You already knew that two of McCain's closest campaign allies, senators Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham, are set to visit Georgia, apparently on McCain's behalf.

Now key Obama ally Joe Biden is also set to visit Georgia this weekend.

The Democratic National Committee brought in more money for July than the Republican National Committee did, the first time this whole cycle that such a thing has occurred. That and other political news in today's Election Central Saturday Roundup.

July fundraising total for Obama: $51 million.

(Compare: McCain raised $27 million.)

From TPM Reader NV ...

I have to take issue with TPM reader OA's statement that "[c]onceding Ukraine to Russia's sphere of interest would be a disaster for Ukraine--it would surely lead to civil war and would destabilize all of Eastern Europe (the Poles and the Balts aren't going to sit idly by)...." I think this overstates things quite a bit. I don't know what OA is suggesting the Poles and the "Balts" (who are they?) are going to do, if not sit idly by.

I was born in eastern Ukraine and moved to the U.S. when I was 11 years old. I still have family in Ukraine and I visit them every year or two.

I think reader OA overstates whatever animosity may exist between people residing in western and eastern Ukraine. What can be considered the core of eastern Ukraine contains 30% of the country's population, and as the polls you cite suggest, opposition to NATO membership extends far beyond that core population. And I think dismissing that opposition as one based on semantics (i.e, if only they changed the name of NATO) is too simplistic and actually borders on the ridiculous. If "every Soviet citizen was told NATO was the enemy," as OA would have it, perhaps the U.S. and various European countries should have changed their names too. Or was this indoctrination limited to the word NATO and excluded all references to America, capitalism, etc.? There is a lot more going on here than the purported continued inability of Ukrainians to overcome Soviet indoctrination, to which, incidentally, people ceased being exposed to since at least Glasnost in the late 1980s.

As for the assertion that conceding Ukraine to Russia (as if the only option for Ukraine is falling totally within Russia's influence or joining NATO) will be disastrous and "surely lead to civil war," that seems extremely remote to me. Recent civil wars in Eastern Europe, as most civil wars, have pitted various ethnic and religious groups against each other. Ukraine is quite monolithic in both its religious and ethnic composition. The talk of two Ukraines is quite overblown and is very much a simplification, as anyone living in Ukraine will tell you. These are not distinct cultures in the same way as Albanians and Serbs are, for instance. There are differences, to be sure. For example, the East is industrialized, more developed, and relatively more prosperous. It accounts for a huge proportion of Ukraine's GDP. The West, on the whole, is rural, less developed, and more poor.

Further, I don't think that the defeat of Ukraine's prime minister in his 2004 presidential race can be attributed to the failure of "multi-vector" foreign policy. It's not clear that this was a policy failure in the first place, and it has worked out quite well for other former republics that have much less in common with Russia, both historically and culturally, such as Kazakhstan.

One must also understand that the relationship between Ukraine and Russia cannot at all be analogized to the relationship between Georgia and Russia. They are unique. The historic and cultural ties between Russia and Ukraine are extensive. Kiev, after all, was the cradle of Slavic civilization.

Finally, OA gets a fact wrong (not dispositive of his argument, but still an important point). The previous Ukrainian president was not "dumped" during the Orange Revolution. He did not run for reelection. To the extent anyone was dumped, it was the sitting prime minister who was the candidate for president supported by many in the east and ostensibly by Russia.

Having said all this, I agree with OA's conclusions. He's right in saying that "the only hope (for all) in the long run is to repair U.S.-Russian relations." And he's also right when he says that "the problem for Ukraine and Ukrainians is how to prevent the interference of the West AND the Russians in domestic politics."

Some bracingly good sense and -- mirabile dictu! -- real on the ground knowledge about the Georgia situation by Michael Dobbs of the Washington Post.

A lot of you have probably seen this video. It's an amateur/independent pro-Obama, anti-McCain ad. There are a few elements -- tonal stuff -- that would have to be changed for a campaign to run something like this. But it's very good. The makings of a killer ad ...

From TPM Reader OA ...

I want to say something about the polling data on NATO and Ukraine--I am a historian who has worked and visited Ukraine many times, both before and after the collapse of the Soviet Union. One of the biggest mistakes made by the U.S. and its allies after 1991--and I thought so at the time--was to retain the name "NATO" even as the mission was redefined. In the Soviet Union, every citizen was taught that NATO was the enemy. It's a name that continues to carry the most negative connotations. It's as if U.S. citizens were polled on whether they thought the country needed a KGB.

In other words, the situation is more complicated than you allow. Ukraine, after all, elected (and will likely reelect) a President in 2004 who favoured integration with NATO and the European Union--even as polls then showed that most people were opposed to Ukraine joining NATO. The problem for Ukraine and Ukrainians is how to prevent the interference of the West AND the Russians in domestic politics. The previous President--the one who was ceremoniously dumped during the Orange Revolution--followed a "multi-vectored" foreign policy, essentially playing off the Russians and the West. That didn't work out so well. Conceding Ukraine to Russia's sphere of interest would be a disaster for Ukraine--it would surely lead to civil war and would destabilize all of Eastern Europe (the Poles and the Balts aren't going to sit idly by); but having Ukraine join NATO in the current political climate would be no less of a disaster and would be seen by the Russians as a provocation of the highest order.

Ultimately, the only hope (for all) in the long run is to repair U.S.-Russian relations. What has happened in Georgia is the result of the incompetence of the Bush administration. It's a terrible black eye for the U.S., though no one in Washington is willing to say it out loud at the moment. The November elections can't come quickly enough, as far as I am concerned.

As I told this reader in my private response, I don't think we're very far apart. In fact, what he says sounds extremely sensible to me. His point that the Ukrainians are electing leaders who favor integration with NATO is a very good one.

Yesterday I read a blog post at another site that summarized my position as a Realist stance believing that we should concede all of the states of the former Soviet Union and perhaps some of the former Warsaw Pact countries to a Russian sphere of influence, and simply be done with it. Needless to say, that is not my position at all. And I think it is a sign of how dangerously monochromatic this discussion has become that there is apparently only the option of allowing the complete Russian domination of Eastern Europe and the Soviet successor states or driving our military alliance right up to what are still in many cases Russia's disputed borders. I think we can mobilize a lot of our and Europe's soft and hard power to insure that these states remain independent, open economies -- existing on the model of interstate relations of contemporary Western Europe rather than some ugly amalgam of late 19th and early 20th century Europe. But I also don't want to see bad actors of the Scheunemann and McCain variety get us jacked up into some enduring and dangerous posture of confrontation with the Russians over a couple separatist regions of Georgia -- something that I don't think is either necessary or at all in our interests. The truth is that the US screwed up here in a big way. This isn't to excuse the Russians. But we pumped the Georgians up as our big Iraq allies, got them revved up about coming into NATO, playing all this pipeline politics, all of which led them to have a much more aggressive posture toward the Russians than we were willing, in the final analysis, to back up. So now they've gotten badly mauled. And we have to decide whether to double down on the moronic policy (McCain position) or try to unwind and loosen this knot, walk this thing back to something like the status quo ante and then try working the whole nestle of problems in a very different way. Like I've said a few times, see the last paragraph of this post by Greg Djerejian where he discusses a difficult but sensible way forward.

