More McBullshit:
The Republican National Committee has tapped a GOP media consultant to run an independent expenditure campaign set up to target Barack Obama, according to a source familiar with the plan.
Brad Todd will run the new arm of the RNC, broadcasting ads and sending mailers with committee money.
The new entity is barred by law from any coordination with either McCain’s campaign or the RNC, but some of the cash they use to air the spots will have been raised by the GOP nominee.
Yeah. Independent. Just funded by John McCain and the RNC, but don’t worry- they aren’t coordinating at all (wink wink).
A reminder of John McCain a few weeks ago:
GOP presidential contender John McCain says he can’t control every attack ad aimed at Democrat Barack Obama and fully expects he’ll face a similar barrage, sounding the bell for a raucous general election brawl.
“I can’t be a referee of every spot run on television,” McCain told the Herald in an exclusive interview. “I admire Sen. Obama and his accomplishments, but we all know there are groups who want to attack me.”
Referee. An interesting word choice, which also shows up in this Marc Ambinder story today about the McCain campaign shake-up:
Steve Schmidt takes control of John McCain’s scheduling and messaging operations.
Was this a shake-up? A natural evolution? A scaling up?
Try a combination of the three.
In the year and a half since McCain and Schmidt first got to know each other, the two have grown close, almost like father and son; each very deferential to the other. Schmidt has taught McCain how to be John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate — a different creature from just plain ol’ John McCain. Schmidt is a partisan pugilist. He speaks in pre-fabricated, consumable, sharp morsels. McCain has learned from Schmidt that it’s OK not to be a referre,, that it’s OK not to play the judge, that it’s OK to draw contrasts with your opponents. And McCain, for a variety of reasons, has come to trust Schmidt’s judgment.
In other words, the transfer of authority to Rove hack Steve Schmidt is a clear sign of where Mr. Straight Talk intends to go with his campaign. It is right there in front of you, mainstream media. Right underneath your nose. When the hit pieces come down from all the “independent” groups, will you make the connection? Or will you just lament that poor John McCain can’t control everyone and everything.
Or will you even notice?
Brachiator
Also, I am certain that Limbaugh will try to prove that he is worth every dollar by becoming the mother of all GOP Smear Machines (NYT story):
Dreggas
that sucking/fwapping sound you hear is coming from the special press section of the McCain plane where the press is busilly earning their right to be there.
rawshark
‘hit pieces’? Your inner republican is showing.
JL
John, Where were you four years ago when the same crap was going on. It’s nothing new!!!
Zifnab
Wha… buh? How the fuck is that NOT coordination?
nightjar
Well it’s about time someone taught MCcain how to be Mccain. Maybe now his speeches won’t sound like Mr. Rogers on Qualudes.
D. Mason
Ummm listen up, the deciderator in waiting deciderated it wasn’t so it isn’t. Got it hippie?
ThymeZone
Uh, I don’t understand. I thought the Most Important Thing was whether Obama threw himself on a bonfire in order to save us from telecom immunity in FISA?
If he is the cowardly scum that won’t do that … why do we even care about the craven machinations of the Magoo campaign?
Why do people who spend all their time sawing off their noses to spite their faces suddenly start worrying about whether they have hypoallergenic makeup?
phobos
McCain is now the RNC’s “other” fucked up, soon to be radioactive daddy.
GOP: “Yay! Two Christmases!”.
Warren Terra
I’m sure that the news coverage of this – if any actually happens – will explain how it’s not nearly so bad as Obama forgoing public funding. While, naturally, ignoring McCain’s existing violations of campaign finance law.
On the subject of McCain and fundraising, Ari Berman’s article in the current Nation tells a very interesting story about how McCain’s re-election committee, his “Reform Institute”, and his outgoing campaign manager Davis all shared office space and personnel – and how his friends, including Davis, milked donations from good-government types to the “nonprofit” “Reform Institute” for their personal benefit.
Mark-NC
Certainly they’ll notice – what a silly question. Then they’ll try to figure out how they can help the cause and earn a ride in the front of the jet.
cleek
that’s right: because McCain is a Maverick Reformer. and that means he doesn’t do anything wrong.
Blue Raven
My money would be on “Regurgitate their material with no analysis and underreport any corrections that get released,” but I hate betting on 2-5 odds.
Ted
He was in the throes of wingnut fever. But we certainly don’t begrudge him that, now that he’s a plasma-breathing anti-wingnut. Somewhere around 2005 The Poor Man stirred up some witch’s brew concoction that cured him.
Ted
I think we’re going to have to resign ourselves that although Obama is (so far) not getting Gored by the media, McCain will be treated like the gold they think he is.
I give McCain one thing: he knew going back 15 years or more that if you just sit down and chit-chat with reporters all the time, they will fucking love you for it and tongue-bathe you in their coverage.
Mike P
Somebody better push this to Paul Krugman in time for Friday’s Times (which nobody will read because of the holiday) because I can’t see anyone in the MSM (besides either Dionne or Myerson of the WaPo) mentioning it.
