As I’ve said, I’m a bit skeptical of some of these “Clinton campaign is full of screwups” stories. An election is a tough, zero-sum competition and you can do the overwhelming majority of things right and still lose. In other words, I have a lot of sympathy for what Jim Jordan says at the end of this article on people second-guessing the Clinton campaign’s spending decisions:

“Obviously, some campaigns are more careful and wise with their money than others,” Jim Jordan, a Democratic consultant who ran John Kerry’s presidential campaign until November 2003. “But these budgetary post-mortems tend to follow a familiar pattern; winners are by definition smart, and losers are dumb and wasteful. In truth, campaign budgeting is hard and complicated and three-dimensional and just impossible to understand without the full time-and-place context of the whole race.”

That said, some of this stuff simply isn’t a question of mistakes or not mistakes:

Nearly $100,000 went for party platters and groceries before the Iowa caucuses, even though the partying mood evaporated quickly. Rooms at the Bellagio luxury hotel in Las Vegas consumed more than $25,000; the Four Seasons, another $5,000. [...] The firm that includes Mark Penn, Mrs. Clinton’s chief strategist and pollster, and his team collected $3.8 million for fees and expenses in January; in total, including what the campaign still owes, the firm has billed more than $10 million for consulting, direct mail and other services, an amount other Democratic strategists who are not affiliated with either campaign called stunning.

That just sounds like self-dealing by the people running the campaign. Obviously, once the money’s been handed over to them, they’re allowed to spend it however they see fit. But if you’re a working person thinking of sending $50 or $150 over to her campaign, you’ve got to wonder if that’s just going to wind up going to rooms at the Four Seasons or as part of some kind of million dollar payday for Mark Penn.

Newsweek reports that the McCain campaign — including the senator himself — is so bitter about the recent New York Times story that it is shunning campaign reporters to the back of the plane:

John McCain’s campaign plane is usually a pretty jovial place to be. [...]

But in the aftermath of today’s New York Times story looking at McCain’s dealings with a Washington lobbyist, the mood is decidedly different. Before McCain boarded his plane, reporters were asked to sit farther back than usual on the plane. And when McCain finally boarded the plane, he failed to offer his usual wave at reporters and opted to quickly take his seat. During the flight, the cabin was unusually quiet, save a few quick discussions McCain had with top aides Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter. Near the end of the flight, Schmidt came back to the press cabin, where, with cameras off, he railed against the New York Times for publishing its story.

At least he didn’t call them “f–ing jerks.”

What Ezra Klein said about this Kos diary which reaches some unfair to Clinton conclusions based on a comparison of the Clinton-Obama records in the Senate.

I would further note that looking at what legislation a Senator has or hasn’t cosponsored can get pretty misleading. Cosponsoring a piece of legislation that’s not going anywhere is the ultimate in congressional cheap talk. What’s more, Senators sometimes sign on to legislation they don’t actually favor (see the Republican co-sponsors of Ron Wyden’s bill) in order to be able to change things around. And sometimes taking a position in favor of something actually means the reverse — I recall a noteworthy moment at YearlyKos last summer where Clinton was trying to brush off worries about her commitment to political reform by noting that she’s on record in favor of full public financing of federal campaigns. Well, I favor that, too, but it’s not going to happen and Clinton’s never done anything to try to lay the groundwork for making it happen. In effect, her support for public financing is a beard to give cover to her opposition to smaller-scale, more realistic political reform proposals.

Which isn’t to say that she’s uniquely duplicitous in these regards, I just happen to be familiar with that particular issue. You see something similar with John Dingell and the carbon tax, and, indeed, with tons and tons of other legislators. If you want to understand people’s records, you have two decent options. One is to go totally “dumb” and use something like DW-NOMINATE which soaks up every single vote cast. There the size of the data set helps iron out the flaws in the individual data points and gives you a crude big-picture sense of where things stand (both are liberal, and Obama somewhat more so). The other way to go is to go “smart” in which case you need to actually speak to people who work with congress on some issue you’re concerned with and ask them how helpful or not some Senator or other has been on some issue. That’ll involve voting records, cosponsored legislation, media appearances, floor statements, timing, committee antics, secret promises, friends of friends, etc.