Todd Gitlin muses at TPMCafe: If only "An American President Who Inspires America" fit on a bumper sticker.

Earlier I noted polling data suggesting that most Ukrainians actually oppose the country's entrance into NATO. I've now gotten hold of some more private polling data, based on a survey of a thousand people around the country last June. The interviews were conducted face to face in both Russian and Ukrainian. Let me run down some key numbers.

Do you support Ukraine joining the NATO alliance?

Yes 22%
No 66%
Don't Know 11%

Do you think it is very important, somewhat important, somewhat unimportant or not at all important for Ukraine to join the European Union?

Very Important 18%
Somwhat Important 36%
Somewhat unimportant 18%
Not at all important 11%
Don't know 15%

Other questions about whether it is important for Ukraine to integrate with Russia or the West either politically and economically, show majorities for integration with Russia, about a third supporting integrating with both and only very small minorities for integrating with the West.

Many of you are familiar with Andrew J. Bacevich, the retired Army Colonel and International Relations expert, who's become one of the most insightful critics of contemporary American militarism. By most historical standards Bacevich is a conservative. But his criticism of America's post-Cold War military posture, particularly the Iraq War, have made him an ally of many on the left. And in a tragic turn of events his son, First Lieutentant Andrew J. Bacevich, was killed last year in Iraq -- a war his father had been making the case against for half a decade.

Bill Moyers is interviewing Bacevich tonight at 9 PM on PBS in about the Imperial Presidency, American militarism and their challenge to American democracy. We got some advanced excerpts of the show, which we're going to be posting shortly.

Late Update: Here's the video:

John McCain says: "My friends, we have reached a crisis, the first probably serious crisis internationally since the end of the Cold War. This is an act of aggression."

Let's run-down the list. Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, followed by the US expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait. Collapse of Yugoslavia and subsequent wars of aggression between successor states. US invasion of Afghanistan. US invasion of Iraq. There are a slew of other examples of serious international crises over last 16-18 years.

One of the great threats we face is the personal sense of grandiosity of the lead foreign hands who shape the course of our role in the world. Not national grandiosity, but personal grandiosity. Because if you're a foreign policy hand or political leader your own quest for greatness is constrained by whether or not you live in times of grand historical events.

There's a lot of this nonsense floating around today by pampered commentators who want to find a new world historical conflict to write bracing commentary about before we're done with the one from last week. But John McCain might be president in six months. And whether it's his own shaky judgment, temperament or just the desire to find a campaign issue, this loose cannon is a real threat to this country.

You've probably heard a lot about how, in the wake of the Georgia crisis, we need to allow Ukraine into NATO. This is from the International Herald Tribune back in June ...

According to polls conducted recently by the independent Democratic Initiatives Foundation in Kiev, 59 percent of Ukrainians would vote against joining NATO, up from 53 percent last December, while 22 percent would vote in favor, down from 32 percent.

Other polls have shown similar levels of support.

Now, one point to bear in mind. There's a profound division between east and west in Ukraine -- with the east leaning strongly toward Russia and the west leaning toward further integration with the West. So in western Ukraine, support undoubtedly runs much higher. Still, to the extent we're dealing with Ukraine as a unified country, which we are if we're planning on agreeing to go to war with Russia over Ukraine, then the fact that NATO membership has very thin support in the country should play into the calculus.

It seems Georgian President Saakashvili's tear of international showboating continues unabated. In a press conference with Secretary Rice currently being televised he is claiming that Europe is to blame for the Russian invasion because of the failure to grant NATO entry to Georgia. This is followed by some odd arguments about why Georgia didn't at the least give Russia a robust pretext by launching into South Ossetia last weekend. It's Czechoslovakia (1938 & 1968), Poland, Kuwait, Afghanistan and several other crises of the past rolled into one and we don't greet this like standing up to Hitler and Stalin our honor is lost today and our freedom tomorrow.

I know there are a lot of people out there whose sense of personal grandiosity wants to puff this guy up into some sort of world historical figure. But he's trouble. And to our great national misfortune the same cabal responsible for scheming the US into Iraq is working hand and glove with him to pull this country into deeper misfortune. And one of them might be president in 6 months.

Just how odd is John McCain's move in sending his own delegation to Georgia? That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

From the Post ...

Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president.

Asked about his tough rhetoric on the ongoing conflict in Georgia, McCain began: "If I may be so bold, there was another president . . ."

He caught himself and started again: "At one time, there was a president named Ronald Reagan who spoke very strongly about America's advocacy for democracy and freedom."

I am curious how this interlude in the campaign ends up playing. McCain's stance on this issue shows him to be close to certifiable -- not only on specific policy points but also in what I guess I would call affect. But it's not lost on me that people without much background on what actually happened might think this shows him at his strongest, best, etc. On the other hand, he really has gone considerably beyond what's ever been considered appropriate or acceptable for a presidential candidate. He's worked at fairly evident cross-purposes with the president of his own party. He's been in several times a day phone contact with one of the key players in the drama. He's dispatching his own faux diplomatic delegations to the scene. Probably it's all too much inside baseball to register with anyone who's not already watching closely and decided. But who knows?

Late Update: On the other hand, the Times gets wobbly in the knees over McCain flexing his credentials.

An informed observer writes in ...

Here's the first reaction from the Obama side to the Wall St Journal article bruiting McCain's tech plan: It appears he plans to give a $2 billion cash handout to 10 companies (the big employers of engineers). We can't be sure right away how many have hired the lobbyists on the McCain campaign team.

Might be worth checking which of McCain's lobbyists helped him put this plan together.

This is one I'm really looking forward to. The Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney (Taxi to the Dark Side) has a new film in the works on Jack Abramoff. It's not expected to be released until 2009, but when we caught up with Gibney last month in Austin, where he was previewing the film at Netroots Nation, he was already well-versed in the arcana of the Abramoff scandal. We got a chance to talk with Gibney about Jack and the other colorful characters in that circle: Ralph Reed, Grover Norquist, and ... Dolph Lundgren:

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

McCain promises a "dramatically different relationship" with Russia if he becomes president.

Bernard Avishai, William Hartung and Dr. C.A. Rotwang weigh in at TPMCafe.

From Roll Call (sub. req.):

The Federal Election Commission will decide next Thursday whether presumptive presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) broke campaign finance laws late last year by taking out a bank loan to keep his then-struggling campaign afloat.

In the recently rebooted agency's first major test, the FEC distributed a draft opinion Thursday siding with McCain, whose fate the commission's three Democrats and three Republicans must still decide at the public meeting next week.

The agency's legal department concluded that McCain did not break the law by taking the loan -- and then exceeding contribution limits -- despite warnings to the contrary from since-ousted FEC chairman David Mason, who had a tense back-and-forth with the campaign in early 2008.

"We believe that the matching payment act does permit candidates to withdraw after they have been declared eligible," the FEC's lawyers concluded in their new draft guidance. "Although no eligible candidate may exceed the expenditure limits, the statues simply do not say whether the commission has discretion to reverse its eligibility determination and decertify a candidate."

As TPM Election Central reports, the Obama camp is coming to grips with the fact that the new book by swiftboating author Jerome Corsi isn't going away anytime soon. Set to remain at the top of the NYT bestseller list for another week, Obama Nation will test whether the campaign can mount a more effective response to such smears than John Kerry did in 2004.

Joe Klein: There's no way to "explain [the kind of campaign McCain is running] other than as evidence of a severe character defect on the part of the candidate who allows it to be used."

For most I think the idea is still that McCain doesn't really approve of the campaign his campaign is running or he wouldn't if he knew about it.

I don't know how widely Obama is running this ad. But it's good. And it captures something key about McCain ...

TPM Election Central reports on the contours of the forthcoming deal between the Obama and Hillary camps on her role at the Convention: her nomination will be put to a roll call vote as a symbolic nod to her hard-fought primary campaign, but she will urge her supporters to back Obama.

Obama goes up with a new TV ad in Indiana using McCain's "the economy is fine" talk in the GOP primaries against him. That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

Andrew Sullivan, who's been on a tear on this story, has another good post on the bankrupt posturing of the neocons, jumping at the hopes of a new Cold War with the Russians, despite the lack of the ideological underpinnings on which we fought the first and any Russian global ambitions or capacity to fight it.

But I think in our own lives we all know the type who heads off into some new and exciting scheme, with high hopes and little forethought. And when things don't pan out or come crashing down at their feet, rather than take stock of the situation or reevaluate their own shiftless practices, they're off to some new ambitious plan or get-rich-quick scheme as if the last gambit had never happened.

And it's hard not to recognize that sad figure in the Max Boots and John McCains and Bill Bennetts and all the rest with their sustaining roots planted firmly at AEI HQ. After all, what happened to the long twilight struggle against radical Islam? So yesterday, I guess. Or can we do both simultaneously, even though the Russians are themselves up against hostile Islamic groups on their southern periphery?

Watching the Bennetts and the Krauthammers get all jazzed up about Georgia as the new Afghanistan, with all the painfully awkward nostalgia and excitement of an 80s era Gilligan's Island reunion flick is entertaining. But much less so when you realize these jokers might be running the government in six months.

Here's a good article from the LA Times on the strategic backdrop to the recent events in Georgia.

There's a core question of US foreign policy in play here that few seem to be discussing. And that is whether it is necessary to the vital interests of the United States, or even consistent with the vital interests of the United States (I'm dubious on this latter point), to demand a Russian sphere of influence which is coterminous with Russia's own current borders. That's the policy goal that is the backdrop of this whole conflict, writ large and small.

Let me see if I can explain this simply.

When Sen. McCain was doing his highly circumscribed senate investigation of lobbyist Jack Abramoff, Jack's then-firm, Greenberg Traurig, hired sometimes McCain foreign policy advisor and most-times lobbyist Randy Scheunemann "for advice on handling the Senate investigation."

This was while Scheunemann was also lobbying for the government of Georgia.

McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers told the Times "he believed that Mr. Scheunemann was hired because he had worked in Congress for more than a decade and had experience with investigations, and not because of any ties he had to Mr. McCain."

In a world where economic might and national power are increasingly driven by information technology, can we afford a president who hasn't learned to use email? Amanda Terkel asks the question.

I will grant him this, Sen. McCain becomes markedly more animated and focused when he's talking about the Tsarist Empire and the Cold War. And I can see that Mark Halperin at ABC News is getting with the program when he cheers McCain's ability to use the Georgian crisis as an opportunity to "distance himself from the more accommodationist Bush Administration."

I think Halperin does us all a service by signaling that the Bush administration will seem "accomodationist" in comparison to a potential McCain administration. At several points in his statements over the last few days McCain has said that he "doesn't think" we're headed back to the Cold War. But listen to the tone of his voice and tell me if it doesn't sound like the one President Bush used to employ when he'd say, circa 2002-2003, that we were taking every step possible to avoid war with Iraq.

James Galbraith, at the TPMCafe Book Club, on Thomas Sowell's attack yesterday on Obama in National Review Online: Since when did conservative economists care about tax revenue? Hasn't he heard of starving the beast?

CNN is currently running a segment promoting Jerome Corsi's new anti-Obama book.

Everyone should watch this McCain press conference. McCain is uncomfortable not being in the Cold War. He feels out of his element and he wants to go back.

This is quite hilarious. Sen. McCain has just announced that he's sending his own delegation to Georgia (Sens. Lieberman and Graham) and now he's insisting that it's not a time for politics and partisanship.

Watching CNN on Georgia -- apparently President Bush isn't up to snuff for not adopting all of Sen. McCain's nutty ideas.

Wouldn't want to think we've got ourselves tied up with a loose canon in the President of Georgia.

President Saakashvili today told Georgians that the US military was moving in to take over control of the country's air and seaports -- which would be a pretty big deal since much of the country still appears to be an active war zone.

And about five minutes later the Pentagon said he didn't know what he was talking about.

"We are not looking to, nor do we need to, take control of any air or seaports to conduct this mission," said Geoff Morrell, Pentagon press secretary. "The role of the U.S. military is strictly to facilitate the delivery of humanitarian assistance to the victims of this conflict."

John McCain says he's talking to Saakashvili every day. What's he telling him? Is he confusing the situation?

The closing keynote speaker of the Netroots Nation convention in Austin last month was environmental and social justice activist Van Jones. Following his Sunday morning speech TPMtv caught up with Mr. Jones and asked him about the perception of the environmental movement in the black community and how to alter that perception for the better in creating a full-blown eco-populist movement ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

In this article, McCain tells the Tribune's Jill Zuckman that he's been on the phone with the President of Georgia every day of the current crisis.

McCain campaign's double-talk on Obama's patriotism largely ignored by national press.

Late Update: Howard Fineman of Newsweek proves the point perfectly.

Continues, and of course keep in mind that these are the kinds of cranks likely to have the ear of a potential McCain administration.

Max Boot -- who the Council on Foreign Relations still continues to allow to speak in its name -- says we should move directly to arming the Georgians with Stinger (anti-aircraft) and Javelin (anti-armor) missiles.

We need to protect the country from pampered foreign policy analysts who derive such evident excitement from every prospect of war.

It seems like John McCain's foreign policy freelancing may be further complicating the situation in Georgia. And President Saakashvili seems reasonably to be asking whether he shouldn't be getting more for having McCain top foreign policy advisor on his payroll for all these years.

This morning Saakashvili told CNN: "Yesterday, I heard Sen. McCain say, 'We are all Georgians now,'" Saakashvili said on CNN's American Morning. "Well, very nice, you know, very cheering for us to hear that, but OK, it's time to pass from this. From words to deeds."

