Greg! Close html tag! The red! It burns!

HTML ALERT! INCOMING!!!!!!!!!

Greg - thank you.

bvd - LOL!

Media went revolt ?

Why didn't somebody tell me ???

The effing media is still carrying water for the Mcinsane and they managed to change the narrative (as the repugs had betted) from ecnonomy to Ayers, The Great White Terrorist meets Obama, the Black one.

Maverick is not a brand. It was a model. It was pulled out of production in Michigan in 1977.

If you are referring to the critter, a maverick is an UNBRANDED range animal.

McCain thinks of himself as not being part of the mindless herd. My kindergarten teacher would list him as "Does not get alond well with others." I would label him as mangy and too quirky to be good breeding stock.

Why? Maybe they all looked up the origins of the term "Maverick" and found out it belongs to a family of populist/liberals from Texas...

Seriously, I agree with you Greg about the economic reason but I also think that, as for the electorate, hearing that he has voted with Bush 90% of the time plays a part in it.

A man who leaves his crippled wife for a beer heirs, a man who was involved in the biggest Saving and Loans scandal in the early 90s, a man who served on the board of a racist, anti-semite fringe group, a man who this afternoon according to CBSnews.com played a role in the Iran-contra scandal was never a maverick.

I wrote Josh demanding he apologize and STILL haven't heard him declare the AP off the TIRE SWING.

Hell he should put up a Mission Accomplished Banner

They just ripped Palin the Reformer today..what more does he want? Fournier's head????

This entire report begs the question of ow he got to be labeled a maverick to begin with. He lost any right to that title when he decided that he needed to the support of th right wing and the apparatus of Karl Rove to win the presidency. Since 2004 he has reversed himself on almost everyone of the issues that made people think he was so independent minded to begin with. We only need look back as far as the republican primary when McCain declared he would vote against his own immigration bill--obviously because it was the main reason he was tanking in the primary-to see he had lost whatever political courage the media were pretending he had.

That it took an explicitly deceitful and ugly campaign full of sophomoric taunts designed by Rove's former henchmen to reveal his willingness to trade principle for power, just shows us how deluded McCain's pals in the media have been.

The turn the campaign has taken this week: angry rallies in front of all white southern audiences decrying the disloyal other-ness of the black candidate is a whole new level of moral bankruptcy. This has nothing to do with maverickness and everything to do with the lust for power.

But I guess it all would have been different if Obama had agreed to hold just 10 town halls meetings.

The first is the now-robust infrastructure on the left, on the internet and elsewhere, that immediately seized on the nonstop lying and adver-sleazements in order to build a counter-narrative about McCain

Indeed. TPM does deserve credit.

You can get a rough and ready flavor of Greg's infrastructure point - excellent - just by browsing through the Yahoo Buzzes or to a lesser degree the Diggs..You'll see very few conservative bits high on the charts but a kazillion from HuffPo and Salon

That McCain is running against Obama has been just as critical a factor in his loss of brand.
There likely wouldn't have been a "tipping point" had he been running against Hillary Clinton:

- He would not have rashly picked Palin in a cynically desperate effort to court Hillary supporters and counter the huge bounce from Obama's Mile High acceptance speech.

- He would not have had to run ads like "The One" or "Celebrity" to drive up his opponent's negatives... Hillary's negatives were high enough on their own.

- He would not have had to take even more blatant policy shifts away from his "maverick" positions to placate the right-wing base...the anti-Hillary sentiment would have done that for him.

I do think McCain had grand ideas of touring the country with Obama and having shared town halls and he was pissed because Obama didn't want to take part in his fairy tale campaign. The way he uses Obama's refusal to that request as reason for his negative campaign is probably rooted in truth.

I think he thought he could pull one over on the youngster, and that he(McCain) would be a shoo-in for the Presidency. And when Obama turned him down, he realized it was going to be an uphill fight.

It's quite obvious that McCain hates Obama on a personal level, let along a political level. It is well known that Sen. Clinton and Sen. McCain got along swimmingly, and McCain probably gets along well with Bill as well. So he started disliking Obama during the Democratic Primary. And it's grown from there - though there are reports from friction between the two back in 2006.

