Yeah, He’s A Liar

The Washington Post headline is not as strong as I might like, but it says what needs saying: McCain Charge Against Obama Lacks Evidence.

For four days, Sen. John McCain and his allies have accused Sen. Barack Obama of snubbing wounded soldiers by canceling a visit to a military hospital because he could not take reporters with him, despite no evidence that the charge is true.

And the WaPo is not alone — Time Magazine’s Karen Tumulty also notes that the McCain folks made up their accusation, as does (believe it or not) Andrea Mitchell, who on multiple MSNBC programs has pretty clearly stated that the McCain ad is utterly false:

Comment Rescue: The Political Place of Statewide Blogs?

Steve Newton writes in the Beating Castle Someday thread:

First, what is the proper use of the blogosphere in statewide politics. Dean, Ron Paul, Obama, and even Hillary made successful use of the blogs, primarily to sign up supporters and raise funds on a nationwide scale. But when you shrink the scale to DE I don’t think there are actually enough people on the blogosphere for them to operate that way.
Example: there were about seventy or eighty people involved in the Ron Paul meet-ups. Once that fad passed, so did they. They weren’t converts to the blogs, they were people sucked in by a particular candidate/cause, who gave money and stuck around while it was novel. Within the state I don’t think–even on the liberal Democrat side, where the blogs arguably have the most effect anywhere in the spectrum–we’ve reached the point where bloggers can be effective fundraisers.

The thing is that while the money race gets a lot of attention and publicity, looking at on-line political activism as just blogging (or commenting) or fundraising fails to recognize there are other (sometimes more) valuable aspects of the successful political sites and that is their social networking aspects. Bringing together a large and disparate group of people, giving them a basic mission, letting them make decisions on goals and how to get there and providing tools for them to execute was what made DFA a lot of fun to be a part of and is what Obama’s campaign has made work at almost every level. (DFA was hugely inspirational too — lots of activists and candidates got really launched here.) In fact, I think that Obama has been so good at this that you do see folks discussing his campaign as a bottom-up run organization, when that is awfully far from the truth.

Campaigning for Vice President Biden

Two weeks ago, on Face the Nation, Joe Biden tells the world he’d say Yes if asked by Barack Obama to be his VP:

“If the presidential nominee thought I could help him win, am I going to say to the first African-American candidate about to make history in the world that, ‘No, I will not help you out like you want me to?'” Biden said. “Of course I’ll say yes.”

Now, I still think Biden could be a great VP choice, but suspect that he’s something of a long shot. If one of the reasons Obama is looking to run a 50 state campaign is to make sure he helps as many downticket Dems as possible, it seems reasonable that his VP committee would be looking for someone who could credibly carry the flag in 2016. Biden would be in his 70’s then, about the age that McCain is now and it is tough to figure how that might play.

But someone is a huge fan of candidate VP Biden. Huge enough of a fan to produce a few You Tube videos to try to sell the Obama/Biden Team:

Opting Out Is Good

Wingnuts everywhere are having one of their synchronized Major League Snits over the fact that Obama has (rightly) opted out of the presidential public financing system.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Snsnqbq_OCo[/youtube]