Going for the middle ground seems appealing, but the odds are that it’s just going to wind up misleading.

Hillary Clinton’s “change you can xerox” crack from last night got me wondering how the people at the Xerox Corporation feel about the use of their corporate name as a generic verb. It turns out they don’t like it at all:

Xerox is a famous trademark and trade name. Xerox as a trademark is properly used only as a brand name to identify the company’s products and services. The Xerox trademark should always be used as a proper adjective followed by the generic name of the product: e.g., Xerox printer. The Xerox trademark should never be used as a verb. The trade name Xerox is an abbreviation for the company’s full legal name: Xerox Corporation.

Apparently the concern is that if too many people start talking about how Brother’s multifunction printers not only print and fax, but make xeroxes, too, that the Xerox trademark becomes diluted. Thus, in public at least, they need to vigorously contest the little-x “xerox” usages. In private, you’ve got to imagine that this is good PR.

Responding to yesterday’s blockbuster New York Times article, Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) campaign sent a statement to reporters claiming “no representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC.” But, as Newsweek reveals today, McCain admitted in a 2002 sworn deposition that he “was contacted” by the company’s head, Lowell Paxson. Here’s McCain in 2002:

ABRAMS: Do you know were they got the information?

MCCAIN: No, but I would add, I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue. [...]

ABRAMS: Did you speak to the company’s lobbyist about these matters?

MCCAIN: I don’t recall if it was Mr. Paxson or the company’s lobbyist or both.

ABRAMS: But you did speak to him?

MCCAIN: I’m sure I spoke with him, yes.

UPDATE: John Aravosis notes that the full context of the McCain campaign’s statement is even more damning.

NBC Nightly News reported last night on the multi-million-dollar PR campaign being orchestrated by the coal front group Americans for Balanced Energy Choices to promote the construction of enormous coal plants in Nevada. As NBC correspondent Anne Thompson points out, ABEC’s misleading campaign is “cloaking coal of once belching smokestacks in green.” Watch it:

In the segment, NASA scientist James Hansen says a moratorium on coal plant development is needed, or else “we don’t have any chance of stopping global climate change.”

It appears that John McCain is a liar:

Just hours after the Times’ story was posted, the McCain campaign issued a point-by-point response that depicted the letters as routine correspondence handled by his staff–and insisted that McCain had never even spoken with anybody from Paxson or Alcalde & Fay about the matter. “No representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC,” the campaign said in a statement emailed to reporters.

But that flat claim seems to be contradicted by an impeccable source: McCain himself. “I was contacted by Mr. Paxson on this issue,” McCain said in the September 25, 2002 deposition obtained by Newsweek. “He wanted their approval very bad for purposes of his business. I believe that Mr. Paxson had a legitimate complaint.”

At this point, it’s worth observing something about the general McCain-press dynamic. One thing reporters like about McCain is that he offers shoot-from-the-hip statements on topics that come up in discussions. Reporters like this for good reason — the carefully worded, artfully hedged statements in which the vast majority of politicians speak nowadays is really annoying. That said, politicians don’t talk like that because they’re all douchebags, they talk like that because that’s how you have to talk. If you make the slightest slip-up or misstatement, the press will pounce all over you.

Unless, that is, you’re John McCain. If you’re John McCain you can make an obviously false statement like claiming you’ve “never done favors for special interests or lobbyists” or saying that “no representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC” when you yourself said in the past that you’d been contacted by Paxson and the press just lets it slide. Why? Because they like him. But they like him because he’s spontaneous. But he’s spontaneous because they let him get away with this stuff. And they let him get away with it because they like him. It’s what makes him such a formidable political figure — he can run around doing things no other politicians could get away with and actually attract praise for it.

Unless, of course, it all comes crashing down. If reporters start judging McCain by their usual rules, then he’ll have to turn himself into just another carefully-hedging pol. But one who’s a million years old, one who thinks the problem with the Bush foreign policy is that we haven’t started enough wars, and one who doesn’t even care about the economic challenges facing the country.