Stunted Campaign

While most American political writers and commentators continue to, hour after hour, like a trailer for a 'Lifetime movie of the week' feed the frenzy around the McCain/Palin sleazy tactics with hushed, voiced over questions of "will it work with white voters in Pennsylvania?"...Lisa Van Dusen offers a straight-forward, no-nonsense portrait of what is actually happening: Not working, won't work - American voters are tired of the BS, and are making up their minds based on the true nature of the issues and candidates - zjm


McCain's tricks fail to impress American voters

By LISA VANDUSEN | 9, October, 2008

You would think, given the age difference, the Washington experience gap and the cultural, face-on-the-dollar-bill factor, that John McCain would be the more "presidential" presidential candidate. But between McCain's visible discomfort with his fate and Barack Obama's increasing comfort level with his, the veteran is the one looking more and more like the guy in the way.

If post-debate polling Tuesday night hadn't backed that up, McCain wouldn't have released an ad yesterday morning saying Obama is "not presidential."

For a candidate who now has his own one-woman goon squad skimming off most of the toxic dirty work of his campaign, McCain still comes off like he's seething with seethiness, as Sarah Palin herself might say.

Part of McCain's churlishness is just who he is and what he's famous for; it's the downside of the maverick persona that has served him so well. The particularly ornery McCain voters saw Tuesday night was likely also a product of the fact that his poll numbers are slipping in a way that, based on the state-by-state numbers, seems all-but irretrievable barring a major October surprise.

Some of it may also be frustration at the fact that his own running mate is outdrawing him by tens of thousands of supporters and rubberneckers in a way that is showing up McCain's lack of charisma while doing nothing to stop the national slide.

Palin's role change

Palin's mandate has changed since it became clear to the Svengalis who called her down from Alaska to boost the galvanic skin response levels in the Republican base that she may not be as transferable to a national context as they thought.

That reality hit at the same time as the much larger disaster of the U.S. economic meltdown was fast becoming a catastrophe for the global economy and Americans were deciding that Obama seemed more competent to deal with the disaster than McCain, whose response was, "When the going gets tough, the tough chew the scenery."

It seems the McCain campaign decided the best option left was to limit or at least postpone the kind of unstoppable slide that sees battleground states start falling like dominoes and daily stories from tour reporters about the different tones and pitches of death rattles.

Palin's value in the past week has been not so much as a standard bearer for the rich Republican policy legacy of the Bush years -- that's not really an option -- but in portraying Obama as a shadowy unknown quantity (after nearly two years of hourly campaign coverage) who hates America so much that he "pals around with terrorists."

But something funny is happening out there in the great swath of public opinion between the Obama supporters and the Republican base. The independents and swing voters don't seem to be buying the stunt-a-week approach of the McCain campaign anymore.

People will only fall for so many tactics -- campaign suspensions, gimmicky VP picks, nutty terrorist talk -- before their suspension of disbelief is exhausted.

With polls now showing 15- and 20-point leads for Obama on compassion, handling the economy and handling the financial crisis, there aren't too many definitions of "presidential" left for McCain to latch onto.

And with the political eternity of a month left to go and an electorate that's all scammed out, an October surprise would have to be an October cataclysm for people to not roll just their eyes and go back to the real news.