Isn't John McCain just a presidential candidate? Not actually president? Is he really supposed to be running his own freelance foreign policy as part of his campaign?

New Obama ad blames McCain-backed spending on Iraq for poor U.S. economy.

Whatever you do, do not miss the article in the Washington Post about Randy Scheunemann's lobbying for Georgia. From the lede ...

Sen. John McCain's top foreign policy adviser prepped his boss for an April 17 phone call with the president of Georgia and then helped the presumptive Republican presidential nominee prepare a strong statement of support for the fledgling republic.

The day of the call, a lobbying firm partly owned by the adviser, Randy Scheunemann, signed a $200,000 contract to continue providing strategic advice to the Georgian government in Washington.

...

At the time of McCain's call, Scheunemann had formally ceased his own lobbying work for Georgia, according to federal disclosure reports. But he was still part of Orion Strategies, which had only two lobbyists, himself and Mike Mitchell.

Scheunemann remained with the firm for another month, until May 15, when the McCain campaign imposed a tough new anti-lobbyist policy and he was required to separate himself from the company.

Since 2004, Orion has bagged $800,000 from Georgia.

For months while McCain's presidential campaign was gearing up, Scheunemann held dual roles, advising the candidate on foreign policy while working as Georgia's lobbyist. Between Jan. 1, 2007, and May 15, 2008, the campaign paid Scheunemann nearly $70,000 to provide foreign policy advice. During the same period, the government of Georgia paid his firm $290,000 in lobbying fees.

Even though Scheunemann has now somehow cut his ties and is receiving no money directly from Georgia, as far as I can tell he is still the co-owner of the company -- and the name that is its main draw. So whatever it does still has a direct bearing on him because of that ownership stake.

After you read the article it's astonishing that Scheunemann is even still with the campaign. And it just adds to the continuing mystery of how McCain preserves this image of being the scourge of lobbyists when he is almost a caricature of the kind of politician whose conduct is managed by a series of lobbyists who manage his actions on almost every point of policy.

Former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner, currently running for U.S. Senate, will give the keynote speech at the Democratic National Convention, it was announced this morning. That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

As things unfold, keep an eye on the fact that the truly fanatic Bush hardliners -- folks like John Bolton and the cadre of neoconservatives who run with him who've spent the last few years suffering what amounts to felony assault at the hands of reality -- have largely lost faith in the Bush administration (he's gone too soft, in their eyes) and are now looking to McCain as their savior. Keep an eye out for the quotes Bolton has been giving about McCain.

Obama thinks it's a good idea for Georgia to join NATO too.

Another treat Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili got for having Sen. McCain's foreign policy advisor Randy Scheunemann on his payroll: Back in 2005, McCain nominated Saakashvili for a Nobel Peace Prize.

In case, you missed it, our chat with former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman ...

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

McCain on Ralph Reed fundraiser: No surrender!!!

Another recommendation to read Fred Kaplan's Slate piece on Georgia. Check out William Hartung's recommendation (which is an interesting read in itself) and then of course Fred's piece.

Joe Lieberman: Obama has not always "put the country first."

Late Update: McCain campaign officially endorses Lieberman's assertion. --gs

The President of Georgia just quoted John McCain in a speech before a large crowd in Tbilisi. It helps having one of the Georgian president's employees running your foreign policy team.

Late update: Here's the video:

But someone should call him out.

From TPM Reader KB ...

Josh, I agree with your reader email that it is almost impossible at this point for Obama himself to call out McCain on playing the race card. But that doesn't mean an outsider can't call out McCain. Imagine if a respected, non-partisan, friend-of-McCain went public with concerns about the images in McCain's advertising. One wonders what Colin and Alma Powell think of the images in the McCain ad and the racial subtext to them. A Powell rebuke would be powerful and debilitating to the McCain campaign. It would change the game.

I know I've made this point in various ways in several posts over the last day or so. But watching John McCain speak about the Georgian crisis in the video below should deeply worry anyone interested in a sane US foreign policy -- or the safety of their children. One arch joke from the earlier part of this decade was that the one good thing about the neocons obsession with getting into a war with Iraq was that it distracted them from their much bigger obsessions -- ratcheting up Cold Wars with China and/or Russia.

The people that are pulling McCain's strings are the people who want to push us into a new Cold War with the Russians -- and ironically and a bit improbably with the Chinese too. But the Russians are probably more willing to oblige us since their power remains limited to oil reserves and military power. In other words, they're people McCain's folks can understand and vice versa.

McCain is going out of his way to cast this as a replay of 1938 and 1939. Is it really in our interest to get into a renewed Cold War with Russia right now? Do we have the military resources for a proxy/advisor war in the Caucasus at the moment? Should we find ourselves in the situation where the Russians want to reassert their sway in Eastern Europe, we would have some very serious and consequential decisions to make. But this just is not that. The key is that McCain, both in terms of policy and temperament, wants to court that result.

It's sort of funny when he's just an unhinged senator. But think for a moment where we'd be if this man were president right now, as he may well be in six months. This man takes the counsel of the people who got us into the Iraq War. On foreign policy, he is in league with the people who were so extreme they've now largely been kicked out of the Bush administration. People like John Bolton and others like him.

It's beyond Obama or political strategy or dinging McCain on this or that policy.

This man is simply too dangerous and unstable to be president. People need to wake up and get a look of the preview he's giving us of a McCain presidency.

McCain gets on the grandiosity bandwagon talking about the crisis in Georgia.

Notice too that McCain's first talking point is that Georgia was one of the first countries to officially adopt Christianity. Beside pandering to the Christian right, what is the relevance of that exactly? This is one dangerous guy ...

Another gem from Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-MN):

"[Pelosi] is committed to her global warming fanaticism to the point where she has said that she's just trying to save the planet. We all know that someone did that over 2,000 years ago, they saved the planet -- we didn't need Nancy Pelosi to do that."

From the Journal ...

John McCain's top foreign-policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, is a leading expert on U.S.-allied Georgia -- and was a paid lobbyist for the former Soviet republic until March, in the run-up to what has become a major battle between Georgia and Russia.

Democratic rival Barack Obama's presidential campaign was quick to try to paint Mr. Scheunemann's dual roles as a conflict of interest after Sen. McCain swiftly took Georgia's side in the dispute, and cited it as evidence that Sen. McCain is "ensconced in a lobbyist culture," as Obama spokesman Hari Sevugan told reporters over the weekend.

But given the rapid escalation of the fighting, and the fact that Georgia is being viewed as a victim of its neighbor's aggression, Mr. Scheunemann's ties to the small nation and its pro-Western Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili may look less like a weakness and more like a strength in the first foreign-policy crisis of the general election campaign.

It's genuinely hard to know where to start with this sort of nonsense. To say that Randy has a conflict of interest misses the point. And I'd hope that's not the argument the Obama campaign is trying to make. The point is that Randy was running point on what was clearly a deeply misguided policy -- one advanced by the Bush administration and lobbied for aggressively by the neoconservative foreign policy community in Washington, for whom, as I said, Randy was essentially running point. Anybody who wants to understand this situation needs to read Fred Kaplan's piece in Slate and Greg Djerejian's blog post from this morning.

