Needlenose

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.

The transcript of Barack Obama’s new TV ad (shown above):

Every time you fill your tank, the oil companies fill their pockets.

Now Big Oil’s filling John McCain’s campaign with 2 million dollars in contributions.

Because instead of taxing their windfall profits to help drivers, McCain wants to give them another 4 billion in tax breaks.

After one president in the pocket of big oil… We can’t afford another.

Barack Obama… A windfall profits tax on big oil to give families a thousand dollar rebate.

A president who’ll stand up for you.

Expect to see a lot more of this. Can ads with Obama swearing to “fight” (or describing how he as “fought”) for this or that be far off?

With all the shakeups since he entered the presidential race, it’s been hard to know who’s running John McCain’s campaign… but I’m gradually becoming convinced that it’s Wile E. Coyote.  Consider this story from the New York Times today:

After spending much of the summer searching for an effective line of attack against Senator Barack Obama, Senator John McCain is beginning a newly aggressive campaign to define Mr. Obama as arrogant, out of touch and unprepared for the presidency.

. . . The moves are the McCain campaign’s most full-throttled effort to define Mr. Obama negatively, on its own terms, by creating a narrative intended to turn the public off to an opponent.

. . . Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements.

The run of attacks against Mr. Obama over the last couple of weeks have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive, including the Bush team’s tactics of seeking to make campaigns referendums on its opponents — not a choice between two candidates — and attacking the opponent’s perceived strengths head-on. Central to the latest McCain drive is an attempt to use against Mr. Obama the huge crowds and excitement he has drawn, including on his foreign trip last week, by promoting a view of him as more interested in attention and adulation than in solving the problems facing American families.

You can imagine the high-fiving in the McCain camp:  “Yessss!!  We’ve applied the Rove handbook perfectly!  We are suuuuper geniuses!” Um, except for a few problems.  First, just because your attack is aimed at your opponent’s strength doesn’t mean it makes sense — and even McCain’s own allies and former close advisers are agreeing that the “celebrity” angle is simply ridiculous.

Second, by their own desperate personal attacks, the McCainites have created their own unflattering narrative, which the Obama campaign is quickly using to define them, unveiling a site today called the Low Road Express.  Strategy honcho David Axelrod twists the knife a bit further in the NYT story I quoted above:

When people are struggling, when they’re trying to pay their bills, when they’re concerned about their fundamental security, I don’t think they have much tolerance for Britney Spears and Paris Hilton,” Mr. Axelrod said. “I think they understand times are more serious than that, and they thought John McCain was, too.“

As Axelrod implies, a negative frame has to be in tune with the public’s sense of the election.  Calling John Kerry a “flip-flopper” may be effective in saying he’s too indecisive to lead a nation in 2004 that had just been plunged into war in Iraq and was emerging from the shadow of September 11th, and when it might have been enough to paint George Bush as more likable than Al Gore back when the national had as few visible pressing problems as it did in 2000… but things are different now.

And that’s where 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.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

(Video via TPM.)

Barack Obama’s campaign must have felt it was Christmas in July when they heard about McCain economic adviser Phil Gramm used some clumsy phrases in trying explain to newspaper editors that the U.S. is not really in a recession.

Given the large number of low-information voters in the U.S., our presidential elections frequently turn not on policy details but rather the broad question of which candidate symbolically represents the “ordinary American” — and not only did Gramm’s remarks give Obama an opening in that regard, but they happened on a day when he was campaigning with Hillary Clinton specifically to shore up his working-class-hero credentials.

Here’s the text of Obama’s remarks:

. . . when you look at our records and plans on the economic issues that matter most for women, it becomes very clear that [Sen. McCain] won’t bring the change we need – while I will.

That starts with acknowledging the economic difficulties so many women are facing right now. Senator McCain, however, has said that we’ve made “great progress” on the economy. And Senator Phil Gramm, a top economic advisor to Senator McCain, just recently said that this is merely “a mental recession.” Senator Gramm then deemed the United States – and I quote – “a nation of whiners.” This comes after Senator McCain recently admitted that his energy proposals will have mainly “psychological” benefits.

Well, you know, America already has one Dr. Phil. When it comes to the economy, we don’t need another.

