Carpetbagger archives and this site’s search feature will remain active indefinitely

, as will my email address.

My most sincere thanks to everyone for all the support and encouragement. I hope to see all of you at my new home.

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Carpetbagger archives and this site’s search feature will remain active indefinitely

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, as will my email address.

My most sincere thanks to everyone for all the support and encouragement. I hope to see all of you at my new home.

Well, the cat is out of the carpetbag: Steve is off to The Washington Monthly to become a real political animal.

It couldn’t happen to a more deserving guy. I’ve known Steve before there was a Carpetbagger Report. I used to joke about him being the biggest political nerd I’ve ever known (and I’ve known quite a few). One unconfirmed rumor is that he asked his parents for a subscription to Congressional Quarterly for his 8th birthday.

People joke about Steve being some kind of machine because of the amount of copy he generates in one day. It just goes to show what a 12-hour work day can do for you. My head would have exploded a long time ago

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, but Steve plugs right along. He lives and breathes this stuff, which makes his analysis so penetrating and thoughtful. The Carpetbagger Report has a truly national (and international) audience, but I’ve always thought it should be larger. Steve’s new home will make that possible.

I won’t be taking the trip over to the Monthly with Steve , so today is it for me as guest blogger. I just want to say thanks to all who have read my posts over the past few years. I know your time is valuable, and I am humbled by the thought that you would spend some of it looking at what I have to say.

I’d like to think I was a good ying to Steve’s yang. Steve is thoughtful and methodical. Although he produces vast amounts of copy a day

, he weighs every word. I’ve observed him write. It’s like you can see the cogs turning in his head (so maybe there’s something to this machine theory after all). My style is more shoot-from-the-hip, and I often tried to break things up with a little humor. Sometimes it worked and sometimes it didn’t, and I’m sure there are posts out there I’d rather drop down the memory hole. No matter — it was always a whole lot of fun.

It was never my ambition to blog full time. I simply lack Steve’s ambition and drive in that area. (More to the point, I have a full-time job and two children.) But I had a ball visiting here on Saturdays

, and it’s possible you haven’t heard the last from me. I will be among Steve’s loyal readers at the Monthly. Who knows? I might even offer a comment or two.

Now get on over to www.washingtonmonthly.com to see what Steve has to say.

As for Carpetbagger content

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, be sure to swing by Saturday morning for a sign-off post from my friend “Morbo.”

And now, back to the news….

* Confirming earlier reports: “Iraq and the U.S. have reached preliminary agreement to withdraw American forces from Iraqi cities by next June, six years into the increasingly unpopular war, Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari said Thursday after meeting with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.”

* Russia isn’t in any hurry: “Washington demanded on Friday that Russia pull its troops out of Georgia ‘now

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,’ but Moscow said it would be another 10 days before the bulk of its force left Georgian soil.”

* What a terrible shame: “Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones, a key figure in Ohio Democratic politics and the chairman of the House ethics committee, died yesterday at a Cleveland hospital after suffering a brain hemorrhage.”

* Taliban wreaks havoc: “At least 60 people were killed and 100 injured in coordinated suicide bombings on the country’s largest army munitions factory here Thursday, the latest in a series of Taliban attacks against Pakistani government targets.”

* He won’t say who

, but Barack Obama has, in fact, decided on a running mate. “I won’t comment on anything else until I introduce our running mate to the world,” he said. “That’s all you’re going to get out of me.” Obama also wouldn’t say if he’s informed his pick yet.

* Harry Reid acknowledged, on the record, that he “can’t stand” John McCain. I can’t say I blame him.

* Tensions with Russia sent oil prices higher today.

* I’m starting to get the impression that Rush Limbaugh has a problem with black people.

* No, really, I’m starting to get the impression that Rush Limbaugh has a problem with black people.

* One of the more depressing scandals of the Bush administration is how routine this gang has made corruption: “Medicare’s top officials said in 2006 that they had reduced the number of fraudulent and improper claims paid by the agency, keeping billions of dollars out of the hands of people trying to game the system. But according to a confidential draft of a federal inspector general’s report , those claims of success, which earned Medicare wide praise from lawmakers, were misleading.”

* Are the Olympics over yet?

* When it comes to the 1922 Colorado River compact, just because McCain says he wants to renegotiate the deal doesn’t mean that McCain wants to renegotiate the deal. Remember, McCain doesn’t always speak for the McCain campaign.