Scheunemann's 'policy' was to get the Georgians ginned up on the idea that we were their close military allies and that we'd come to their rescue if their brinksmanship with the Russians went bad. Well, that didn't work out very well. Any situation where you start the shooting and then find yourself begging for a ceasefire within 48 hours is a major blunder. He's not an 'expert' on Georgia; he's the lead guy on the policy that got us into this situation. And the fact that John McCain would make him his chief policy advisor after he's been the conductor on so many trainwrecks should tell us all we need to know about Sen. McCain's foreign policy judgment.

Last week I mentioned that the Times reporting earlier this year on the McCain/Paxson/Iseman story had missed the key element of McCain's participation in the influence peddling. Remember that McCain denied that he'd asked for a decision one way or another in the case Paxson and his lobbyist Iseman had before the FCC. He'd only pressed them to decide the matter one way or another. That was McCain's story.

FCC insiders knew different. In fact, McCain was squeezing one of the FCC commissioners -- making okaying Paxson's deal a condition of their reappointment.

What I hadn't realized is that McCain's quid pro quo had actually already been flagged, albeit circumspectly, in what was apparently a little noticed piece by Josh Green in The Atlantic Monthly.

Susan Ness, a Democratic commissioner, took the rare step of breaking with her fellow Democrats and voting with the Republican commissioners to approve the Paxson deal.

...

And while there is no evidence that McCain or anyone on his staff made an explicit quid pro quo demand, Ness's vote is widely thought to have been a bid to win her reappointment to the FCC--a bid that happened to have stalled before McCain's committee months earlier.

So here we have what Paxson and Iseman bought from McCain, which pulls the whole story together and gives a much better sense of just what went down.

I know there are others out there (beside those who've already been in touch) who know more about what happened and can shed more light on the favors McCain provided. So please drop me a line. As always, your anonymity is assured.

Free on bail while his appeal is pending, former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman was in Austin last month for Netroots Nation. I got a chance to ask him about the various investigations into allegations that his prosecution for public corruption was politically motivated -- and Karl Rove's alleged role:

Full-size video at TPMtv.com.

I'm not privy to any inside thinking. But I do wonder at this point whether there are any second thoughts in the Obama campaign about the decision to (de facto) close down those 527s. A lot of people now seem to be getting it about what McCain's pushing in his 'celeb'/Obama+white girls ad campaign. He's has clearly decided to play on the race issue. But as rancid and dishonorable as McCain's ads are, they are laying down a clear theme for his campaign. And I don't sense a similar one from the Obama camp. The topline national numbers appear to have stabilized. So perhaps the thinking is that for all McCain's sleaze it's not working.

But the lethal message against McCain is that he's four more years of Bush -- on domestic and foreign policy, a lethal message that has the advantage of being undeniably true. I think things would be different right now if that message was being hammered home day in and day out in ads running across the country.

Some shrewd analysis of the Georgia crisis from Greg Djerejian.

I would really recommend Greg's post to everyone. This whole crisis, both in what has aptly been called the feckless policy-making that went into it and the aftermath, puts McCain's shaky grasp of foreign policy in really sharp relief.

What pretty much everyone who's paying attention can see is that the US casually made a bunch of promises and representations to the Georgians which we were obviously neither prepared to or interested in backing up. As Fred Kaplan noted in his piece in Slate yesterday, what's both tragic and almost comical is that a lot of Georgians actually expected that we'd come to their defense militarily if got themselves into a real shooting war with the Russians. They've clearly paid a steep price for that cheap talk. Meanwhile, McCain's response is to up the ante with more bluster and nonsense, apparently not getting what happened in the first place.

Republican lawyers gearing up to challenge Democratic voter registration drives. That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

TPM Reader KD not optimistic ...

As a black guy I can appreciate what McCain is doing. The subtext of the add is hot WHITE chicks dig him. The genius of the strategy is that Obama cannot call him out without being accused of playing the race card again. Apparently now in America, it is worse to call out subtle racism than to actually practice it.

Now that McCain has in effect inoculated himself against the charge, you can expect to see these type of subtle ads kept being run. McCain will never run an add saying that Obama will sleep with your white daughter, but his ads will all have a subtle insinuation of this theme. The goal will be repetition. And they are counting on the media to play and talk about the ads. I dont think Obama can do anything about it.

If Obama loses, his decision to kill the 527's will be a key reason why. Right now they would be carpet bombing McCain into the stone age (no pun intended). Move On on other 527's would have numerous ads on how McCain thinks Americans are whining about the economy, how confused McCain always is, etc. McCain would be on the defensive, instead of making Obama react to every new ad.

The only hope now is that Obama's ground game. His ads have been most unimpressive. They lack creativity. The media really do not want to talk about them. One hopes that this all will change. Right now I give McCain's new campaign manager an A+. He may be despicable, but he knows what he is doing.

In a sense the revelations of Mark Penn's 'xenophobia' memos is old news, a post-mortem on a campaign that was all-consuming three months ago and now part of history. But seeing the memos beyond the message is instructive, highly instructive for another reason.

During the campaign there was a lot of clucking about whether the campaign's message just accidentally stumbled on to charged words and associations. And now we can see what was obvious at the time -- that the people in charge of the message weren't sloppy and unlucky but rather what you would expect, professionals following a detailed plan.

Now how about Sen. McCain? You see his ads lining Obama up with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, a new ad with the tagline "hot chicks dig Obama" (yes, those are the actual words in McCain's ad) and countless montages of Obama as pop music sensation. How do you think McCain's memos read?

Only the deeply naive or the deliberately oblivious -- which regrettably includes the greater number of the people covering the campaign -- don't know the answer to that question.

In Newsweek, John Barry makes the argument for the truly insane approach to the Georgian crisis -- first, the simpleton's historical analogies, then the totally loopy prescription -- issue a guarantee of Georgia's independence and sovereignty and back it up by sending the 82nd Airborne (after all they're done in Iraq, so they're available) into the country as a tripwire.

Brilliant.

(Do whatever you can to make sure John McCain is not elected president. Too many opportunities for crazy mischief to let him get his hands on the military and the bomb.)

Andrew Sullivan is right about this. This is something that transcends whatever immediate campaign tactics or even strategy Barack Obama may be pursuing. It goes beyond him. It goes beyond the Democrats. The whole country needs to wake up.

The foreign policy of the last seven-plus years has been an unmitigated disaster for the United States by virtually every measure. And John McCain would ramp up all the worst traits of the current administration. His instincts are always toward force and the people advising him come squarely from the Cheney wing of the current administration. In comparison to Bush he's not just more of the same. There's every reason to believe he'd be much worse.

The current situation in Georgia and his response should make clear to everyone how dangerous a president John McCain would be.

Josh Green's much-anticipated article in The Atlantic about the struggles in Hillaryland has just gone live online, complete with a treasure trove of internal Hillary campaign memos that paint a vivid portrait of the campaign's internal battles over strategy.

