It's Like A Black Fly in Broder's Chardonnay

David Broder tells us how the candidates feel about the negative tone of the campaign:

"I'm very sorry about it," McCain said in a Saturday interview at his Arlington headquarters. "I think we could have avoided at least some of this if we had agreed to do the town hall meetings" together, as he had suggested, during the summer months.

Obama, in a phone interview yesterday from Elkhart, Ind., argued that "the classic tit-for-tat campaigning" of recent weeks "is part of the politics of the past that we have to move beyond." Ironically, having turned down McCain's proposal for weekly joint town halls, Obama argued that the formal debates, starting in late September, may refocus the campaign on real issues.

How is that ironic?

In any event, I think it's simplistic to suggest that if there were an exhausting series of "town hall meetings", the discourse would suddenly become elevated. I don't recall that, during their respective, seemingly never-ending series of debates, either the Republican or Democratic primaries were sunny and positive. Broder quotes McCain,

"When you have to stand on a stage with your opponent, as I've done in other campaigns, you obviously have a tendency to improve the relationship. . . . When you have to spend time with somebody, I think it changes the equation."

Why let facts get in the way of that?

Campaign Ad Humor

I know that it's dangerous to run ads like these, because you're going to get an indignant response, "Can you believe he just compared himself to one of our great Presidents," as if that's the point. But you could still have some fun with the idea:

You know I respect you, but you're a newcomer to the Capitol. You've only been here a couple of years. I've been here working hard for decades. Sure, you're a celebrity. Everybody knows your name. They love you in France. Heck, they love you so much, they're probably going to put up a statue in your honor. [Chuckle] But does your standing up to George - opposing his war - really qualify you to be President?

No, Mr. Washington, it doesn't.

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I appreciate your work for civil rights. Me, I've fought my entire life for equal rights for everyone. But aren't you being presumptuous? You did some good things as a lawyer back in Illinois, but you're trying to become commander in chief. These are troubled times, my friend, times of war. You've never been on a battlefield. You've never commanded soldiers. What makes you think that you can govern a divided nation and defend our way of life?

Sorry, Mr. Lincoln, I just don't think you're qualified.

---

You? President? You're kidding me, right? You write beautifully, I have to admit that. But you're inconsistent in your support for our nation's military forces. And you're always talking about civil rights and freedoms, but your policies make it hard for us to fight terror. You talk about "due process," "excessive bail," "probable cause" - admit it, you're soft on crime. If we do things your way how do we keep terrorist off our streets?

Sorry, Mr. Madison, your ideas are way too liberal.

I Am Not Impressed....

With Andrew Malcolm of the L.A. Times. Regarding Bill Clinton's statement, "I am not a racist," Malcolm says,

Former presidents get a whole lot of leeway in what they say in public. But former President Bill Clinton just violated one of the prime rules of political communications: Never say what you are not.

"I am not a crook," said Richard Nixon, which, of course, raised or confirmed the issue in the minds of millions during the long-running Watergate scandal that forced him from office. And provided a historic sound bite.

Uh oh... I said what I'm not. Does Malcolm think that means that I am, in fact, impressed?

Don't count on it.

Let's apply Malcolm-think to some of McCain's statements:

• McCain's an economist!

• McCain has guaranteed the success of 'the surge'!

• McCain's in the habit of making promises to his country that he does not intend to keep!

• McCain is unappreciative of blogs! (Okay, that may in fact be his actual thought.)

A similar list could be compiled of Obama's "I am nots" - some keep trying with this one - but I picked McCain out of the apparent partisan nature of Malcolm's potshot.

Weatherstripping, Nothing....

Bob Herbert endorses conservation, suggesting,

Because of the high price of oil, people in many parts of the country are already frightened, in the heat of summer, about their winter heating bills. Families are worried about having to choose between mortgage payments and fuel bills, or fuel bills and prescription medicine.