* And the Bush White House sure is clumsy: “The White House is missing as many as 225 days of e-mail dating back to 2003, and there is little likelihood that a recovery effort will be completed by the time President Bush leaves office

, according to an internal White House draft document obtained by the Associated Press…. The draft document outlines a process in which private contractors would attempt to retrieve lost e-mail from 35,000 disaster recovery backup tapes dating to October 2003, a period covering such events as growing violence in Iraq, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the criminal inquiry into the disclosure that Valerie Plame, wife of an administration critic, worked for the CIA.”

Anything to add? Consider this the last end-of-the-day open thread we’ll have at The Carpetbagger Report.

, today is the last day I’ll be posting content to The Carpetbagger Report. Starting first thing in the morning, I’ll be writing exclusively for the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal blog. It’s right here.

A couple of other quick notes. First, my friend “Morbo” will have a sign-off item on Saturday morning

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, so be sure to stop by.

Second, a lot of you asked about whether the Carpetbagger archives will still be accessible. They will, and they’ll be available by week and month. What’s more

, the search function will still work, and the email address you have for me will also remain active.

And third, many of you had very helpful suggestions and ideas about changes you’d like to see to Political Animal. I’ve been pulling all of the recommendations together, and promise to see what I can do. I’m hesitant about being the new guy, coming in and wanting to make a bunch of changes, so I hope readers will be patient. (Most notably, those readers who want to see a full-post RSS feed will be pleased to know one is available here.)

My most sincere thanks to everyone for all the positive feedback and encouragement. I hope to see all of you tomorrow morning in the new place.

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Nevertheless, overshadowed or not, this really is pretty crazy.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) called lobbyists “birds of prey” Wednesday and vowed to enforce a lifetime ban on lobbying for members of his administration.

“Whenever there’s a corrupt system, then you’re going to have these birds of prey descend on it to get their share of the spoils,” McCain said in a half-hour interview with Politico following a town-hall meeting in the southern part of this swing state. […]

The senator went so far as to say: “Lobbyists don’t come to my office. Because they know they’re not going to be an earmark. They know they’re not going to get a pork-barrel project.”

Even by McCain standards, this is transparent nonsense. Putting aside the fact that McCain, like every other senator, has sought and received earmark, the reality is lobbyists do come to McCain’s office, and as a rule, once they get there, they’re given influential jobs in the McCain campaign.

McCain’s campaign manager is a lobbyist. His chief strategist is a lobbyist. His top foreign policy advisor is a lobbyist. The man he tapped to run the Republican convention is a lobbyist. His top two senior advisors are both lobbyists. His campaign is being financed by donations from lobbyists

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, bundled by other lobbyists.

In one rather dramatic anecdote, McCain actually had a corporate lobbyist conducting business directly aboard his campaign bus.

Of all the lobbyists involved in the McCain campaign , the most prominent is [Charles] Black, who has made a lucrative career of shuttling back and forth between presidential politics and big-time Washington lobbying…. [E]ven as Black provides a private voice and a public face for McCain, he also leads his lobbying firm, which offers corporate interests and foreign governments the promise of access to the most powerful lawmakers. Some of those companies have interests before the Senate and, in particular, the Commerce Committee, of which McCain is a member.

Black said he does a lot of his work by telephone from McCain’s Straight Talk Express bus.

By one count, McCain has at least 159 lobbyists

, on leave from their firms, running his campaign operation. It’s why McCain has defended lobbyists and the lobbying industry over and over again.

“Whenever there’s a corrupt system, then you’re going to have these birds of prey descend on it to get their share of the spoils.” It sounds like the corrupt system McCain is describing is his own presidential campaign.

When it came to voter disenfranchisement , von Spakovsky was a reliable member of Team Bush. And as a reward, Bush tried to promote von Spakovsky to a six-year term on the Federal Election Commission, which touched off a major fight with Senate Democrats, and in turn, effectively shut down the FEC for months.

In May, Dems won when Spakovsky withdrew from consideration. In August

, Americans lost, as Spakovsky was hired as a “consultant” to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

If Spakovsky’s history of backing efforts to make voting more difficult strikes you as a poor fit with the Commission’s mission of defending voter rights, consider that of the eight current commissioners at the agency, only two are registered Democrats, a politicization that the New York Times Charlie Savage brought to light last year.

