The Stench of McCain's Desperation
I admit to a certain weariness already over the remarkable imbalance in treatment of the two presidential candidates by the corporate (mainstream) media and apparently more than a few of those with nose-rings linked to same. For example, there are reports this weekend that Obama's response to the hateful McCain Paris/Britney ad may have been more widely perceived as "racist" than was the ad itself. I'm sorry, I have a little trouble grasping that, but maybe it is my routine - and often wrong - assumption that we are dealing with upright creatures with opposable thumbs who can and occasionally do (perhaps at random) both think and behave rationally.
But, for the record, this is yielding far too much benefit of the doubt to the McCain machine, which has been and can be expected to continue to be racist, dirty, and completely without principle or scruple. When conditions permit, they may indulge in enough cross-talk and mixing of messages that deniability may be marginally plausible in conversation with a corporate media representative or others lacking opposables, but sometimes it will just be plain nasty. In the meantime, even a relatively light-hearted acknowledgement that skin colors and appearances do vary, never mind that our country has a very unhappy record when it comes to race and minorities of every sort is right up there with a bare lapel. Steven Colbert has the market on "not seeing color" cornered, and yet it is apparently the case that the repub version of political correctness requires that "race" or "otherness" never be mentioned - at the very least obviously not by those of color or other minority status. That would be uppity, like, say, refusing to move to the back of the bus. And, well, failing their PC litmus test apparently means ipso facto you are racist.
Slightly (and only briefly) diverting from my theme, I encourage you to check out this site, set up to agitate for reconsideration of Wesley Clark as a VP candidate. As you may recall, Clark found himself on the outside after making the perfectly reasonable observation that having your aircraft shot down and spending years as a POW were not sufficient qualifications to be President (ed: and what other qualifications is McCain touting?? Advanced degrees in flip-floppery?). The Obama campaign erred I believe in being so hypersensitive as to distance the candidate from Clark's remarks. This was not Rev. Wright after all (or anywhere close to as venomous as what seems to be almost the norm now for the McCain campaign).
Anyway, check this out. I like what they're saying and encourage you also to consider signing the poll. I believe Clark may be superior both in terms of qualifications and "value-added" to any of the other obvious VP candidates.
John Heilemann has a great article in NY Magazine cataloging the damning degree to which the McCain campaign is unfolding in all its' dark Machivellian pathology, risking exposing all the years of denial, forestalled grievance, and almost certainly psychopathology reaching back at least to South Carolina 2000, if not Hanoi:
On the morning in March when Barack Obama was preparing to give his speech on race in Philadelphia to try to contain the fallout from the Jeremiah Wright imbroglio, I was having breakfast in Washington with a member of John McCain’s inner circle. The topic at hand was whether McCain was licking his chops at the prospect of facing Obama in the fall—whether he relished the idea of running negative against the hopemonger on questions of his patriotism and, er, otherness. My McCainiac source noted that his boss had “demonstrated admirable restraint and respect for Obama in the last few weeks,” citing McCain’s rebuke of the Tennessee GOP when it issued a press release that invoked Obama’s middle name and featured that photo of him in Somali tribal clothing, calling it “Muslim garb.” “McCain has drawn a bright line and said that’s unacceptable,” my companion said. “It’s a genuine reflex: He really wants the campaign to be civil.”
The following night I was drinking with a big-time Republican operative who’d worked during the primaries for a rival candidate. When I floated the notion of the Good McCain, this person snorted. “He didn’t have a problem calling Mitt Romney a phony in New Hampshire or comparing George W. Bush to Bill Clinton in South Carolina in 2000,” he said. “McCain is a tough guy. He’ll do whatever he needs to do.”
Until last week, it was an open question which of these visions of McCain bore a closer relation to reality. But with the weeklong string of attacks uncorked by the Arizona senator and his people during Obama’s trip abroad and in its aftermath—some brutal, some mocking, but all personal and focused on Obama’s character—we now have an inkling of just how deep in the mud McCain and his people are willing to wallow in order to win in November: right up to their Republican eyeballs.
