Solving the Palin Problem

I don’t have all the details, but I understand angry Republicans are working feverishly to solve their “Palin problem”.

They were ecstatic when Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin first burst onto the scene as Sen. John McCain’s surprise choice to be his running mate. She was gracious, charming and “hot”.

Married to the “first Dude” with three kids named Willow, Trig and Track, the media ate up her life style. On her way to work she could shoot a moose and fire a librarian for not banning books.

In those first giddy days of cheering crowds and words by Teleprompter, no one seemed to worry that her qualifications to be a “heartbeat away from the presidency” rivaled those of Mayberry’s Barney Fife.

It was only after her interviews with Charley Gibson and Katie Couric, hysterically reproduced by Palin look-alike Tiny Fey on Saturday Night Live, that they put her in the Witness Protection Program.

She has become such an embarrassment that many Republicans are demanding she be dropped from the ticket. Conservative columnist Kathleen Parker wrote in National Review Online that if Palin were a man, “we’d all be guffawing.” Parker told how she watches Palin interviews “with held breath” her finger poised over the mute button in case it gets too painful. Calling the candidate “clearly out of her league” she wrote “if BS were currency, Palin could bail out Wall Street herself.”

What to do? The fact that Tina Fey is a dead-ringer could be the answer to the GOP dilemma. The idea is to keep her bubbly, charismatic presence on the ticket while not keeping her. Why not replace her with politically-savvy…Tina Fey?

That’s the deal they’re working on.

Republicans have so much as stake in this election they can give Fey just about anything she wants to stand-in for Palin through the election and perhaps the first six months in office.

Palin would replace Fey on 30 Rock but since that’s a scripted show and she’s an accomplished TV performer, NBC might be willing to risk it. Whether the “first Dude” replaces Alex Baldwin is just one of the details to be worked out. As anyone who has ever viewed 30 Rock knows, writers would have no trouble creating roles for Willow, Trig and Track.

Fey, a University of Virginia graduate, is not only a SAG Award-winning writer but a smart businesswoman up to the task of dealing with that burned out building known as the Bush economy. She created and produces 30 Rock that was NBC’s biggest winner in the recent Emmys.

Writing political satire as Fey has done for the past 10 years requires knowledge and understanding of the issues—something that totally eludes Palin. Bringing that quality to the McCain campaign would allow Kathleen Parker and other worried Republicans to loosen the grip on their TV remotes and view with pride, not horror, as their candidate responds to media interviews.

Like I say, they’re still working out the details.

Hillary Voters Know that Palin is a WINO

The religious right-wing extremists who run the GOP have never liked Sen. John McCain—they consider him a RINO (Republican in Name Only).

So putting party ahead of country, McCain named an unknown, unqualified, self-described “hockey mom” with a Barney Fife resume to be a “heartbeat away from the presidency”.

As a Pentecostal who supports teaching creationism in the schools, Palin is from the farthest fringe of the fundamentalist wing of the GOP.

She has the religious right ecstatic. James Dobson, head of the radio-based ministry Focus on the Family, said he never could vote for McCain but Palin has changed all that. “I’ve not been so excited about a political candidate since Ronald Reagan.”

The cynical McCain not only expects Gov. Sarah Palin to rouse sleeping evangelicals, but to attract “disenchanted” Hillary Clinton supporters.

Hillary’s 18 million voters are a lot smarter than that.

Just as McCain is a RINO to his Republican base, Hillary voters know that on all the issues important to women, Sarah Palin is a WINO (Woman in Name Only).

Palin is dead wrong on every issue important to women, such as equal pay, health care, guns, choice, judicial appointments, stem-cell research, the war and protecting our environment, to mention a few.

From a wealthy rural state, Palin is totally out of touch with the issues that vex the American mainstream.

McCain boasts that Palin has “balanced budgets”. Big deal. Unlike governors in the lower 48 states where the failed Bush economy has forced them to make painful cuts in critical public services, balancing a budget in resources-rich Alaska means sending every resident a dividend check.

