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Reach out and touch a political spinner
A day doesn’t pass that I don’t receive 10 to 20 e-mails from the presidential campaigns of Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain and their supporters.
A number of the e-mails invite me to participate in teleconferences with campaign officials and/or supporters. I typically pass because they usually are a waste of time.
On Wednesday, the Obama campaign held a teleconference at 2:30 p.m. with the McCain campaign holding one 30 minutes later.
For some unexplained reason, I decided to listen to both. At least I’m getting a column out of the calls.
The first one was billed by the Obama campaign in an e-mail as “McCain’s recently politically motivated flip flop concerning his purchase of a foreign made car for his daughter.”
The McCain e-mail about the teleconference came from the “Ohio Palin Truth Squad” to discuss Obama’s comments about Sarah Palin, the Republican vice presidential nominee.
Before going further, I have to tell you about how reporters access these teleconferences. If you have my Aug. 6, 2004, column handy — and I know most of you have all of my columns placed neatly in a file — you’ll see that things haven’t changed much in four years.
Just as was done in 2004, the campaigns e-mail a telephone number to call and an access code. This is designed to keep the riff-raff off the calls.
The Democratic code is typically a long number. For the Obama call, the code was “1550159.”
The Republicans like to keep it simple. After all, they’re dealing with the media. The code for their call was “McCain Palin 2008.”
The Obama call featured United Auto Workers President Ron Gettelfinger; Joe Shields, a UAW local president from Fenton, Mo., and our very own Jim Graham, president of the UAW Local 1112 at the Lordstown General Motors complex.
The three discussed McCain’s recent comment in Michigan that he didn’t buy his daughter her Toyota Prius. This contradicts McCain’s statements in South Carolina in October 2007 that he bought the foreign-made car for his daughter.
Graham called the contradictions “a slap in the face to this entire country.” He added that if McCain would “lie about an issue as small as a Prius, what’s he going to do on the big issues?”
Graham added: “It scares me.”
Forget about killer bees, spontaneous combustion or alien invasions. Graham’s scared of McCain changing his story on buying his daughter’s Toyota.
Graham also mentioned speaking to McCain a few months ago when the Republican visited the Lordstown GM plant.
“I’ve been on this job too long to be hula-hooped,” he said about McCain’s rhetoric on free trade. I wonder if Graham could be Frisbeed, Slinkyed or Silly Puttyed.
Ohio Auditor Mary Taylor and Betty Montgomery, the state’s former attorney general and auditor, were on the McCain call.
The two were “offended” by comments Obama made in Virginia.
The Obama statement in question is too long to fit here, but it was about McCain talking about change but not following through. The line that attracted the outrage is: “You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.”
The McCain campaign insisted the comment was a sexist attack on Palin. Obama said that’s not the case.
“We’re here to say shame on you, Sen. Obama. You know better,” Montgomery said even after a reporter read the entire Obama comment to her.
Like Montgomery, Taylor wasn’t interested in the context of Obama’s statement because the auditor insisted he apologize to Palin.
Montgomery acknowledged before her criticism of Obama that “this is going to be the silly season for all of you.”
That’s about the only thing I heard in the two teleconferences that made any sense.