There is also certain jealousy - look at his early campaign attacks against Obama, about his big speeches of saying nothing and his "celebrity" - then he goes out and picks Palin who says nothing in her speeches and is more of a "cult of Personality" than he ever accused Obama of being and he's happy as the proverbial pig in shit about his pick. He wanted the big crowds, he wanted the screaming supporters and had to go embarrass himself in Strugis in order to get them. I wouldn't be surprised if we learn down the line from an insider book that McCain picked Palin based on the fact that she's be able to attract a crowd.

His Maverick Brand died when he brought in Schmidt. It just took some folks longer to realize is all. Cementing of this fact was when he brought in the 2000 SC Primary Bush campaign veteran to run Palin's campaign. He became everything he condemned in 2000.

The Maverick probably died long ago, but it became clear the minute he picked Sarah Palin. The real Maverick, if he existed at all, would have picked Tom Ridge or (gulp) Joe Lieberman. When that woman walked on stage and began speaking, it became clear that Country First was just a slogan, and the Maverick was dead.

My wife is a great political sounding board. She follows politics only passively and only through the MSM filter.

Yesterday she told me that McCain just isn't the same person he was in 2000. That's all the evidence I need to know that the "Maverick" brand is ruined.

OT

http://www.wral.com/news/video/3689706/

live feed of Michelle Obama's military family rally in North Carolina.

Lets face it, beyond the POW experience, there's nothing particularly compelling in John McCain's biography. The most newsworthy event in McCain's twenty-five plus years of political life is his involvement in the Keating Five scandal. We are often told that he's a maverick, but strangely there's nothing to actually support that myth.

McCain has never provided great leadership. He's never inspired the public to get involved. There's no eloquent speech that McCain has given on some grand issue. There's no moment in his political history where he went out on a limb to help the little guy, or some wise piece of legislation with his name on it that we all give great thanks for. How do we know these things? Because if there were a whiff of these things in McCain's past, the media would be telling us about them ad nauseam, and McCain would certainly have them in his ads.

Is there any wonder why McCain gave up so quickly in trying to present his own biography and instead has devoted most of his energy and ad time attempting to damage the biography of Barack Obama?

Is this a trick question?

McCain is not a maverick, particularly since 2000. McCain worked with the media to create this reputation and the media is the group who is now working to destroy it.

Good riddance.

There's little question that the development of this counter-narrative influenced mainstream media coverage.

I think this is probably right, and certainly hope so, but wonder about the empirical evidence. Can we trace examples of, say, some ditz like John Roberts or David Gregory on CNN being influenced by the story being told here on TPM or on Dkos? Indirectly if not directly?

The 2006 mid-term election was a watershed moment. The negative attack ads that have become a Republican staple surprisingly didn't work. Despite the Republican mantra that terrorists would win if Democrats were elected, and the promise that the country would be in a shambles with a Nancy Pelosi congress, the country voted overwhelming for Democrats ensuring a Democratic majority.

Despite a long presidential campaign and our national reputation of having a short attention span, the public remains energized and is tuned-in to the issues. We have seen record turnouts in the Democratic primaries in state after state, with multitudes of new voters registering as democrats. And month after month we have witnessed record numbers in small donations to the Obama campaign.

In previous elections, the negative attacks and misleading ads that McCain is using would certainly have been effective, but thus far they aren't gaining any traction. Such ads rely heavily on an uninformed and uninspired public. Not only are McCain's negative ads proving to be ineffective, but with each misleading statement about Barack Obama, McCain is doing more damage to himself. Ironically, McCain's negative attacks have become more of a negative on him and his reputation.

This sentence needs to be changed ...

McCain lost his "maverick" brand because on the driving issue of the campaign, he isn't a maverick, and never really was.

To this:

McCain lost his "maverick" brand because he isn't a maverick, and never really was.