Let’s be clear, when people are struggling with the rising costs of everything from gas to groceries, when we’ve lost 438,000 jobs over the past six months, when typical families have seen their incomes fall nearly $1,000 since 2000, this economic downturn isn’t in our heads. It isn’t whining to ask for more than just psychological relief.

And I think it’s time we had a President who doesn’t deny our problems – or blame the American people for them – but takes responsibility and provides the leadership to solve them. That’s the kind of President I will be.

But you really need to watch the video above to see how Obama milked the opportunity for all it was worth, talking in his best casual, regular-guy style — complete with Reaganesque smiles of disbelief and an impromptu “Whoa!” to underscore the ridiculousness of Gramm’s comments.

I guess Gramm was demonstrating the keen political instincts and timing that fueled his own run for the White House a dozen years ago (he dropped out early in the primaries, having spent $20 million and earning only 8 — count ‘em, 8 — delegates). Of course, McCain was familiar with Gramm’s past, since he was a chairman of the campaign. Can’t see why you’d want to break up a winning team like that…

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

Via Steve Benen, here’s our friend Mr. Double-Talk Express at a campaign stop in New Jersey yesterday:

“I will look you in the eye and promise you that I will get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice,” McCain said in response to a direct question from one of the 2,000 people in attendance at the college’s Pemberton campus gym.

McCain said the key to ending the long search for bin Laden was to increase the number of human spies abroad.

“We need better human intelligence. We need people who can swim in the water,” McCain said.

Steve thinks this is a statement to make fun of, apparently not grasping McSame’s allusion to the Maoist slogan that guerrillas move among the people like fish in water (hence, to catch them, you need people who can swim in the water).

What McCain is really doing, though, is making the strong-daddy pitch (as in his infamous 2013 ad) that if we elect him, he’s so manly and decisive that unsolved, complicated problems will dissolve in the face of his will. Not to mention appealing to those who think the White House is like a Tom Clancy novel — the president shouts “Dammit, make this happen!’ to the CIA, and the entire bureaucracy suddenly snaps to attention, smoothly implementing his orders to get better sources inside Bin Laden’s inner circle (as if they never thought about it before!) and getting immediate results.

What I think you’ll see Obama do is point out that George Bush made the same blustery promise, but couldn’t follow through. And that was because while the tough talk was moving in one direction, the decisions and resources went in another — specifically, toward Iraq. Where John McCain wants us to remain indefinitely, with 100-140,000 U.S. troops and the logistical and human intelligence resources to support them, and no clear plan for bringing them home. As Obama has long said, he wants to scale back our Iraq commitment in part so we can reinforce our efforts in Afghanistan, which would strengthen our ability to track down Osama.

So while John McCain makes tough-sounding promises, it’s Barack Obama who will make the tough decisions and take the tough actions that might actually turn that promise into a reality.

From ABC News yesterday:

Sen. Barack Obama called Sen. John McCain’s refusal to admit he misspoke about troop levels in Iraq “disturbing” and cast his actions as the sequel to the Bush administration’s refusal to admit their own mistakes.

“We’ve seen this movie before,” Obama said at a town hall in Rapid City, S.D. “A leader who pursues the wrong course, who is unwilling to change course, who ignores the evidence. Now, just like George Bush, John McCain is refusing to admit that he’s made a mistake.”

Obama explained to the crowd of 2,700 that McCain had said on Friday that the United States had drawn down to pre-surge troop levels in Iraq.

. . . “Now we all misspeak sometimes. I’ve done it myself. So on such a basic, factual error, you’d think that John McCain would just say, ‘Oh, I misspoke, I made a mistake’ — and then move on. But he couldn’t do that. Instead, he dug in,” Obama said and connected it to Bush’s handling of the Iraq war: “We all know this president refused to admit that he made a mistake. That’s the leadership that we’ve had enough of over the last eight years.“

Obama’s campaign thought this speech was important enough to send the text around to the media in advance. Greg Sargent (at TPM Election Central) and Steve Benen were pleased that it showed Barack as willing to go on the offensive, while D-Day praised him for his ability to “weave new information into his overall narrative” — but the important thing is how he’s going on the offensive, and what that narrative is.

