After the first debate, a lot of people noticed that John McCain seemed a little, well, out of sorts.  He wouldn’t look at Barack Obama, or even directly address him.  His voice had an irritated edge to it.  He seemed to be kinda angry throughout the whole thing.  There was the meeting with the Des Moines editorial board.  McCain seethed through the whole interview, prompting one editor to ask, “Is McCain too thin-skinned for the presidency?”  While some might suggest that this is just because Sen. McCain is pissed to …

John McCain was not always a Mavericky Maverick on a crusade to change his party. When he first got in to Congress, he seemed to like it there. People kept wanting to give him things, and he didn’t see anything wrong with that. And when one of those people explained that there were a few pesky regulators making things difficult for him, McCain, along with a few other Senators, was happy to help him out. Thus were born the Keating Five.
After getting off with some harsh …

Via Talking Points Memo, I see that Joe McCain, John McCain’s brother, referred to two Northern Virginia counties as “communist country” at a campaign stop earlier today.
Joe McCain, speaking at an event in support of his brother, called two Democratic-leaning areas in Northern Virginia “communist country,” according to a report on The Washington Post’s Web site.
“I’ve lived here for at least 10 years and before that about every third duty I was in either Arlington or Alexandria, up in communist country,” Joe McCain said at an event in Loudon County, …

You can see our liveblogging of the debate below, and we’ll have more substantive analysis later.  But I just wanted to share something I heard on PBS.  An analyst from Politico said (paraphrasing), “If you’re judging this based on the way you’d usually judge a debate-who had the best, most substantive answers, who actually answered the questions that were asked-there’s no doubt who won.”
But, of course, as he went on to explain, we weren’t judging thi sneutrally.  We were judging this based on Palin’s extremely low expectations.  And since she …

Herein lies a quandary:
In an election campaign notable for its surprises, Sarah Palin, the Republican vice- presidential candidate, may be about to spring a new one — the wedding of her pregnant teenage daughter to her ice-hockey-playing fiancé before the November 4 election.
Inside John McCain’s campaign the expectation is growing that there will be a popularity boosting pre-election wedding in Alaska between Bristol Palin, 17, and Levi Johnston, 18, her schoolmate and father of her baby. “It would be fantastic,” said a McCain insider. “You would have every TV camera …

Still taking a bit to get back into the swing of things, as they say, but with a tip o’ the hat to Daily Kos I just had to share this:

So, earlier today after we learned that John McCain was suspending his campaign and wanted to cancel the debate scheduled for Friday, my friend and I were talking and trying to figure out the strategy behind this absolutely ridiculous proposal. I jokingly suggested that perhaps McCain was only testing the waters here because what he really wanted to do was cancel the Sarah Palin/Joe Biden vice-presidential debates scheduled for next week. However, I should have known that satire and sarcasm have nothing on the McCain campaign.
McCain supporter Sen. …

As usual, Brandy beat me to it, but I couldn’t let this pass by without comment.
I swear to God, I thought this was an Onion article, but no, it’s the Wall Street Journal:
NEW YORK — Sen. John McCain said he will “suspend” his presidential campaign on Thursday and will return to Washington to focus on the unfolding economic crisis. In the meantime, he called for a delay in the presidential debate scheduled for Friday night in Mississippi.
t’s been “unfolding” for months, and now McCain wants credit for finally noticing that …

Sarah Palin has only faced one real interview (Fox News doesn’t count) since becoming the vice presidential nominee for the Republican Party. During that interview, she revealed that she didn’t know what the Bush Doctrine is, implied she’d be all for a war with Russia and came off as underqualified and ill informed. So it is understandable that the McCain campaign doesn’t want her to face the tough any questions from reporters. But it is important for a presidential campaign to dominate the media and it is hard to do …

I nearly choked on coffee due to laughter when I got to the highlighted line: 
At the same time, the campaign cost itself a lot of credibility — certainly with the media, and to a lesser extent with voters — with some of their shenanigans of the past week, most notably Lipstickgate, “Thanks, but no thanks”, and the Obama kindergarten commercial. To use a crude metaphor, the McCain campaign may have blown its wad too early. Organic shifts in the momentum of the race can and probably will still occur, but …