I believe setting themselves against the press is part of McCain's Orwellian campaign strategy. They intentionally turned the press against them so that they could claim that the press was against them. What better way to avoid accountability than to be able to (credibly) claim that the press hates you and holds a bias against you? They're shooting for the Republican base, plus whatever lunatics they can add to that dwindling number. It's a stupid, desperate strategy, but it's becoming increasingly clear that McCain and Palin (along with the entire campaign team) are stupid, desperate people.

Good NPR story HERE explaining Obama's work on the Annenberg project and really breaks it down to reality. Hopefully this lays the association to rest.

God, that I'm agnostic about, please let McCain and the Republican Brown-Shirt Party, and all potential and real imitators of such, go directly down their kitchen sink drain with the garbage disposal running full blast for the next several generations at least if not forever.

If you do, then I promise I will no longer hilariously mock the possibility of your existence in some form that I can't comprehend and will try to reduce the amount of schadenfraude (?) I feel whenever I see people coming out of a church or talking on the TV about your glorious sacrifice and believers' heavenly perks.

PLEASE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!?

(Please don't hold it against me if I misspelled that schadenf... word, as my prayer is sincere and desperate and that should be enough, according to your "Word", oops, Word.

With all (due) respect,

Your Newest Enabler,
Larry

I sure hope ACORN is not part of what Greg is calling the robust infrastructure of the left.
I have a feeling we are going to be ass deep in that brand of nuts for the rest of the campaign.

I have been critical of Obama along the way for not being hard enough on the McCain Campaign. Today, I eat my words because I think the contrast is astounding. Obama continually taking the high road, being the candidate with integrity, reason, calm, and critical analysis is paying off big time. McCain looks small, angry, vile and desparate. Americans are sick, sick, sick of smear and fear. Taking the high road appears to be a win win strategy.

"Advisers worry about 'grumpy McCain'"

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1008/14364.html

Huff's headline goes "MCCAIN: THE GLOVES WILL COME OFF TONIGHT" but I'm not sure how he'll take the gloves off without being grumpy...

"The media went into revolt and painted the suspension stunt for the ruse it was. ..."

And yet when the McCain sleazebots decided to "turn the page," there the press was, again, lapping it all up, filling page after page, hour after hour with "Who is Obama, really?" "What are his ties to Ayers?" and on and on and on.

The press, and I don't include the writers on this site as "press," or anything resembling journalists, has become lazy (or dumb). All of these questions should have been asked and answer -- by the press -- long ago.

The Real Mavericks are pissed off at McCain!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/weekinreview/05schwartz.html?no_interstitial

Greg, I have no idea that the "new infrastucture on the Left" including TPM, other blogs, Keith and Rachel, have affected the way this election has been covered. But, at the end of the day, do we really have any evidence to show with any degree of certainty that the negative coverage McCain/Palin have received was due any less to: (1) McCain kicking his barbecue buddies off the "Straight Talk Express, and (2) their own, naturally occurring disillusion with the phony nature of his campaign?

I'll say just what I did when the GOP whined about Gwen Ifill. The moderator didn't write the questions, and both candidates get the same question. How exactly is Brokaw's bias supposed to play out?

Heck, they may just ignore the questions anyway, a la Palin.

I wouldn't get too steamed about overly emotional hostile outbursts from one or two folks at a Palin or McCain rally. maybe they are plants. It's despicable, but not representative of the mindset of independent, swing voters who appear to be able to understand reality this season. Obama's latest polling numbers are even better. Five Thirty Eight meta-polling site has Obama's numbers rocketing upwards. Palin's negatives are enormous and McCain's favorables are plummeting. I don't think Obama attacking on Keating is necessary, although it is "guilt by guilt" rather than the Ayers "guilt by association"... McCain should be hammering the Chicago politician theme. Obama will still win... I doubt many independents really believe Obama is a terrorist or a terrorist lover...

I am sure it's been said, but I am old and too tired to read all the comments.

How did McCain lose his maverick cred? Probably because he was never an authentic maverick to begin with.

There's more posturing phony-baloney to this guy than anything else. I do respect his service as a soldier, but the guy has never really accomplished a whole lot as a legislator except promote his own image--and that brand is always going to be the flavor of the month.