As I’ve blathered about repeatedly in the past, the standard GOP framing of presidential elections hasn’t developed by accident. Republican strategists know that if a contest is determined by who can best solve the problems of the moment, they lose — because their side only believes in using those problems to further their permanent agenda of funneling money to the wealthy (through tax cuts, military spending and other corporate welfare, etc.). So they’ve sought to make a virtue out of the fact that they always support the same policies, and a vice out of caring about the effects of those policies. A year and a half ago, I wrote:

The Republicans certainly know where the strength of their brand is, which is why they try to denigrate the very concepts of reality and pragmatism at every turn…. ridiculing intelligent and articulate Democratic politicians as morally dubious girlie-men, and ignoring the foreign-policy arts of intelligence and diplomacy in favor of blustering threats and military force. In each case, moral and ideological certainty is portrayed as the highest ideal, and the willingness (or — gasp! — desire) to adapt to a changing reality is depicted as a sinful, deadly weakness.

Obama, though, is turning that narrative on its head. Certainty in the face of contrary facts isn’t an ideal at all; it’s a flaw that leads to disasters like the one we can all see in Iraq. Instead of a choice between “strength” (ideological certainty) versus “weakness,” what Americans really face this November is one between common-sense responsibility and phony bluster.

The power of this attack is that it turns McCain’s fundamental strategy into an ally for Obama. The “flip-flopper” meme has been effective in the past against Democrats in part because the GOP could always count on them to say something nuanced (“I voted for the $87 billion before I voted against it”) that could be pounced upon as proof to further it along. Since McCain’s would-be daddy frame (like Dubya’s) depends on him pretending to be infallible — which is why he couldn’t admit the error on how many troops we have in Iraq to begin with — he almost doesn’t have a choice but to keep proving Obama right by generating more phony bluster, and then being unable to back down.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

I’m kind of looking forward to Barack Obama’s response to John McCain’s latest batch of schoolyard taunts, as reported by the Associated Press:

Republican John McCain on Monday sharply criticized Democratic rival Barack Obama for not having been to Iraq since 2006, and said they should visit the war zone together.

“Look at what happened in the last two years since Senator Obama visited and declared the war lost,” the GOP presidential nominee-in-waiting told The Associated Press in an interview, noting that the Illinois senator’s last trip to Iraq came before the military buildup that is credited with curbing violence.

“He really has no experience or knowledge or judgment about the issue of Iraq and he has wanted to surrender for a long time,” the Arizona senator added. “If there was any other issue before the American people, and you hadn’t had anything to do with it in a couple of years, I think the American people would judge that very harshly.”

. . . Obama, who has all but clinched the Democratic nomination, says he will remove U.S. combat troops within 16 months of taking office, though sometimes he shortens it to 11 months.

“For him to talk about dates for withdrawal, which basically is surrender in Iraq after we’re succeeding so well is, I think, really inexcusable,” said McCain, who has been to Iraq eight times, most recently in March.

. . . “I go back every few months because things are changing in Iraq,” he said. McCain questioned whether Obama has ever been briefed by Petraeus. “I would also seize that opportunity to educate Senator Obama along the way.”

Since McCain’s attack is right out of the daddy-framing handbook — where the strong daddy (McCain, the Shrub-in-Chief, and the military commanders) knows everything, and the children aren’t supposed to ask questions — I expect Obama will look to emasculate it by repositioning McCain’s would-be assertion of authority as empty bluster, disconnected from the reality that the voting public already understands far too vividly.

Perhaps he’ll start by noting that the presumption that McCain will “educate” Obama is more of the arrogance Americans would like less of in their next president. Especially since the supposed educating will occur in the shelter of the Green Zone and fortified U.S. bases — the only places it’s safe for American politicians to go in Iraq, despite McCain’s puffed-up talk of “succeeding” and victory.

Does McCain really think Obama will learn some truth about the situation in Iraq from the spin he gets in closed-door meetings and choreographed photo ops? (In Jim Webb’s famous words to Sen. Lindsey Graham, “You haven’t been to Iraq, Lindsey. You go see the dog and pony show. That’s what Congressmen do.“) Barack can point out McCain’s experience with that, because Mr. Double-Talk Express is the guy who sauntered through a Baghdad market wearing a flak jacket and surrounded by a hundred armed U.S. troops, backed up by several helicopters, and went on TV to claim it was proof of how safe Iraq was.

