McCain: Gunga Galunga
Posted: Friday, July 25, 2008 9:14 AM by Mark Murray
Filed Under:
2008, McCain
McCain meets with the Dalai Lama today in Colorado.
And with that visit, here’s a classic from Caddyshack (hat tip to NBC’s Bill Hatfield):
Check out this admission in Charles Krauthammer's lead: "In a stunning upset, Barack Obama this week won the Iraq primary."
The New York Times on McCain’s tough week: "Campaign advisers to Mr. McCain say that the mood is not good at headquarters in Arlington, Va., and that the week got off to a bad start when Mr. McCain was photographed in a golf cart with the 84-year-old former President George Bush in the resort town of Kennebunkport, Me. It was the same day that pictures of Mr. Obama in sleek sunglasses alongside Gen. David H. Petraeus in a helicopter in Iraq were beamed all over the world.”
VIDEO: More of Sen. John McCain's interview with NBC's Kelly O'Donnell.
“But Mark Salter, one of Mr. McCain’s closest advisers, said Thursday over his own bratwurst lunch that he, for one, was not alarmed, and that Mr. McCain had spent the week in battleground states meeting with people who actually vote in American elections. ‘I think he’s getting his message out — go look at some of the local press and the local TV packages,’ Mr. Salter said. “It’s John McCain on energy and the economy.”
The DNC puts out this memo on McCain’s week: “Another week of bad news, bad reviews and campaign chaos for the McCain campaign. The only change: the campaign’s increasingly desperate response. In what has become a recurring theme, McCain’s week was dominated by foreign policy gaffes, misleading attacks, terrible reviews and new polls showing him lagging far behind among key groups of voters. Instead of addressing those challenges, the McCain campaign chose to lash out at the media and launch desperate new attacks. Despite starting his general election campaign by pledging ‘to conduct a respectful campaign’ and run ‘the most positive kind of campaign,’ McCain has resorted to the kind of negative attacks that would make even Karl Rove blush—capped off with McCain himself questioning Senator Obama’s patriotism.”
The RNC responds with its own memo: “Despite the most challenging environment for Republicans in years and an overwhelming advantage in attention paid by the media, Barack Obama remains unable to open the lead against John McCain that many pundits predicted.”
The Boston Globe's Ellen Goodman draws the Vietnam comparison: Gary Hart once said, 'In a way, John is refighting the Vietnam War.' For a long time, the former prisoner of war has believed that Vietnam should have, could have had a different ending. Americans lost the war because they lost their will. He's thought more about the sorry last chapter of that war than its foolish beginning. So, too, his attention on Iraq has been less on the war's origin than on some undefined victorious conclusion. McCain jumped the shark when he accused Obama of wanting to win an election even if it meant losing a war. But even before that intemperate charge, he said something equally damning: 'The fact is, if we had done what Senator Obama wanted to do, we would have lost.' But what if 'we had done what Obama wanted to do' in 2002, when he was a lowly state senator and an opponent of invasion? We wouldn't have roared into this disaster."
