Daily Dadbits: June 15, 2008 (Father’s Day Edition)

• While Bush has tea with the Queen, Obama is helping to make sandbags in the Midwest and has his campaign organizing relief efforts. Is the Midwest flooding Bush’s second Katrina? And where is McCain?

• Obama’s better performance with independents vs. McCain will help in down-ticket races.
• Obama’s remarks celebrating Father’s Day.
• Daily Tracking Polls. In Rasmussen, McCain is now below 40% for the first time, as Obama leads 46-39%. Usually, the critical line for an incumbent is 50%. Failure to crack 40% is flat-lining, politically. Not coincidentally, Bush’s approval rating remains at a record low in Rasmussen, 31%. In Gallup, Obama leads by a relatively tight 44-42%. This shows relative consistency between Rasmussen and Gallup in McCain’s number — the delta is in Obama’s number. This shouldn’t be too surprising because Obama’s number requires the inclusion of more speculative modeling assumptions since his base includes newly registered voters, and a higher turnout of minority and young voters. But the GOP must be sweating bullets to see McCain somewhere between 39 and 42% as the nominee of the incumbent party holding the White House and the better known public figure.
• Pew survey says most voters don’t view McCain as a “maverick.” “Old” was the most common descriptive image he conjures up among voters.
• Gingrich dreams of Gov. Jindal as McCain’s running mate. So do I. Let’s bring on a right wing, unknown politician with roughly 6 months experience as governor to serve as VP. Let’s see what that does to the GOP talking point of the importance of McCain’s longer duration in office.
• Politico: Historians of both parties say McCain should lose decisively to Obama — like Hoover v. FDR in ‘32 (which McCain remembers so well).
• McCain Confused Again? As noted below, McCain told a questioner at an event that it can be tough to be proud of the United States. But as Politico noted, it’s quite likely the questioner was being sarcastic, and McCain didn’t get it. The questioner said he’s a graduate of Princeton and Harvard and makes $300K, and how can he be proud of America? It was likely a jab at Michelle Obama, given that she went to those schools and makes nearly that much as an executive at the University of Chicago Hospital. Either way, it isn’t pretty for McCain: either McCain literally thinks its tough to be proud of America, or he has difficulty understanding a pretty obvious GOP-partisan joke.
• NY Times’s obtains a copy of McCain’s 1973 thesis written after his return from Vietnam as a student at the Naval War College. Despite having given a “confession” of war crimes by the United States under the coercive pressure of torture by his North Vietnamese captors, he displays a strong intolerance for prisoners of war who spoke ill of the war. His solution is to “explain” the foreign policy objectives more thoroughly to the troops. But critics say this means getting the troops involved in partisan politics, and reflects McCain being stuck in the mindset of the 50s, when there was a simpler, monochromatic US foreign policy that was broken by the tumult and widespread dissent of the 60s. This thesis seems to reveal why McCain remains inflexible in his position on Iraq.
• The New Yorker profiles Keith Olbermann.
• “Frank Rich thankfully focuses on hypocrisy of McCain’s opportunistic outreach to Hillary supporters.
• Newsweek: Senators Kerry, Biden and Dodd all hope to get Secretary of State should Obama win.
• McCain Still Courting the Women’s Vote in Unusual Ways. McCain refuses to return $300,000 raised by Clayton Williams of Texas, who had famously said in the 90s when running against Ann Richards that if raped, a woman should “just lie back and enjoy it” and also said he would tie and drag Richards like cattle in the contest. Sounds like blood money, but McCain wants every penny.
• Boston Globe: Michelle Obama’s formative years at Princeton.
• Mark Warner, former governor of Virginia and candidate for senate, tells state party convention that he is committed to running for the senate and will not accept the VP slot if offered by Obama. The list of potential veeps is getting smaller. So far Edwards, Gore, Strickland and Warner have taken themselves out of the running.
• McCain tells questioner that it can be tough to be proud of the United States.
• Not that it’s even worthy of attention, but Floyd “the Willie Horton Racist” Brown’s new TV ad suggesting Obama was a Muslim because he attended a Catholic school in Indonesia as a child earns three pinocchios in WaPo’s Fact Checker (in other words: NO!).
• WaPo interviews folks in small, conservative rural towns in downstate Illinois about Obama.