As countless fact-checkers and tsk-tskers have maintained, the broadsides were a blend of distortion, innuendo, and outright slander. But that doesn’t mean they (and their inevitable successors) won’t prove effective, especially against an opponent with so little experience under ruthless and relentless fire. Before Obama hurled himself into the presidential scrum he’d never been hit with a negative ad—a point often raised by Hillary Clinton’s people. And though they made sure Obama lost his negative-spot virginity, the ads they ran against him were patty-cake compared with what he faces now. Hence the questions on which the general election may turn: Will Obama be capable of withstanding the pummeling the McCain forces have begun to unleash? Or, as Hillary privately predicted, will he crumple like a paper doll?
For those not keeping score, a quick review of the McCain campaign’s lunge for Obama’s jugular. First, its new slogan: “Country first,” with its inverse insinuation that Obama puts something else (i.e., his own ambition) ahead of the nation. Second, McCain’s accusation that Obama “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” Third, the McCain ad “Troops,” which claims that Obama, while in Germany, “made time to go the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops—seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras.” And, finally, the ad “Celeb,” with its intercut images of Obama in Berlin, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears.
The strategy behind all this isn’t hard to discern: Drive up Obama’s negatives and render him unacceptable to pivotal voting blocs. Thus the depiction of him as too young, too feckless, and too pampered to be president. (In almost every shot in the McCain ads, Obama is smiling flashily, whereas McCain is pictured as weathered, sober, staring hard into the distance—a clever bit of jujitsu, using Obama’s pretty mug against him.) Thus the portrayal of him as precious, self-infatuated, and effete: “Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand ‘MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew—Black Forest Berry Honest Tea’ and worry about the price of arugula,” wrote campaign manager Rick Davis in an e-mail announcing “Celeb.” And thus the emphasis on Obama’s rock-star persona, designed to engender envy and contempt among the swath of Middle America for which hipness is no virtue but a sign of pretension.
The racial undertones of this assault are subtle but undeniable, as Obama himself suggested when he asserted last week that his opponents are trying to make voters “scared” of him because he “doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency.” They’re most glaring in “Troops,” which features footage of Obama sinking a three-pointer in Kuwait, despite the fact that the shot took place at a military base, which undermines the ad’s argument. But the spot’s deeper aim is to foster an unconscious simile: Obama as a blinged-up, camera-hungry, NBA shooting guard, Allen Iverson with a Harvard Law degree. Am I reaching? Consider this: Would the ad have featured footage of Obama on a golf course draining a hole-in-one? “No, it wouldn’t,” laughs a GOP media savant. “The racial angle is the first thing I thought of when I saw that ad. It fits into the celebrity stuff, too.” (For McCain, that impolitic, pro-Obama Ludacris track was manna from hip-hop heaven.)
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And Joe Conason took the words right out of my mouth in entitling his Salon column "Wanting the White House in the Worst Way":
For many of the journalists who regard John McCain as an unusually honorable politician, listening to his increasingly dishonorable campaign rhetoric is a painful and puzzling experience. They are openly wondering what has driven him to denigrate and even smear Barack Obama in a style more reminiscent of McCain's old enemies in his own party than the straight-talking maverick. They want to believe that he has not really changed, and that somehow these lapses can be blamed on someone else. Like a spouse in a bad marriage, they have yet to face up to the fact that he actually changed years ago -- or to ask if he was ever the man they once thought he was.
Although several prominent pundits have denounced McCain for questioning Obama's patriotism, a lingering reluctance to confront reality still colors much commentary on the campaign. Writing gingerly in the Washington Post of the Arizona senator's "fuzzy" campaign persona, David Ignatius pleaded with McCain to return to the noble, tolerant and healing ways that no longer seem to govern his character.
Without saying exactly what troubles the senator's Beltway fan club about his current behavior, the Post columnist offered an exculpatory theory: "What's damaging the McCain campaign now, I suspect, is that this fiercely independent man is trying to please other people -- especially a Republican leadership that doesn't really trust him."
But the Republican leadership, whomever that might include, did not dictate the smears against Obama now emanating almost daily from the McCain camp. When McCain accused Obama of seeking to win the presidency by losing the Iraq war, tantamount to calling the Democrat a traitor, he uttered those words himself. When his campaign aired a commercial claiming that Obama had refused to visit wounded U.S. troops without TV cameras, he personally endorsed that lie. When his campaign then aired a vapid ad depicting Obama as a celebrity comparable to Britney Spears, McCain claimed to be "proud" of that attack on a Senate colleague.
It is sad to watch McCain so casually abandon the civility that he pledged to maintain. But the descent from decency didn't begin yesterday.
