Sometimes reporters are so obtuse it defies belief.
Take the latest McCain tactics in his uphill campaign against Barack Obama.
It’s aimed at his base. Period. Well it’s aimed at someone’s base, the base McCain still doesn’t have.
Every reporter in town knows this. John McCain is still suspect among rabid Republicans, among rabid Bushies who still sport W the President stickers in their windshields. And there are millions of these people.
McCain’s only hope of energizing them in time to get some use from them is to run a Karl Rove campaign, appealing directly to prejudice, fear, and painting Democrats as evil. That’s how W gained and kept power. Sadism is the only thing these people recognize — they have really become that debased.
The irony, of course, is the latest ad targets Republicans. Paris Hilton’s family has given big to McCain. Britney Spears is on record as being a loyal Bushie. But in this game truth doesn’t matter, who you hurt doesn’t matter. What matters is that you’re hitting the other side and dominating the discussion. Which he was doing this week. Thanks to media complicity.
Despite having spent most of the last 8 years sucking up to the Republican establishment which preferred Bush to him in 2000, McCain is still suspect among those people. He won the Republican nomination by default. Giuliani and Thompson self-destructed. Romney came off as phonier than thou. Huckabee was a rank outsider. What choice did the party have? And when the final crunch came, in Florida, McCain triumphed by just five percentage points.
But winning a nomination and winning a party’s loyalty are two different things. Always. Most candidates who weren’t favored have to go to extraordinary lengths to win their base vote back before they can proceed. Michael Dukakis was negotiating with Jesse Jackson right up to the 1988 convention. George H.W. Bush fought a rearguard action against his activists right through his 1992 convention. Al Gore wasn’t Bubba and was never embraced.
The Republican Party, still, is the party of George W. Bush. Despite the fact that independents and Democrats despise him, George W. Bush is a beloved figure among hard core Republicans. He just is. And the only way McCain can energize those people is to copy Bush’s tactics — he’s done everything else to suck up to Bush, without success.
So that’s what he has done. He has hired a bunch of Rove proteges who take their orders directly from the master, and he’s running the 2000, 2002 and 2004 campaigns all over again. It doesn’t matter that he promised a month ago not to. Rove’s tactics have at least given him a fair shake with the daily news spin. He appears to be on offense, his opponent on defense, and with Republican activists that’s what counts.
I like the way Obama himself deflected the most recent attacks, and
wish his campaign ads just ran those comments rather than having some
omniscient voice-over with a script suitable to a freshman Congressman.
Let Obama be Obama, guys — that’s why you’re following him.
Then get back on the offense. Make them wonder what you’re going to do
to them, and stop wondering what they’re about to do to you.
