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Friday, September 12, 2008
What I'm Worried
About
Where
McCain has Obama right now. But does he know it?
NEXT STEPS. I know the left is deep-down vicious, but even I was surprised by the speed and depravity of the MSM/blog/Dem assault on Sarah Palin. It was over the top even for them, and though I have read many intelligent attempts to explain the irrational ugliness of the past two weeks in terms of who Sarah Palin is and is not, I think they're mostly wrong. It's not about Palin being a woman or a mother or a Christian or a conservative. It's about a light bulb that suddenly switched on in the subconscious minds of the Obama intelligentsia. As soon as she was named, they knew they had lost the election. What followed was an enormous tantrum, which hasn't stopped yet. It's true. They have lost the election. Unless McCain and his campaign staff don't see this fact or don't see why it's true. That's what I'm worried about.
I worry about the ads expressing Republican outrage about lipsticked pigs and Palin pursued by wolves. (Though I'm disdainful of ALL the pundits who profess belief Obama didn't paint the pig on purpose any more than he gave Hillary the middle finger on purpose. Grow up, naifs.) These are wholly unnecessary diversions because the election isn't about Palin. It's about McCain and Obama. And Obama is in the position of the bull in the photo above, bloodied, pierced by debilitating lances, and helpless to prevent a surgical political kill. All that's left is applying the sword with antiseptic grace in the upcoming three debates. There isn't even any need to be particularly negative from this point forward. No name-calling is required. The double-edged axe of Obama's/Palin's (in)experience doesn't have to be hauled out, only mentioned in passing. The coup de grace isn't a function of judgment, or Biden, or Hillary, or Bill Ayars, or Jeremiah Wright, or Michelle, or racism, or elitism, or the documentation of lies and misrepresentations. McCain shouldn't even have to raise his voice. Just slide the sword smoothly in at exactly the right location, and the election is over.
Unfortunately, I don't see much sign in all the heaped-up brilliance of the right that anyone on McCain's side is seeing the forest instead of a row of tempting trees. Although there is one NRO editor, Jim Geraghty, who has isolated and identified the only important fact in the woods:
All statements by Barack Obama come
with an expiration date. All of them.
Before the supposedly disastrous Biden pick and before the Democrat Convention's odd conceit that McCain is exactly the same as the president he has battled, sabotaged, and embarrassed at every opportunity, Bill Clinton actually tried to tell the Republicans why Obama is so fatally vulnerable:
Speaking at a forum of former world
leaders less than a mile from the site of the Democratic National
Convention, Bill Clinton drew an analogy that had many wondering
whether he had made peace with the idea of an Obama candidacy.
“Suppose for example you’re a voter and you have candidate X and you have candidate Y,” Clinton said. “Candidate X agrees with you on everything but you don’t think that person can deliver on anything. Candidate Y disagrees with you on half the issues but you believe that on the other half, the candidate will be able to deliver. For whom will you vote?
“Suppose for example you’re a voter and you have candidate X and you have candidate Y,” Clinton said. “Candidate X agrees with you on everything but you don’t think that person can deliver on anything. Candidate Y disagrees with you on half the issues but you believe that on the other half, the candidate will be able to deliver. For whom will you vote?
Of course, his analogy was veiled, discreet, and understated, but political double-agent that he is in this election, he was sharing his political genius with anyone capable of inductive reasoning. The only part he left out is that Obama has changed his position on so many matters of fact, policy, and his own character that it's impossible to take him seriously on anything. He may believe everything he says when he says it, which is why there's no need to accuse him of lying or cynical flip-flopping. It's simply that anything and everything he says is subject to radical change and even reversal at a moment's notice whenever circumstances, as they inevitably do, change his view of our view of him.
Consider any policy issue or position that comes up in a presidential debate. If it's Obama's tax plan, McCain doesn't have to explain the economic impossibility of funding trillions in new spending on the backs of the 5 percent who have their taxes raised while 95 percent get a tax cut. All he has to do is list the number of times Obama's tax promises have changed during the 19 months he has been running for president. He wanted to repeal all the Bush tax cuts and double the capital gains tax. Now he doesn't. In fact, he's no longer sure that taxing the five percent who are rich is a good idea in a recession. But inauguration day is three whole months away. What will Obama's tax plan be by then?