Among Spakovsky’s duties will be overseeing the USCCR’s report on the Justice Department’s monitoring of the 2008 presidential elections, a source inside the USCCR told TPMmuckraker.

Spakovsky’s hiring is at the request of Commissioner Todd Gaziano

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, who works for the conservative Heritage Foundation on FEC issues and has defended Spakovsky in the press before. According to a federal government source, Gaziano has recommended Spakovsky at the government’s highest payscale — which would work out to about $124,010 annually if Spakovsky was to stay for an entire year.

This is crazy. The guy who was accused of voter-suppression tactics has no business “helping” monitor to the elections on behalf of the Justice Department and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Given all the scandalous players in the Bush administration, it’s easy to get lost remembering which hack did what to whom, but in this case, Spakovsky is one of the less honorable people in Bush World.

Von Spakovsky’s Senate confirmation hearing last June was noteworthy for many oddities, not the least of which was a letter sent to the rules committee by six former career professionals in the voting rights section of the Justice Department; folks who had worked under both Republican and Democratic administrations for a period that spanned 36 years. The letter urged the committee to reject von Spakovsky on the grounds that while at DoJ, he was one of the architects of a transformation in the voting rights section from its “historic mission to enforce the nation’s civil rights laws without regard to politics, to pursuing an agenda which placed the highest priority on the partisan political goals of the political appointees who supervised the Section.” The authors named him as the “point person for undermining the Civil Rights Division’s mandate to protect voting rights.”

Von Spakovsky’s response to these charges at his confirmation hearings? “I was not the decision maker,” he claimed. “I don’t remember that complaint at all,” he demurred. “It’s privileged,” he insisted. That’s the kind of bobbing and weaving that likely cost Alberto Gonzales his job. That the same absurd testimony from von Spakovsky might be rewarded with a professional upgrade is unfathomable.

And what was von Spakovsky trying to hide at his hearing? Why is the nation’s largest civil rights coalition urging that his confirmation be rejected? Because this man was one of the generals in a years-long campaign to use what we now know to be bogus claims of runaway “vote fraud” in America to suppress minority votes. Von Spakovsky was one of the people who helped melt down and then reshape the Justice Department into an instrument aimed at diminishing voter participation for partisan ends.

The point to remember here is that Spakovsky has been at the heart of the indefensible

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, right-wing effort to prevent eligible voters from participating in elections. Tom DeLay’s re-redistricting scheme that violated the Voting Rights Act? Spakovsky approved it. Georgia’s re-redistricting scheme to disenfranchise black voters? Spakovsky approved that

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, too. The conservative campaign to fabricate an epidemic of voter fraud? Spakovsky helped create the scheme and execute it. When a U.S. Attorney in Minnesota discovered that Native American voters were being disenfranchised? It was Spakovsky who shut down the investigation.

Only 151 days to go.

A couple of hours later, though, the McCain gang went with the one response that applies to every question.

The McCain campaign is road-testing a new argument in responding to Obama’s criticism of his number-of-houses gaffe

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, an approach the McCain camp has never tried before: The houses gaffe doesn’t matter because … he was a P.O.W.!

“This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison,” spokesman Brian Rogers told the Washington Post.

I see. When the Rev. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a close Bush ally, publicly questioned McCain’s marital infidelities

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, the McCain campaign responded by highlighting McCain’s background as a prisoner of war.

When Dems attacked McCain’s healthcare plan in May, McCain responded by noting his background as a prisoner of war.

Asked by a local reporter about the first thing that comes to his mind when he thinks of Pittsburgh, McCain responded by talking about his background as a prisoner of war.

Accused of possibly having heard the questions in advance of Rick Warren’s recent candidate forum

, the McCain campaign responded by highlighting McCain’s background as a prisoner of war.

There seems to be a pattern here.

To be sure, McCain no doubt endured horrific conditions during the war, and it’s obvious that McCain’s detention as a young man in Vietnam helped shape his life. Given this, it’s not unreasonable that he’d want voters to know about his experience.

But that’s not a license to force the “P.O.W. card” into every unrelated question.

And all of this, of course, dovetails with the McCain campaign running multiple television ads talking about McCain’s background as a prisoner of war, literally including interrogation footage in the commercial.

This hard-sell wouldn’t be quite so odd if McCain didn’t go around saying that he’s reluctant to talk about his Vietnam experiences.