The Senate considered but was unable to pass a measure that would have substantially increased financing for the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. It was a very bad sign. If the government can’t get that done in the current atmosphere, it hardly seems likely that it could move to an even more important step: finding a way to get the homes of these cash-strapped families properly weatherized so that they use substantially less fuel over the course of each winter.

How about we start subsidizing the conversion of their homes to geothermal heating and cooling systems. Using grants, subsidized loans and conventional loans, it should be possible to create affordable paths to geothermal systems for most consumers, with any loans repaid in a manner that still results in a net savings (and much greater stability) in their heating bills.

Laugh It Off?

As you might expect from a person smart enough to see through the smokescreen, Dan Larison believes that Obama has a viable campaign tactic in laughing off attacks:

This is very much like the overheated response to “Celeb” or “The One”–rather than simply laughing off these ads and articles as ridiculous, Obama’s supporters and many media figures seem to be deadly serious about stressing the cunning, super-secret deployment of racial messages in both. Whether it is Perlstein hallucinating Nazi propaganda film homages or Gergen detecting racist tropes or Noah discerning skinniness as the latest one of these tropes, the responses have managed to make the various targets of their criticism seem sane, well-balanced and serious by comparison.

Yet one of the reasons campaigns don't laugh off these attacks can be seen in the history of the Swift Boat Liars campaign against John Kerry. Kerry attempted the Larison approach, "mock them for their stupidity, and stop investing them with the importance that their creators want you to give them", and by the time he recognized the failure of his tactics it was too late to stamp out the lies.

Obama seems intent on staying above the fray, with statements like "John McCain is an honorable man who is running an increasingly dishonorable campaign". But history tells us, dishonorable campaigns work. That's why McCain is running one, and why he now has a nominal lead in the polls. If they're unrebutted, they grow legs. That's what happened with the Swift Boat nonsense, to the point that a lot of people who were more than smart enough to "know better" were defending the attacks. And for people so passively receptive to smears and innendo as to believe that Obama's comment about not looking like past presidents was racist?Larison wrote,

What I find even more remarkable is the idea that anyone could interpret Obama’s comment as being racist. It is now “racist” to hint that others are going to use a candidate’s race against him? Does that make any sense? Do 53% of likely voters really think Obama making an obvious reference to his race (one so obvious that you have to think your audience morons to deny it) is racist? If so, can we officially declare that the word has no more meaning, or at least that for the most part it is trotted out whenever we want to refer to something as Very Bad? Obama’s remark may be many things, but of all the words I can think of to describe it racist is not among them.

What hope should anybody have that those voters will see through McCain's smokescreen?

If I were running ads, I would pull some examples of McCain deploring negative campaigning in the past, contrast them with his current smear tactics, and lament that McCain's sense of honor seems to have disappeared. Perhaps that's the next step after "he's an honorable man who is running a dishonorable campaign" - it could become, "I used to think he was a man of honor, but actions speak louder than words".

I don't actually have a problem with "attack ads" as such - a lot of fair comparison ads get called "attack ads". I don't see accurate ads that boil down to, "My position is X, my opponent's position is Y, and my position is better" as a bad thing, even if unflattering pictures are presented of the opposing candidate as ominous music plays. I don't think the public would be served by a sushine and lollipops campaign of positive ads that elide any differences between the candidates - we saw in 2000 how a popular conception of, "there are no real differences between the candidates," coupled with media ennui, can lead to huge numbers of voters actually buying into that nonsense.

You know what? The biggest audience for the harshest critics of the current round of McCain ads is Obama's supporters. Check the blogs - to the extent that they're commenting, McCain's supporters appear to be uniformly gloating about them. They're unaffected by the criticism. To the extent that there has been a shift, it has been in the perception of some pundits who are pretty much taking Obama's line - they can't believe that the great and honorable McCain is behaving like this. (Maybe it's mind control.)

