Tonight, John McCain will attend a fundraiser for his presidential campaign in Michigan. According to the invitation, he will be joined by the chair of his Michigan Victory 08 committee, John Rakolta, Jr., and McCain Michigan co-chairman Robert Liggett. What the invitation does not say, however, is that Rakolta and Liggett were two of the key backers of an organization that helped finance an ad that compared Democrats to Adolf Hitler in the 2006 election. Rakolta and his wife contributed $10,000 to a group called Voice the Vote, which used the money to buy a newspaper ad that compared Michigan Governor Jennifer Granholm and a procession of Democratic presidents to Hitler.

By Jon Cohen
Washington Post Staff Writer

Public disapproval of the way President Bush is handling the nation's economy has hit a new high in Washington Post-ABC News polling, and his overall favorability rating remains near an all-time low.

Seven in 10 Americans now give negative ratings to the president's stewardship of the sinking U.S. economy. Only 28 percent approve of his performance in this area, a double-digit decline from a year ago, and even core Republicans have begun to abandon the president on the issue.

This morning, John McCain launches his effort to reinvent himself for the general election with a week of speeches.

After running as a so-called "maverick" and "outsider" in his failed 2000 campaign, John McCain cast aside his principles and morphed into a Bush Republican for this year's primaries. Now, after embracing the President's budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy, abandoning his own immigration reform plan to cozy up to the right wing of his party, and turning his back on the campaign finance and lobbying reforms he once championed, McCain is trying to reinvent himself yet again.

We live in a "gotcha" media culture that revels in exposing the foibles and hypocrisies of our politicians. But one politician manages to escape this treatment, getting the benefit of the doubt and a positive spin for nearly everything he does: John McCain. Even during his temporary decline in popularity in 2007, the media continued to bolster him by lamenting his fate rather than criticizing the flip-flops and politicking that undermined his media-driven image as a "straight talker."

In Free Ride: John McCain and the Media, David Brock and Paul Waldman show how the media have enabled McCain's rise from the Keating Five savings-and-loan scandal to the underdog hero of the 2000 primaries to his roller-coaster run for the 2008 nomination. They illuminate how the press falls for McCain's "straight talk" and how the Arizona senator gets away with inconsistencies and misrepresentations for which the media skewer other politicians.

What part of job loss does John McCain not understand?

Asked this morning in Atlanta about today's terrible economic reports, McCain said the jobs numbers were "not terrible" because "the unemployment rate did not go up," even as experts reported the worst job losses in five years.

These comments come just days after McCain said the best short-term relief for families feeling the economic pinch was making Bush's budget-busting tax cuts for the wealthy permanent in 2010—nearly two years from now. [AP, 3/7/08; Wall Street Journal, 3/3/08]

Maybe McCain didn't realize that oil prices hit a new record high yesterday with people in North Carolina paying up to $3.18 for a gallon of gas. That, of course, comes as home foreclosures around the country hit an all-time high in the final quarter of last year, with 3,491 families in North Carolina losing their homes.

Hours after clinching his Party’s nomination, the one-time “maverick” completed his transformation into a full-fledged Bush Republican by heading to the White House this afternoon to receive President Bush’s formal endorsement.

In his desperation to cozy up to the right wing of the Republican Party, McCain has endorsed President Bush’s decision to deny health care for 116,000 North Carolina children by vetoing SCHIP expansion, threatened the retirement security of North Carolina seniors by promising to privatize Social Security, further strained North Carolina’s reserve and national guard units by promising to keep our troops in Iraq for 100 years, and promised more of the same on everything from ethics to the economy.

President Bush, please take Dick Cheney with you when you leave the White House.

Cloaked in secrecy, Vice President Dick Cheney met today in a closed meeting with the Charlotte Chamber of Commerce.

“While we might not know what they talked about, the evidence is clear that the Bush-Cheney economic policies have failed North Carolina,” said NCDP Chair Jerry Meek.

“A recession is looming and it costs more to put fill our gas tanks, heat our homes, and pay for health care when illness strikes,” Meek said.

In 2001, gas was $1.37 per gallon. Now it costs $3.09 per gallon. Americans could heat their homes for as low as $1.40 per gallon. Now it costs $3.39.

Health care insurance premium costs for families have doubled from $6,230 in 2001 to $12,106 per household today.

“North Carolinians work hard to secure a better future for their children and grandchildren,” Meek said. “But the Bush-Cheney Administration has diminished that with irresponsible policies and an unquenchable thirst for debt.”