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 16, 2008

Scolds

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One more thought about the “lyin’ McCain” issue. There’s been some reasonable blogospheric pushback from Ross Douthat and Mickey Kaus arguing that calling McCain out for being a liar just isn’t a compelling line of attack. Douthat:

For much the same reasons that I never hated the Clintons, I can’t bring myself to worry about whether McCain has kept his “dignity” sufficiently intact while slugging it out for the Presidency: The point of being in national politics is to win elections and govern the country in accordance with whatever goals led you into the arena in the first place, not to please columnists who disagree with you on ideological grounds but appreciate a finely-tuned sense of political principle. And anyone who believes that McCain is running a uniquely dishonorable campaign for the presidency just doesn’t have enough historical perspective – or enough distance from their own passions – to comment sensibly on contemporary politics. Every successful politician and political movement has to master the art of below-the-belt, us-versus-them political engagement, because that’s how democratic politics works: You can appeal to the electorate’s reason all you want, but you have to appeal to their passions as well, and that means making them dislike and fear the other side as often as it means making them love you.

Kaus:

5. The current lib blog-MSM-campaign tack–getting outraged by McCain’s “lies”–is a total loser strategy. Why?

a) MSM outrage doesn’t sway voters anymore. It didn’t even back in 1988, when the press tried to make a stink about George H.W. Bush’s use of “flag factories,” etc. After this year’s failed MSM Palin assault, it certainly won’t work;

b) When Dems get outraged at unfairness they look weak. How can they stand up to Putin if they start whining when confronted with Steve Schmidt? McCain’s camp can fake umbrage all it wants–the latest is that an Atlantic photographer took some nasty photos that the mag didn’t run!–and nobody will accuse MCain of being weak. That’s so unfair. A double standard. Dems can learn to live with it or complain about the unfairness for another 4 years. Their choice.

There are three issues here: The McCain campaign’s unprecedented dishonesty; how Obama should respond; how the media should cover the persistent attempts to mislead. And these have all gotten mixed up in a way that, surprise, benefits McCain.

I agree with Douthat and Kaus that, generically speaking, attacking your opponent for lying is a dog-bites-man kind of message. Voters know politicians lie. Big deal. And most voters are not politically engaged enough to get the distinction between McCain’s serial whoppers and more garden-variety obfuscation. Moreover, the offended, scolding, moralistic tone of most Obama/Democratic attacks on McCain is annoying/irrelevant. McCain let us down, and it’s all so unfair and outrageous! As Kaus says, it looks weak.

The fact that McCain has abandoned his principles to win is wholly unremarkable. It has almost nothing to do with the issue at hand: being president. There may be a line of attack that works better than what we’ve heard – McCain has a problem with the truth, he says one thing and does another, etc. – in other words, something that makes voters question what kind of president McCain would be. (Given what we’ve seen, that’s a substantive question: will McCain return to a more conventional approach to communications if elected, or will we get four more years of disengagement from reality?) But what we’re hearing now is indeed classic Democrat loser talk.

Finally, there’s the media vs. McCain. This has gotten mixed up with the Obama vs. McCain issue because the media’s reaction is essentially identical to that of the Democratic establishment – shock, disappointment, honorable-man-dishonors-himself, wouldn’t it be horrible if this works, etc. This makes sense – McCain was once the Republican that both Democrats and the media could love unconditionally. But he isn’t anymore. You’ve lost him! It’s over! Please, get over it. This is another example of the Dowd-ization of political coverage – it’s all about character and personal drama.

When politicians lie, it’s the media’s job to expose those lies. That’s all.

 

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.

 

September 3, 2008

Joe

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I used to like Joe Lieberman. Yes, he was sanctimonious. But he could talk about issues Democrats tended to stay away from – culture, morality, religion in the public square – and occasionally say something smart. He’s been out on front on global warming and other issues. That’s why his migration into the neoconservative, Republican camp, which has become so unhinged from reality over Iraq and terrorism, has been painful to watch. Lieberman’s journey is also highly idiosyncratic. Iraq made a lot of smart people think twice about foreign misadventures. I’ll bet even Bill Kristol, in his most private moments, wavered a little. But, seemingly alone among prominent Democrats, it made Lieberman a true believer.

So Lieberman’s convention speech was a peculiar exercise. It was a partisan speech – he was talking to the Republican National Convention! – cloaked in bipartisan rhetoric. But not the standard editorialist’s let’s all work-together-and-meet-in-the-middle approach. Lieberman has taken the exact opposite tack for more than a year.

Rather, Lieberman identifies himself as the one, and only, true tribune of bipartisanship. And of course, for him, as with Bush and McCain, there is no bipartisan compromise possible on the central issue of our time, terrorism. In Lieberman’s view, then – at least where it counts most – bipartisanship equals Lieberman, which equals McCain, which equals Bush. Whatever the merits of McCain’s foreign policy, bipartisan spirit is not among them.

All politicians are egotists, but Lieberman seems to have retreated into a kind of narcissistic cocoon. It’s sad. It’s also hard to see how his appeal to undecided Democrats and independents – based on the idea that it’s the Democratic Party that has failed to address the challenges facing the nation – will square with their experience of the recent years of Republican rule.

 

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