evanmorris.com
From the daily archives: Monday, October 6, 2008
A top McCain adviser signaled last week that the campaign intends to “turn the page” from economic issues — which polls show have staked Obama to a significant lead — and ramp up attacks on Obama as an inexperienced ultraliberal.
“I know the policies he’s supported these past eight years and wants to continue are pretty hard to defend,” Obama told a rally at a high school football stadium. “I can understand why Sen. McCain would want to turn the page and ignore this economy.”
McCain and his agents are “gambling that he can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance,” Obama added. “They’d rather try to tear our campaign down than lift this country up. It’s what you do when you’re out of touch, out of ideas and running out of time.”
McCain’s course correction reflects a growing case of nerves within his high command as the electoral map has shifted significantly in Obama’s favor in the past two weeks.
“It’s a dangerous road, but we have no choice,” a top McCain strategist told the Daily News. “If we keep talking about the economic crisis, we’re going to lose.”
Insults fly as Barack Obama & John McCain prepare for second debate.
No comment, literally:
CLEARWATER — Constantly under the watchful eyes of security, the media wasn’t permitted to wander around inside Coachman Park to talk to Sarah Palin supporters. When reporters tried to leave the designated press area and head toward the bleachers where the crowd was seated, an escort would dart out of nowhere and confront him or her and say, “Can I help you?” and turn the person around.
When one reporter asked an escort, who would not give her name, why the press wasn’t allowed to mingle, she said that in the past, negative things had been written. The campaign wanted to avoid that possibility Monday.
From a profile of Lionel Trilling in a recent New Yorker:
A key perception of “The Liberal Imagination” is that most human beings are not ideologues. Intellectual coherence is not a notable feature of their politics. People’s political opinions may be rigid; they are not necessarily rigorous. They tend to float up out of some mixture of sentiment, custom, moral aspiration, and aesthetic pleasingness. Trilling’s point was that this does not make those opinions any less potent politically. On the contrary, it’s the unexamined attitudes and assumptions—things that people take to be merely matters of manners or taste, and nothing so consequential as political positions—that need critical attention. “Unless we insist that politics is imagination and mind,” as Trilling put it, “we will learn that imagination and mind are politics, and of a kind we will not like.”
today’s moodcat
