McCain’s next stunt
Could Bill Kristol be right for once in his life? Nah. But he could be serving as a GOP apparatchik, which would be entirely in character. An excerpt from his latest NYT column:
It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign…
What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.
And let McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past — running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.
Kristol advises press conferences for both McCain and Palin, which is clearly absurd. Palin can’t handle Katie Couric. She’s gonna do press conferences? Not bloodly likely.
But McCain might adopt part of such a strategy, repudiating negative campaigning, holding press conferences himself and allowing Palin to continue doing Fox infomercials to keep the base on board. He might be convinced that the base will vote for their Queen Esther regardless of how angry they’d be with McCain himself for junking the slime strategy.
Nate Silver over at 538.com also detects a whiff of wingnut media outlet coordination —both in Kristol’s column and in the recent touting of McCain’s polling numbers by Drudge:
Something is a little bit funny when Matt Drudge is treating 1-2 point gains for McCain in the Rasmussen and Zogby tracking polls as “BREAKING” news. Naturally, Drudge ignores other results like the just-released ABC/WaPo poll that show Obama continuing to gain ground.
Drudge has a nose for news, and he knows that a one-point gain in a tracking poll is not news—unless someone desperately wants it to be…
The McCain campaign is planning on a major “reboot” of its campaign in some point in advance of Wednesday night’s debate. This will take on something of the form that Bill Kristol advocates in his must-read Monday AM piece in the Times, including some combination of (i) pledging to run a positive campaign; (ii) firing/demoting Steve Schmidt and or/Rick Davis; (iii) apologizing for his campaign’s tone. In fact, Kristol’s column may be something of a trial balloon for this strategy.
What the McCain campaign really, really doesn’t want is for this move to be portrayed as desperate stunt. McCain has already developed a reputation for being a bit erratic under pressure—the ABC/Post poll now shows that a 48-45 plurality of voters trust Obama to handle an “unexpected major crisis”—and Bill Burton and Robert Gibbs must be foaming at the mouth waiting to spin something like this.
The only way for McCain to do that is for him to convince the media that he already had the momentum. The campaign will probably try and claim the moral high ground, perhaps contrasting McCain’s repudiation of the woman who called Obama an “Arab” on Friday against John Lewis’s comments from Saturday. They will suggest that McCain found his voice, and made the “maverick” move of telling off the Beltway Republicans who were urging him to go for blood. They will suggest that the reboot is a continuation of this strategy, and that—as the Zogby poll so obviously attests to!—voters were already responding favorably to McCain’s new tone.
I think Nate is onto something. But I don’t think it’s entirely about correcting a failing strategy. I think it’s also about McCain’s unwillingness to confront Obama directly with the sleazy Ayers charges in Wednesday’s debate. McCain has painted himself into a corner—Obama and Biden have both publicly called him out on running sleazy ads and not having the guts to bring up the Ayers issue to Obama’s face. McCain made the weak-ass excuse that it just didn’t come up during the last debate.
But now he knows he has to bring it up Wednesday—his manhood has been questioned over it. He also knows that the Ayers issue is so substance-free that if he does bring it up, he will look like a petty, desperate politician who has no answers on the real issue that people care about—the wretched economy. It’s a lose-lose proposition for him.
Unless he can somehow avoid it while simultaneously looking all mavericky and honorable. Renouncing sleazy attacks would defuse the situation, or so he thinks. Should be an interesting 48-hour news cycle.
Posted by Betty Cracker on 10/13/08 at 08:01 AM • Permalink
Categories: Politics • Election '08 • St. McSame • Barack Obama • Joe Biden • PUMAs • Sarah Palin •
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