Needlenose

Greg Sargent at The Plum Line has a couple of posts today about the boost of rhetorical adrenaline Democrats have gotten from the reflexive apology Rep. Joe Barton (R – Big Oil’s Pocket) issued to BP CEO Tony Hayward yesterday.  Saying that “Dems are determined not to let the Joe Barton story recede into the background, now that he’s retracted his apology,” Sargent notes:

The DNC has rapidly put together a new ad starring Barton that calls on Republicans to “stop apologizing to big oil” and says that if the GOP takes over the House, Barton will be in charge of the probe into the spill as chair of the Energy and Commerce Committee.

In a follow-up post, Sargent quotes Rep. Chris Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC), promising this won’t be the end:

“Joe Barton said publicly where the majority of Republicans stand on energy — protecting the big oil companies,” Van Hollen argued, pointing to the fact that the Republican Study Committee, which has over 100 members, has called the BP escrow fund a “shakedown.” … ”This goes way beyond Joe Barton. It’s part of a larger pattern where Republicans in Congress are on the side of big corporate interests.”

…”We’re going to be making the point again and again that Joe Barton’s comments on big oil [show] Republicans in the House stand on the side of big corporate interests against consumers and taxpayers.“

In fact, Roll Call reports that the DNC has begun fundraising to support the new ad, and David Dayen notes in today’s Roundup that individual Democratic candidates are starting to blast their GOP opponents for remarks similar to Barton’s.

This visceral, who’s-on-your-side framing should be familiar to anyone aware of populist Democratic messaging over the years, and it’s a far sight more potent than the emotionally-drained “party of results” versus “party of no” approach that DNC chairman Tim Kaine was threatening promising a couple of months ago.  (A hint, guys: If unemployment is still hovering between 9.5% and 10% come November, don’t expect that “party of results” stuff to have much resonance.)

But however refreshing it is to hear Democrats forthrightly characterizing Republicans as what they are, it’s equally sobering to think of what it took to reach this point — an epic ecological catastrophe, extended so long that the president’s poll numbers began to be dragged downward, pushing his party to find a potential angle of counterattack.  Before that, it was all about mealy-mouthed “bipartisanship,” pragmatism, and attempts at partnering with politicians and interest groups diametrically opposed to the needs and wants of ordinary Americans.

So, unless Democrats are willing to revisit a more effective economic stimulus program, a public option for health insurance, and a host of other issues, it’s hard to see this rhetorical shift as anything but a conversion of convenience, scheduled to expire just after this fall’s elections.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Via TPM Election Central, the Obama campaign cuts to the chase about tonight’s debate:

On the big issues, this debate is one last chance for John McCain to do what he has failed to do throughout this entire campaign: explain to the American people how his economic policies would be any different at all than the failed Bush agenda he has supported every step of the way. It’s his last chance to somehow convince the American people that his erratic response to this economic crisis doesn’t disqualify him from being President.

. . . the real question is not how many attacks McCain can land in the debate, but whether he can finally communicate a vision to turn this economy around.

Not only that, the vision he unveils has to be so convincing that a significant chunk of people who are currently planning to vote for Obama step back and say, “Whoa!  What were we thinking?!”

After all, Obama built his lead during the recent financial meltdown by consistently presenting (in the debates and his omnipresent ads) the kind of policies and temperament that people think are best suited to getting us out of the ditch.  McCain needs not only to show that he can play in the same league, but to convince people somehow that what we saw from Obama over the past month was some kind of illusion.

It’s McCain’s bad luck that after building up a mythology about his awesome leadership potential and supposed ability to take charge in a crisis, an actual crisis and test of leadership erupted in the middle of the campaign, and he failed.

Update 1: Then again, I could be wrong — McCain’s highly focused debate preparation may carry him through.

Update 2: More seriously, if it weren’t probably too late (and beyond McCain’s ability to pull off performance-wise), this is reasonably good advice on how to re-establish his brand from one of the guys who helped him build it.

A month ago, right after the Republican convention attempted to reinvent John McCain as a reform-bringing outsider, I remarked to someone via email that “with McCain pretending to offer the same ‘change’ as Obama, the choice for low-information voters is which one seems authentic versus which one seems risky.”

By the middle of the month, Obama was using issues-based positive ads as a way to seize the high ground in terms of authenticity, and since then his response to the Wall Street meltdown has presented him to voters as less risky than McCain as well.

