Wednesday, August 27, 2008

DAMNED IF YOU DO, JOHNNY MAC, AND DAMNED IF YOU DON'T

Politico's Jonathan Martin continues to make clear that John McCain desperately wants to pick Joe Lieberman as his running mate -- but howls of protest from McCain's masters in the GOP base (see, for instance, Robert Novak's column) suggest that McCain won't be allowed to pick Joe.

Assuming he doesn't even try, I think the Obama campaign should razz him just the way his campaign razzed Obama for not picking Hillary Clinton. The Obama campaign's ad, of course, would be somewhat different -- something along the lines of this:

John McCain wanted to pick his pal Joe Lieberman to be his running mate. But Joe supports a woman's right to choose, and Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, the leaders of the religious right, and other political partisans told McCain, "Uh-uh -- we're not going to let you do that." And even though John McCain says he's a maverick, he did just what the partisan forces in his party told him to do.

John McCain: afraid to challenge his party. Four more years of the same old Republican politics.

(UPDATE THURSDAY: I just added Karl Rove because I see that he called Lieberman trying to compel him to withdraw.)

*****

But if McCain, somehow, does summon up the nerve to pick Joe, I wouldn't start by attacking his war record or his phony-Democrat act. I'd go straight at him for his support for John Hagee (Joe, of course, spoke at Hagee's summit last month and said of him last year, "He is an Ish Elohim. A man of God.... Like Moses, he's become the leader of a mighty multitude. Even greater than the multitude that Moses led from Egypt to the Promised Land"). And I'd focus on Hagee's anti-Catholic statements -- his linking of the Catholic Church with Nazis, his references to the Catholic Church as "the whore of Babylon," and so on. Maybe Joe Biden would like to lead the charge.

I know that Hagee's apologized. But do you think that would stop the Republicans if the situation were reversed?

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