If that’s the kind of education McCain has in mind, I think both Obama and the American people will say, no thanks, we already know enough.

Update: The actual Obama response via TPM Election Central (just minutes after I completed this post) –

“John McCain’s proposal is nothing more than a political stunt, and we don’t need any more ‘Mission Accomplished’ banners or walks through Baghdad markets to know that Iraq’s leaders have not made the political progress that was the stated purpose of the surge. The American people don’t want any more false promises of progress, they deserve a real debate about a war that has overstretched our military, and cost us thousands of lives and hundreds of billions of dollars without making us safer.”

Barack Obama returned Tuesday night to Iowa, where the incredibly long Democratic nomination campaign began. He may not have officially declared victory, but he did unveil a new speech laying out his themes for the general election against John McCain:

As far as I can tell, all of that “Change is…” language is brand new — and it’s exactly what I (among others) have been wanting to hear from Obama for nearly a year. From when he was trailing in the polls last September and October to when he caught up in January and as he forged a lead in February, my numbingly repetitive consistent prescription for Obama’s campaign was that he needed to “shore up [his] high-concept appeal by connecting it to more specific and tangible policy results.”

As I wrote in mid-February, “connecting his candidacy with the specific agenda of problems America needs solved will make it harder for the Republican sludge machine to win by eviscerating him personally.” Now that the battle has been more or less officially joined, I think each passing week will make it clearer that this is the tug-of-war that will define the presidential contest. Harold Meyerson put it well in the Washington Post last week:

Since back when I was writing about “the people’s business” just before the 2006 elections and “the American agenda” in the days afterward, I’ve felt that this divide over which party cares about solving the country’s problems (especially if it can be raised to a level of moral responsibility) is the key to a long-term realignment of voters with Democratic/progressive goals.

So I’m glad to see that Barack Obama embracing a more issue-based campaign strategy. Of course, having finally (if indirectly) taken my advice, he damn well better win. I don’t want to have to deal with both another Republican president and being proved wrong.

Around the blogs today, there’s a good deal of commentary, consternation, and near-confusion over the hallucinatory vision laid out today (and already memorialized in an online ad) by Mr. Double-Talk Express, John McCain, today:

By January 2013, America has welcomed home most of the servicemen and women who have sacrificed terribly so that America might be secure in her freedom. The Iraq War has been won. Iraq is a functioning democracy, although still suffering from the lingering effects of decades of tyranny and centuries of sectarian tension. Violence still occurs, but it is spasmodic and much reduced. Civil war has been prevented; militias disbanded; the Iraqi Security Force is professional and competent; al Qaeda in Iraq has been defeated; and the Government of Iraq is capable of imposing its authority in every province of Iraq and defending the integrity of its borders. The United States maintains a military presence there, but a much smaller one, and it does not play a direct combat role.

Eric Martin observes at Obsidian Wings that in this effort to substitute fantasy for policy prescriptions, McCain is “employing the Glenn Reynolds Field Manual” (“What should the U.S. do in Iraq now?” “Win.”), but there’s really more than that going on here.

In my periodic missives on political framing, one of the themes I’ve explored is the GOP effort to maintain its perceived position (as George Lakoff has famously identified) as the daddy party. McCain’s speech is an attempt to reach those voters who, consciously or not, would prefer to be ruled than governed — to elect not a representative, but a supreme authority whom we need only to obey. The implicit message is that if we elect McCain as our national father figure, the goals he describes will come about by sheer force of his determination, with no further thought or effort on our part.

As I wrote more than two years ago, the rhetorical strategy is to “Remind everyone that they’re the strong daddy, and as long as they’re in charge, the children (also known as us) shouldn’t waste time second-guessing about what they’re doing.” Of course, I wrote that about our current president, making this stylistic choice another way that — surprise! — McCain is turning out to be just a would-be extended version of George Bush.

What to do about it? Well, since this is such a timeworn GOP approach, I’ve written about that, too, here in early 2007:

The absurdity of such spin after all this time shows us what the antidotes are: facing reality, appropriate derision of those who would rather live in a fantasy… and, above all, communicating to the broader public that they — we — are fully equipped to judge reality and determine the best response to it, rather than waiting for some Wizard of Oz-like daddy to tell us what to believe.

Still seems like the right answer to me.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)