Michael Scherer of Time magazine, not heretofore noted for his insight, explains how McCain’s latest mud-slinging barrage is a belated attempt to reverse people’s perceptions in these areas:

The Albuquerque speech represented a dramatic pivot in the McCain campaign’s strategy, to what Republican strategists have called the “Manchurian Candidate” attack.

The Manchurian Candidate is an well-trod technique in political warfare: You claim that you are the candidate people know, while your opponent is not who he seems to be. In fact, you argue, he has secret ulterior motives that he is trying to hide. You say he is a danger to all that the country holds dear. . . . let me repost some of the excerpts, edited for brevity to show how the Manchurian strategy works:

I didn’t just show up out of nowhere, after all — America knows me. You know my strengths and my faults. You know my story and my convictions.. . . And the same standards of clarity and candor must now be applied to my opponent. Even at this late hour in the campaign, there are essential things we don’t know about Senator Obama or the record that he brings to this campaign. We have all heard what he has said, but it is less clear what he has done or what he will do. What Senator Obama says today and what he has done in the past are often two different things. He has often changed his positions in this campaign, and the best way to determine where he would really take this country is to examine where he has tried to take it in the past. . . . For a guy who’s already authored two memoirs, he’s not exactly an open book. . . . Whatever the question, whatever the issue, there’s always a back story with Senator Obama.

The goal is that, even if the electorate doesn’t immediately buy the doubts McCain is selling, at least Obama will be drawn off the subject of the economy as he tries to explain himself on whatever bogus issues are raised. And that loss of focus in itself will create room for more questions to be raised in people’s minds… and, well, who knows what will turn up then? (This kind of opening is the best a campaign trailing in the last month can hope for.)

There’s an easy way, however, for Obama to defuse this attack and simultaneously turn the subject back to his preferred themes.  All he has to do is say that the most dangerous secret he could be hiding is that he supports another four years of the same economic policies and philosophy we’ve had under George Bush.

Another four years like the last eight is the result from this election that the American people should fear most.  And it’s exactly the risk they’d be taking if they vote for John McCain.

You may have already seen this quote today, where Republican campaign consultant Craig Shirley assessed the effect of John McCain’s re-reversed stance on attending tonight’s presidential debate (via the Huffington Post‘s Sam Stein):

In the end, he blinked and Obama did not. The ‘steady hand in a storm’ argument looks now to more favor Obama, not McCain.

The Obama campaign couldn’t have framed things any better, you might think to yourself, and you’d be right — Obama spokesman Bill Burton used the same metaphor yesterday (via Ben Smith at Politico):

Throughout the course of this crisis, Sen. Obama has shown voters that he would be a steady hand at the wheel were he to be elected president at a time of crisis, and I don’t know that voters would have gotten the same impression having seen John McCain over the course of this same week.

Burton’s comments today on behalf of Obama have continued to push this steady-vs.-unsteady theme, and you can bet that Barack himself will find a way to work it into his debate arguments tonight.

Ironically, one of the reasons McCain had for wanting to avoid the debate is that being seen as the “safer,” more experienced candidate is traditionally a plus in presidential elections — and in the past, nationally televised debates (most notably for Ronald Reagan in 1980) have been a forum where a candidate seen as risky or inexperienced could cross the “credibility threshold” by coming across as composed and knowledgeable enough to be a plausible President. Already ahead in most polls, Obama could close the proverbial deal tonight with many wavering voters with a calm, confident presentation.

That danger for McCain is now magnified by the clumsy impulsiveness he’s demonstrated the past few days. Just by keeping his cool, Obama can portray himself as not only the outsider who will bring change to Washington, but as the safer, steadier leader — a rare combination that will be hard to defeat.

McCain’s insistence on seeing the election (and world events) as mere vehicles for his all-consuming personal drama has been noted before. Now, it’s almost impossible not to notice… and it may be about to guarantee his defeat.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Amid the general concern over John McCain’s post-Palin boost in the polls, framing guru George Lakoff weighed in with a diary at Daily Kos last Friday about what he thought Barack Obama was doing wrong. Agreeing with “the statement by Rick Davis, McCain’s campaign manager, that the campaign is ‘not about the issues’,” Lakoff writes:

The Obama-Biden campaign seems to have become the Gore-Kerry-Hillary campaign. They are running on 18th Century theory of Enlightenment reason: If you just tell people the facts, they will follow their self-interest and reason to the right conclusion. . . . What Republican marketers have known for decades is that the Enlightenment theory of reason doesn’t describe how people actually work. People think primarily in terms of cultural narratives, stereotypes, frames, and metaphors.

