Wednesday, July 23, 2008 - Posts
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The National Enquirer said on Tuesday that its reporters tailed John Edwards to the Beverly Hilton, where he was allegedly visiting Rielle Hunter. She’s the woman the tabloid has claimed is the mother of Edwards' "love child."
Major media outlets haven’t picked up the story as of yet, presumably because it doesn’t prove Edwards is the father. All it shows is that the ex-senator met Hunter at a hotel in a room reserved under the name of her friend Bob McGovern (whom the Enquirer claims was there with the baby), entered through the basement and took the elevator up so he wouldn’t be seen, and left at 2:40 a.m., only to be accosted and cornered in the bathroom by reporters.
I’m sure there’s a perfectly plausible explanation. In fact, I can think of several:
Edwards met Hunter, who produced videos for the former presidential candidate’s campaign, to shoot a new "webisode" for the series they started last year. This one was going to be about Edwards accepting Barack Obama’s offer to be his running mate. They had to meet in secret at 2 a.m. because Obama didn’t want the news to leak.
Hunter was planning to sue the Enquirer for defamation, and wanted Edwards, an acclaimed trial lawyer, to represent her.
Edwards wanted to confirm the baby was not his but couldn’t be sure until it started growing hair.
A local charity asked Edwards to meet with a single mother who had no health care and couldn’t earn a living wage. He had no idea it would be this one!
Edwards had come to return Hunter’s sari, which she had left the time he came to return her bomber jacket, which she had left the time he came to return her charm bracelet, which she had left the time he came to return her first edition of Pulp’s His 'n' Hers, which she had left on the campaign bus in Reno.
It was a setup by Barack Obama, who needed some new material for his stump speech on deadbeat dads.
It was a setup by Hillary Clinton, who is still determined to knock Edwards out of the Democratic primary.
It was a setup by John Kerry, who doesn’t want Barack Obama to make the same mistake he made.
It was a setup by John McCain, who hates anything to do with the Hilton.
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It’s still a reasonable assumption that a major organization’s Web site should be its name followed by .com or another relevant suffix. It’s true enough, anyway, that one can usually skip the search engine and guess a big company’s Web site on the first attempt.
Not so for anyone who goes to www.obama.com expecting a dose of change he or she can believe in. My colleague Andy Bouvé at Slate V noticed yesterday that this domain directs the user to a Japanese site registered to a Satoru Obama in Fukuoka, which is in southwest Japan. (The registration actually lists both "Satoru Obama" and "Obama Satoru.")
An auto-translation of the site strongly suggests it’s just a generic default page, with advertisements for loans, insurance, and hair transplants. Saturo has not responded to my email asking whether the Obama campaign has attempted to buy the domain name.
This would be nothing more than novelty but for the fact that, according the Web analytics company Compete.com, nearly 140,000 people visited Obama.com in February. After a dropoff in traffic in the spring, Obama.com rebounded with over 100,000 visitors last month.
By way of comparison, that makes Obama.com more popular than my hometown newspaper, the Daily Progress.
It doesn’t help the Obama campaign that commenters on online forums frequently implore fellow readers to "Go to Obama.com" to read more about the candidate. Sure, no one is going to mistake this site for official Obama campaign content. But how many of those 140,000 people had planned to donate $25 but got confused by their browser’s mangling of the Kanji font? It may not be insignificant.
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This ad,
created by Ohio
congressional hopeful John Boccieri, dings his opponent for supporting domestic
oil drilling. But it could just as easily be an Obama spot. Obama has
criticized McCain for suggesting that off-shore drilling would ease oil prices
when, in fact, relief at the pump would be many years away.
The 2030 estimate comes from an Energy Department study on offshore drilling. Here’s the full quote: Their
projections “indicate that access to the Pacific, Atlantic,
and eastern Gulf regions would not have a significant impact on domestic crude
oil and natural gas production or prices before 2030. Leasing would begin no
sooner than 2012, and production would not be expected to start before 2017.”
The assessment doesn’t include the Alaska National Wildlife Refuge. McCain recently
said
he opposes drilling in ANWR, but would be open to hearing arguments in favor.
After McCain’s “Pump” ad blaming oil prices on Obama -- a claim that's been widely panned -- Obama needs a good comeback. Cue snarky futuristic Web ad. (Can we suggest a soundtrack?)
And while we're at it, here's another projection: In the year 2030, Obama will still be younger than McCain is now.
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The latest McCain flub to percolate across the blogs is a statement—made to CBS but not aired—that suggests the surge caused the Anbar Awakening. From the transcript:
Katie Couric: Senator McCain, Senator Obama says, while the increased number of US troops contributed to increased security in Iraq, he also credits the Sunni awakening and the Shiite government going after militias. And says that there might have been improved security even without the surge. What's your response to that?
McCain: I don't know how you respond to something that is as—such a false depiction of what actually happened. Colonel MacFarland was contacted by one of the major Sunni sheiks. Because of the surge we were able to go out and protect that sheik and others. And it began the Anbar awakening. I mean, that's just a matter of history. [emphasis added]
Spencer Ackerman and HuffPo have dug up a quotes from MacFarland and McCain himself to show that it’s the other way around—the "awakening," in which tribal leaders in Anbar province agreed to join forces against al-Qaida, preceded the surge. Here’s one more, from President Bush’s Jan. 10, 2007, address to the nation, in which he announced the surge:
Our military forces in Anbar are killing and capturing al Qaeda leaders, and they are protecting the local population. Recently, local tribal leaders have begun to show their willingness to take on al Qaeda. And as a result, our commanders believe we have an opportunity to deal a serious blow to the terrorists. So I have given orders to increase American forces in Anbar Province by 4,000 troops. These troops will work with Iraqi and tribal forces to keep up the pressure on the terrorists. America's men and women in uniform took away al Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan -- and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq. [emphasis added]
Indeed, the awakening was a justification for the surge, not a result of it. That’s not to say the surge didn’t facilitate the awakening’s long-term success. But as far as causation, McCain is just wrong. It wouldn’t be a huge deal if Iraq weren’t his supposed strong suit. His cocky delivery—did he really have to call it a "matter of history"?—makes it all the more absurd.
A statement from McCain’s campaign to the AP addresses the awakening’s post-surge success, but not the timeline problem: "Democrats can debate whether the awakening would have survived without the surge ... but that is nothing more than a transparent effort to minimize the role of our commanders and our troops in defeating the enemy, because to credit them would be to disparage the judgment of Barack Obama and praise the leadership of John McCain."
All this in the week when Obama was supposed to be the vulnerable one.
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