The memos show even more clearly than before that chief Hillary strategist Mark Penn advocated a brutally negative and xenophobic campaign against Obama, and they reveal a host of internal tensions on other matters.

Fred Kaplan on Georgia ...

Regardless of what happens next, it is worth asking what the Bush people were thinking when they egged on Mikheil Saakashvili, Georgia's young, Western-educated president, to apply for NATO membership, send 2,000 of his troops to Iraq as a full-fledged U.S. ally, and receive tactical training and weapons from our military. Did they really think Putin would sit by and see another border state (and former province of the Russian empire) slip away to the West? If they thought that Putin might not, what did they plan to do about it, and how firmly did they warn Saakashvili not to get too brash or provoke an outburst?

It's heartbreaking, but even more infuriating, to read so many Georgians quoted in the New York Times--officials, soldiers, and citizens--wondering when the United States is coming to their rescue. It's infuriating because it's clear that Bush did everything to encourage them to believe that he would. When Bush (properly) pushed for Kosovo's independence from Serbia, Putin warned that he would do the same for pro-Russian secessionists elsewhere, by which he could only have meant Georgia's separatist regions of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Putin had taken drastic steps in earlier disputes over those regions--for instance, embargoing all trade with Georgia--with an implicit threat that he could inflict far greater punishment. Yet Bush continued to entice Saakashvili with weapons, training, and talk of entry into NATO. Of course the Georgians believed that if they got into a firefight with Russia, the Americans would bail them out.

Scott Horton has some more sage thoughts.

Anatol Lieven of DC's New America Foundation has a very different take on the Georgia crisis than you're likely to see in the US press. It appears in the Times of London.

I don't sign on or not sign on to the entirety of his take. I need to learn more. But it is at least a needed counterbalance to a lot of the rah-rah nonsense I'm seeing in a lot of coverage I'm seeing. Take a look.

I see George "Macaca" Allen is on Fox explaining why John McCain's gonzo antics trying to get us into a nuclear confrontation over Georgia shows why we desperately need to make him president as soon as possible. But I do notice that McCain is bragging about how he's been repeatedly on the phone talking with the President of Georgia (as has Obama) and generally conducting his own mini-foreign policy.

Says the FT ...

John McCain, the Republican presidential nominee, on Monday upstaged George W. Bush's administration over the Georgia crisis with his strongest statement so far calling on the US and its allies to come together in "universal condemnation of Russian aggression".

Mr McCain, who gave his first response early last Friday several hours before any official word from the Bush administration, said the US should take steps to assist Georgia and other democracies in the region that he said were threatened by Russia's actions.

"Russia's aggression against Georgia is both a matter of urgent moral and strategic importance to the United States," said Mr McCain. "The implications go beyond their threat to . . . a democratic Georgia. Russia is using violence against Georgia, in part, to intimidate other neighbours such as Ukraine, for choosing to associate with the west."

Mr McCain's statement - his third since the crisis began - stood in clear contrast on Monday to the relatively low-key response of the Bush administration and the Obama campaign. Barack Obama himself issued a statement on Saturday but remains on vacation in Hawaii. President Bush, at the Beijing Olympics on Saturday, expressed "grave concern" about Moscow's "disproportionate response" in South Ossetia, but did not follow Mr McCain in portraying the crisis as a watershed moment for democracy in the region.

Isn't this a bit, well ... presumptuous.

Someone might want to mention to Sen. McCain that we only have one president at a time (however feeble he might be) and he shouldn't be reaching above his station.

Was John McCain so up to speed on Georgia that his campaign had to look it up and crib the entry from Wikipedia?

Late Update: TPM Reader JO counter-snarks ...

Really great title. But I'm not sure you really want to make this point. It just kills the "McCain can't work a computer" meme.

A few weeks ago Left Blogistan was mocking McCain for his lack of computer skills. Here he is cutting and pasting, and from Wikipedia no less. I mean, he leaped over the Microsoft Encarta era completely. Give the guy some credit -- at least he didn't copy from World Book Encyclopedia.

Having found most pundits to be incorrigible morons on racial/sexual messaging, McCain decides to push a bit further ...

A contrary view from TPM Reader VI ...

I have to respectfully disagree with you on your post "Beware". I never thought I would be agreeing on Cheney and McCain, but here I am, as weird as it seems to me. First of all your comparison with Kosovo is flawed. Sure it is a "vexed" region as you say, but some areas are more vexed than others. In this case, there is really no history of ethnic strife between the breakaway region Ossetia (home of ethnic ossetians) and Georgia. Even now there is a notable absence of any ethnic based violence, as one would expect to see. Pretty much all of the fighting is between Russian military and Georgians. In fact, the only reason this is a breakaway region is because Russia invaded that part of Georgia in early 90's and setup a puppet regime. The government that runs Ossetia almost entirely consists of former Russian regional governors, former officials of Russia's ministries, military and FSB. So this is pretty much an artificial 'breakaway' situation.

Secondly, how far exactly are we willing to go to avoid a conflict with an aggressive government, like Russia? Would we be willing to let Russia trample a real, legitimate democracy (one of so few in the region) and a true U.S. ally, who is not just another sketchy 'friend of Bush' (like Pakistan, for example)?

If Russia gets to win this one, they will surely feel encouraged to pursue their other territorial ambitions. They have ambitions toward parts of Ukraine and Moldova. They frequently express desire to protect allegedly oppressed ethnic russians in the Baltic states, as well as Ukraine and other parts of former USSR.

Russia's foreign policy is a real threat to regional and world stability. This should not be allowed to stand.

Disagreeing is TPM Reader RC ...

A few things need to be considered about possible Georgia adventures: 1) When Kosovo declared independence on Feb. 17, 2008, the United States and most European nations rushed to support it, ignoring Russia's energetic complaints. This support was the logical outgrowth of nearly two decades of Western backing for the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, the West also gave clear support to the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union.

2) Russia has long charged, with apparently some justification, that Georgia gave covert support to the rebels in Chechnya during the 1990s.

3) From most accounts, the South Ossetian and Abkhazian people genuinely support secession from Georgia.

4) The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which traverses Georgia and opened in 2005, was intended expressly as a way to export oil from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to the West while bypassing Russia. A growing share of Israel's petroleum imports traverses this pipeline - surely one of the reasons why Israel has joined with the United States to train and arm Georgia's military. Israel is also planning to link this pipeline to Israel's own Ashelon-Eilat pipeline from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, thus creating an oil export conduit to Asia.

5) Since the 1990s, and accelerating under the Bush administration, Georgia has avidly become an arch-loyal ally of the United States, hosting U.S. military training teams and what is reputed to be a major CIA station. Its 2,000 troops in Iraq (now hastily withdrawn) were a sign of this fealty.

All these factors should give us reason to suspect that U.S. support for Georgia, its tacit opposition to South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence, and its pious complaints about Russian conduct are deeply hypocritical. Democracy and self-determination are fine concepts, but in this case they're mainly being used by Washington as weapons in a latter-day Great Game of oil geopolitics and lingering Cold War attitudes.

