John, the flailing seems to continue. The Obama team plainly doesn’t know what to do about Sarah Palin or Palin-mania. Today Barack Obama took after Palin:
“She’s a skillful politician. But, you know, when you’ve been taking all these earmarks when it’s convenient, and then suddenly you’re the champion anti-earmark person, that’s not change. Come on! I mean, words mean something, you can’t just make stuff up.”
The subject was a report that she received earmarks for her constituents in Alaska. There are at least four off things about this. First, John McCain never asked for a single earmark and Obama got many worth hundreds of millions,includings ones for his wife’s employer. Why in the world go down this road? Second, Obama invites comparison to Joe Biden on the subject of earmarks and inside the Beltway favoritism. They don’t want to go there. (Mark my words: an unintended benefit of Palin is greater scrutiny of Biden whose lobbyist ties, not to mention his mouth, are a disaster waiting to happen.) Third, perhaps in a fit of jealousy, Obama is insistent on going after the newest political star and his opponent’s VP, thereby lowering himself to fighting with the bottom of his real opponent’s ticket. He forgets that the job of VPs is to punch and his job is to sail above the fray. And finally and not surprisingly, he leaves himself open to the counterattack that he is a man with no record – which came swiftly from the McCain camp:
“Barack Obama has requested the equivalent of one million dollars in new pork barrel spending for every working day he’s been in the U.S Senate, while John McCain has never once asked for an earmark, and Governor Palin has vetoed hundreds of millions in government spending including killing the infamous ‘bridge to nowhere’. Just like so many other issues Barack Obama is all talk, has no record to back it up and isn’t ready to make change.”
Obama’s counterattack on Palin has all the, excuse me, earmarks of a nervous and confused campaign. Rather than say, “how nice for McCain to find a VP with such energy” they are apparently obsessed with knocking her down. I suspect their polling is inducing a measure of panic, and today’s ill-conceived effort is the result.
