« Refine this & more Cuban oil fantasies | Main | Firefighters to endorse Shaheen »

How utterly original. It's clear the John McCain campaign and the GOP has settled in on a positive campaign theme for the duration -- Barack Obama is the most notorious flip-flopper in American history who can be trusted to say one thing and do another and thereby can't be trusted while McCain (as notorious a flip flopper as they come) is portrayed as somehow consistent and principled. Of course, the Obama folks work to undermine McCain's shrinking credibility every day.

We have now entered the swamp war chapter of the general election campaign where defining your opponent, according to conventional wisdom, is critical -- and guaranteed to turn off hundreds of thousand of voters in the rpocess which the GOP wouldn't mind at all.

For what it's worth, both candidates have a similar theme of the week -- the economy, the economy, and the economy. Both of them have ideas with varying degrees of plausibility and sheer fantasy but McCain takes the early lead so far in the surely crazy sweepstakes with his call for a balanced budget by 2013. The logic is so strained as to be laughable especially since he's a convert to the genius of the Bush tax cuts. But hey, if your gonna say victory will be achieved in Iraq by 2013, you might as well go for the daily double.

Stadium rock
In a salute to the bygone days of the 1970s when the peak of rock band mania included tours that filled up sports stadiums from sea to shining sea (Eagles, Rolling Stones, Elton John, Led Zeppelin), the Obama campaign is going to break all the rules and hold his convention acceptance speech outside in Denver at Invesco Field -- before an intimate audience of some 75,000.

Earmarks
The Nashua Telegraph does an excellent job today of putting the spotlight on the connection between Congressional earmarks (those personal appropriation bills) by elected officials in NH and campaign donations. What reporter Albert McKeon found was...well, not a whole lot of controversy or quid pro quo and some pretty conventional legislative bipartisan hustle to bring federal dollars home to the Granite State. It's worth a read though it likely won't warm the heart of 1st District Congressional GOP candidate John Stephen who has made earmarks the scourge of civilization -- or John McCain who believes he can balance the budget on the back of earmarking abusers that he will smite and contain.