As many observers have noted by now, the negative strategy adopted by the McCain campaign under the leadership of new manager Steve Schmidt follows a template created by Schmidt's old boss, Karl Rove. It is all very familiar stuff, from the direct assault on Obama's power as a media star to the insinuations that he is weak, elitist and not truly patriotic. All these themes can and will be amplified by "independent" advertising that raises doubts about Obama's religious and racial attitudes (or those of his wife).
It isn't Swift-boating -- yet -- but it regurgitates the same themes used by Rove in both the midterm campaigns of 2002 and the presidential race of 2004. Whether Schmidt or Rove executes those same old appeals to the worst in us hardly matters. What matters is that McCain has adopted an approach that was once thought beneath him. And that choice dates back to his decision to ally himself with George W. Bush and indeed with Rove, despite the vicious tactics that defeated him in the Republican primaries of 2000 -- for which he held them responsible.
The slurs aimed at McCain during the South Carolina and New York primaries were appalling -- even in an era of scoundrel politics -- and nobody doubted that they should be attributed, at least indirectly, to Rove. The whispering campaign included anonymous leaflets and phone calls about the former drug dependency of Cindy McCain and the alleged illegitimacy of the McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter, Bridget. Then an independent committee tied closely to Rove and Bush mounted a TV campaign in New York accusing McCain of cutting breast cancer research funding, even though his sister was a survivor of the disease.
It must have been hard for Cindy and Bridget McCain to watch the maverick reformer throw his arms awkwardly around President Bush during the 2004 convention. It must have been hard for McCain to make the TV ad featuring that embrace, with a script approved by Rove. It must have been even harder for him to watch the Swift-boating of his old friend John Kerry, a fellow Navy veteran whose volunteer service he respected, even though they disagreed vehemently about the Vietnam War and many other issues.
By the time McCain spoke up feebly against the Swift boat campaign, the damage had been done -- to him as well as to Kerry. He had undergone a public transformation into a willing instrument of lesser men who trampled on his character and his honor, even his patriotism, just as his campaign is now seeking to do to Obama.
"They know no depths," he had complained wearily to reporters on his "Straight Talk" bus during the 2000 primaries. Now he has once more sold himself to those same forces, hoping that they will at last usher him into the White House. In his concession speech after the South Carolina primary, he said, "I want the presidency in the best way, not the worst way."
That is what has changed.
But, for the record, this is yielding far too much benefit of the doubt to the McCain machine, which has been and can be expected to continue to be racist, dirty, and completely without principle or scruple. When conditions permit, they may indulge in enough cross-talk and mixing of messages that deniability may be marginally plausible in conversation with a corporate media representative or others lacking opposables, but sometimes it will just be plain nasty. In the meantime, even a relatively light-hearted acknowledgement that skin colors and appearances do vary, never mind that our country has a very unhappy record when it comes to race and minorities of every sort is right up there with a bare lapel. Steven Colbert has the market on "not seeing color" cornered, and yet it is apparently the case that the repub version of political correctness requires that "race" or "otherness" never be mentioned - at the very least obviously not by those of color or other minority status. That would be uppity, like, say, refusing to move to the back of the bus. And, well, failing their PC litmus test apparently means ipso facto you are racist.
Slightly (and only briefly) diverting from my theme, I encourage you to check out this site, set up to agitate for reconsideration of Wesley Clark as a VP candidate. As you may recall, Clark found himself on the outside after making the perfectly reasonable observation that having your aircraft shot down and spending years as a POW were not sufficient qualifications to be President (ed: and what other qualifications is McCain touting?? Advanced degrees in flip-floppery?). The Obama campaign erred I believe in being so hypersensitive as to distance the candidate from Clark's remarks. This was not Rev. Wright after all (or anywhere close to as venomous as what seems to be almost the norm now for the McCain campaign).
Anyway, check this out. I like what they're saying and encourage you also to consider signing the poll. I believe Clark may be superior both in terms of qualifications and "value-added" to any of the other obvious VP candidates.
