Chances are, few would have heard about professional right-wing loudmouth Bill Cunningham’s tirade against Barack Obama at a McCain event earlier this week, had McCain not personally denounced it. The story created an interesting dynamic — it served to amplify Cunningham’s ugly attacks (which undermines Obama), while making McCain look like he’s above it all (which undermines Obama).
Yesterday, it was more of the same from The Tennessee Republican Party, which issued a press release smear against Obama, drawing a rebuke from the national party. The result was similar — more people heard about the specific attacks, and more people were led to believe the Republican establishment doesn’t like it.
Josh Marshall encouraged everyone not to miss the trend here.
Hopefully, everyone can now see the McCain strategy for running against Barack Obama. Yes, we have some general points on taxes, culture wars and McCain as war hero who can protect us in ways that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy Barack Obama can’t.
But that’s not the core. The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in, but we’ll have to see. The details and specific arguments are sort of beside the point. They’re like the libretto in a Wagner opera, nice for some narrative structure. But it’s the score that’s the real essence of it, the point of the whole exercise.
Now, a good deal has been made out of John McCain’s repudiation of talk radio yakmeister Bill Cunningham, who led off for McCain at one of his rallies with the full run of Obama sludge. But don’t be distracted or fooled. This is more like an example of what the digital commerce folks refer to as ‘channel conflict’. You’ve got your multiple distribution channels. You’ve got the way McCain’s selling the product. Broadcast. Broad and thematic about McCain. But you’ve got a number of other product channels to sell through, most of them a lot grittier, but no less essential for ultimate success.
It’s not especially subtle. The Republican Machine wants, arguably needs, to destroy Obama with nonsensical smears. The same machine wants to keep McCain above the fray. So, obviously, the answer is to take the low and high roads at the same time — sending supporters to do the dirty work, while the campaign shines a spotlight on the dirty work by denouncing it.
Indeed, isn’t it interesting that McCain campaign officials encouraged Cunningham to take his cheap shots?
“[McCain’s] people told me to give the faithful red meat. Give them red, raw meat.”
Josh added:
Don’t insult your intelligence or mine by pretending that John McCain’s plan for this race doesn’t rely on hundreds of Cunninghams — large and small — across the country, and the RNC and all the GOP third party groups, to be peddling this stuff nonstop for the next eight months because it’s the only way John McCain have a real shot at contesting this race.
If McCain really wants to repudiate this stuff, he can start with the Tennessee Republican party which dished all the slurs and smears about Obama being a Nation of Islam-loving anti-Semite, just today. And once he’s done talking to the people who will be running his Tennessee campaign, we’ll have a number of others he can talk to, like the head of his Ohio campaign, former Sen. Mike DeWine, who gave that Cunningham guy his marching orders.
Let’s just not fool ourselves, not lie to ourselves about what’s happening here and who’s in charge.
Yesterday afternoon, McCain spokeswoman Jill Hazelbaker noted that her candidate condemned the press release from the Tennessee GOP and apologized to Obama — the day after apologizing for Cunningham. “There will be times in this campaign where people do and say stupid things,” Hazelbaker said. “It’s a fact and it’s beyond our control…. We will continue to condemn [such comments] in the strongest language possible and reiterate our commitment to running a positive campaign based on the issues.”
As much as I’d like to assume the campaign is operating in good faith, the circumstances make that impossible.