Palin charmed the media with her gun-shooting exploits. She once shot a moose, probably on the quiet streets of “downtown” Wasilla where she served as a part-time mayor. Wasilla doesn’t have too many Bloods or Crips or concern over assault weapons that full-time mayors must deal with in places like New York and Philadelphia and Los Angeles.

Striving for a better, fairer America and appealing to the best that is in us, Hillary voters made history when they put 18 million cracks in the glass ceiling.

The McCain campaign is counting on a WINO to give us four more years of Bush.

Time for Tuck

One of John McCain’s Arizona constituents is Dick Tuck.

Remember him? Tuck is the guy who made negative campaigning fun. His favorite victim was President Nixon. During one of Tricky Dick’s “whistle-stop” train tours, Tuck wore a brakeman’s uniform and signaled the engineer to start moving the train in the middle of Nixon’s speech. At a Nixon rally in L.A.’s Chinatown, Tuck put up a “Welcome Nixon” banner that in Chinese read “What about the Hughes loan?”, a reference to a scandalous loan Howard Hughes had made to Nixon’s brother. None of Nixon’s staff could read Chinese so the banner stayed up as a backdrop throughout Nixon’s speech. At Nixon campaign indoor events, Tuck posing as a fire marshal would offer reporters a miniscule count for attendance.

Before it was over Nixon and GOP strategists were muttering oaths and looking anxiously over their shoulders and around corners for the next Tuck attack on their carefully orchestrated campaign.

While Tuck could be worrisome and infuriating, he wasn’t lethal or malicious. Even Nixon supporters found themselves smiling at his antics. Later, Tuck’s roguish rapier wit gave way to the far more effective bludgeoning style of negative campaigning. When the Willie Horton ad appeared in 1988, it spelled the end for both Dukakis and Tuck.

Bur now, with John McCain as the Republican candidate, maybe it’s time for Tuck to come back. Who better than Tuck – now living in Tucson--to prick the hypocrisy of the “Straight Talk Express”? Who better than Tuck to get under McCain’s thin-skin, to bring to the boiling point that legendary McCain temper?

Admittedly, there are problems. Tuck’s demented schemes that tormented Nixon were raucously reported because the media didn’t like Nixon. Today’s mainstream press adores McCain. Also, today’s political skullduggery is conducted more on the Internet than at campaign events.

In the 1960s after the day’s political rally, reporters gathered in the most prominent local hotel bar to regale each other with Tuck’s latest escapade. Reporters don’t drink anymore. No longer is there a Jack Germond holding court with his midnight musings of candidate foibles and consultant mischief that helped educate us all.

Now we have the no-accountability of 527 “swift-boating” campaigns that tarnish the reputation of a decorated Vietnam War hero and convince a wide swath of gullible voters that Barack Obama is the Muslim Manchuria candidate.

No sensible campaign can deal with that.

Which is why we need Tuck.

Wake me when it is over

Even as his approval rating sinks toward single digits, President Bush insists that future historians will have a more positive view. I wouldn’t count on it. One thing that may cloud their thinking is the fiscal as well as emotional hangover of the Bush war in Iraq. Evidence shows that Bush not only misled the country into an unnecessary war but put the enormous cost of the war on a credit card for future generations to pay—which includes those historians who will be evaluating his two disastrous terms in the Oval Office.

On thing sure to puzzle those historians is how in the Congress impeached a President for lying about sex and failed to impeach Bush who violated our Constitution so many times in so many ways that even the Supremes that put him in office are rebuking him.

We should all be grateful that former Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich had the guts to put on the record seven years of Bush deceptions and skullduggery and call for his impeachment. In a five-hour floor speech, Dennis let it all hang out. As the Indianapolis Star reported, “you cannot find a more complete and compelling indictment of the Bush administration.”

