Moving Days

Both Presidential campaigns did some moving in the past few days--Obama to the center and McCain to Colombia.

McCain sought to burnish his foreign policy credentials with the visit and he even had a mini Reagan moment. Shortly after his departure from Cartegena yesterday the Colombian government announced that the Revolutionary group FARC had released four high profile hostages. Like the Iranian hostage crisis, it's always great when you can do none of the work but have people say 'Well, maybe he had something to do with it'. McCain moves on to Mexico.

Many strategists find this trip curious. With an American economy in shambles, visiting a South American country and praising free trade (we have a free trade pact with Colombia that is stalled in Congress), is a gambit that could cause trouble down the trail. Perhaps that's why his campaign implemented a major personnel shake-up. Hard-nosed politico Steve Schmidt, who ran Arold Schwarzenegger's gubnatorial campaign, is taking over operations. Apparently, this move came at the behest of Republican bigwigs who weren't liking the McCain organizational or fund raising game plan. Normally, this would mean huge trouble for a candidate, but not neccessarily for McCain. For one thing, Schmidt is a seriously effective operations guy. For another, Mac did the same thing last summer (to the day) and went on to win the nomination. Let's face it, politically, the dude is like Jason. He just won't die.

Obama has continued his 'Values' week with a couple of more events meant to re-brand himself as a God-loving, patriotic Amurickin. After a faith-based speech in which he declared that he would expand on Bush's faith based initiatives (allowing Federal dollars to go to religious organizations who do public service good works), he gave a speech yesterday on 'Service'. No matter what you think of Obama, please watch this video of the speech. It is unassailable. It's what we ask leaders to pitch to us.

Predictably, voters on the left are getting nervous about this rightward tack of Obama's. If you want to see him win, this is good. This election, like most of them recently, will be waged in the middle. If Obama can ease the doubts about himself as an ultra liberal to just a small percentage of centrist voters, he wins. And one of the ways to do that is to make moves that shows he's not afraid of defying his base once in a while. To wit, when Arianna Huffington says he making a big mistake by moving to the center, he is succeeding in that mainstreaming process.

Speaking of mainstreaming, just when you thought it was safe to be a regular Joe and keep hitting Obama with the elitist club, out come some damning numbers on Cindy McCain's spending habits. Like $750,000 in credit card charges...for one month! Wow. Must be nice.

And finally, what's with the Joe Lieberman "I'm with him" tour? I mean, everywhere McCain travels, there's Joe. What's he doing? Is he there to keep correcting McCain on the name of foreign sectarian groups? I live in Connecticut. The guy's my Senator and I feel ripped off. Do your day job, Ace.

Yesterday, at a press conference in Colombia, Cindy walks up on stage, Mac walks up on stage...and doh, duh, doh, doh, doh, here comes Joe. I mean, it's like he's Zelig, or Forrest Gump. And I really don't mean to be catty, but I have to say when I saw the three of them up on the stage, all I could think of was "Cindy McCain looks like a beard". For those of you too young to know what that means, go ask your parents.

And one piece of advice to Steve Schmidt. Ban any video where Lieberman is wearing a baseball cap. He looks like a combination of Chico Marx and Michael Dukakis in a tank.

Will either campaigns' moves be beneficial to them? Talk about this or anything else by clicking on'comment' below, bypassing the Google sign up and hitting the anonymous or nickname button.