John Heilemann has a great article in NY Magazine cataloging the damning degree to which the McCain campaign is unfolding in all its' dark Machivellian pathology, risking exposing all the years of denial, forestalled grievance, and almost certainly psychopathology reaching back at least to South Carolina 2000, if not Hanoi:
On the morning in March when Barack Obama was preparing to give his speech on race in Philadelphia to try to contain the fallout from the Jeremiah Wright imbroglio, I was having breakfast in Washington with a member of John McCain’s inner circle. The topic at hand was whether McCain was licking his chops at the prospect of facing Obama in the fall—whether he relished the idea of running negative against the hopemonger on questions of his patriotism and, er, otherness. My McCainiac source noted that his boss had “demonstrated admirable restraint and respect for Obama in the last few weeks,” citing McCain’s rebuke of the Tennessee GOP when it issued a press release that invoked Obama’s middle name and featured that photo of him in Somali tribal clothing, calling it “Muslim garb.” “McCain has drawn a bright line and said that’s unacceptable,” my companion said. “It’s a genuine reflex: He really wants the campaign to be civil.”
The following night I was drinking with a big-time Republican operative who’d worked during the primaries for a rival candidate. When I floated the notion of the Good McCain, this person snorted. “He didn’t have a problem calling Mitt Romney a phony in New Hampshire or comparing George W. Bush to Bill Clinton in South Carolina in 2000,” he said. “McCain is a tough guy. He’ll do whatever he needs to do.”
Until last week, it was an open question which of these visions of McCain bore a closer relation to reality. But with the weeklong string of attacks uncorked by the Arizona senator and his people during Obama’s trip abroad and in its aftermath—some brutal, some mocking, but all personal and focused on Obama’s character—we now have an inkling of just how deep in the mud McCain and his people are willing to wallow in order to win in November: right up to their Republican eyeballs.
As countless fact-checkers and tsk-tskers have maintained, the broadsides were a blend of distortion, innuendo, and outright slander. But that doesn’t mean they (and their inevitable successors) won’t prove effective, especially against an opponent with so little experience under ruthless and relentless fire. Before Obama hurled himself into the presidential scrum he’d never been hit with a negative ad—a point often raised by Hillary Clinton’s people. And though they made sure Obama lost his negative-spot virginity, the ads they ran against him were patty-cake compared with what he faces now. Hence the questions on which the general election may turn: Will Obama be capable of withstanding the pummeling the McCain forces have begun to unleash? Or, as Hillary privately predicted, will he crumple like a paper doll?
For those not keeping score, a quick review of the McCain campaign’s lunge for Obama’s jugular. First, its new slogan: “Country first,” with its inverse insinuation that Obama puts something else (i.e., his own ambition) ahead of the nation. Second, McCain’s accusation that Obama “would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” Third, the McCain ad “Troops,” which claims that Obama, while in Germany, “made time to go the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops—seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras.” And, finally, the ad “Celeb,” with its intercut images of Obama in Berlin, Paris Hilton, and Britney Spears.
The strategy behind all this isn’t hard to discern: Drive up Obama’s negatives and render him unacceptable to pivotal voting blocs. Thus the depiction of him as too young, too feckless, and too pampered to be president. (In almost every shot in the McCain ads, Obama is smiling flashily, whereas McCain is pictured as weathered, sober, staring hard into the distance—a clever bit of jujitsu, using Obama’s pretty mug against him.) Thus the portrayal of him as precious, self-infatuated, and effete: “Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand ‘MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew—Black Forest Berry Honest Tea’ and worry about the price of arugula,” wrote campaign manager Rick Davis in an e-mail announcing “Celeb.” And thus the emphasis on Obama’s rock-star persona, designed to engender envy and contempt among the swath of Middle America for which hipness is no virtue but a sign of pretension.
The racial undertones of this assault are subtle but undeniable, as Obama himself suggested when he asserted last week that his opponents are trying to make voters “scared” of him because he “doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency.” They’re most glaring in “Troops,” which features footage of Obama sinking a three-pointer in Kuwait, despite the fact that the shot took place at a military base, which undermines the ad’s argument. But the spot’s deeper aim is to foster an unconscious simile: Obama as a blinged-up, camera-hungry, NBA shooting guard, Allen Iverson with a Harvard Law degree. Am I reaching? Consider this: Would the ad have featured footage of Obama on a golf course draining a hole-in-one? “No, it wouldn’t,” laughs a GOP media savant. “The racial angle is the first thing I thought of when I saw that ad. It fits into the celebrity stuff, too.” (For McCain, that impolitic, pro-Obama Ludacris track was manna from hip-hop heaven.)
