James Fallows asks: 

1) At any point will the right-wing press join the effort to hold Palin accountable for her false claim, as all of the press held Clinton responsible?

Unless I count as part of the right-wing press, which is something of a stretch, no.

2)  If Palin keeps making the claim, will press critics redouble their debunking, as they did with Clinton, or taper off for fear of seeming biased or boring?

They will probably give up on it out of fear that they are creating the impression that the media are engaged in a purely anti-Palin campaign, which might very well be contributing to the tremendous outpouring of sympathy and enthusiasm for her. 

3) At any point will Palin herself — or, far more significant, McCain — acknowledge that there are such things as fact and fantasy, and stop making a demonstrably false claim?

Why do that when lying works so well for them?

Richard makes many good points in his complaint about Ron Paul’s semi-endorsement of Barr, Baldwin, Nader and McKinney (Barr didn’t show for the press conference), but I would say that there was never any realistic chance that he was going to make his own third-party or independent run.  I say this with some confidence because Rep. Paul said that he wouldn’t do it months and months ago, and at the time I thought not running in the general election made the most sense.  If there were any chance that a Paul campaign in the general could win 20% of the vote (probably an overestimation), you can be sure that Paul would have been made the scapegoat for Republican defeat.  Instead of being held accountable for their failures, the GOP would have been able to explain away their defeat as an electoral fluke–never mind that a huge independent protest vote indicts the incumbent party for its failures–and nothing would change in terms of policy.  An independent Paul campaign in the general election would make his supporters feel better and would certainly affect the outcome of the election, but would mainly accomplish the election of Obama, for which Paul and his supporters would be held responsible.    

Besides, the prospects for third-party or independent candidates on the right have dimmed considerably in the last two weeks as the Palin nomination has worked its magic on anti-McCain conservatives.  Many of the undecided voters who were contemplating a protest vote in states across the South and the old Border states, where I thought a third-party candidate such as Barr might do unusually well, now seem to be swinging behind McCain in their Palinmania.  Perhaps they would have done so anyway even if Paul were in the race, but the reality is that Paul already missed whatever window of opportunity there was.  If there was a time to launch the independent campaign, it was six months ago, but the Paul campaign at that time was still pressing on to win delegates that, in the end, did not vote for Paul at the convention.  If this shows the futility of working within the GOP and trying to save it from itself, it also makes clear that the Revolution for this year had already concluded around February 5, when Paul made most of his largest gains in the caucus states in the Upper Plains and Northwest, or perhaps even earlier when he made the pledge not to run on a third-party ballot or as an independent.  Given Paul’s repeated pledge that he would not run, what I would have liked to see was an endorsement of either Barr or Baldwin or perhaps both together.  Instead, we have a muddled message that boils down to an “Anybody But The Major Parties” argument.   

Update: Barr held his own press conference.

Mike Gravel takes up for his fellow Alaskan.

Helen Rittelmeyer was disturbed by the hostility to urban life on display in St. Paul at the Republican convention:

I was among those who found it slightly chilling to see America’s Mayor get his William Wordsworth on, and only slightly less chilling when the sentiment was expressed by speakers whose cosmopolitan credentials were less obvious. Has the Republican party really drifted so far towards ruralism? Assuming that conservatives want to frame this election as a question of us versus them, does it have to be that us and them?

What I found more troubling is the ease with which these personifications of Eastern urban elites (e.g., Romney, Giuliani, Thompson–who is today as much of a small-town Tennessee boy as I am the President of Nicaragua) play to the crowd’s dislike of coastal and urban elites.  As a political matter, this pandering is simple demographics: even in otherwise fairly conservative states, cities tend to be the stronghold of those with liberal, progressive and centralist politics, as they have been since Bolingbroke and Jefferson inveighed against the corrupting effects of cities on the political order.  The GOP’s main target audience does not live in cities, but in rural areas, small towns, suburbs and exurbs.  “Red” states are typically less urbanized than “blue” states, which helps to reinforce this pattern of support.  One can lament what you could call the populist turn on the right, I suppose, and as the resident anti-democrat I am more sympathetic to this complaint than most, but if it is possible to have an urban conservatism, and I think it is, it is also possible to have an aristocratic populism that respects and takes seriously the interests of rural and small-town America.  A mistake that we often make, myself included, is to imagine that all populists are hostile to all forms of elitism and that elitists must necessarily disdain anything that can be dubbed populist.  This sort of opposition makes no allowance for Bolingbroke, Jefferson or Jeffersonians, and so does not hold up very well when put to the test.  As we see in the case of the phony populists, their deployment of rhetorical anti-elitism is really just a mechanism of diverting attention and advancing the interests of other elites under the cover of defending the very Middle America they are exploiting.  