Obama's probably correct, to keep his official pronouncements in sync with the punditocracy's views. Letting them decide when this is, in fact, McCain's "real voice" rather than the work of a doppleganger. To get ahead of them would likely result in their turning on him. But no, pretending to laugh at bad jokes doesn't make them go away. It's more likely to trigger a response of, "It's not funny unless there's some truth behind it, and even you think it's a joke." When a smear campaign is launched, its authors are deserving of scorn, and although I see it as largely ineffectual I have no problem with the target's supporters initiating what amounts to a grassroots expression of scorn. At the same time, smear campaigns usually don't get legs without the active cooperation (and sometimes collaboration) of the mainstream media. So for criticism pointed in that direction, at all levels of the campaign, I say "(cautiously) turn up the heat."

A Nasty Two-Way Street

One thing that continues to hurt the Democratic party, and results in an absurd number of self-described Democrats to say they're "undecided" or inclined to vote for McCain,¹ is the party's tendency to devour itself. You saw the same thing going on during the Republican primaries but, now that they have their candidate, for the most part they're pulling themselves together and presenting a unified front. The Dems have never been that disciplined.

Making it worse, of course, is the continued tension between the Clintons and their supporters and the Obama team. You'll still find Clinton dead-ender sites saying it's Obama's fault that race is presently an issue in the campaign, or that picking Hillary Clinton as a Vice Presidential candidate would be a magic cure-all for Obama's campaign, but portending disaster if he picks somebody else. Meanwhile, this type of conduct is also blamed on Obama:

Snow asked Clinton, "Do you personally have any regrets about what you did campaigning for your wife?"

With his arms folded and looking a bit tense, Clinton replied, "Yes, but not the ones you think. And it would be counterproductive for me to talk about it."

Barely pausing for a breath, he added, "There are things I wish I'd urged her to do, things I wish I had said, things I wish I hadn't said. But I am not a racist, I never made a racist comment, and I didn't attack him personally," a clear allusion to Sen. Barack Obama.

So he won't go into the mistakes that he regrets, but he'll stick in something he wasn't asked about - something that as being "counterproductive" goes can only help McCain - the implication that Obama or Obama's supporters wrongly branded him as a racist.

Seriously, folks, other than some poor choices of words that one would not expect from a politician of Clinton's skill, has anybody said, "Bill Clinton's a racist"? Does anybody believe that Bill Clinton's a racist? If so, I'd like to meet this person. There is a population that views some of the Clinton team's comments as having been intended to draw attention to Obama's race, and imply the rhetorical question, "Can a black candidate win the election", but there's a world of difference between believing the Clintons engaged in some low road politics and believing that they're racist. (And no, I don't care if their perception is entirely fair, entirely unfair, or somewhere in between - it exists, and thus it's something that must be dealt with.)

Meanwhile, Paul Krugman asks why the Obama camp isn't engaged in rapprochement. And he raises a valid point. Obama is too slow to credit Clinton, either individually or as a Democratic President, when contrasting the 90's to the Bush II years. And perhaps as the nominee, Obama should take the initiative.

But at the same time, unless they've been secretly told with 100% certainty that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee, I think it would do wonders if the Clinton camp would stop playing up Hillary Clinton as the best, perhaps only, V.P. choice, and start campaigning unreservedly for Obama. And if they have been told that Hillary Clinton will be the V.P. choice, they should already be doing just that.

As it stands, there's something to the Hillary Clinton dead-enders' claim - which to me comes across as a gloat - that Obama will be harmed by any choice of V.P. other than Clinton. If he picks a woman, "Why is she more qualified than Clinton?" If he picks a man, "Why not a woman?" But you know what? If the "white voter" concerns Hillary Clinton raised are as pressing as she suggested at the time - and pretty much everybody concedes that there is a block of voters that is unlikely or unwilling to vote for a black man - I don't think that his picking her will help him with that block. I'm not sure that any pick will, but unfortunately I suspect that the type of voter at issue would be most influenced by the presence of a white man on the ticket.