. . . The job for the Obama campaign is to reverse the present mindset that the Republicans have constructed, to reveal the conservatives as elitist Washington insiders who cynically manipulate them, to get conservative populists to identify with Obama and Biden on the basis of values and character, and to have them see realities through Obama’s leadership capacities.

I think what Lakoff doesn’t see is that Obama is using the “issues” argument to set up exactly the contrast he recommends. The recent ad above, where Obama defines “real change” based on taxes and health care, isn’t really about the issues so much as positioning Obama as a straight talker who respects the viewer and shares their concerns.

Compare that with a new ad today that defines McCain:

Enough of a contrast there for you? As with the pro-Barack ad, this one connects policies/issues with character — Obama will bring policy changes because he’s honest and shares middle-class American values, while McCain has become an ugly liar to cover up his desire to keep Bush’s programs in place.

Seen in this light, caring about the problems that affect voters’ lives isn’t ignoring the need for “authenticity” — it’s a way of demonstrating authenticity, even to people who don’t read the policy details.

So much for “Obama fatigue.” Via Fezwearers Anonymous, the Associated Press reports:

Barack Obama’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention was seen by more than 38 million people.

Nielsen Media Research said more people watched Obama speak than watched the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing, the final “American Idol” or the Academy Awards this year. Obama talked before a live audience of 80,000 people in Denver.

His TV audience nearly doubled the amount of people who watched John Kerry accept the Democratic nomination to run against President Bush four years ago. Kerry’s speech was seen by just over 20 million people.

Much to the chagrin of the John McCain’s campaign handlers, those people all got to see the real “real Obama” — unfiltered, not through the distorted lens of their Rovian B-team attack ads — and learned that he was anything but a pampered empty suit:

in the faces of those young veterans who come back from Iraq and Afghanistan, I see my grandfather, who signed up after Pearl Harbor, marched in Patton’s Army, and was rewarded by a grateful nation with the chance to go to college on the GI Bill.

In the face of that young student who sleeps just three hours before working the night shift, I think about my mom, who raised my sister and me on her own while she worked and earned her degree; who once turned to food stamps but was still able to send us to the best schools in the country with the help of student loans and scholarships.

When I listen to another worker tell me that his factory has shut down, I remember all those men and women on the South Side of Chicago who I stood by and fought for two decades ago after the local steel plant closed.

Just as importantly, though, they learned what Obama was committed to do as President: changing the tax code to reward work and job creation instead of existing wealth, expanding access to health care and quality education, and the Kennedyesque challenge to end U.S. reliance on Mideast oil in 10 years.

It’s a stark contrast to the shallow, identity-based politics being played by the Republicans, exemplified in John McCain’s announcement of his vice presidential nominee today.

The GOP presidential message boils down to this: Vote for McCain because he was a prisoner of war. Vote for Sarah Palin because she’s female. Vote for them because of who they are, not because what they’ll do.

If you have the crazy notion that this country has enough serious problems that some important things need doing… well, as Obama said, “you’re on your own.” Unless, that is, you vote for change.

I have a feeling that most of those 38 million-plus people who watched Obama speak last night were of the opinion that voting for a president because of what he’ll do is exactly the change we need.

A month ago, as John McCain was starting his perverse “celebrity” line of attack against Barack Obama, I wrote:

I think the frontal assault on the crowds turning out to see Obama will really backfire. As I’m sure Barack himself will point out soon, they’re showing up because times are so difficult, and they so desperately want a change for the better — and a candidate who will rise above divisive campaign tactics and tired policy approaches to really solve their problems.

John McCain wants to argue that this is a bad thing? That people shouldn’t hope, that they should be ashamed of wanting something better? Um, yeah, good luck with that approach.

With Obama due to give a nationally televised speech in front of 75,000 people tonight, I think it’s a likely moment for him to trot out this line of argument.

Update: And… he didn’t! Guess you can file this with my VP prediction… more thoughts on the speech tomorrow.

Let’s see, at the beginning of this week, the talk about the Obama presidential campaign was… oh, yes, the “palpable lack of any consistent lines of attack” against John McCain.

That problem seems to have resolved itself somewhat quickly, hasn’t it? (Although the assist from McCain himself was, admittedly, quite unexpected.)

It seems like a foregone conclusion already that Mr. Double-Talk Express has locked up this election year’s “I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it” prize for reinforcing his opponent’s narrative with his clumsy attempt to avoid admitting how many homes he and his wife own (and thus, by implication, how jaw-droppingly wealthy they are).