In all, Kucinich laid out 35 articles of impeachment, ranging from Article III: “Misleading the American people and members of Congress to believe Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, so as to manufacture a false case for war” to Article XVI that gives sordid details of Iraq contracting, how the Bush administration “recklessly wasted public funds on contracts awarded to close associates, including companies guilty of defrauding the government in the past, contracts awarded without competitive bidding, ‘cost-plus’ contracts designed to encourage cost overruns and contracts not requiring satisfactory completion of the work.” Oh yeah—those chosen to oversee the contracts, said Kucinich, were “their business partners.”

Kucinich based his indictment of the Bush record on the government’s own documentation of wrongdoing.

Naturally, neither the Congress nor the news media paid much attention to Kucinich, causing even Fox News to wonder why. Constitutional law expert Jonathan Turley says that America’s founders “would have been astonished by the absolute passivity, if not the collusion, of the Democrats in protecting President Bush from impeachment.

Leaving that for future historians to mull over, what about this:

I can understand it when the airlines start charging passengers for each pretzel and bag because we know they’re going bankrupt. But when you see gas prices racing toward 5 bucks a gallon, how do you square that with the oil companies making billions in profits? If we didn’t have two oil men in the White House, the thought of “nationalization” of the industry might occur so that the government could ease the pain at the pump and even have a few bucks left over to repair potholes in the Interstates.

Winning the Working Class Vote

Democratic primaries in Kentucky and West Virginia have pundits punditing that Barack Obama can’t win the working class vote. But that’s when his opponent is Hillary Clinton. What if he’s taking on John McCain?

The Charleston Gazette tells about a “preposterous statement” McCain made when he traveled to one of the poorest areas of east Kentucky in April. Standing where Lyndon Johnson announced the War on Poverty in 1964, McCain declared poverty programs “do not work.” That surprised the people of Martin County where between 1969 and 1979 the poverty rate dropped from 56% to less than 25%.

The Gazette also noted that on the day McCain was in Kentucky, he said he opposed a Senate bill to give equal pay to women.

It’s clear that if elected McCain will continue the economic policies of George W. Bush, with more tax breaks for the wealthy and the back of his hand to everyone else. His tax cutting proposals for corporations would cost about $400 billion a year. To make up for the lost revenue, he plans to reduce the growth of Medicare.

This is McSame, staying the course.

When Bush took office in 2001, budget surpluses of $5.6 trillion were projected over the coming decade. Stan Collender, author of The Guide to the Federal Budget, writes that Bush pledged “to eliminate the national debt by the end of the decade because that’s what Bill Clinton did as his term was ending. The new Bush administration had to look at least as fiscally conservative as the Democratic White House it was succeeding.”

What we got instead was a misguided, unnecessary, never-ending war in Iraq sucking money out of every other government need. After Bush leaves office the debt held by the public will be close to $6 trillion, an 80% increase over what it was when he first became president.

Collender notes that the biggest problem will be that the federal government will be committed to paying about $200 billion a year in interest on the debt!

That’s money that would have been available to help fund Medicare, repair our crumbling infrastructure and create jobs that working people so desperately need.

So much for McCain winning the working class vote in November.

Can't Anybody Here Play this Game?

Our hearts go out to the distraught Republican leadership after losing three in a row special elections that were held in GOP strongholds. How the mighty have fallen. It wasn’t too long ago that Karl Rove was crowing about a permanent Republican majority. In the ashes of recent losses, their elderly statesmen compare the party label to dog food that people won’t buy.

Just how bad is the GOP image? Party pollster Fran Luntz tells the Weekly Standard: “It used to be that Republicans won on economic and values and foreign policy issues. Democrats won on quality of life. Now Democrats are winning on everything.”

The Democratic primaries are generating millions of new voters while a stream of defectors cause more anguish for the GOP. Not since 1932 has the party been in such trouble.

What to do? In a fit of desperation, party leaders put their battered heads together and came up with a new slogan, fittingly copied from a drug maker’s anti-depressant pill. That probably won’t do the trick.

