September 28, 2008

The perils of stunt campaigning

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John McCain spent a lot of time in Friday’s debate repeating the mantra that Barack Obama was “naive” or “doesn’t understand” various things about foreign policy. But after reading Jonathan Weisman’s account of what happened last week with the budget bailout, it’s impossible not to conclude McCain is the naive one, at least when it comes to legislative brinksmanship.

As it was unfolding – McCain’s “suspension” announcement, the bailout deal taking shape, then apparently falling apart – it was impossible to figure out what was going on. Was McCain – who made such a big deal about returning to Washington to bridge the partisan divide – deliberately trying to derail the discussions by allying himself with the House Republicans, whose proposal was both politically and practically unworkable? That made no sense, even by the chaos-sowing standards of the McCain campaign. But what was going on?

Weisman recounts that McCain came back to Washington only to find himself exploited by the House Republican Study Committee (what is it they study, anyway – Hayek? Jude Wanniski?), looking to derail the talks, and outmaneuvered by the Democrats, who were looking to undermine McCain himself. This came to a head in a surreal meeting in the Cabinet Room:

Obama then jumped in to turn the question on his rival: “What do you think of the [insurance] plan, John?” he asked repeatedly. McCain did not answer.

One Republican in the room said it was clear that the Democrats came into the meeting with a “game plan” aimed at forcing McCain to choose between the administration and House Republicans. “They had taken McCain’s request for a meeting and trumped it,” said this source.

Congressional aides from both parties were standing in the lobby of the West Wing, unaware of the discord inside the Cabinet room, when McCain emerged alone, shook the hands of the Marines at the door and left. The aides were baffled. The plan had been for a bipartisan appearance before the media, featuring McCain, Obama and at least a firm statement in favor of intervention. Now, one of the leading men was gone.

McCain has been in Congress for 25 years. Why did he think he could ride into Washington – in the middle of a campaign, with the Republican Party divided, the Democratic Party united, and the fate of the nation literally on the line – and have everything fall into place around him?

 

September 25, 2008

What would Broder do?

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One more brief observation about John McCain’s decision to temporarily suspend his campaign. It’s hard to believe this will have any practical effect on the matter at hand, passing a bailout bill. It could have the opposite effect, by injecting presidential politics and posturing into an intricate, and politically volatile, matter of policy. But influencing the policy, for good or ill, doesn’t seem to be what McCain’s after. It’s all about optics: he wants voters to see him as a leader capable of overcoming the partisan divide.

This doesn’t make much logical sense coming on the heels of nearly six weeks of divisive culture war politics. But it amounts to an appeal to one of the most dearly-held big media assumptions – that partisanship is always the problem and bipartisanship always the answer. In this view (reiterated, predictably, in today’s David Broder column, which blames both Congress and the White House for the government’s lack of credibility in the crisis) grand bipartisan gestures – bringing everyone together to solve the nation’s problems – are the way out of gridlock. Making these gestures is a sign of true leadership. Needless to say, this is a highly symbolic and unrealistic approach in a political landscape largely shaped by partisan Republican policies.

The McCain campaign tried to exploit the media’s tendency to seek out false equivalencies in fact-checking its ads and rhetoric. When that didn’t work so well, it attacked the media. Now it’s betting on another political media tic, the yearning for a kind of bipartisan utopia. Will it work?

 

September 24, 2008

McCain flails

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It’s amazing to watch John McCain – who wasn’t doing all that badly in the polls until last week – try one desperate stunt after another in an attempt to change what his advisers must see as the inevitable dynamic of the campaign: an Obama victory. Obama seems to enjoy not just the advantage of the outsider in a “change” election, but also, in his comparative prudence, some of advantages of a successful incumbent too. The more McCain flails, the more reassuring a figure Obama appears to be.

