It’s almost amusing. John McCain’s presidential campaign distributes a daily email to reporters, letting journalists know about the senator’s schedule. The big event, obviously, for McCain today is his event alongside the president of the United States, with whom he has not appeared publicly for months. In this morning’s email, “McCain’s campaign made no mention that the leader of the free world would be appearing with the candidate tonight.”
One might get the impression that McCain is ashamed of his president. Not so ashamed that he doesn’t want Bush’s help in filling his campaign coffers, but just embarrassed enough not to want to be seen with him.
Barack Obama, not surprisingly, saw this as a hanging curve, ready to be hit.
“I just had the privilege of visiting with Felicitas Rosel and Francisco Cano at their home here in Las Vegas,” Obama said. “Today, John McCain is having a different kind of meeting. He’s holding a fundraiser with George Bush behind closed doors in Arizona. No cameras. No reporters. And we all know why. Senator McCain doesn’t want to be seen, hat-in-hand, with the President whose failed policies he promises to continue for another four years.
“But the question for the American people is: do we want to continue George Bush’s policies? … On issue after issue, John McCain is offering more of the same policies that have failed for the last eight years. That’s the agenda that he and the President are raising money to support later today. But I’m here in Nevada because we know it’s time to turn the page…. We’ve had enough of the can’t-do, won’t do, won’t even try approach from George Bush and John McCain. We can’t afford another President who can’t be bothered to stand up for working people. It’s time for change. It’s time that Washington went to work for working people.”
I suppose the McCain campaign will be tempted to respond — but that might involve acknowledging the McCain-Bush event McCain’s aides are trying to pretend doesn’t exist.
On an only-slightly related note, Marc Ambinder had an interesting item today on what we can expect from the Obama campaign in about a week:
In June of 1984, the day after California handed Gary Hart a last-minute victory and New Jersey, thanks to Hart’s having insulted the state, voted for Walter Mondale by 15 points, Tad Devine, Mondale’s chief superdelegate counter, was ready. Worried that Mondale would not meet his pledge to end the primary season with a majority of delegates, Devine and his team made a “frantic” series of phone calls to undeclared party leaders; by noon, a few dozen superdelegates endorsed Mondale en masse, taking the wind of out Hart’s campaign forever.
Neither the Clinton nor the Obama campaign is clear what the DNC’s rules and bylaws committee will do on May 31; depending upon how or whether they re-allocate delegates, Obama could wind up within to 20 to 30 votes of the nomination — a situation rectifiable by a piddling performance in Puerto Rico, South Dakota and Montana — or more than 100 delegates short, requiring solid performances in those states plus a few dozen superdelegate endorsements to put him over the top.
To prepare for that eventuality, the Obama campaign has, for the first time, really, begun to bank delegates. Sources close to the campaign estimate that as many as three dozen Democratic superdelegates have privately pledged to announce their support for Obama on June 4 or 5. The campaign is determined that Obama not end the first week in June without securing the support of delegates numbering 2026 — or 2210, as the case may be.
Stay tuned.