The McCain campaign conceded that the senator owns “at least four.” The new Obama ad puts the number at “seven.” There’s one estimate that points to 10 homes

, and I saw one count that pegs it at 13 properties.

Yglesias noted, “I’ve seen a lot of liberals giving John McCain a hard time about not knowing how many homes he owns. But this is a genuinely difficult question to answer!”

It actually is tricky. First, McCain owns a lot of homes. Second, he owns a lot of properties with multiples homes on the properties. And third, in a couple of instances, McCain has bought two homes, only to start tearing down walls to create super-duper homes. (Do we count the $700,000 condo McCain bought for his daughter as a graduation present? Decisions, decisions.)

The estimable Jed Lewison put together a very helpful Google Earth tour that helps sort through the presumptive Republican nominee’s extensive portfolio.

I’d just add that the McCain campaign’s odd “arugula”-based response chastises Obama for having made “$4 million last year.”

Maybe the McCain gang can clarify — doesn’t that make Obama

, by McCain’s standards

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, middle class?

Post Script: Alas, there is no video of McCain struggling with the question, but there is an audio file. I’m expecting some clever audiophile to have a remix available in 5…4…3…

Based on the last few hours, I think they got one.

We talked earlier about a reporter from the Politico asking John McCain yesterday how many homes he owns. “I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain said. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

In an impressive display of rapid-response, the Obama campaign already has a new ad out, capitalizing:

Around the same time the campaign was unveiling the ad, Obama was hosting a town-hall event in Virginia, and kept the pressure on.

“I guess if you think that being rich means you’ve got to make $5 million and if you don’t know how many houses you have

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, then it’s not surprising that you might think the economy was ‘fundamentally strong,'” Obama said. “But if you’re like me, and you’ve got one house, or you are like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so they don’t lose their home, you might have a different perspective… So there’s just a fundamental gap of understanding between John McCain’s world and what people are going through every single day here in America.”

This is a pretty devastating message. That McCain has so many homes he’s lost track of the number is embarrassing, but what’s damaging about this story is the way in which it ties into McCain’s misguided economic worldview.

McCain has opposed increases to the minimum wage, he opposes universal healthcare, and he blamed the housing crisis on homeowners. At the same time, McCain thinks the economy is strong, that Bush has been a good steward of the economy, and what the nation really needs is more tax cuts for millionaires.

I’m not watching the networks, so I have no idea if this story is getting major play right now, but it has the potential to humiliate McCain in a very serious, lasting way.

It’s not about wealth and elitism; it’s about being out of touch. This narrative looked pretty compelling when McCain described our economic problems as “psychological,” but this house flap takes the issue to a whole new level.

I’m sure the surrogates will be all over this — they already are — but it sure would be entertaining to have Democrats everywhere doing events nationwide , asking members of the audience if they know how many homes they own.

Barack Obama’s campaign, moving rapidly to exploit what they see as a major opportunity, is deploying high-profile surrogates in 16 states across the country today to highlight John McCain’s uncertainty yesterday about how many houses he owns, the Democrat’s campaign tells Politico.

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, members of Congress and state legislators will hold conference calls and press conferences in front of homes to draw attention to the issue. Party leaders such as Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius

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, on the stump in Ohio and Iowa respectively, will move to incorporate the matter into their remarks on the campaign trail today in an effort to draw local media attention to the story.

Further, some state parties will hold contests in which Democrats seek out real voters who don’t know how many houses they own.

And in other states, ordinary citizens who have been victim of the mortgage crunch will hold press availabilities to contrast their plight with McCain’s wealth.

The McCain campaign is trying to hit back, saying something about arugula. Please. Note to McCain gang: your guy just admitted he doesn’t even know how many homes he has. The proper response is to change the subject

, not try to engage on the same topic.

I’ve been thinking all week that Obama needed a break to help shift the race a bit. And here it is.

, but may be of interest to political observers:

* The major players are still hoping for unity: “Politico reports that Clinton’s campaign is putting together a 40-person ‘whip team’ to quickly shut down any protests before they become vocal enough for the TV cameras to catch. ‘If people get down there on the floor and want to start blowing kazoos and making a scene

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, we want to make sure we’ve got people who stand in front of them with Obama signs,’ someone involved in the planning told the paper.”

* Several leading Republicans, including Mitt Romney and Tim Pawlenty, are headed to Denver next week to try to crash the Dems’ convention party.

* The Obama campaign has begun pushing back more aggressively against the “infanticide” smear making its way through right-wing circles.

