Hillary Democrats for McCain
August 26th, 2008 at 12:55am Mark Noonan
Downplay this all you want, Democrats, but this looks like it will be a close election, and even 10% of Hillary’s voters switching to McCain could spell the difference between victory and defeat:
Debra Bartoshevich hoped to attend the Democratic National Convention this week as a delegate helping to give the party’s nomination to Hillary Rodham Clinton.
Instead, the Wisconsin nurse crashed the Democrats’ party Monday by starring in a campaign ad for Republican John McCain. The spot targets former Clinton supporters as Democrats try to unite the party behind Barack Obama during the Denver convention.
In the ad, Bartoshevich describes herself as a “proud Hillary Clinton Democrat” who is switching sides to vote for a Republican for the first time in her life.
“She had the experience and judgment to be president,” she says in the ad. Of McCain, she adds: “I respect his maverick and independent streak, and now he’s the one with the experience and judgment. A lot of Democrats will vote McCain. It’s OK, really!”
McCain’s campaign said the ad was running in Wisconsin and other key states.
Bartoshevich was elected as a Clinton delegate to the convention. After Clinton conceded the race, Bartoshevich said she could not support Obama and threw her support to McCain. The state party stripped her of her status as a delegate last month.
McCain seized on her story, meeting with Bartoshevich for coffee when he campaigned in Racine last month.
On Monday, the mother of two joined other McCain supporters in Denver, outside the convention hall where she had hoped to spend the week.
As I’ve said before, McCain is manifestly better qualified than Obama - in cold, hard reality, Obama is entirely out of his depth and its a risk not just to the United States but the entire world to have someone so inexperienced become President. Obama has many gifts and he might make a great leader at some point, that point isn’t now, and anyone who thinks of country before party will have to come down hard on McCain’s side in November.
UPDATE: The American Prospect has an interview with two more Hillary supporters turned McCain voters.
Entry Filed under: Campaign 2008, Democrats, Republicans
12 Comments
1. Thrower | August 26th, 2008 at 1:43 am
As I said in an earlier thread, this move by McCain insures there will shortly be an ad showing the town hall meeting where McCain laughed off a “How do we beat the bitch?” question which obviously referred to Hillary.
2. neocon | August 26th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Do you have a point Thrower?
Or are you mindlessly flailing about, lashing out and at a complete loss to understand why Obama will lose big time in November?
And why are Democrats such emotional, racist trolls?
3. Rich | August 26th, 2008 at 10:33 am
Hey what house was Obama in during the first night of the convention. He said he was in St. Louis and his duaghter corrected him by asking what city he was in, which was Kansas City. Now if McCain flubbed a line like, this you libs would be talking about him being senile. Obama doesn’t have this excuse. Is he not smarter than a fifth grader, or is it all that crack he smoked?
4. Rich | August 26th, 2008 at 10:38 am
Sorry for the missed ? and misspelling of daughter. I must not be smarter than a fifth grader either
5. SEW | August 26th, 2008 at 10:51 am
Yea, but there are only 18,000,000 that voted for Hillary. Obama will likely pick up the 4,000 that pulled the Biden lever. 1% of Iowa voters, 3% of his home state Delaware.
6. Sunny | August 26th, 2008 at 11:04 am
neonon - pot; kettle; black
7. Thrower | August 26th, 2008 at 12:14 pm
Translation for Neocon:
a) You don’t recruit the faithful by allowing one of your supporters to call their leader a “bitch.”
b) If Obama doesn’t play the Republican slime game, someone else will. Everyone loses, including your candidate who will be portrayed as an adulterous, confused elitist who is older than dirt.
c) We end up with a president who is despised by 45% of the electorate the day he takes office, and politics continue to fail in this country.
8. Sunny | August 26th, 2008 at 12:48 pm
And when this Hillary supporter, now McCain supporter, was told that McCain would appoint Supreme Court Judges who would overturn Roe v Wade she was stunned. We will see what she does now that she was “educated” by the press regarding McCain’s policy stands.
9. neocon | August 26th, 2008 at 2:29 pm
Thrower,
The majority of the electorate consider McCain to be the better CIC.
Care to scale back the histrionics?
10. Thrower | August 26th, 2008 at 3:43 pm
Despite being the best known candidate in years, McCain doesn’t hit 50% in any national poll, indeed not even in his home state. That is hardly a lofty perch from which to survive the slime attack that is coming.
Wonder how the CIC numbers will play out after someone takes his occasional use of Ambien and makes it the basis of a 3:00 A.M. ad?
11. Lindsay | August 28th, 2008 at 4:56 pm
In the McCain Ad, they also incorrectly spell “judgment” as “judgement “… some “experience” they have in spelling….
12. skeemo | September 4th, 2008 at 6:01 pm
EMAILS & ADS LIKE THIS MUST STOP!