The same is true of everything in Obama's continuously fluid platform. The Iraq War (immediate pullot/conditions on the ground, surge failed/succeeded), FISA (determined to filibuster against it before he voted for it), NAFTA (no/maybe/yes), the federal death penalty (no/yes), negotiations with foreign tyrants (yes/sometimes/no), the Second Amendment (no/yes/who knows?), fixing social security (let's dance), the spiritual mentor he could never disavow (father figure/disappointing stranger), drilling for oil (no/yes/maybe), nuclear power (no/maybe/whatever), etc, etc. Bringing up any of these topics in a debate is tantamount to putting the old warrior McCain into a shooting gallery filled with nothing but targets of opportunity. "It doesn't matter what the specifics of this plan are; they'll change substantially before he submits his first bill to Congress as president. He can't help it. Circumstances change, public opinion changes, and his deeply and gravely held principles will change right along with them. Nobody can show you anything he's ever stuck to against the party line."
This is where Obama's lack of experience and any substantive legislative record is no longer a political charge, but a factual proof. Supporting a brilliant young talent with virtually no experience is fine in some circumstances (Sarah!), but without a record of experience all we have to go on is words. And while 19 months of campaigning is still not a credentialing experience for Obama, it is all the experience "we the people" need to make a decision about him. No matter how much we love his eloquent words, he has given us absolutely no reason to trust his word. It doesn't matter nearly so much that we know very little about Obama the man inside the image as it does that we know nothing about where he will choose to stand tomorrow, wherever he says he stands today.
That one argument, hammered home however tactfully, is all that's required to peel away the moderates, independents, and Reagan Democrats that constitute the margin of victory in this election. It's really that simple. McCain's word is good, backed by a lifetime of documented actions in the military and in public life. Game over.
Politically acute Democrats have known this, or felt it deep in their guts, for many months now. All parts of their coalition have been disturbed by the rapidity and degree of Obama position changes since Hillary suspended her campaign. Republicans somehow failed to notice that the thrust of the Obama campaign transitioned away from Obama the Savior to McCain as a third term for Bush. Why? Two reasons. First and less important, they -- no more than the electorate -- could work up any real hostility toward John McCain, whom they actually respected without wanting to, and the illusion of running against Bush was the only way the party pros could work up some passion in their speeches. Second, and critically important, because they no longer had a real candidate, only the wildly popular image of one. Their quite reasonable hope was that the sleeping Republican base wouldn't notice, that a tired and underfunded McCain wouldn't notice either, and that the general election would be a lackluster formality -- i.e., a vision of the Obama campaign coasting across the finish line on an empty gas tank.
That's why the Biden pick for VP actually made great good sense. He would be the excitement, the comic relief, the buffoon that people still had to take seriously because he was a Democrat Party elder regardless of his dumb blunders, and he would therefore reinforce the last remaining element of the Obama mystique, his aloof, above-all-the-nonsense gravitas. It was the exact right move for a campaign that had lost all its substance even before the nominating convention. (Hillary would have deflated the Macy's balloon gigantism of the Obama brand.)
Then came the Palin selection. In political terms, it was a nuclear explosion. Not because of who Sarah was but because of what her nomination did to the Republican base and the candidate. They all woke up, so suddenly that to Democrats it must have seemed a miracle in reverse.
That's why they immediately launched the carelessly self-destructive nuclear counterstrike against Sarah Palin. It was an act of projection and displacement. Mad at Sarah? Yeah, maybe, on general liberal fascist principles. But the specific personal vituperation was so psychotically vengeful that it couldn't have been inspired by a total stranger. Psychologically, the real target of their rage was Obama himself. Obama, the no-experience guy, the exotic life story from left field, the seductive mirage that caused so many to lose their senses and stupidly abandon the one real candidate whom they had rudely shoved out of the way. The more the Republicans embraced the inexperienced but sexy new unknown, the more their rage swelled and twisted their hearts. They wanted to destroy her in revenge for the fact that her race and gender opposite/apposite had cost them the White House a third time in a row. The hatred on open display was also self hatred. Is self hatred. Particularly for the MSM, which lives exclusively in the realm of what happens on TV and other media; they have a vivid nightmare image of just how bad the Obama-McCain debates might be. And what fools they will feel for having used all their prodigious power to create such a humiliating scenario for themselves.
What does this mean for the McCain campaign if they are smart enough to see it? Forget about forcing Palin to run any gauntlet of media accreditation. She owns the base, no matter what. Quit defending her. Quit tossing her into baited traps. Take the fight to Obama, but not in the way they have been doing the past few weeks. Produce and run ads that contrast, without much explanation or leading commentary, the fact of Obama's countless changes of position in every conceivable area. Deliberately withhold the charge of flip-flopper. Don't make any charge at all -- just statements, dates, documentations of the only change we can count on Obama for, the change in his own mercurial positions on everything that matters to the American people. Save the punchline for the debates. Then use the sword cleanly.
Do I think they'll do it? No. That's why I'm worried. I think they'll try to slug it out issue by issue, accepting each new Obama position as final, and thereby enable the cipher ZERObama to hide his nonentity in the weeds of detail.
Somebody please reassure me.