It’s sad. McCain has all but ruined his straight-talk reputation by countenancing repeated lies and misrepresentations and shutting out the press, then attacking the press for pointing this out. The Washington Post/ABC poll showed Obama now leads McCain by 11 points on the “honest/trustworthy” question. Now, after wallowing in the worst of Rovian politics – and not even effective Rovian politics, but sloppy, unfocused tactics that are no doubt making Rove smack his forehead in exasperation – McCain expects voters to believe he wants to “rise above politics” by rushing back to Washington to … do photo ops? Talk to Richard Shelby? I don’t know how well U.S. voters understand our options in dealing with the banking crisis. But they do know that presidential candidates are politicians.

 

September 17, 2008

Exhausting the culture wars

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For all its audacity, the McCain campaign still comes off as a random, desultory affair. The culture wars were once an organizing principal of American politics. Now, they’re just a frayed set of memes and imagery, pulled out and hurled into the campaign arena in hopes that they’ll move the right demographic groups and won’t tick off the wrong ones too much. I look at this phenomenon in a Guardian piece today:

Past GOP culture-war campaigns were negative, divisive and personal. But they made coherent arguments. When George HW Bush attacked Michael Dukakis as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal in 1988, he had a point. Dukakis was a traditional liberal during a time of conservative ascendancy. And the main points of attack were based on facts: Dukakis did nominally oversee the prison furlough programme that released a killer who then raped and assaulted a woman. He did veto a bill requiring the Pledge of Allegiance to the US flag be recited in Massachusetts public schools. In 2004, George W Bush’s denunciations of John Kerry as a liberal Washington insider who had trouble articulating clear positions also had the ring of truth.

Those campaigns were slick and sophisticated attempts to shape public opinion. By contrast, McCain’s ads and rhetoric sound like they’re generated by a bunch of twentysomething Republican bloggers, strung out on caffeine at 3am, each trying to out-snark all the others. The main thing the campaign has going for it is sheer outrageousness – that is, by hitting every conceivable cultural hot button and repeating untruths over and over, it will both get an anti-Obama message out and also dominate the news cycle.

 

September 15, 2008

The outrage campaign

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The McCain campaign has the political world transfixed on its parade of falsehoods and culture war attacks on Obama. But the overarching theme here is actually outrageousness. By flagrantly, repetitively lying and putting out anti-Obama ads that run 180 degrees counter to reality, the McCain campaign has exploded the etiquette of presidential campaigns. Or, to put it another way, it’s violating what were considered immutable political laws – and amounts to a giant and risky bet that those laws are no longer operative.

It used to be, campaigns had a message. In making their arguments they routinely stretched the truth, but there was usually some slender factual basis for their statements. They tried to get favorable coverage for themselves and generate unfavorable coverage for the opposition. Finally, if your guy was behind in the last 2 weeks of the campaign, you started lying and sliming with abandon – and attacking the media.

Now McCain has skipped over all the other stuff and gone straight to the last-ditch, desperate phase. I doubt this will work, because it usually doesn’t when employed in the last 2 weeks. But of course, by that time it’s always too late. Now, maybe not. So who knows?

But there’s one law that, seemingly, hasn’t changed – the law of the news cycle. When a campaign does something audacious and outrageous – no matter how objectionable, or for that matter, stupid – it dominates the news cycle. The idea is, any news is good news. And with this kitchen sink approach, McCain dominates it on several levels beyond the usual attack-response-counterattack. It’s not just McCain attacks Obama. There’s also: McCain crosses line attacking Obama. McCain goes where even Rove wouldn’t go! Is the media covering McCain well, or does it lack a spine? Obama responds lamely. Obama vows to do a better job responding. McCain attacks Obama even more outrageously/dishonestly/incoherently. And the cycle repeats.

But I doubt this can continue for another seven weeks, because of a couple of other iron laws of media. One, the news cycle always changes, especially in a close race. The media get bored, or impatient – or maybe, in this case, disillusioned and outraged. Real news happens. The polls shift. A gaffe occurs. The other side “finds its voice.” The “narrative” changes. If the race remains close, I don’t see how McCain can, in effect, keep topping himself. And that’s the final iron law: outrageousness gets old.

