An offering of bullshit

Rick Davis extends an olive branch to the Sarah Palin in 2012 faction of Republicans. Of course, the peace offering is pure bullshit: They failed to manage properly the $150,000 expenditure on her clothing.

Look, no one else ever in the history of American politics needed heavy management to make this work. Palin didn't prepare, and the Republicans threw money at it because they knew the fundamental appeal of their VP pick was her appearance, and they needed to package her as well as they could.

And all she brought to Arizona was a fleece top and a pair of skanky sweatpants.

Monkey business

Follow me, said John McCain.

On Sunday, in an interview with CNBC and The New York Times, Mr. McCain responded to a question about Mr. Davis’s role in the advocacy group through 2005 by saying that his campaign manager “has had nothing to do with it since, and I’ll be glad to have his record examined by anybody who wants to look at it.”

McCain must have forgotten Gary Hart's campaign self-immolation twenty years ago.

One of the giant mortgage companies at the heart of the credit crisis paid $15,000 a month from the end of 2005 through last month to a firm owned by Senator John McCain’s campaign manager, according to two people with direct knowledge of the arrangement.

And:

They said they did not recall Mr. Davis’s doing much substantive work for the company in return for the money, other than speak to a political action committee of high-ranking employees in October 2006 on the approaching midterm Congressional elections.

Exactly the kind of payday for who you know, not what you know, that looks to normal non-Washington people totally like bribery.

The cherry on top of the bullshit sundae: McCain has been flaying Obama for ties to the river of dirty debt.

Obama's social network

Americans should be immune to the big media campaigns that pretend to be national conversations about democracy. But they aren't. Not yet.

At the same time, voters are getting harder and harder to reach. Direct mail goes into the recycle bin. Caller ID makes telephones inefficient. Cell phones are impossible to district and then to reach. Newspapers are bleeding readers.

That leaves door-to-door, and no one can run for President by going door to door. Republicans assert this truth this way:

John McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, flatly declares that what got Obama the nomination "is not a general-election strategy" and contends that Obama's operation will be weak against McCain's crossover appeal in such states as Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota and Nevada.

It's true that primary campaigns and general elections are much different animals. Shannon O'Brien ran a great primary campaign for Governor of Massachusetts in 2002 but faltered in the general.

There's new feature of politics since then, though, that the McCain campaign ignores at its peril. Social networks and grassroots organizing are back because they have to be. Republican social networks have mattered before, but the evangelicals are much more divided in 2008 than they were in 2000 and 2004.

On the other hand, social networking tools and principles tested by Deval Patrick in winning the governorship of Massachusetts in 2006 have changed the game. Howard Dean started it, but Patrick brought it to fruition. It's not an accident that much of Obama's infrastructure sounds
like Patrick's.

After all, who would you prefer to hear about politics from - a neighbor you can have an exchange with or a blithering talking head like Chris Matthews? And, I hope, if voters are hearing from their neighbors, they'll stop being taken in by all the bullshit covering our TVs.