Andrew Sullivan provides some helpful color commentary on the nutballs.

TPM Reader WM responds to my post below ...

There is no question in my mind that this is about OIL (as is so much else that happens in this world). There is at least TWO major pipelines in Georgia control of which would give Russia much more control over caspian sea oil.

Russia recognizes (as do the hawks in our admin - all oil people) that at least for now OIL = POWER. Russia has clearly taken over state control of its natural gas and oil resources, is earning major bank from them and is now doing exactly what we did in Iraq; using aggression to secure more. It is not a major leap to think Russia will move further against other neighboring states if this isn't stopped now, but this alone may accomplish their goals. My recollection was the BTC pipeline's purpose was to bypass Russia altogether. If Russia takes Georgia over or more likely institutes a regime change then they will have accomplished something detrimental to the rest of the world and will be encouraged to do it again.

I don't agree with the hawks on going to war with Russia, but there has to be a painful consequence for Russia's actions, especially when it becomes clear their interest is in taking oil resources over by force. Bush & Cheney being against this is the surest sign is about oil since they haven't given a crap about Russia for the last 8 years. I also have major suspicions about how this all got starte -- and given Russia's history (as well as our own) in starting wars of agression on false pretenses -- and so should you.

There is a lot I agree with in this email. And I don't really see anything that contradicts my earlier point. First, the energy resources issue is hugely significant, perhaps even the primary issue in play here. (As I side matter, I actually think that Russia's massive and not unsuccessful reliance on resource extraction is a long term weakness. And those who see controlling Caucasian natural resources as critical to American power in this century are shortsighted. But that's another question for another post.) I also agree that what now appears to be an invasion of Georgia will undoubtedly cast a big shadow over the other post-Soviet successor states in the region. Nor do I have any illusions that the Russians are fair-dealing players in this matter.

The people around Putin -- and many others in Russia -- believe that the immediate post-Soviet leadership (mainly Yeltsin) impotently and unwisely allowed recalcitrant border regions of their former country (Czarist Russia > USSR, etc) to break away when they never should have. They may not feel the need to forcibly reabsorb these countries. But they certainly want to reassert effective hegemony over them. I'm sure a localized war that confirms that hegemony would be far from unwelcome to them.

Among many other things, what the Iraq war reminds us is the need to distinguish between critical national security interests and wish-lists that may be nice to fill if they come at little or no cost and all the grey areas in between. My concern here is that we're getting ginned up into signing on for things we don't fully understand or fully grasp the price of.

To paraphrase the old saw, those who learn their history from Sean Hannity are condemned to repeat it (and/or do a long list of other stupid things.)

McCain is up by a single point in the latest SurveyUSA poll of Virginia.

Late Update: New polling from Colorado today as well. It shows Obama up 4 points.

James K. Galbraith, professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, sits in at the TPMCafe Book Club this week to discuss his new book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.

Writes Galbraith:

The judicial coup of December 2000 that installed Bush and Cheney brought back some of Reagan's men and his most extreme policies - tax cuts for the wealthy, big increases in military spending, aggressive deregulation. But it didn't bring back the ideas. Instead, it became clear that Bush and Cheney had no real ideas, no larger public justification. ... Under Bush and Cheney, oil and gas, drug companies and defense contractors, insurers and usurers control the government of the United States, and it does what they want. This is the predator state.

You can see the extremely bellicose statements of Vice President Cheney and Sen. McCain (soul mates on this issue) on the conflict in Georgia. And a number of Democratic-affiliated foreign policy hands are roughly on the same side of this issue, if not quite as utterly nuts and eager to get into a war with Russia as Cheney and McCain.

But let me briefly (I hope to come back to this later today) register my deep skepticism about a great deal of the coverage we're seeing about what's happening. We're hearing analogies to Czechoslovakia and Kuwait (which was of course supposed itself to be a latter-day Czechoslovakia) and many other charged incidents of the past. But this strikes me as a lot of crap.

To the best of my understanding, the separatism in these 'breakaway' regions of Georgia is not something ginned up by Russia, though certainly they've exploited it in their effort to either reclaim or dominate parts of what was the Soviet Union. And the Georgians themselves triggered this crisis, however 'disproportionate' the Russian response may be.

This is a vexed part of the globe we're talking about, with a host of overlapping ethnic and separatist conflicts that can make the difficulties of Kosovo and the Palestinian territories seem tractable by comparison. As the standard line goes, my point is not to justify Russian actions. And I should be clear that I have not researched the details of this conflict nearly as deeply as I would now like to. But we should be clear that there are small state actors in the region (Georgia being one of them) interested in making high stakes gambles vis a vis the Russians and they are trying to do it on our dime -- that is, both literally on our dime but more importantly by trying to involve us militarily in their defense.

Meanwhile, there are players (largely, though not perfectly, overlapping with the folks who got us into Iraq) in the US who want to use this period of relative (though diminishing) Russian weakness to push American security guarantees (primarily NATO) not just to the borders of the old Soviet Union (which we've largely already done) but actually within the borders of the old Soviet Union (which we've begun to do in the Baltics). John McCain has been a supporter of inducting Georgia into NATO. And it is worth noting that had we done that we would currently be in effect in a state of war with Russia since we would be obligated to see the treat the attack on Georgia as an attack on us. Indeed, McCain is saying now we should move ahead quickly and bring them into NATO.

It's worth asking McCain whether he thinks we should be sending American troops into Georgia because in the current circumstances the two moves are close to synonymous.

As I said, there are many complexities to this current situation. And the Russians have a crass and brutal way of expressing their pretensions to regional hegemony. But we need to think closely and carefully just whose defense we're signing on to and whose risk-taking behavior we're underwriting.

As I said, do you want to go to war with Russia over Georgia? John McCain, and unfortunately quite a few others, seem to be saying yes, they do. The hawks will say that the example set in Georgia will foreshadow that to be applied in Eastern Europe. But that's a highly, highly questionable leap. We're in the midst of being led very far astray.

This is the sort of mind-numbingly banal observation that passes for political analysis these days. Tut-tutting over the timing of Barack Obama's family vacation, Cokie Roberts yesterday on ABC's This Week added that Hawaii was not an appropriate destination: too foreign and too exotic. "I know Hawaii is a state, but ..." Roberts declared, while insisting Obama vacation in some place like Myrtle Beach, S.C.:

She picked the theme up again this morning in her regular Morning Edition appearance on NPR:

RENEE MONTAGNE: Now Obama is spending the week on vacation in Hawaii, he's taking a vacation, he says, because it's good for his family, but is it a good point in the presidential campaign?

COKIE ROBERTS: It's a little rough to be doing it at this point, although I think he's feeling somewhat secure, but Hawaii is also a somewhat odd place to be doing it. I know that he is from Hawaii, he grew up there, his grandmother lives there, but he has made such a point about how he is from Kansas, you know, the boy from Kansas and Kenya, and it makes him seem a little bit more exotic than perhaps he would want to come across as at this stage in the presidential campaign.