* Both the Obama and McCain campaigns agreed this morning to the dates, times, and exact format of the questioning for their three fall debates.

* The superdelegates played a fairly significant role in this year’s nominating process, but Obama wants to lessen their significance in future contests.

* Rudy Giuliani really thinks his party would be just fine with a pro-choice running mate for John McCain. Come to think of it, he thinks the GOP would be fine with a pro-choice nominee, too, but the primaries should have made it clear how wrong this is.

* McCain continued to insist that Obama is “opposed to nuclear power.” He continues to be wrong.

* Rasmussen shows Obama leading McCain in Pennsylvania by five

, 45% to 40%.

* Rasmussen shows Obama leading McCain in New Hampshire by one, 43% to 42%.

* Rasmussen shows Obama leading McCain in Maryland by 12, 53% to 41%.

* A University of Minnesota poll shows Obama leading McCain in Minnesota by 10, 48% to 38%.

* InsiderAdvantage shows McCain leading Obama in North Carolina by two , 45% to 43%.

* Public Policy Polling shows McCain leading Obama in Missouri by 10, 50% to 40%.

* McCain is taking three days off, leaving the campaign trail altogether, starting today.

For a while, McCain would tell anyone who asked about the differences that he disagrees with Bush on pork-barrel spending. Then he’d argue that McCain takes global warming more seriously than Bush does.

Now, he’s decided to hardly answer the question at all, telling the Politico, “I don’t have any need to show that I’m different than President Bush.”

Actually, in an environment in which voters are desperate for some kind of change in how the government operates, McCain absolutely needs to show how he’s different from Bush. If he’s not going to try, I’m delighted to hear it.

Yglesias provides some helpful context:

[S]ure

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, McCain isn’t under any moral obligation to demonstrate difference from President Bush. But if he intends to pursue substantially the same policies as President Bush

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, then he has no right to react angrily when his political opponents say he’ll pursue substantially the same policies as President Bush. But he does react angrily. But if he’s going to be indignant about the idea that he’ll pursue Bush-like policies

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, then he should be able to name some policy areas in which he intends to pursue substantially different policies.

Quite right. The McCain campaign gets surprisingly testy when Dems describe him as “Bush’s third term.” At the same time

, McCain concedes the he doesn’t “have any need to show that I’m different than President Bush.”

Look, this isn’t complicated. McCain has boasted, “[O]n the transcendent issues, the most important issues of our day, I’ve been totally in agreement and support of President Bush.” As recently as last year, he voted with Bush’s position 95% of the time. He’s offering a policy agenda, and on practically everything — foreign policy, taxes, Social Security, healthcare, energy policy, the federal judiciary — there isn’t any difference between McCain’s agenda and what we’ve seen over the last eight years.

McCain doesn’t “have any need” to show that he’s different from Bush because he isn’t different from Bush. If he’s prepared to double-down on the last eight years, I’m sure Dems everywhere will be delighted.

Yesterday, Obama’s team mixed it up a bit, and started pointing at least one of McCain’s more glaring character flaws.

In an apparent effort to regain the offensive, the Obama campaign launched a broad attack on McCain [yesterday], portraying him as reckless on foreign policy, a hot-head who’s too willing to use force and not willing enough to apprise himself of facts on the ground before urging military action.

On a conference call with reporters [yesterday afternoon]

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, senior Obama foreign policy adviser Susan Rice argued that there is “a pattern here of recklessness” when it comes to McCain’s approach to various national security issues. She pointed out that McCain reacted too quickly with “aggressive and bellicose” rhetoric on the Russia-Georgia crisis, and contrasted that with Obama’s measured response to the dust-up.

“There’s something to be said for letting facts drive judgment,” Rice said, also referring to McCain’s desire to target Iraq right after 9/11.

Richard Clarke, who was a top counter-terrorism official in the last three administrations, also weighed in on the call, slamming “quick-draw McCain,” calling him “reckless,” “trigger-happy” and “discredited.”

There’s no shortage of Dems arguing, “If only Obama would pursue (fill in the blank) narrative/line of attack, he’d stand a better chance.” And with that in mind, challenging McCain on his temperament is just one of many possible approaches for Dems to pursue.

That said, it’s one of my favorites.

