Minneapolis/st. Paul Blog

MinnPost item: Delegates dig "classy" Cindy McCain's awesome outfit!

Quick retort: That outfit cost roughly $300,000. $300,000! That's about 150 percent of what the median home price is in Minneapolis-St. Paul.

You buy a house; Cindy McCain buys earrings. The earrings cost more. It's a good thing the McCains are just plain folks, and not, say, elitists with fancy tastes.

Confession: I like exploring the nuts and bolts of foreign policy. So when I heard the University of Minnesota was hosting an event examining what a McCain administration's foreign policy would look like – featuring late addition Sen. Joe Lieberman, who would answer reporters' questions – I jumped.

We could get into Iran policy! Did Joe really think military action was appropriate, necessary, or possible? What about Israel? Why did Joe walk a more hawkish line than most Israeli citizens? Or North Korea. Did he really want to count out the diplomacy that he used to support when dealing with hostile nations?

But I was disappointed. Because the term “late” addition was apt.

Joe Lieberman wants you to wait for him outside. Yes, you, hippie.

John McCain supporters were in the minority of protesters yesterday, but a few were brave enough to show their support.

One man, holding a sign that read simply "God", explained to me in great detail why it's important to have a Christian Commander-and-Chief (wait … but isn't Obama … oh, nevermind).

Then, to my utter astonishment, he left me with this:
Him: "McCain is the anti-christ."
Me: "Wait… what?"
Man: "I mean… umm… Obama is the anti-christ."
-- Andy Mannix

In the wake of a pending national emergency in the Gulf, presumptive Republican nominee John McCain announced Sunday that the Republican National Convention will be delayed. Most of Monday's schedule has been eliminated as attention shifts to Hurricane Gustave.

According to the New York Times:

Convention planners and delegates arriving in St. Paul said it would be politically perilous to hold a four-day party as Americans were evacuating New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in advance of Gustav, a Category 3 hurricane, with winds of up to 125 miles per hour, that is expected to make landfall sometime on Tuesday. The Bush administration’s unsteady response to Hurricane Katrina, which left New Orleans in ruins three years ago, outraged Americans and remains, for many, a stain on Mr. Bush’s record.

President Bush and party leaders are working round the clock to make sure the mistakes of Katrina are not repeated, both for the sake of the nation, and Republican party leadership. President Bush and Vice President Cheney have cancelled their plans to attend the convention on Monday. For his part, McCain called on party members, asking them to "take off our Republican hats and put on our American hats.”

The John McCain campaign's favorite smear-of-the-moment against Obama is that he's a "celebrity". McCain famously launched the attack in this ad, which in turn led to this response from Paris Hilton. It's a pretty clear attempt to make up for McCain's obvious shortcoming of not being able to attract and electrify a crowd the way Obama can.

But a better measure of "celebrity" would be appearances on late-night talk shows, and by that metric, McCain is 13x the celebrity Obama is, as Ana Marie Cox of Swampland points out:

John McCain was on the Tonight Show last night for the thirteenth time.

A little bird points out who else has been on the couch with Leno that many times: "Pamela Anderson, Dr. Phil, Larry the Cable Guy, Simon Cowell, Jennifer Love Hewitt." Schwarzenegger has been on twelve times; Obama has been on once.

As Denver prepares for Barack Obama's speech today at Invesco Field, the McCain camp have a canny counterpunch planned. They will release the name of John McCain's running mate tomorrow.

This is an attempt to blunt the impact of a potential post-convention bounce for Obama. It's also the latest instance of strange timing in an odd year for releasing such news: McCain's doing it on a Friday, the day when people always try to bury bad news. Maybe that says something about who the pick is going to be.

Remember how John McCain didn't seem to know how many houses he had? Well, now the housing drama has gotten even weirder. It turns out at least one of McCain's houses was in fact owned by a man calling himself "Eldon Smith," which is apparently a fake name used by McCain to disguise the fact that he was moving out of the Phoenix congressional district he represented. From Politico:

In 1986, when then-Rep. McCain was running for the Senate seat vacated by Barry Goldwater, he quietly began remodeling a $500,000 house in central Phoenix owned by his wealthy father-in-law James Hensley. The $225,000 project -- which included the construction of a 4,000-square-foot addition, swimming pool, jacuzzi, cabana and barbecue -- held political peril for McCain, who was already fighting charges that he was as an opportunistic carpetbagger.

The new house was located in Phoenix's fourth congressional district -- outside of the first district in Tempe which he represented at the time.

AP caught wind of the work at 7110 North Central Ave. shortly before the general election and dispatched a reporter to examine blueprints at the planning department. They found the permit applicants were listed as Hensley and a mysterious "Mr. Smith."

The reporter tracked down McCain's plumber, who told him he'd been told Mr. Smith's first name was "Eldon."

Eldon Smith, it turned out, was John McCain.

When confronted with the blueprints, McCain's spokeswoman didn't deny that the renovation was being done for McCain and his wife Cindy -- and suggested that Smith was Cindy's mother's maiden name. She didn't explain why Marguerite Hensley might have been listed as "Mr. Smith."

John McCain often uses the "I can't remember, I'll have my people get back to you" dodge. The most notable time was when he was asked how he voted on women's birth control. He barely got away with that one--his squirming and discomfort could be chalked up to an old man being asked about girl parts--but now he's gone to the well once too often and got caught in a truly ridiculous Senior Moment.

It turns out McCain--the man who wants to be President of the United States, Commander in Chief, and leader of our country--does not even know how many houses he and his wife own.

"I think — I'll have my staff get to you," McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. "It's condominiums where — I'll have them get to you."

I don't like to blog so soon about the same topic, but this Russia-Georgia situation just keeps getting worse. The right-wing saber-rattling is a great opportunity for Barack Obama to address the commander-in-chief issue while tarring his opponent as reckless and out of touch.

Yesterday, John McCain seemed to endorse a NATO peacekeeping force in South Ossetia. This was for reasons based partially on the Georgians' religious proclivities, which is odd, but whatever reason you want to come up with, it's a terrible idea. The armed forces are stretched thin, the blood's piling up in Iraq as the treasure depletes, and by the way, Russia's a dangerous nuclear power that we'd be taking on in their sphere of influence. Ask Germany how that works out.

Seriously, this attack ad writes itself. I wrote one in 30 seconds that you can find after the jump.

Our sister paper, Phoenix New Times -- who has covered John McCain since McCain became McCain has a story on the candidate. The writer, Amy Silverman, has covered McCain for 15 years -- and yet amazingly, there's fresh material here. A tease of an example: