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It’s not the campaign, it’s the candidate

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We talked earlier about the frustration is some Republican corners about John McCain becoming Senator Small, abandoning some of his perceived strengths to become a petty, almost pathetic, attack dog. The next question, of course, is why he ended up this way.

There’s a temptation, at times, to think McCain is a good man who’s been led astray by a bad team. McCain used to abhor Karl Rove, Rove’s team, and Rove’s style of slash-and-burn, scorched-earth politics. And yet, here we are, and McCain is taking Rove’s advice, has hired Rove’s team, and is following Rove’s playbook to the letter.

The WaPo has a front-page item today suggesting it’s an awkward fit, and helps explain why McCain appears to be such a bad candidate.

As Election Day nears, McCain’s campaign is adopting the aggressive, take-no-prisoners style of Karl Rove, the GOP operative who engineered victories for President Bush. The campaign continued the attack Wednesday with a sarcastic television ad deriding Obama as a “celebrity,” part of an intensifying effort to cast him as an elitist.

But the sharp-edged approach is being orchestrated for an unpredictable candidate who often chafes at delivering the campaign’s message of the day. It is that freewheeling style that has made him popular with voters and cemented his reputation for candor and straight talk.

McCain, who was most comfortable as an underdog in the unscripted environment of the New Hampshire primary, makes his advisers cringe as he delivers the attack line — and then keeps talking. In that respect, he is no Bush, his handlers say.

The result is a presidential campaign that sometimes rolls between serious policy discussions about the nation’s future and gotcha politics aimed at undermining his opponent’s character. McCain himself is often caught in the middle, proclaiming his commitment to the former while participating in the latter.

This might sound compelling at first blush, but I don’t buy it. Indeed, the underlying message of this argument is that McCain is fundamentally a smart, decent guy who’s being turned into a monster by a bunch of Rove-inspired Dr. Frankensteins.

But that’s not quite what’s happening here.

Kevin explained quite well why this it’s-not-McCain’s-fault argument misses the mark.

Apparently he’s just a straight talking guy who woke up one morning and found himself mysteriously under the sway of a vile cabal of political hit men and unable to do anything about it.

Enough’s enough. McCain hired Steve Schmidt, he approves the strategy, and he signs off on the ads. If his campaign is mired in sleaze, it’s not happening despite McCain, it’s happening because of McCain. Stop making excuses for him.

Quite right. McCain hired Rove’s operation for a reason: he really wants to be president, and doesn’t much care how he gets there.

The Post article argues that McCain “sometimes rolls between serious policy discussions about the nation’s future and gotcha politics.” Really? Where are these elusive “serious policy discussions”? Seriously, name one. I can’t.

If McCain wanted to be a substantive candidate, he’d be a substantive candidate. If he wanted to present his vision of the future, he could do that, too. If he wanted to make this entire presidential race a battle of ideas and issues, that was clearly an option available to him. McCain — not his team — decided against it.

Some of the coverage suggests there’s a tension between an honorable candidate and his team of hatchet-men. I doubt it. What we have here is an angry, undisciplined, confused candidate, who’ll do anything to win.

Comments

  • zeitgeist

    says:

    it’s the result of an angry, undisciplined, confused candidate

    you forgot jealous. when i saw the “Celeb” ad, all i could think is how it just drips with envy that people like Obama, that Obama can draw crowds, that people cheer his name. McCain is like a classicly tragic figure from literature or opera, warped and unhinged in his envy, lashing out in a way that may harm his better rival in the second Act, but in the end the demon of envy is always the undoing of the antagonist. John McCain is just a sad, attention-starved child of a man, acting out in the semi-conscious understanding that a scolding from the teacher is better than nothing from the teacher at all.

  • artigiano

    says:

    Going negative this early is just plain silly. There is no way you can sustain it until election day without the public coming to detest you. And you give your opponent plenty of time to rebuild any damage you do to his image and message.

    Obama is smart to take the high road and keep his powder dry. The response from Camp Obama has been tepid by design. Axelrod literally phoned in a defense. A calculated move to insure there would be no video to air on the net or cable. I really believe Obama has a mole inside McCain’s camp that told them “Don’t take the bait. They are trying to provoke you into a street fight.”

    The Obama answer commercial was also quite measured. It set up the meme for this week’s Sunday talking heads that McCain is lying and desperate while making no news about Obama to give them another subject to discuss.

  • KP

    says:

    I like how the fact that Obama can draw large crowds makes him ‘out of touch.’ He is a celebrity BECAUSE he touched a nerve.

  • neilt

    says:

    wouldn’t it be nice if this proved to be the swan song of Turdblossom?

    more immediately however, how BAD have the last two weeks been for John McCain? I’m guessing that the convention cannot come quickly enough for his campaign, they’re gonna be limping in Minnesota, and it ain’t gonna be pretty.

  • David in NY

    says:

    Doesn’t the post listen to what McCain says? He’s cheerfully parroting this crap! It’s his.

  • SteveT

    says:

    McCain used to abhor Karl Rove, Rove’s team, and Rove’s style of slash-and-burn, scorched-earth politics. And yet, here we are, and McCain is taking Rove’s advice, has hired Rove’s team, and is following Rove’s playbook to the letter.

    It’s would have been tragic for McCain to embrace and use the disgusting smear tactics that were used against him. But for McCain to embrace the people who used the disgusting smear tactics against him, merely to further his own ambition, requires him to completely reject any honor and integrity he may have had left.

    McCain is now nothing but a simulation of the man he once was, a hollow shell animated by a pathological need to be president.

  • ericfree

    says:

    It might be charitable, in memory of what he once may have been, to think of McCain as “fundamentally a smart, decent guy who’s being turned into a monster by a bunch of Rove-inspired Dr. Frankensteins,” but that’s not the focus of the story at all, which says something about the WaPo and what it no longer is.

    The article portrays McCain as a fuzzy-minded dunderhead unable to stay on topic and kneejerkily reacting to the headlines of the day, aided by sharp, gallant professional pols trying to give his campaign focus. That most of them used to work for Karl Rove, and that most of what they have contributed is an outright lie, are mentioned in asides when they’re mentioned at all.

    The WaPo really does see these self-aggrandizing neo-McCarthyites as the good guys; witness their front page story and accompanying Dana Milbank column on what a loss to Alaska and the country the indictment of good-ol’ Ted Stevens is.

  • Fast Eddie

    says:

    I’m probably batshit crazy, but I’d swear that Schmidt is deliberately sabotaging McCain. The commercials are ludicrous strategically – the last two have featured Obama in front of adoring crowds and shooting hoops with the troops – and making both candidate and campaign seem dumber by the day.

    I can see McCain now: “Are you sure this will work Steve?” “Trust me John. It’s a home run.”

  • Haik Bedrosian

    says:

    Are people really not seeing that Britney and Paris ad for what it is? It’s the Harold Ford “Call me” ad in sheep’s clothing. The point is to raise the specter of big black Barack with the little blonde daughters of America. I mean why Britney and Paris? Why not Oprah? Robert DiNiro? Jim Carey? David Hasslehoff? Aishwarya Rai? There’s a reason the McCain ad juxtaposes the images of these two young blondes with Barack Obama. It is specifically to hint at interracial sex for deep residual racism in the American psyche.

  • JoeW

    says:

    Well, that didn’t take long. The media is going to hang onto the ‘maverick, straight talk express’ meme they created, at any cost, until they realize they’re holding onto a dead and decomposing cat. I’m not sure if this is because of the need to protect McSame, or hide their own slothfulness. At some point, you’d think some of them would demand McCain resolve the obvious contradictions between what he says and what he does. But, I’m not holding my breath.

  • Joe Bourgeois

    says:

    One sort of just instrumental thing that I think is interesting …. It seems to me that, to succeed, Rove’s tactics need the frontman to be a kind of genial idiot Barney Rubble type, like you know who. The Shrubster really could pull off a stance of “What? What’s the problem? I’m just funnin’ with ya, can’t take a joke?” McCain can’t integrate the attack mode with the rest of the ethos he’s tried to establish; it’s too petty to fit “war hero,” ditto (and too concerned with the other guy) in re: “maverick.” So we’re left with him looking more and more like the octogenarian neighborhood crank.

  • N.Wells

    says:

    Even “gotcha politics” is way too kind to McCain. Gotcha politics is catching your opponent in a mistake and exploiting it to your benefit. What McCaine is doing is making up outrageous lies and then spreading them around. It’s baseless lying and smearing.

    However, the Republicans certainly can keep up a relentlessly negative barrage between now and election day, and be successful at it. They’ve done it before, and they’ll do it this year too. They’ll lie about his strengths and attempt to cast doubt on them (see the attack against his popularity), they’ll project McCain’s own weaknesses onto him (they’ve already attacked him for flip-flopping), and they’ll try a whole lot of covert race-baiting (you know that they considered a whole bunch of synonyms for “uppity” before launching the “presumptuous” attack).