Here is an email I received today from a friend who says it came from a woman in Alaska who supports Obama.
Why aren’t more women stepping up to condemn this smear /insult campaign?
The way they are attacking her & her children is a disgrace. I don’ care what your political affiliations are this disrespect should not continue!
SNIP:
Finally, someone asked about the gorked-out kid. Until two/three weeks before she hatched it in April in the middle of the legislative session, no one knew that Sarah was pregnant. Those of you who have been pregnant can decide how odd that was. It was so odd that it provoked a swirl of speculation that the kid actually is Bristol’s, Sarah’s seventeen-year-old daughter. But those rumors went as quickly as they came. If the kid is Sarah’s, she told the press that she knew from the get-go that it was gorked-out with Down syndrome but, being a Bible-thumbing right-to-lifer, she decided that God wanted her to have it. That story, which as I type is ripping through the evangelical hard-right, will energize the Republican base to McCain’s advantage in a way that McCain never could have himself.
*********************************************
Note from an Alaska native: “In lieu of responding one by one to the telephone calls and email traffic, as of this afternoon, my view of the Palin situation is as follows:
Sarah Palin is a flag-waving, Bible-thumping, evangelical, right-to-life-promoting, lifetime NRA member, right-of-right-wing wing nut who is a locally grown product of the most reactionary white trash subculture in Alaska, i.e., the Mat-Su Valley.
Most Republicans and Democrats of my acquaintance share the view that, during her two-year tenure, Sarah has been one of the most incompetent governors in Alaska history. She knows next to nothing about the nuts and bolts of state government, the little she does know about it she doesn’t like, and most of the people she has appointed to help her are worse than she is.
But Sarah’s operational incompetence has been masked by $120 to $140 a barrel oil. With that kind of money flowing into the state’s coffers, if they, rather than Sarah, were governor, Bobby Mungabe, Charlie Manson, or the Unabomber would be viewed by rank-and-file Alaskans as rock stars. To cite one of many examples, Sarah has felt so bad about Alaskans having to pay $4.26 for regular when we fill up on Saturday mornings at Costco that, in addition to the $2,000 the state is sending us in October as our share of this year’s earnings from the Alaska Permanent Fund, Sarah is sending every man, woman, child in Alaska an extra $1,200 (at a total cost of almost $1 billion). For that she has received universal acclaim for having had the imagination to craft such a sensible state energy policy.
However, all of the above said, for Barack Obama, Sarah Palin is a very dangerous woman. Not only is she razor smart, but, as a politician, she is as intuitively gifted as Ronald Reagan. Because she is, at every stop on her meteoric rise she has been underestimated. So my advice is that no one, starting with Obama, should underestimate her now.
Like Ron, the hoi polloi love Sarah. And even before yesterday’s bounce, her approval rating here in the subarctic has been an astounding, and absolutely rock solid, 70 to 80 percent. And that approval rating has hardly moved even as she (and hubby Todd) have become entangled in a minor scandal that the Legislature has appointed a special prosecutor to investigate which centers on her misuse of the governor’s office to try to get her ex-brother-in-law fired from his job as a state trooper.
Even worse for Obama, while much of the pundit chatter over the past twenty-four hours has been speculation about whether Sarah can steal away any of Hillary’s cadres, in my view, it is men, rather than women, who like her the most. If that’s correct, and I think it is, if I were McCain, for the next two months I would keep Sarah in a bus and on the road in Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Montana, Colorado, Nevada, speaking in VFW and union halls to white, working class men who voted for Hillary because they can’t stomach the idea of voting for a quasi-fake black guy.
One last thing. When Napoleon was asked what was the quality he most looked for in his generals, without hesitation he answered, “Luck.” “I don’t need smart generals. I don’t need a ruthless generals. What I need are lucky generals.” True story. I mention that because for more than ten years Sarah has been lucky to an extent that defies the odds of statistical probability. What happened yesterday was more of the same. And while the dice McCain has thrown are still rolling down a very long table, if you watched Sarah’s seemingly extemporaneous performance on the stump in Dayton you saw that there is no reason to believe that her extraordinary run of luck is anywhere close to being over.
Finally, someone asked about the gorked-out kid. Until two/three weeks before she hatched it in April in the middle of the legislative session, no one knew that Sarah was pregnant. Those of you who have been pregnant can decide how odd that was. It was so odd that it provoked a swirl of speculation that the kid actually is Bristol’s, Sarah’s seventeen-year-old daughter. But those rumors went as quickly as they came. If the kid is Sarah’s, she told the press that she knew from the get-go that it was gorked-out with Down syndrome but, being a Bible-thumbing right-to-lifer, she decided that God wanted her to have it. That story, which as I type is ripping through the evangelical hard-right, will energize the Republican base to McCain’s advantage in a way that McCain never could have himself.
So stay tuned.”