It’s an encouraging sign, in a general sense, to see Obama’s team take on McCain on character in the first place. Yes, McCain is wrong about, well, pretty much every issue under the sun, but that’s not enough — voters don’t just consider issue positions. It’s just as important to consider how McCain thinks and how he’d lead. In this case, that means a would-be president who loses his cool, can’t be counted on in a crisis, and is overly inclined to use force.

More specifically, I think my friend A.L. is on the right track here.

Every Obama surrogate should be saying this stuff over and over again. And they should frame the issue not just as a matter of judgment, but as an extension of McCain’s general character and temperament. There’s all kinds of material to work with here, so it shouldn’t be hard. As I noted the other day, many of McCain’s Republican colleagues are on record saying that he doesn’t have the temperament to be president, that he’s a hothead with a hair-trigger temper. Those quotes and anecdotes are highly damaging and need to be repeated endlessly. Obama’s surrogates just aren’t doing their jobs until voters are hearing the words “hothead” and “trigger-happy” at least as often as they hear the word “celebrity” and are picturing Yosemite Sam every time they hear McCain talk.

The message needs to be “if you liked the Iraq War, you’re going to love a McCain presidency.” McCain has an “act first, think later” approach to foreign policy and it’s dangerous.

Greg Sargent added:

Will painting McCain as a hair-trigger hothead who’s catastrophically overeager to support the use of military force, and not willing enough to apprise himself of the facts before acting, prove effective in the face of a withering assault on Obama as weak and indecisive?

In one sense, the grand experiment at the heart of the Obama campaign is an effort to win the election by speaking to the voters like adults.

Agreed. I’ve said many times that Obama seems committed to treating the electorate like grown-ups, perhaps more than any candidate in recent memory. There’s an inherent risk in this, and we’ll see if it pays off.

But on the temperament question, my only concern is that there are so many narratives to pursue with McCain, it’s hard to know which to pick — and Dems can’t pick them all. McCain’s a flip-flopper. And a hothead. And he’s out of touch. And he’s a confused old man. And he’s an angry candidate running a desperately negative campaign. And he’s self-righteous. And he’s a hypocrite. And he’s given up on straight-talk

, preferring constant mendacity.

It’s obviously tough to choose

, since all of these narratives are true, but I think “Senator Hothead” certainly deserves its due.

But I have a hunch not one of these is as humiliating as this one.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said in an interview Wednesday that he was uncertain how many houses he and his wife

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, Cindy, own.

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told us in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

It’s one thing to be so extraordinarily wealthy that you own multiple homes. It’s another to be so extraordinarily wealthy that you can’t even remember how many homes you own.

There’s been at least a half-hearted effort on the part of Democrats lately to characterize McCain as out of touch with the concerns of regular ol’ working American families. There’s been a more subtle effort to paint McCain as old and befuddled.

By struggling to count his own number of homes, McCain has done Democrats an enormous favor. I’ve seen some equate McCain with Grandpa Simpson, and I’ve seen some equate McCain with Mr. Burns. It turns out, he’s both.

Time’s Mark Halperin reported this morning that Dems are planning a “major offensive” on this, and intend to “hammer the Arizonan” over his comments. I can’t say I blame them. This is a slow, hanging curve, right over the middle of the plate.

Now , for accuracy’s sake, I should note that there’s been some question as to exactly how many homes McCain actually does own. I’ve heard some Dems argue he has six, while Newsweek recently pegged the number at seven. McCain’s staff told the Politico the correct answer is “at least four.”

By one count, the actual number is actually 10.

But in most respects, the exact number isn’t especially relevant. The point is a) McCain is so rich he owns a lot of homes; b) McCain is so out of touch he can’t even remember the number of homes he owns; and c) despite his extravagant wealth, McCain is anxious to push an agenda that favors the rich even more while screwing over the middle class and working families.

Over the course of the campaign, McCain has offered a couple of doozies. He talked about keeping U.S. troops in Iraq for 100 years. He described the Social Security system as a “disgrace.”

But this is the kind of humiliating story that can really hurt. Everyone in America heard about Al Gore claiming to have invented the Internet (despite the fact that never happened). Everyone in American heard John Kerry said he “voted for it before I voted against it.”

And fairly soon

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, if there’s any justice at all, everyone in America will know that John McCain is so out of touch, he’s lost count the number of homes he owns.

In the midst of a housing crisis, with foreclosures skyrocketing, and with McCain offering a regressive economic agenda, this story is quite a gift to Democrats. Expect to hear a lot more about it.