  • Capt Kirk

    says:

    President McCain looks at his National Security Advisor and asks a question regarding his plan to bomb bomb bomb bomb bomb Iran: “Are you sure this will work Steve?”

    “Trust me John. It’s a SLAM DUNK!”

    In the immortal words of Kurt Vonnegut, “so it goes.”

  • 3reddogs

    says:

    A lot of people from Arizona will tell you that John McCain, quite simply, is NOT a nice person or a good person. He’s usually described as cutthroat, ruthless and/or ambitious, he doesn’t like being challenged, and he’s had his sights set on the White House for a lot of years. (How else to explain his embrace of Bush/Cheney/Rove after they humiliated him personally and politically back in 2000 with their “black love child” story?) In the long run I wonder if McCain wouldn’t do more harm to this country than George Bush has done. At least Bush can be manipulated by his “handlers” and, presumably, made to listen to reason. I get the distinct impression that if something or someone riled McCain he would be unstoppable. I shudder to think how he might react if (when?) the U.S. is attacked again by terrorists. In fact, I don’t think Commander-in-Chief McCain would hesitate to send us headlong into World War III.

  • zeitgeist

    says:

    someone on the Obama mailing list please tell me that the campaign is quickly using the “Celeb” spot to raise money? i would think they could get a great outpouring of cash in response to this one.

  • Barry

    says:

    Okay, so let’s accept the premise: McCain has ceded control of the biggest and most important enterprise in his lifetime – his Presidential campaign- to a group of ideologues. Hmmm, where have we heard of this before?

    This is just further proof that McCain is a man whose time has come and gone. He is truly another Bush and Obama must do everything legally possible to win this election. McCain certainly will, and he will stretch that “legally” part too.

  • SadOldVet

    says:

    To interpret the rethugnican-speak of 10:

    Whenever the born to privilege and wealth, country club set of WASPs say elitist they mean:
    – intelligent & articulate
    – educated
    – prefers facts over beliefs
    – prefers science over religion

    Whenever the rethugs & their corporate media echo chamber say arrogant they mean ‘uppity n*gger’.

    Whenever the rethugs & their corporate media echo chamber say ‘low information voter’ they mean ‘stupid white trash’.

    And everyone knows that stupid white trash will continue to vote against their own economic interests and vote republican so that we don’t elect an ‘uppity n*gger’ who is intelligent, educated, articulate and prefers facts and science over beliefs and religious dogma.

  • Stevio

    says:

    Times change, people don’t. They are who they are. McAce was considered a maverick for his stances against colleagues who pissed him off for their politics. A past drunk who was shot down for flying too low (breaking rules apparently his forte) and an elitist, wealthy guy who was considered a “maverick” for bucking bad decisions made by his party that were put into place to help rich people. When he found out that those rich people didn’t like to be held accountable (push polled to oblivion in 2000) he decided to join in on the fun. He may have tried to run a “good campaign” initially but when it became clear he just didn’t have it, or at least didn’t have what his party wanted he knew he would lose the election. So, what to do, what to do. Push poll, lie, cheat , deceive, fear monger, go negative. Hey it worked so well for Bushit (twice) and low and behold, those “nasty players” were right there willing to help if he was willing to trash what was left of his own soul. The presidency is at stake here. Ruler of the vast Armies is for the taking; bombing of Iran within reach! It was just too much for such a beaten man to resist.

    Can’t say I blame him. I mean, with all that power, if he could just get his “maverick” hands on it, just for four years, he’d change things for the good. Unfortunately, obtaining the Midas Touch has it’s draw backs and those “nasty players” will want more than a few “Midas touches” to satiate their thirsts, many more. He’ll be lucky if they’ll let him change a roll of toilet paper in the White House

    Power corrupts, Absolute power…

  • SickofBushMcCainLiebermann

    says:

    It’s interesting watching a party implode under the weight of it’s own co-opted principles. Had they bothered to nominate a candidate stronger than McWeaksauce it would be a far more vigorous campaign. McNovaCain should have just retired and let his service stand. Now he’s just muddied the reflection pool of his legacy.

  • biggerbox

    says:

    Anyone who doesn’t believe John McCain would do anything to win the White House hasn’t spent enough time looking at the famous “huggy bear” photo of him embracing El Jefe. It’s been clear for a long time just what McCain’s priority is, and it isn’t ‘Straight Talk” or “maverick” status – it’s the Oval Office with his butt in the chair.

  • TomB

    says:

    I think HaikBedrosian (#9) makes a point I had thought about. Why compare Obama to Britney and Paris? Why not compare him to Tiger Woods and Will Smith? Or why not George Clooney? (Bigger celebrities, but not airheads.) The sexual connection is there.

  • dalloway

    says:

    Remember when McCain’s campaign was comatose and everyone was waiting for him to drop out? Know when that began to turn around? Right after Turdblossom’s surprise resignation from his job at the White House. Rove has been masterminding McCain since then and it’s a truly horrifying marriage of convenience. McCain needs Turdblossom to get elected and Turdblossom needs McCain to be elected so a Democratic administration doesn’t prosecute him for all his crimes and throw his fat white ass in prison. Contrast that with Obama’s campaign, staffed by people who believe passionately in him and in his ability to repair the damage done by eight years of Bush and Rove. The American people may not know why Obama’s campaign rings true and McCain’s doesn’t, but they can feel it.

  • The Answer is Orange

    says:

    Whether or not McCain is just a nice guy (har har har) or not is irrelevant. A guy who can’t control his own campaign operatives, that guy can’t control an entire administration and a huge military.

    I’d argue that a guy too dumb to realize that people have seen how the “Nice Guy with Nasty Friends” works and they don’t want any more shouldn’t be allowed near metal flatware, never mind the big red phone.

  • Bernard HP Gilroy

    says:

    @9 :

    There’s a reason the McCain ad juxtaposes the images of these two young blondes with Barack Obama. It is specifically to hint at interracial sex for deep residual racism in the American psyche.

    I’m glad I’m not the only one who reached that conclusion.

  • mommadona

    says:

    John McCain is the President of the INTERNATIONAL REPUBLICANS INSTITUTE

    IRI.ORG

    John McCain is an established rightwingnut.

    Now, if the ‘MAINSTREAM MEDIA’ would do it’s job (hint*hint*), this fact would be out there and in the news SO VOTER COULD JUDGE if they really want to be a part of a bunch of INTERNATIONAL REPUBLICANS…

    The NewYorkTimes has stepped up to the plate….

    http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/28/us/politics/28IRI.html?_r=1&hp=&oref=login&pagewanted=print

  • joey

    says:

    “…What we have here is an angry, undisciplined, confused candidate, who’ll do anything to win….”

    With such an irritating personality that if you were having a beer with him you’d get up and leave…my friends. Acting like a stocker in a grocery store to show he shops just like us…in his $2000 suit and his $500+ Italian loafers …what a phony. Meanwhile Obama doesn’t have to pretend, attracting 200,000+ crowds. It’s his substance free policies and irritating personality stupid.

    This man will never be president…ever.

  • Alex

    says:

    He tried to present his “vision for the future.” Remember the 2013 speech? He got laughed off the stage. I think he tried to campaign positively for about a month, realized that it was going to get him nowhere, and sold it off to Schmidt and KR.

  • barbara tate

    says:

    He got sandbagged but good in 2000 and is determined to win this time. As for him being a nice guy, just remember the sneering smiks that passed over his face in every debate when he addressed Romney. It was obvious that he hated Mitt. He strikes me as just what his Senate collegues say he is, a vicious, angry man who stops at nothing when challenged in any way. He is obviously unstable and has been his entire adult life. He wasn’t called McNasty as a young man for nothing. He is not a nice person at all. He presented a pleasant face to the press which fooled them all since they are such grovelers at the feet of any Republican. But I for one think he has gone way round the bend emotionally and mentally. He is George W. Bush all over again only a little older. He got into Annapolis because his father was an admiral and not on his own merit. He finished fifth from bottom in his class at the Naval Academy and yet he miraculously got into flying school which is reserved for only the top people in the navy. He crashed at least 4 airplanes while he was in the Navy, not counting the one he was flying when he was shot down. A couple of those crashes where due to his hotdogging. He should have been taken off flying status long before he got to Vietnam. So once again, the Republicans are running a not so smart guy who owes all his success to his daddy. Oh, and one more similarity between Bush and McCain, both heavy drinkers. As far as I know, McCain never went on the wagon. So here we have it, folks, your chance to vote for another disasterous Republican candidate – an older and in many ways inferior George W/ Bush. McCain could very well finish this country off in four years. Just look at how he has run this campaign. Not one iota of substance and all mudslinging.