy can win over the vast majority of younger voters -- even if he is old enough to be their grandfather. Exit polls showed that voters 24 and under chose Reagan over his Democratic rival, Walter Mondale, by 20 percentage points in the 1984 landslide. Many in the vanguard of the Reagan Revolution went on to become the party's next generation of leaders - and some fill the ranks of McCain's campaign."
Here’s a
graphic showing the disparity.
The St. Louis Post-Dispatch merges its local story of interest -- the sale of Anheuser-Busch -- with McCain and Cindy's dealings with the brewery. "McCain's campaign is unwilling to directly address questions flowing from InBev's purchase of Anheuser-Busch Cos. in light of his wife, Cindy's, ownership of a large Anheuser-Busch distributorship in Arizona, Hensley and Co."
"A veterans group critical of the war in Iraq accuses John McCain of wanting to occupy Iraq indefinitely, against the wishes of the country's leaders, in an ad that will air later this week. The group, VoteVets.org, calls attention to Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki's desire for a troop withdrawal timetable. The group will spend $100,000 to run the ad on the MSNBC and CNN cable channels from Friday through the middle of next week."
The New York Times notes that Arizona isn’t necessarily a slam-dunk for McCain.