I feel so badly for these poor folks that I have a suggestion that might help. Why don’t they play on voters’ compassion? When I see the mighty reduced to rubble this way, I think of how Casey Stengel went from the all-winning New York Yankees to manager of the deplorable New York Mets. As terrible as the expansion Mets were, fans packed the old Polo Grounds to see them play. Thanks to the way Casey presented his team to the media, the Mets won the hearts of New York and were heralded everywhere as “lovable losers”.

Pay attention, John Boehner, here’s how Casey did it:

First, you’ve got a Presidential nominee who is the oldest in our history and while Democrats will be too polite to draw voter attention to it voters are sure to notice. Shortly after Casey Stengel led the New York Yankees to five straight World Series titles, he was fired because he was believed to be too old to manage. When he came out of retirement to manage the Mets, he made light of his age: “It’s a great honor to be joining the Knickerbockers”, a New York baseball team that last played around the time of the Civil War.

After losing Denny Hastert’s seat and should-be “locks” in Louisiana and Mississippi, GOP brass put the blame on “bad” candidates. That’s not how Casey would have explained it. Here is his positive spin: “I’ve been in this game a hundred years, but I see new ways to lose I never knew existed before.” As for “bad” candidates, Casey told reporters about two of his rookies: “See that fellow over there? He’s 20 years old. In 10 years he has a chance to be a star. Now, that fellow over there, he’s 20 too. In 10 years he has a chance to be 30.”

Ready for the Fall

The greatest myth perpetrated this election cycle is that the nasty, bitter Democratic presidential campaign will leave the party divided this fall. Sure, supporters of the losing candidate will be angry and disappointed and may sulk a bit, but any notion they will go for Sen. John McCain in November is Republican fantasyland.

When the Democrats leave Denver in August, their presidential nominee will have a double-digit lead and the “battle” over lapel pins and Bosnian snipers won’t even be a blip on the voter radar honed in on Iraq, the economy and eight years of Republicans Gone Wild.

No matter how many times McCain says “my friends,” he will have few of them among general election voters when they give unbridled attention to his position on issues they care about.

Soaring gas prices, stagnant wages and the housing collapse have our economy in tatters, and McCain concedes this isn’t his strong suit even though “I’ve got Greenspan’s book.” Our failing economy is one of the casualties of the Iraq War that McCain continues to strongly support. At long last, the media are beginning to ask some hard questions about the cost of the war.

Ron Brownstein of National Journal poses this question for McCain: “If the war really is crucial to America’s security, shouldn’t today’s taxpayers finance it?” As has been pointed out numerous times, Iraq is the first major war that this country has fought by transferring the entire cost to future generations through government debt. President
Bush never proposed raising taxes to pay for the war. Worse, in 2003 he substantially cut taxes, unprecedented in war time.

Expect more of the same from a McCain administration. McCain has already endorsed tax cuts that would cost more than $300 billion a year, including reduction of the corporate income tax from 34% to 25%. And, of course, he wants to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, another $110 billion.

A constant worry to families across America is our deteriorating health care system where rising costs leave nearly 50 million with no insurance coverage and millions more underinsured. The current system cherry-picks the healthy and tells those with chronic diseases to get lost. When a journalist asked if the Senator’s skin cancer might make him sympathetic to the idea of requiring that insurance companies offer policies to those with such conditions, McCain responded: ‘That would be mandating what the free enterprise system does.” (He is referring of course to a system that does indeed allow insurance companies to choose the healthiest people and refuse coverage to those who are sick.)

McCain told the Boston Globe he would give people with preexisting conditions “an extra tax credit” to help pay for insurance funded by savings in the Medicaid program. The Columbia Journalism Review made this observation: Where does McCain think the Medicaid savings will come from? Does he mean cutting benefits to poor people who depend on Medicaid for health care? Or from middle-class families who rely on Medicaid to pay for nursing home care?

Real issues like these keep people awake at night, and only the Democrats offer real solutions. I think I’m really going to enjoy the fall campaign.