-clip-
And Joe Conason took the words right out of my mouth in entitling his Salon column "Wanting the White House in the Worst Way":
For many of the journalists who regard John McCain as an unusually honorable politician, listening to his increasingly dishonorable campaign rhetoric is a painful and puzzling experience. They are openly wondering what has driven him to denigrate and even smear Barack Obama in a style more reminiscent of McCain's old enemies in his own party than the straight-talking maverick. They want to believe that he has not really changed, and that somehow these lapses can be blamed on someone else. Like a spouse in a bad marriage, they have yet to face up to the fact that he actually changed years ago -- or to ask if he was ever the man they once thought he was.
Although several prominent pundits have denounced McCain for questioning Obama's patriotism, a lingering reluctance to confront reality still colors much commentary on the campaign. Writing gingerly in the Washington Post of the Arizona senator's "fuzzy" campaign persona, David Ignatius pleaded with McCain to return to the noble, tolerant and healing ways that no longer seem to govern his character.
Without saying exactly what troubles the senator's Beltway fan club about his current behavior, the Post columnist offered an exculpatory theory: "What's damaging the McCain campaign now, I suspect, is that this fiercely independent man is trying to please other people -- especially a Republican leadership that doesn't really trust him."
But the Republican leadership, whomever that might include, did not dictate the smears against Obama now emanating almost daily from the McCain camp. When McCain accused Obama of seeking to win the presidency by losing the Iraq war, tantamount to calling the Democrat a traitor, he uttered those words himself. When his campaign aired a commercial claiming that Obama had refused to visit wounded U.S. troops without TV cameras, he personally endorsed that lie. When his campaign then aired a vapid ad depicting Obama as a celebrity comparable to Britney Spears, McCain claimed to be "proud" of that attack on a Senate colleague.
It is sad to watch McCain so casually abandon the civility that he pledged to maintain. But the descent from decency didn't begin yesterday.
As many observers have noted by now, the negative strategy adopted by the McCain campaign under the leadership of new manager Steve Schmidt follows a template created by Schmidt's old boss, Karl Rove. It is all very familiar stuff, from the direct assault on Obama's power as a media star to the insinuations that he is weak, elitist and not truly patriotic. All these themes can and will be amplified by "independent" advertising that raises doubts about Obama's religious and racial attitudes (or those of his wife).
It isn't Swift-boating -- yet -- but it regurgitates the same themes used by Rove in both the midterm campaigns of 2002 and the presidential race of 2004. Whether Schmidt or Rove executes those same old appeals to the worst in us hardly matters. What matters is that McCain has adopted an approach that was once thought beneath him. And that choice dates back to his decision to ally himself with George W. Bush and indeed with Rove, despite the vicious tactics that defeated him in the Republican primaries of 2000 -- for which he held them responsible.
The slurs aimed at McCain during the South Carolina and New York primaries were appalling -- even in an era of scoundrel politics -- and nobody doubted that they should be attributed, at least indirectly, to Rove. The whispering campaign included anonymous leaflets and phone calls about the former drug dependency of Cindy McCain and the alleged illegitimacy of the McCain's adopted Bangladeshi daughter, Bridget. Then an independent committee tied closely to Rove and Bush mounted a TV campaign in New York accusing McCain of cutting breast cancer research funding, even though his sister was a survivor of the disease.
It must have been hard for Cindy and Bridget McCain to watch the maverick reformer throw his arms awkwardly around President Bush during the 2004 convention. It must have been hard for McCain to make the TV ad featuring that embrace, with a script approved by Rove. It must have been even harder for him to watch the Swift-boating of his old friend John Kerry, a fellow Navy veteran whose volunteer service he respected, even though they disagreed vehemently about the Vietnam War and many other issues.
By the time McCain spoke up feebly against the Swift boat campaign, the damage had been done -- to him as well as to Kerry. He had undergone a public transformation into a willing instrument of lesser men who trampled on his character and his honor, even his patriotism, just as his campaign is now seeking to do to Obama.
"They know no depths," he had complained wearily to reporters on his "Straight Talk" bus during the 2000 primaries. Now he has once more sold himself to those same forces, hoping that they will at last usher him into the White House. In his concession speech after the South Carolina primary, he said, "I want the presidency in the best way, not the worst way."
That is what has changed.
posted by Sir Gumbo at 10:28 PM
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