Elizabeth Crum

RFC Radio co-founder and station manager Andrew Riley just got off the phone with Minuteman Civil Defense Corps founder Chris Simcox - who confirmed the veracity of Ben Smith’s story on Politico:  he is indeed going to be running against McCain in 2010.

(We at RFC have a personal interest in this because Simcox is a station partner and friend ~ and has a talk show that airs with us.)

Chris says he’ll be on Fox News to talk about this tomorrow.  And that his son will be wearing an RFC Radio t-shirt.

:-)

I have never been a big fan of McCain and very happily endorse Chris Simcox who is a True Conservative.  I know a lot of Arizona citizens and bloggers who will do the same.

Obama visits the White House while the echoes of McCain’s can’t-say-that (or That either) (and definitely not THAT!) protestulations and admonishments still ring in our heads. 

This makes it hard to understand why The Maverick has been so quiet on the snarkfest re: Palin.

Says a new blog pal:  Your silence, sir, is deafening!

Lisa Schiffren has a great post on The Corner.  She posits that McCain deliberately held back in the campaign.  Here’s part of it:

…some McCain aides had felt for a while that their candidate had had a deep reluctance to impede the election of the nation’s first African American president. That he had, perhaps, pulled punches and failed to strike as hard as necessary to win this thing, for that greater good. [This] was infuriating, since more depended on the election than changing the race dynamic — which, it must be said, has been changed for some time, and did not require this particular symbol to validate it. To be sure, McCain must have known that his campaign was losing — and did not want to swing blindly. And maybe he didn’t like being called “erratic,” “desperate”, and a “racist” every time the inconvenient facts of Barack Obama’s short past came up for discussion.

But all Republicans who watched their candidate these past few months, must have been struck, as I have been, by the sense that he was holding back. I wondered, too often, how it could be that no one at the campaign could frame and muster the arguments that were clear to all conservative writers here and at the other publications and blogs that share our view. When the arguments were made, they were too little, too late, and garbled enough to drain their force. The campaign had it’s (very serious) flaws, but it seems that the reluctance to aim and shoot cleanly, was due to the candidate’s internal conflict here.

I’m not sure what I think about this.  But I also often wondered why, with so many brilliant minds and writers at his disposal, McCain did not do a better job of articulating his message in speeches, interviews, debates and ads. 

How is it possible that McCain’s campaign could not manage to patch together a persuasive narrative?  Lisa’s post may explain at least some part of it.

Newsmax just sent out a press release including the following:

Fox Poll: McCain Tied in Key States

A just-released Fox News poll of 1,000 voters in each of six key states shows Republican presidential candidate Sen. John McCain making major last minutes strides to pull even with his Democratic rival, Sen. Barack Obama.

While Obama leads in two of the battlegrounds states, the candidates are now tied, or within 1 point of each other, in four others, according to the Rasmussen Reports survey.

In Ohio, one of the states that McCain’s supporters believe they have to win, McCain has pulled dead even. Obama and McCain are now tied in Ohio, at 49 percent apiece.

Here are the results from the Fox News poll:

Colorado

Obama 51

McCain 47

Florida

McCain 50

Obama 49

Missouri

Obama 49

McCain 49

N. Carolina

McCain 50

Obama 49

Ohio

Obama 49

McCain 49

Virginia

Obama 51

McCain 47

The poll has a plus or minus margin of error of 3 percent.

Charles Krauthammer explains why he’s voting for McCain.

My favorite parts:

I stand athwart the rush of conservative ship-jumpers of every stripe — neo (Ken Adelman), moderate (Colin Powell), genetic/ironic (Christopher Buckley) and socialist/atheist (Christopher Hitchens) — yelling “Stop!” I shall have no part of this motley crew. I will go down with the McCain ship. I’d rather lose an election than lose my bearings.

And:

I’ll have no truck with the phony case ginned up to rationalize voting for the most liberal and inexperienced presidential nominee in living memory. The “erratic” temperament issue, for example. As if McCain’s risky and unsuccessful but in no way irrational attempt to tactically maneuver his way through the economic tsunami that came crashing down a month ago renders unfit for office a man who demonstrated the most admirable equanimity and courage in the face of unimaginable pressures as a prisoner of war, and who later steadily navigated innumerable challenges and setbacks, not the least of which was the collapse of his campaign just a year ago.

McCain the “erratic” is a cheap Obama talking point. The 40-year record testifies to McCain the stalwart.

And

McCain’s critics are offended that he raised the issue of William Ayers. What’s astonishing is that Obama was himself not offended by William Ayers.

And

The case for McCain is straightforward. The financial crisis has made us forget, or just blindly deny, how dangerous the world out there is. We have a generations-long struggle with Islamic jihadism. An apocalyptic, soon-to-be-nuclear Iran. A nuclear-armed Pakistan in danger of fragmentation. A rising Russia pushing the limits of revanchism. Plus the sure-to-come Falklands-like surprise popping out of nowhere.

Who do you want answering that phone at 3 a.m.?

As reported by the Reno Gazette-Journal. 

Here’s the Sun editorial.  And here’s the RJ piece.