I drove all the way across Kansas and back last week, and Cokie is right: It's anything but exotic. But Hawaii as too foreign? Seriously?

It got us to thinking. What is the most white-bread place for a black presidential candidate to vacation, since that's apparently the new standard? Surely we can do better than Myrtle Beach. The best we've come up with so far is Branson, Missouri -- so long as he avoids the Shoji Tabuchi Theatre, which is way too exotic.

Late Update: TPM Reader JH suggests:

1) The Wisconsin Dells 2) Wall Drug, South Dakota 3) Wildwood on the Jersey shore.

All of this must be done with Barack driving the family in a station wagon, preferably wood paneled. Just don't pull a Romney and put the dog on top ...

TPM Reader DW continues the Mitt theme:

I nominate Kennebunkport for a white-bread vacation spot. From Wikipedia: The racial makeup of the town was 98.49% White, 0.22% Black or African American ...

Failing that, go wherever it is Mitt Romney vacations, that's gotta be white

Later Update: TPM Reader CG says don't forget Dollywood.

Latest Update: Some intra-reader squabbling over what constitutes "white bread." From TPM Reader M:

Wildwood, N.J., may be white -- but it sure as hell ain't white bread!

That's like saying 'The Sopranos' is just too darn WASPy. Too Edith Wharton.

Wildwood was made legendary by working-class Italian-Americans from South Philly and (to an only slighter extent) the swampier regions of the Garden State. Those folks still come out in droves, but now you get working-class Russians and even African-Americans too. (Though, okay, in no great numbers.) It's the kind of place where women wear make-up on the beach and the boardwalk is fragrant with the smell of Zeppolli [look it up] from all the stands. (Zeppolli -- not white bread!)

As a fan of gross cultural ignorance I stand in awe of you and JH.

Man, are you two clueless!

Obama supporter Bill Richardson floats a new "Washington celebrity" line against McCain, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis attempts to defend his own lobbying record, and some quintessential old Washington pundit flummery. All in today's Sunday Show Roundup ...

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the new Obama ad targeting McCain as a celebrity suggests McCain's Paris/Britney line of attack may have been seen within the Obama camp as successful. That and the day's other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

Late Update: A longtime reader disagrees that the new Obama ad is a response to McCain's Paris/Britney ad:

Nope. It means that they know that they can get the national press corps (especially the campaign press corps) to write about "McCain = corrupt establishment, not really a maverick" as long as they throw in the word "celebrity" so it looks like a response to McCain's ad.

Which it is not.

As has already been pointed out by far worthier observers than I, making the election about Obama is the only way Obama loses. If it's about Bush? Obama wins. If it's Obama vs McCain? Obama wins. If it's about some more vague "are you better off than you were four years ago?" Obama wins. Ah, but what if it's a referendum about Obama? Can Team McCain/GOP build enough doubts and worries about Obama? You bet. I think that's where all of those McCain ads want to go.

Halperin gives you the run-down of election insight in some sort of dingbat aphorisms ...

-Obama's running mate: will seem safe, but will be risky.

-McCain's running mate: will seem risky, but will be safe.

-Obama's pick timing: sooner than you think.

-McCain's pick timing: later than you think.

It gets worse from there. Sort of like The Note, only without the substance ...

Ralph Reed holds fundraiser for McCain.

A note from TPM Reader JB, who's a Republican, albeit of a slightly lapsed sort ...

I've noticed something about both your recent, frequent campaign posts and most of what the Obama campaign itself has had to say recently. Both talk about Sen. McCain -- sometimes mentioning Sen. Obama as well, sometimes not -- and neither mentions President Bush very much at all.

Now, of course as a blogger you can write whatever you feel like -- though I have to say your bitter comment a couple of days ago about McCain having married into his money sounded pretty strange coming from a guy who supported John Kerry four years ago and who had until fairly recently many nice things to say about Hillary Clinton. As far as Obama's people are concerned, though, doesn't it seem to you that they are doing things the hard way?

After all, it is President Bush whose approval ratings are in the mid-20s, not McCain's. Obama is trying to promote himself as the candidate of change, but from what? Obviously, from Bush and Bush's administration. The biggest question voters have about Obama is, what kind of President would this guy be? This isn't just about what he would do (or try to do) but about how he would operate and the kinds of things that are important to him. He can't answer that question very well by contrasting himself to McCain -- not because McCain is a phony maverick or gives lousy prepared speeches, but simply because McCain has never been President.Bush has, and so far it seems to me that Obama's campaign has rather taken for granted Bush's unpopularity and its usefulness in helping Obama overcome voters' uncertainty toward his candidacy. Moreover, Obama's rote linkages of McCain to "Bush's failed policies" are delivered in a way that demands nothing of McCain. Specifically, they don't put McCain in the position of having to either defend Bush or agree with Obama's criticism: the former identifying him further with the unpopular President, the latter antagonizing Bush's admirers in the GOP base, most of whom don't like McCain to begin with. Finally, Bush will never be provoked into answering attacks from Obama if all Obama's attacks are aimed at McCain, and provoking Bush should be an Obama campaign objective.

I wouldn't call this campaign advice for Obama's camp, not really. This is because I don't know exactly what they are trying to accomplish (it is, of course, possible that with so much time left until the election they are merely pacing themselves). It looks as if his people are running a fairly conventional "base-plus" campaign that will emphasize maximizing turnout among likely Democratic voters and doing just enough otherwise to make it across the finish line first. I think they can do this for Obama doing what they are doing now -- again, simply because the dead weight of Bush's unpopularity is not something any Republican candidate this year could shed. This strategy worked for Nixon in 1968, and should work for Obama this year.

I can't help thinking, though, that such a strategy doesn't aim very high. In no meaningful sense is the Republican Party today John McCain's party. It is George Bush's party. Its elected officials and political consultants (including some on McCain's campaign payroll) owe their primary loyalties to Bush, not McCain; its platform this year will be written mostly by people who would nominate Bush for a third term if they could. A candidate promising a clean break from Bush can quote chapter and verse from too many policies and people to list here, better defining himself while making it difficult for McCain to respond as his own man (and incidentally presenting the same difficulty for Republican candidates for the House and Senate).

I suppose it might be possible to so "expose" a candidate far more popular personally than either the incumbent President of that candidate's party or the party itself that the candidate would become unpopular. That seems to be what Obama and his supporters are trying to do at the moment -- as I suggest above, really doing things the hard way.

The Obama campaign posts a Web video firing back on the McCain campaign's ad saying Obama will raise taxes on the middle class: "In summary, this ad is a lie." That and other political news in today's Election Central Sunday Roundup.

Hmmmm. Looks like someone got to hop over the embargo.

Anyway, since Mike Allen, presumably, was already given the go-ahead to spill the beans, I can tell you that I've read the piece and the most salient information is confirmation that Mark Penn was actively pushing for the kind of xenophobic campaign against Obama that many of us argued he was during the campaign.