Meanwhile, something brooding , negative comments don't help overcome are the Clinton's negatives with large numbers of voters. Sure, they're mostly Republicans, but some are independents or "swing" voters. Clinton's negatives raise valid concerns for the Obama team that adding her to the ticket could hurt him in the polls. A cheery, enthusiastic Clinton team pressing right now for Obama's victory (whatever their personal feelings may be) could help demonstrate both that the Clintons can help Obama win and that concerns about Hillary Clinton's negatives are overblown. A sulking, half-hearted "he's the candidate"-type endorsement, accompanied by the reciprocal nursing of grudges over a hard-fought primary? The Clintons are more than smart enough to know where that leads. Here's an idea: no more of the childish refusal to endorse Obama as qualified to be President.

I guess this goes out to Obama and both Clintons: You need to be in this to win, and to the extent that it means you have to "get over yourselves", do it.
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1. I think there's an inherent absurdity for any person, after proclaiming ideological alignment with one political party, to then say, "But I'm going to vote for the other party's presidential candidate." If your party affiliation is that tenuous, why claim it in the first place?

The Answer To Everything? A Series of Sound Bite Showdowns!

Today Fred Hiatt actually signs his name to a column on the presidential race. Looking at Obama's remark,

"So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they're going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, he's not patriotic enough. He's got a funny name. You know, he doesn't look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He's risky. That's essentially the argument they're making."

Hyatt claims,

I was more struck by the preamble to that comment: by Obama's statements that McCain and the Republican Party are so bankrupt in policies that they can win only by spreading fear.

Except that Obama didn't say anything about the Republican Party - he identified policies associated with the President and the Presidential nominee. Isn't that the same thing, you ask? Perhaps Hiatt has forgotten the scathing attacks on Bush from within his own party, the efforts congressional candidates are making to distance themselves from Bush and his policies, various right-wing pundits trying to claim that he's really a "liberal", his 20% approval rating.... And perhaps he's forgotten the similar attacks on John McCain that preceded his winning the nomination. Only through an astonishing case of amnesia could you believe that the Republican Party as a whole marches in lockstep with Bush and McCain.

Really, Hiatt's assertion could be seen as an attack on McCain. Did you hear that, John? Fred Hiatt thinks there's not a whit of difference between what you stand for and the policies of G.W. Bush. Well, it would be an attack if Hiatt weren't so confident that the entire Republican Party shares those same views.... I suspect that what's really going on is that Hiatt largely shares those views, so he takes it personally that Obama (and most of the nation) see the Bush/McCain platform as having failed.

Hiatt proposes an interesting cure for Obama's dip in the polls, something he says "political practitioners" (but not himself?) "seemed to agree" resulted from McCain's "negative ads and petty misrepresentations" - a zillion or so "town hall" encounters with McCain.

The forums would return attention to the issues, where Obama believes he has a clear advantage. And if McCain sought to use them for personal attacks, he would at least have to bear full personal responsibility for doing so.

Really? I think the lesson of the zillion or so debates during the Democratic primary process is that fatigue sets in quickly - that voters lose interest - at which point the contest becomes "what sound bite can be best misrepresented" or "how can the moderator spice things up". If Obama wants to take the high road to McCain's low road, as a result of voter fatigue, media sensationalism aimed at breaking through that fatigue, and the media's preference for covering claims in what they later concede to be "negative ads and petty misrepresentations" as if they're the gospel truth, the zillion "town halls" create risk.

Take, for example, one of Hiatt's paper's star reporters, Dana Milbank, his happy repetition of one of the McCain campaign's favorite themes (Obama's being "presumptuous") and his misrepresentation of Obama's recent remarks. I understand why Hiatt wants Obama to feed that dysfunctional media machine, but since the primaries ended it seems to primarily serve McCain. Really - where's the upside for Obama?¹
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1. I do not intend to suggest that these two examples are representative of Milbank's work as a whole.
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Update: As if I needed another example of the media's irresponsibly helping to perpetuate a McCain campaign misrepresentation/smear, we now have insipid coverage of comments on tire pressure.