Begala on McCain: CNN 09/04/08

Wolf Blitzer, Campbell Brown and Paul Begala
"Situation Room" 7:20pm
Banter

CAMPBELL BROWN: [...] how crucial is it that John McCain separate himself, and convey, in some way, to the people he—not necessarily the people in this hall because I think you could argue that the crowd here is a George W. Bush crowd, but those independents out there. How crucial is it for him to convey that he is not with George W. Bush?

PAUL BEGALA: It is essential and yet, it may be impossible. The Obama campaign is burning into peoples' brain the statistic that McCain votes with him 9o% of the time. In truth it's actually 91—the Obama campaign being that rare creature that understates the actual facts even when the facts are in their favor.

McCain will try and he has this or that occasionally where he has parted company with President Bush, very quickly then getting back in line, I will note. The other thing he'll try to do is take a page out of the Bush playbook, which is cultural populism. We saw so much of that last night with Governor Palin.

You know, the democrats, when they're on their game try to posit that the republicans are economic elitists. The republicans, when they're on the game, and Bush was one of the best at this, posts my party as cultural elitists. I think he'll try to do that.

Now, it's hard to be a regular guy when you're John McCain and you have nine homes, actually—not seven—nine homes in three time zones and Vanity Fair says that McCain's wife last night was wearing an outfit worth $300,000. It's kind of hard to be an average guy, by the way, when you schedule your big speech up against the first NFL game of the year. What are these people, crazy?

I mean, every decent, normal, red-blooded American is gonna be watching the Redskins lose to the Giants. So I don't know how well they're gonna do on the cultural populism.

PB2 JM CNN 09-04-08 19.20 (JR#457) EeU

Category:

News & Politics

Tags:

• McCain
• rich
• wealthy
• elite

[saratogaslim]

Hopefully everyone can see through her plan to blame the media. Here's a woman who opposes stem cell research, opposes abortion in ALL cases, supports a war that is costing us $10 billion a week, favors a huge tax cut for the top 2%, believes that there is no man-made cause to global warming, believes that the market will fix the healthcare crisis, is opposed to gay rights, and wants to teach creationism in schools. She DOES NOT represent the mainstream.