 

September 12, 2008

Dukakis, Kerry, Obama?

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In the spring of 2004 I attended a roundtable media discussion with John Kerry at his campaign headquarters. This was not long after Kerry had locked down the Democratic nomination. He was incoherent, droning on in an unorganized fashion about the mistakes of the Bush administration, and various programs he’d push for. There was no concise argument on why he should be elected, and not Bush.

He clearly felt he didn’t even need to make such an argument. It was obvious to Kerry that Bush was a failure. He seemed to be living in a kind of Democratic-liberal-Senate cocoon, assuming that its attitudes reflected those of the rest of the country – or at least, 51 percent of it.

As the campaign wore on, Kerry improved. But this basic, temperamental complacency followed him throughout. We had to wait until the first debate to hear him make a good argument against the Iraq war.

I hate to pile on Obama, as everyone is doing this week. But he seems to share this same temperament: that the blunderbuss attacks coming from the other side are absurd and irrelevant to the “real issues,” and thus unworthy of attention, except in rote “I will not be swiftboated” statements. And that the election will ratify what is already obvious to him, and to what he thinks is a majority of Americans.

Dukakis had the same problem. Remember this now-famous SNL sketch from 1988:

Diane Sawyer: You have fifty seconds left, Mr. Vice-President.

George Bush: Let me sum up. On track, stay the course. Thousand points of light.

Diane Sawyer: Governor Dukakis. Rebuttal?

Michael Dukakis: I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy!

It’s amazing that Obama and his team of geniuses could look back at the campaigns of the past 20 years and not devise a strategy to deal with what they’re facing now. The Obama campaign is the proverbial aircraft carrier, under attack by a swarm of kamikazes.

Or, maybe Obama really is doubling down on boring and passive. The fundamentals still favor him. And the message of the McCain attacks – that Obama is rude, or something – doesn’t seem compelling, at least compared the GOP attacks on Dukakis or Kerry, which at least made semi-coherent arguments about leadership. (Dukakis was a down-the-line liberal running during a time of conservative ascendancy; Kerry was a creature of Washington who had trouble articulating clear positions.) It may be that Obama’s apparent complacency about dumb attacks is justified – that people won’t buy it this time, that the news cycle gyrations are less important than the political universe believes them to be. We’ll see.

 

September 11, 2008

The kitchen sink

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Worth noting: the McCain campaign is using a “kitchen sink” approach on Obama. First he was a lightweight celebrity. Then they got their own lightweight celebrity so that went out the window. This week Obama’s a boorish sexist, a pervert and a dangerous radical:

Sen. John McCain’s presidential campaign launched a broadside against Sen. Barack Obama yesterday, accusing him of a sexist smear, comparing his campaign to a pack of wolves on the prowl against the GOP vice presidential pick, charging that the Democratic nominee favored sex education for kindergartners, and resurrecting the comments of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.

These attacks may monopolize media attention and force Obama off message. But they’re inconsistent. They aren’t really the kinds of charges that stick, either with the media or in the public mind. They lack the narrative thread necessary to drive news cycles beyond a day or two or to “define” their target. I really don’t know what McCain wants me to think about Obama anymore. A kind of furious incoherence appears to be the defining characteristic of late-stage culture war politics.

 

September 11, 2008

The view from Qo’noS

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As I wrote yesterday, I think all the fulminations about McCain’s lost “honor” are silly. He is a politician who has made an ever-escalating series of dishonorable choices. They seem all the more so because of his previous record. But this is still unremarkable, and not a compelling point against him in the context of winning votes. I’m not saying that people should overlook McCain’s dishonesty – quite the contrary, it should be aggressively called out – but that the outrage contains a degree of personal disappointment in McCain that is beside the point.

