Needlenose

Robert Draper’s attempted dissection of the schizophrenic McCain presidential campaign in the New York Times magazine is an amazingly rich source of anecdotes — some insightful, some dubious, and some just plain weird.  This story told by pseudo-strategist Steve Schmidt to Draper may fit in all three categories:

The smartest bit of political wisdom he ever heard was dispensed by George W. Bush one spring day at the White House residence in 2004, at a time when his re-election effort was not going especially well. The strategists at the meeting — including Schmidt, who was directing the Bush campaign’s rapid-response unit — fretted over their candidate’s sagging approval ratings and the grim headlines about the war in Iraq. Only Bush appeared thoroughly unworried. He explained to them why, polls notwithstanding, voters would ultimately prefer him over his opponent, John Kerry.

There’s an accidental genius to the way Americans pick a president, Schmidt remembers Bush saying that day. By the end of it all, a candidate’s true character is revealed to the American people.

Leaving aside that this obviously wasn’t true for Dubya (although it may be proving that way for McCain), what are we supposed to make of a so-called strategist who says he got the best political advice of his life from George Bush? Isn’t that like taking performance advice from Howdy Doody or Charlie McCarthy?

Then again, I suppose that’s what Sarah Palin did.

The Dems are fighting back the Repug attempt to disenfrachise voters in swing states.  They won a minor battle to restore some registrations in Michigan and surprisingly of new voters in Ohio - surprisingly because the legal fight went up to the SCOTUS which ruled against the Greasy Old Pigs!  Guess Shrubya’s buddies don’t care for McCain.

("Bad Reporter" cartoon by Don Asmussen)

Analysts and historians who waste their time in future years looking back at John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign will undoubtedly be struck by the raw, unfiltered ugliness of McCain’s personality during his three debates with Barack Obama.  As Jane Hamsher wrote just after Wednesday’s final match, McCain’s “smirking, snarky tone was decidedly un-presidential… [he] was a nasty, vicious glass of sour milk who can barely contain his temper and can’t quite fathom what is happening to him.“

But now I think I understand why McMean couldn’t control himself.

You see, when I wrote three weeks ago about “McCain’s insistence on seeing the election (and world events) as mere vehicles for his all-consuming personal drama,” and three weeks before that about how “for McCain, being president isn’t about doing anything for the American people — it’s the world’s biggest gold watch… [he] has been a goddamned selfless patriot his entire adult life, and it’s time for you fuckers to pay him back,” I had no idea just how right I was.

I didn’t know what the Washington Post reported on Monday about the origin of McCain’s White House ambitions:

To endure their long ordeal, John McCain and the other U.S. servicemen held as prisoners of war in North Vietnam in the 1960s developed a number of survival techniques. None was quite as effective as the one former Navy pilot Richard Stratton remembers: “If you kept your mind occupied, you were going to be okay.”

Stratton would imagine meticulously assembling a large glider and flying it over the Alps. Another prisoner imagined himself fishing. But McCain had the most audacious dream of all, and he shared his vision one day with a group of fellow POWs. “He was talking about his father to us and then he said: ‘I want to be president of the United States. Someday I’m going to be president,’ ” Stratton recalls. “If the cell wasn’t so small, we’d have been rolling around laughing.”

. . . Not at all dissuaded, McCain offered his view on the meaning of real command, shaped in part by his father’s perspective on genuine power. He wanted to be the one who made the decisions, McCain said, and his father had taught him that even such impressive-sounding jobs as chief of naval operations, the service’s highest uniformed position, didn’t always provide that opportunity. The only job that guaranteed it was that of president, McCain believed.

“Pursuit of command,” as McCain often referred to it, was an ethos bordering on obsession in his family, and it was in Vietnam that he embraced it.

Over at emptywheel’s blog, bmAZ picked up on the narcissism of McCain’s apolitical desire for power for power’s sake, but that’s only part of the story.  See, it’s not just that in pursuit of his private dream, McCain lied, cheated, backstabbed, married for money, sold himself to lobbyists and all the rest, but for three decades or more, he got away with it.  And after the seemingly definitive failures of his 2000 GOP primary defeat and near-collapse in the polls before the 2008 contests began, this summer he finally, miraculously found himself just one step short of his ultimate goal.