Calouste
SA2SQ: IOKIYAR, and especially IOKIYAMJMWHPOW
JL
So are you suggesting that the reporters are nothing but unpaid prostitutes.
TR
Sorry, but they can’t smell it because they have Saint McCain’s barbecue ribs under their nose.
His sauce is so mavericky!
Ted
No, they’re paid prostitutes in most cases. Constant access to candidates = more interesting stories to write. More interesting stories = more advancement within their companies, which = more money.
cleek
fxt!
Ted
It’s the addition of the lime juice. If a reporter asks him, he’ll tell them that too. Then they can write a story about McCain’s BBQ sauce recipe, instead of writing about hard stuff like his health care “plan”.
JL
Ted, McCain doesn’t have a health care plan. What he has is tax breaks for the healthy and the wealthy.
ThymeZone
It isn’t often that we have to look to Tucker Carlson for sanity, but Ole Tuck today said it plain:
All Americans should thank Barack Obama for exposing the ‘campaign reform’ system for the useless and broken thing that it truly is. Maybe now, he suggested, they’ll get around to building a system that actually works.
daphne
OT, sorry, but I don’t understand why my comments from yesterday were deleted. I had a link that looked ok(I used the button, but the HTML was correct), but immediately after, someone complained about a link. Did I do something wrong?
John Cole
Daphne, the only thing I can think is if you had three links in one comment, and it got dumped into the spam filter. When I woke up this morning, there were 2800 comments, and I just deleted them all rather than waste an hour and a half sifting through them.
Sorry if that is what happened.
The Other Steve
I think it’s interesting the contrast.
Obama winning the nomination makes him the new defacto head of the Democratic Party, and as such some party operations are moving to Chicago.
McCain winning the nomination makes him their new candidate, and as such some McCain campaign operations are moving in as part of the party apparatus. But McCain controls nothing, he is a puppet of the broader party.
Joshua Norton
Now is the summer of our discontent – and of perpetual phony outrage and “how dare you’s” coming in in bursts of 8 minute news cycles. Gotta fill all that dead air somehow.
Joshua Norton
Is it true that McCain asked to where all the records were made during his trip to Columbia?
I’m just askin’….
cleek
This just in: John McCain now denies that he ever went to Columbia; calls on the Obama campaign to stop playing the same old politics by claiming he did.
montysano
Is it just me, or does McCain seem absolutely miserable, as though he realizes he’s made a huge mistake and would really rather be doing something else? He has no sense of fun, no joy, and seems to my eye to be noticeably more frail than a few months back. So, in addition to being a liar/confused, he’s just a fookin’ drag.
daphne
Thanks John — I guess I just got caught in the seine. I understand.
Back on topic — Obama called all this. I think he knew when he chastized MoveOn.
There’s no need for that sort of thing on his side. McCain on the other hand needs this input.
daphne
montysano, he wanted to run with Hillary. That didn’t work out. Now he has to really run.
He had a playbook and funding if he had to run against Hillary. Now, all that isn’t going to work.
Zifnab
McCain has leverage in so far as he can exert it. But Obama is coming into a party that has propped him up as the Great Hope of ’08. McCain comes to his party as the None Of The Above candidate. When George Bush took the nomination in 2000, he set an agenda that wasn’t necessarily the same as that of Trent Lott or Tom DeLay. He moved the party more corporate. A Pat Robertson or Pat Buchanan on the ticket, by contrast, would have taken the party in a more religious direction. I mean, lets face it, the corp-cons have received virtually everything they’ve asked for since ’00, but the evangelicals are still basically sitting high and dry.
McCain is taking the party deeper into the Iraq War, a place that Huckabee or Brownback or even Romney probably wouldn’t have gone. He’s focusing on his war record and leaning heavily on military credentials and support. By contrast, he’s not sucking up to evangelicals nearly as much as a theo-con would. And he’s elevated Lindsey Gram from just another Senator to a prime candidate for VP and McCain’s right hand man.
jake
So he speaks in Doritos. I think I hear the entire 911th Frightened Keyboardists falling in love.
Dennis - SGMM
If, at the age of 71, someone has to teach you how to be yourself then you’re a hopeless, hapless, dickless, piece of human debris.
Delia
I wonder if Schmidt also taught Marc Ambinder how to write short, snappy crap.
Nellcote
from the JedReport:
The loophole works like this: the RNC establishes what it calls an “independent expenditure committee.” (Don’t be fooled by the name, there’s nothing independent about it.) This expenditure committee is a subsidiary of the GOP and McCain can directly raise money for it — up to $28,500 per individual. (He can also raise money for the senatorial and congressional committees, but those funds can’t be used on behalf of his campaign.)
The expenditure committee can spend an unlimited amount of money on ads either for McCain or against Obama — and of course, every last dime of the money will be privately raised.
http://www.jedreport.com/
Jody C
Funny since Schmidt had to be the genius behind the green screen of McCain’s speech.
He did the exact same thing for Schwarzeneger – suddenly he became the ‘green’ candidate. Everything was green.
Hack