Just as I don’t think anyone can actually be cosmopolitan according to its original meaning, I don’t think “cosmopolitan conservatism” is possible, either, so Ms. Rittelmeyer gets off to something of a bad start when she frames the dispute in terms of cosmopolitanism vs. ruralism.  Properly speaking, the cosmopolitan–if such a person could exist for very long without going mad–has no loyalty to any particular polis, and this would include megalopoleis such as L.A., New York and Chicago, and if there are urbanites who have no loyalty to their own city they are simply bad citizens and not world-citizens.  If the difference is between mentalities–the broad versus the narrow–it is not at all clear that most urbanites come out looking very good, since there is something quite narrow about disdain for rusticity that has defined urbanites throughout Western history, and it has made them fairly homogenous.  Urban conservatism, on the other hand, does not strike me as impossible, but it is likely to be very different and possibly irreconcilable with the conservatism of the places where most self-styled conservatives live.  This is a matter of conflicting interests and conflicting habits.  The weird display in St. Paul is the result of a party that draws heavily on urbanites for its leadership, but which also still relies heavily on rural, small-town, suburban and exurban people to vote them into power. 

The shamelessness of the utterly phony populism of Romney and Giuliani is what is most galling about Republican theatrics, since the same people who will pander to the small-town and suburban voter as the embodiment of American character are busily at work promoting the policies that seek to uproot people and transform their towns beyond all recognition.  Phony populism of this sort is another form of condescension, the patronizing sort that treats Middle Americans as pets to be trained and conditioned to respond to the right signals, and what it will never do is allow anything remotely resembling a populist agenda (i.e., an agenda that actually serves the interests of the majority of the people) to gain purchase.  What is so discouraging about the promotion of Sarah Palin is that it appears to be an effort to use a small-town American to blind a majority of Republicans to the policies promoted by the GOP that are antithetical to their own interests and it is working.

Perhaps I’m being too sensitive, but I cannot help but think that it isn’t healthy for a political movement to keep telling itself that if only America were tough enough, and if only it were run by “concerned parents and citizens,” all our problems would be solved, and we’d be moving back in the right direction. Because the fact is that there are lots of concerned parents and citizens on the left who feel like the country is going in the wrong direction, and have very different ideas about how to reverse that trend. ~Conor Friedersdorf

I second that, and I would add that the combination of being tough and concerned will get you nowhere, and will probably result in calamity, unless your concerns are grounded in reality and you understand the difference between toughness and bellicosity.  I might go a bit farther than Conor and say that it isn’t particularly healthy for a political movement to take advice on life and politics from celebrities, and it cannot say much for the state of conservative publishing houses that they are promoting books written by Chuck Norris.  I mean, what’s next–relying on radio entertainers for advice on how to vote?  Oh, right.  What might be even more depressing than the publication of such a book is the realization that a political book with Norris’ name on it would probably sell like hotcakes.

But here’s the thing. Even if Palin did initially accept the money [for the bridge], I have a hard time blaming her.  As the Governor of Alaska, her job was to spend Alaska’s taxpayer dollars responsibly, not federal tax dollars.  I have no problem with a state governor taking any money Congress wants to throw their way.  I do have a problem with Congress giving money away stupidly. ~Amber Bryer-Wotte

That’s almost beside the point in this case.  The two people most preoccupied with casting blame in connection with earmarks are McCain and Palin (they were just using this to needle Obama the other day), and they have opted for some reason to make her into an anti-earmark crusader as proof of her “reform” credentials.  The GOP candidates are the ones who want to make the earmark “game” a central issue of the campaign, while simultaneously pretending that the fresh outsider member of the ticket had nothing to do with said “game.”  To that end, they have repeatedly made false and misleading statements about her actual record on the bridge and her willingness to accept earmarked funds.  If Palin was simply taking advantage of a broken system, there’s not much reason to be outraged by that, but there is good reason to take issue with her decision to engage in a pattern of deceiving the public about her record, which she has clearly done in the hopes that her past obscurity will shield her from being held to account for making false claims.  More to the point, once you strip away the hostility to earmarks Palin’s “reform” credentials become pretty thin, and the more it becomes apparent that adding Palin to the ticket really was as much of a P.R. stunt as the critics said it was. 

