7 Days in America Blog

Obama said he wouldn’t question McCain’s motives or patriotism, but I can: a man who said that Islamic terrorism is the #1 issue of our time has put political tactics above country and constitution by choosing a complete rookie as his VP nominee. Objectively, when you combine Dan Quayle and Chauncey Gardiner, you get Sarah Palin.

Two questions for Senator McCain: do you really think that Sarah Palin is the best Republican in the country to succeed you as president should you be unable to serve – or the best 10, or even the best 100? And does a Palin-Putin summit on nuclear arms worry you at all?

Our A List panel on 7 Days of Bob Shrum, John Podesta and Ron Reagan are underwhelmed by the choice of someone so underqualified. But they also tactically suggest that Democrats hold their fire and instead insist that the media hold her accountable for performing at a presidential level in the campaign so she doesn’t succeed by beating very low expectations, as W did in 2000.

As JFK's closest advisor for 11 years and then the first to prominently yoke Kennedy and Obama, Ted Sorensen's views are politically telling this month in our approach to Denver. But John Edwards' humiliating sex scandal is not for two reasons: it's a failing of person, not party, and John McCain did the same thing -- viz. have an affair while his wife was ailing.

This is not to say that the misconduct of both Johns should be disqualifying for president. If that were true -- and based on the best scholarship -- we wouldn't have had an FDR, IKE, JFK, LBJ or Clinton and we'd today be lionizing Nixon and W as top tier presidents. I recall once debating a religious conservative. Cal Thomas, on a talk show during the Clinton kerfuffle. "What could be worse than lying to your wife?", he said. "Nuclear war" was my reply. That is, looking back, who would we rather have had navigating the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world risked extinction -- a frisky Kennedy or a chaste Bush 43?

McCain has admitted to his misconduct. It hasn't come up in this contest and shouldn't. It should not be THE factor determining someone's vote but rather possibly a factor for those who choose to focus on bad behavior 30 years ago rather than his capacity to be president today.

Hear that, Republican mudslingers? Let us in this context urge rabid family-values Republicans and Atwater-Rove political operatives to stop their moralistic slandering when the shoe's on the other foot. Recall how most of those Hill Republicans hounding Bill Clinton over Monica Lewinsky in 1999-2000 had their own affairs -- Gingrich, Livingston, Hyde. Recall how so many anti-gay conservatives came out of closet later or were throw out.

Obama's "Rolling Thunder Tour" through the Middle East and Europe has likely decisively changed the arc of both the war and McCain's presidential candidacy.

Usually it's only in retrospect that history judges a moment to be a turning point politically, like the day in 1980 that Jimmy Carter's helicopters on a hostage rescue mission crashed in the Iranian desert - and so did his chance for reelection.

But Senator Obama's trip this past week was like a rolling decisive moment, stylistically, substantively and politically. I'd be surprised if years from now we don't look back on these 10 days as when his 4-6 point lead hardened and expanded.

Our conversation with Senate Armed Services Chairman Carl Levin - and Arianna Huffington and David Bender - converged on the conclusion that Obama looked "presidential" and like a commander-in-chief while McCain looked like a biblical Job wandering around from golf carts to supermarket aisles shopping for news and votes. Short of negotiating peace between Shia and Sunni, it's hard to conclude anything other than Barack Obama won the week, if not the election.

First, the contrast between the two candidates couldn't have been more pronounced. One was calm, cool, poised, positive - the other was surly and defensive.

Second, one was vindicated on his Iraq position when Prime Ministers Maliki and Brown agreed with a 16 month timetable for withdrawal - while Bush agreed on a time "horizon" and even McCain told Wolf Blitzer that "16 months was a pretty good timetable."

Two fuses were lit this past week that could eventually explode later in John McCain's campaign -- a housing-banking crisis exposing Republican anti-regulation orthodoxy and the senator's penchant for falsehoods that gives new meaning to Bush III.

First, the modern anti-regulation crusade began officially in 1978 with enactment of Prop-13 in California limiting property taxes and the defeat of the federal Consumer Protection Agency in Congress as "more big government." And then of course Reagan rode this deregulatory movement -- "Government is not the solution... Government is the problem" -- to the White House two years later.

Now cut to 1995 when two events combined to start a counteraction: Speaker Newt Gingrich's unpopular shut-down of the federal government during a budget battle with President Clinton and the attack in Oklahoma City by domestic terrorists who killed people precisely because they were federal workers. Responded Clinton, "I'll never criticize 'bureaucrats' again."