But the problems McCain has created for himself go beyond inadvertently handing the “country club economics” theme to Obama for the next three months. For one thing, living up to the party-of-the-rich stereotype of Republicans damages his efforts to (re)paint himself as a maverick and makes it far easier for Democrats to tie him to the generic unfavorable image of the GOP.

Even worse, his evasion of the number-of-homes question comes across as clueless and dishonest at the the same time, a deadly combination. When Dems chastise McCain as “out of touch” for his response, it resonates not just in terms of his lack of empathy for ordinary Americans’ financial situations, but also as having a faulty moral compass.

McCain’s slipperiness in answering such a straightforward inquiry, combined with the wealth he was trying to hide, makes him hard for casual voters to identify with, in the sense expressed so vividly by Montana governor Brian Schweitzer three years ago:

They’ve got to know you; they’ve got to know that you believe in what you’re saying. And that’s probably more important when people vote than your policies. . . .

They [need to] look up there and say, “That guy’s a straight shooter. If I wasn’t so busy bowling and working and fishing, and if I had time to spend on these issues, I bet I’d come to the same conclusions that that guy would.”

That’s why “… is out of touch” and “… just doesn’t get it” can be such devastating political attacks. Keeping Democratic candidates from achieving this kind of identification with voters is why Republicans invariably launch such blistering personal assaults, with negative ads seeking to make them figures of ridicule and portray them as weird, morally suspect freaks. All of a sudden, though, now it’s McCain who seems abnormal and inauthentic. (That reporters and pundits are starting to recognize the McCain team’s “But he was a POW!” defense as canned shtick doesn’t help.)

And the hits may keep coming. Via Attackerman (who’s been blogging up a storm all day today on the subject), the reports of a potential U.S.-Iraq withdrawal agreement has given the Obama campaign the opportunity to open a second front on this subject:

Senator McCain has stubbornly focused on maintaining an indefinite U.S presence in Iraq, but events have made his bluster and record increasingly out of touch with reality.

I’ve been pleading for years to have Democrats to connect on this gut level with low-information voters by ignoring the GOP’s pet frame of “strong versus weak” in favor of contrasting common sense and being reality-based with Republicans’ empty bluster. To John McCain’s regret, that moment may have come.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Now the rovin’ gambler he was very bored
He was tryin’ to create a next world war
He found a promoter who nearly fell off the floor
He said I never engaged in this kind of thing before
But yes I think it can be very easily done
We’ll just put some bleachers out in the sun
And have it on Highway 61.

– Bob Dylan, “Highway 61 Revisited”

The Washington Post a couple of days ago caught a key moment of John McCain’s arrogant foolishness regarding the Georgia-Russia spat, one that deserves more attention:

Aides to Republican Sen. John McCain were scrambling last Thursday morning even as his plane was descending into Des Moines. Russia had escalated its aggression in the bordering Republic of Georgia, they told reporters, and McCain wanted to seize the moment.

On the ground in Iowa, advance men raced to erect a podium on the tarmac, just feet from McCain’s plane. The Republican nominee strode to the microphone for the first of several blistering statements condemning Russia’s moves, delivering his comments well before President Bush spoke publicly about the incident.

Josh Marshall and Kevin Drum have already weighed in today on this unseemly showboating. Says Drum:

What this demonstrates is McCain’s urgent, deep-seated desire to believe that he, John McCain, is right smack in the middle of world historical events, a desire remarkably similar to one we’ve seen from George Bush since he took office. That temperament hasn’t worked out so well for the past few years, and I’m not sure the country is ready for a repeat.

It’s not just that, of course, but the McCain camp’s immediate reaction of “Hey, this is good for us!” and rushing to get their guy’s mug on as many TV screens as possible right away. Some people have complained about the Democratic nominee-to-be’s low profile during the crisis, but I wouldn’t be surprised if once Obama does step forward for extended comment, he draws attention to the intentional contrast.

After all, do we really want a presidential candidate — much less a President — whose instinctive reaction to an international crisis is unabashed glee?

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Barack Obama caused a minor stir back in June when he quoted The Untouchables in referring to the inevitable Republican attacks against him:

“If they bring a knife to the fight…

… we bring a gun.”

Okay, so maybe it took more like bringing three knives, but whatever.

Update: About two weeks ago, when McCain started his “celebrity” shtick, I wrote that “I think the frontal assault on the crowds turning out to see Obama will really backfire. As I’m sure Barack himself will point out soon, they’re showing up because times are so difficult, and they so desperately want a change for the better.”

Today, the Obama campaign finally started adopting this approach. Look for it to be a major riff in his acceptance speech at the convention.