I went it alone again today—which allows for more analysis. In preparing to talk about Mark Penn’s dismissal from the Clinton campaign, I found myself trying to translate “pollster” to Spanish—turns out, there’s no such term. It also turns out that I skipped over talking about the pitfalls of having your chief pollster doubling as a strategist. I took my talking points for this based on Mara Liasson’s insightful analysis of this on NPR this week.

As for John McCain’s comments on Afganistan, there’s nothing like seeing it for yourself:

MCCAIN: “Afghanistan is not in trouble because of our diversion to Iraq. Afghanistan is in trouble..
WALTERS: A lot of people think it is because we don’t have the troops there that we need.
MCCAIN: “I know a lot of people think that. And we do need more troops there.”
[The View, 4/10/08]

Not the first example of how out of touch he is with the reality of the situation. I e-mailed my friend Julio de la Guardia about this because he spent 6 months last year in Afghanistan as the spokesperson for the European Police. He said:

Finally, we need less “Enduring Freedom” (only anti-terrorism and anti-insurgency) and more ISAF (security but also reconstruction and development) and more UN and NGOs. Afghanistan is still one of the poorest countries of the world despite the presence of the International Community. We are turning a blind eye to corruption in the government (interpreted to be a lesser evil in comparison to the Taliban). This has to change. The government and parliament of Afghanistan must be accountable and the wealth must be better distributed!

I won’t repeat any of my past rants on women in politics, but I will recomend that you read Nicholas Kristoff’s interesting take on this campaign in a column titled Our Racist, Sexist Selves.