The focus on McCain’s honor is actually a very Klingon view, which eerily resembles the purported McCain worldview – one shaped by war, military codes, and the fetishization of personal integrity. “He has no honor” is the ultimate Klingon putdown. I’m sure McCain feels stung.

But he’s not running to be the Klingon chancellor (fortunately for him, given that doing so requires rituals only slightly more elaborate than ours, including hand-to-hand combat). If you asked most Americans about the role of “honor” in politics, they’d probably say the two are mutually exclusive.

 

September 10, 2008

McCain-Palin Derangement Syndrome

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Scanning various blogs today, I’m amazed at the seething outrage at the McCain campaign’s plethora of dishonest tactics, from Sarah Palin’s lie about rejecting the Bridge to Nowhere to the ad charging Obama with promoting sex. Josh Marshall, who normally reads political events pretty coolly, has joined Andrew Sullivan in all-out high-dudgeon mode:

[McCain and Palin have] both embraced a level of dishonesty that disqualifies them for high office. Democrats owe it to the country to make clear who these people are. No apologies or excuses. If Democrats can say at the end of this campaign that they made clear exactly how and why these two are unfit for high office they can be satisfied they served their country.

Rather, I’m amazed not at the outrage itself so much as the fact that it seems to have obliterated all sense of proportion. Call it McCain-Palin Derangement Syndrome. Step back a moment: McCain is running for president. Both his place in history and the future of the country are on the line. In the words of George H.W. Bush, he’s going to do “what it takes” to become president. John McCain may have once had a reputation as a straight-talking, unconventional politician, and maybe that McCain could have made a go of it – we’ll never know. But now, for obviously well-thought-out strategic reasons, we’ve got a different McCain.

Certainly, McCain has made moral compromises here, will doubtless make more, and that will undermine if not destroy his stated quest to heal the divisions in Washington. This augers poorly for a McCain presidency, especially following on eight years of George W. Bush.

But do dishonest-but-effective campaign tactics really render McCain “unfit to lead”? No. Voters obviously don’t think it disqualifies him either, at least not in great numbers. Maybe they see the lies, but they also see the aggression. This is a guy who really, really wants to win – and that counts for a lot in a presidential campaign. If McCain wins, most people will quickly forget the campaign’s lies, distortions and negative ads, and his fitness will ultimately be tested by what he does in office.

Meanwhile, the howls over McCain’s lost “honor” and the appeals to America’s sense of fair play are, frankly, ridiculous. The man fights dirty. If you don’t like it, find a way fight back.

 

August 30, 2008

The Palin fallacy

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What more can be said about Sarah Palin? I think the politics of the selection could go either way. On the negative side, she will likely make gaffes on the campaign trail, and probably not fare well in a debate with Joe Biden (as long as he manages to restrain any impulses to cross the stage and wave a piece of paper in her face). On the plus side, maybe she will be a terrific campaigner, and the selection seen as bold and forward-looking. Though I doubt it.

The problem is not politics, but substance. VP selections don’t matter politically (if Dan Quayle couldn’t sink the top of the ticket, I don’t think Palin will). But they can matter tremendously after the election. And Palin is obviously unqualified to be president. Given McCain’s age, the choice is especially reckless.

McCain appears to have turned his campaign over to a bunch of people half his age – Steve Schmidt and the Karl Rove brain trust – who are fundamentally unserious. They lack the temperament and perspective of those with experience in government, or, for that matter, life. They have lots of experience winning news cycles and “tearing the bark off” Democrats. But they have no sense of how the government works, or the relationship between electoral politics and policies. Hence the McCain campaign is not really a campaign at all – an attempt to persuade voters on the candidate’s abilities and policies, with the aim of implementing those policies – but a series of “bold gambits” that get the media yakking, but later come to naught, or backfire, with no lessons learned. This is not surprising, as it’s a defining characteristic of the Bush administration.

 

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