For my part, I think the Republican preoccupation with earmark reform reveals a truly bizarre view of what is wrong with the federal government and how its dysfunction might best be fixed, as if pork-barrel spending were the main problem with Republican governance over the last decade.  Still, this is the field where McCain and Palin have chosen to fight, and this is what they are choosing to lie about, so it seems fair that they pay some political price for that.

Wait until Andrew sees this one:

Some of McCain’s biggest gains in this ABC News/Washington Post poll are among white women, a group to which “hockey mom” Sarah Palin has notable appeal: Sixty-seven percent view her favorably and 58 percent say her selection makes them more confident in McCain’s decision-making [bold mine-DL]. Among those with children, Palin does better yet. And enthusiasm for McCain among his female supporters has soared. White women have moved from 50-42 percent in Obama’s favor before the conventions to 53-41 percent for McCain now, a 20-point shift in the margin that’s one of the single biggest post-convention changes.

Men may respond more favorably to Palin, but it seems that there is a definite contingent of white women voters who are susceptible to the blatant pander and have responded just as McCain hoped they would.  According to the ABC News poll, McCain has also made up huge ground among Midwestern voters, which suggests that my initial assumptions that the choice would not draw more women and would hurt McCain in the Midwest were wildly off.  It’s true that I have been warning of Obama’s failure since February, but I really did think that a VP selection this off the wall would damage the candidate who made it.  It still seems to me that this Palin boost will ebb as she becomes better known, and I think the choice will ultimately prove to be a liability.  Right now, though, it is looking clever.

At what point did the McCain campaign decide that earmarks — seriously, earmarks — are the single most important issue in the campaign? ~Steve Benen

I can’t give an exact date, but at least as far as domestic policy is concerned I believe it must have been in March or April 2007, or at least no more than a few weeks after McCain’s announcement of his candidacy.  By the fall of 2007 one of his favorite shots at the Democrats was his line (“I was tied up at the time”) about the earmark for a museum in Woodstock that Clinton had supported.  Throughout the primaries McCain’s main line of criticism against the GOP was that it had engaged in too much wasteful spending, by which he meant spending earmarked for various pork projects, and for most of 2008 the issue for McCain, as well as the House minority leadership and many Republican pundits, has been reformingearmarks.  One reason for this preoccupation has been the utterly mistaken impression that the 2006 midterms were a punishment for the GOP’s excessive use of earmarks.  (To his credit, the head of the NRCC, Tom Cole, has acknowledged that earmarks had nothing to do with the defeat in ’06.)  Naturally, having made this practically the centerpiece of his domestic agenda (before drilling became the obsession), he chose a soul running mate reputed for her acceptance of earmarks that McCain himself considered wasteful.  Of course, it is a testament to the establishment nature of the GOP leadership and of McCain himself that something as insiderish and obscure to most voters as earmarks has acquired such centrality in the Republican presidential campaign.  Nothing says that the GOP has been in power too long better than its insistence that its main failing was attaching too many pork projects to its legislation.

You remember that? For it before you were against it? I mean you can’t just make stuff up. You can’t just recreate yourself. You can’t just reinvent yourself. The American people aren’t stupid. ~Barack Obama

Look, let me talk about the broader issue, this whole notion that I am shifting to the center.  The people who say this apparently haven’t been listening to me. ~Barack Obama

As the man said, you can’t just reinvent yourself.  However, it may not be true that the people won’t fall for it.  At the Democratic convention, they had Kerry give an effective attack on McCain’s own many flips and inconsistencies over the years, deploying the “for it before you were against it” line against McCain, so it is clear that Obama and Biden are counting on a public backlash against McCain and Palin’s opportunism.  Still, it is difficult to take advantage of opponents who are unscrupulous trimmers when you are no different, and it is hard to indict your opponents as advocates of “more of the same” when you represent accommodation and support for so much of the status quo.