I doubt any adviser could have convinced McCain then that he had only won because his Republican challengers were even more implausible and inept than he was.   From the candidate’s perspective, it must have seemed that fate was on his side.  Why should he need to learn message discipline, or emotional self-control, or (heaven forbid!) gain a convincing knowledge of the issues facing the American public now?   He merely needed to present himself to the world and be granted his destiny.

At least, that is, until Barack Obama came along.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

One of the following pictures is not of John McCain at last night’s debate. Can you tell which one?

“Keep a civil tongue in your head” — Shakespeare, The Tempest

Last time, McCain got through one answer where he followed his coaching, then turned back into John McCain.

Tonight, he got through almost 30 minutes where he followed his coaching, then turned back into John McCain.

All Obama did… or had to do, for that matter… was stay calm and wait for him to self-destruct.

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.

Now you can find out for yourself:

I wonder if they guarantee the results.

(Via fivethirtyeight.com)

Grasping for a foothold on the economy, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) plans a new economic package that is likely to focus on tax cuts for investors, campaign officials said.

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who was helping plan the announcement at a meeting Sunday, said on CBS’ “Face the Nation” that it would be “a very comprehensive approach to jump-start the economy, by allowing capital to be formed easier in America by lowering taxes.”

. . . McCain officials said the measures being considered include tax cuts — perhaps temporary ones — for capital gains and dividends.

Those were on a menu of roughly 30 options that had been presented to McCain.

. . . Officials would not say which ones he chose during a major strategy meeting Sunday.

Politico, today:

Presented with 30 options for new economic measures, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has – at least for now – chosen none of them.

. . . The campaign now says no new policy announcements are planned. Participants in the meeting refused to say what happened.

“We’re locked down,” said one official.

Must have been a fun meeting.  I wonder if the famously impatient McCain is starting to lose interest in his own campaign.

The disintegration of the current Republican presidential campaign into personal innuendo and the stoking of partisan fury (call it the Hate Talk Express) has provoked a great deal of serious, valuable commentary.

But it’s also provided an opportunity to witness some hilarious tone-deafness from the McCain camp.  Responding to Barack Obama’s remarks today (“The American people aren’t looking for someone who can divide this country — they’re looking for someone who will lead it. We’re in a serious crisis — now, more than ever, it is time to put country ahead of politics.”), McCain spokesliar Tucker Bounds said:

Instead of acknowledging the real differences that exist in this election, Barack Obama is using America’s economic crisis to deflect legitimate criticisms of himself and his record.

Is that brilliant, or what?  To help you appreciate the audacity of Bounds’ accusation, consider this tidbit from Frank Newport at Gallup Daily about their recent polling:

About half of Americans indicate in Gallup’s economic tracking measures that they personally had worried about money the day before they were interviewed.

Roughly fifty percent of the country is concerned about their financial security… and Team McCain’s attitude is, dammit, people, you’re letting this distract you from what really matters!  Like who Barack Obama sat with during lunch at the school cafeteria when he was a teenager, and so on.

Fortunately for them, I have a solution.  Since McCain needs to communicate to the American public how much more important Obama’s personal history is than this silly economic meltdown — and since the financial crisis itself was considered sufficient cause for McCain to “suspend” his campaign briefly a few weeks ago — he obviously needs to suspend his campaign again to personally lead an investigation into Obama’s life and acquaintances.

That would certainly get people’s attention, wouldn’t it?  And canceling all those hostility-fueled rallies and insinuation-filled ads would have its own benefits for the rest of us.  So it seems like a win-win all around.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

These have kicking around the blogiverse for a few days (so you may have seen them already) but they finally filtered down to my bottom-feeding level of awareness and I figured I’d share them for anyone who was equally out of the loop.  First, from Ben Smith of Politico:

An Obama supporter, who canvassed for the candidate in the working-class, white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, sends over an account that, in various forms, I’ve heard a lot in recent weeks.

“What’s crazy is this,” he writes. “I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n—-r and mention how they don’t know what to do because of the economy.”

And, explaining the phenomenon, Ta-Nehisi Coates of the Atlantic:

Racism is a luxury that, at this point, a lot of white voters can ill afford. I think a crucial number of them know that.