Just Another Day on the Campaign Trail

It's a race to the bottom - to see which political party can show itself to be more out of touch and engage in self-defeating actions.

You've got McCain adviser Carly Fiorina wondering about Gov. Palin's ability to lead a multinational corporation. It's a valid question, but one that could be made of Palin, McCain, Obama, or Biden as all four have minimal experience in corporate leadership. I still wonder how Fiorina was able to find a job after nearly destroying Hewett Packard, but when you know people, I guess it's pretty easy to land on your feet.

Another McCain adviser decided to get too cute by half and claim that Sen. McCain was behind inventing the BlackBerry. Nice. It's not as bad a gaffe as Al Gore himself declaring that he invented the Internet, but it's close.

McCain also appears to be flipping and flopping on the utility of regulations (or more regulations in the financial services industries. I'd like to remind folks that Sarbanes-Oxley didn't exactly help matters, but it spawned a whole new cottage industry of financial services to conform to the new additional regulations.

But the cake for today (in the Marie Antoinette sense) has to belong to the Obama campaign, which is busy partying in Los Angeles at a fundraiser among the Hollywood elite. Obama's people know this looks bad, even as the investment houses and brokerages and banks are staring at layoffs and bankruptcies, which explains why they're trying to ban cameras from seeing who's involved and the lavishness of the event.

Obama likes for people to think that he's raised most of his money from the little guy, but the facts show otherwise.
Donations of $200 or more made up 55% of his overall donations and he needs these kinds of fundraisers just to keep up with the McCain campaign, which opted to use federal funds rather than have to spend the bulk of his time fundraising for his own campaign. It also means that he can spend time helping out other candidates, plus can use Obama's latest fundraising efforts in Hollywood to great effect in places like Ohio. McCain knows that he can't win in California, but Ohio is up in the air, and people don't like the condescension of Obama, who says one thing to one group - his rich fat-cats, and then says something completely different to the hoi polloi.

He needs to raise incredible amounts of money because his campaign is burning through the money raised even faster. The Obama campaign burn rate is so bad that he has no money to help out the DNC help fellow Democrats get elected. He spurned Sen. Reid's call to assist other Democrats seeking (re)election to the Senate. There's no fiscal responsibility within the Obama campaign, which is bloated with hundreds of advisers and paid staff, which should be a signal to anyone paying attention that Obama will not have any fiscal discipline when it comes to taxpayer money either.

Speaking of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, he's completely and utterly clueless about what to do with the market meltdown and credit crisis. This is the crank who has held up the nation's energy policy for years by preventing nuclear power development, to say nothing of offshore oil drilling or any other usage of power originating in the US.

Reid's partner in crime, Rep. Nancy Pelosi doesn't know where natural gas comes from, and yet she's pushing a bogus drilling plan that will not actually allow for the drilling for natural gas or oil offshore.

That's not Pelosi's crisis de jour, which comes in the form of Rep. Charles Rangel. Rangel's tax evasion and ethical mess needs to go away and Pelosi doesn't have a clue or the power to take action without fracturing her party caucus. So, the criminal gets to continue writing tax laws for the rest of us, and he only occasionally pays his taxes.

Then, you've got the Obama campaign's treatment of reporter Amir Taheri, who exposed that Obama's last trip to Iraq included Obama engaging in foreign policy to advance his own political career by pressing the Iraqis to delay accepting any deal with the Bush Administration until after the elections, is now getting pressured from the Obama campaign. Actually, the Obama people are engaging in a smear campaign.

When Obama's people don't like what you have to say, they try to shut you up. They've attempted the same thing when people, like reporter Stanley Kurtz, started rooting through the Chicago Annenberg Challenge files, wondering just what Obama did for them, and what kind of relationship Obama had with the Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers (who had no problem entering Chicago politics seamlessly, which could explain why Obama has no reason to think that Ayers was toxic). Obama's people tried to shout down Kurtz and David Freddoso on a major Midwest radio station, even though everything that Kurtz and Freddoso has found is factually accurate - albeit unkind to Obama and his so-called experience. The Obama camp was also hoping that the Department of Justice would investigate those looking into Obama's ties to Ayers. The DoJ refused to do any such thing.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin notes the Obama campaign and Democrats were busy trying to paint Gov. Palin as a book burner (or banner) by claiming that she fired a librarian for not kowtowing to her desires. They want everyone to ignore that that it was Democrats like John Kerry, who sought to get books banned because they showed Kerry in an unflattering light, and that the Obama camp is basically recycling the same kinds of attacks on individuals who write or say bad things about the Obama campaign.

However, the most egregious story from the campaign trail today has to be the fact that someone hacked into Gov. Palin's personal Yahoo! email account and then published it. Gawker then turned around and published the images and law enforcement is scrambling to figure out who was responsible. RS McCain has more, including the fact that the AP is still carrying Obama's water for him by wondering whether the emails raise questions of Palin's impropriety, instead of sticking to the federal crimes committed by the hackers into her account.

So, while both parties are out of touch, both are extremely well versed in the practice of throwing mud. Lots of it. And with that mud sometimes comes highly questionable actions and even illegal conduct.