I was fully prepared to give credit where it’s due to McCain for this maneuver.
But reading Pam’s post and Kathy’s post, my skepticism began to rise. Using surrogates to advance an attack and then “rising above” is a classic campaign tactic. To a degree, the Democrats are doing it. Biden spent much of the debate hammering at McCain, which opened the floor to Obama to speak positively about himself. McCain has nothing left but attacks now, so they’re pulling a ham-fisted, stupid version of the same tactic---the foaming at the mouth followers advance bullshit about how Obama is a terrorist, socialist, or the Anti-Christ, and McCain plays the good cop.
Here’s the thing. McCain has the power to rein in Sarah Palin, and he has the power to rein in surrogates like Frank Keating, who called Obama “a guy of the street”. Coming from McCain, the tut-tutting means nothing to the rabid base. Now, if Sarah Palin says it, I’ll pay attention. But right now, I’m not buying it.
See, it’s part of the right wing mythology that they are the perpetual victims of a politically correct dictatorship that denies them the all-important freedoms to use racial epithets and believe loudly in the Anti-Christ without whipping out the toothful enforcement power known as “making the speaker feel like a moron”. According to the myth, the more power you have, the more powerless you are, because you had to sell your “true” (racist, crazy) beliefs in order to get past the P.C. police who can wither you with the mighty power of sucking their teeth and looking shocked. A smart right wing politician plays this belief like a fiddle. George Bush was a master. He’d publicly show a modicum of official respect to religious pluralism, and then would blow dog whistles to let the fundies know that they’re Number One in his heart, and if he could say it out loud, he totally would.
I suspect that this strategy is about selling this bullshit narrative to the base: McCain was the consummate insider, a man who had lost his right wing way after years of having to go to dinner parties with Democrats, which infected him with Teh Librul. But Sarah Palin is pure. She’s been stashed in the middle of nowhere, where she can run around with guys who believe it’s every man’s right to take their penis substitutes into schools, and so she can speak her mind more freely with less fear of the P.C. police. So McCain is more free to be the good cop, because Palin is playing the role of the wingnut inside. And if the message wasn’t strong enough, they’re passing the microphone at rallies so that followers can get those accusations---terrorist, socialists, America-haters, oh my!---out there while allowing McCain a measure of plausible deniability. Nothing about this game is about scolding the mobs about their beliefs. It’s about setting up a structure so they can feel validated in their beliefs that they’re the “real” Americans, and that they are victims of the interlopers (immigrants, black people, gays, and liberals, oh my!) who have illegitimately taken over the country through that damned democratic process. In fact, McCain openly plays the game of letting a follower put words in his mouth to express his “real” feelings in this video. Witness: a rant about hooligans and socialists, and McCain saying, “The gentleman is right,” and then rephrasing what the man said in mellow terms that conflate “Democrat” with “socialist”. Which feeds right into the narrative---that Republican leaders sincerely believe that the opposition party are a bunch of commies, but they just can’t say so because of the all-powerful P.C. police.
I’d be interested to find out who the presumed ordinary citizen at this rally was. He sure is mighty eloquent.
The belief that Obama is a “secret” commie/terrorist symp is another form of projection. They believe that their Republican leaders are secret right wing radicals, and unfortunately, many of them are willing to wink at the wingnuts and let them believe just that. Which is sleazy, but of course, justified in wingnut minds because the liberals are doing it, too. Obama is “pretending” to be a centrist Democrat, but is “secretly” all sorts of things.
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I won’t give him a lot of credit, but I think it could be an honest effort to rein in the crazies (time will tell of course). The reason I won’t give him much credit is because it’s obviously failing. If letting loose the crazies had moved poll numbers in his favor then you wouldn’t even be seeing this walk back. The strategy was obviously failing, because Americans are scared shitless about the economy right now, so stupid guilt by association attacks are just going to make the attacker look worse. We’ll see if Palin and the other surrogates back off too.
I think Obama/Biden do the good cop/bad cop thing better because they aren’t saying anything Obama wouldn’t bring up in a debate. McCain could have easily fit the Ayers crap into the debate if he wanted to, but he chose not to. Obama did bring up McCain’s erratic behavior and the need for steady leadership in times of crises. So, their strategy works a lot better in that regards. Their strategy of attacking McCain for only offering up smears when the economy was in trouble also proactively defended against these latest attacks, and McCain just walked right into the trap.
I’m not buying it either. Actually the dual-channel thing (candidate “denounces” the slime being peddled by “independent” groups) is the way the Rove game is supposed to be played. McStain just hasn’t been very good at it.
I’ll give some credit to McCain here. Sure, it’s a bit of political expediency as well, but what from either side *isn’t* during an election?
It’s just as likely as anything else that McCain’s actually gotten a look at just how ugly the base is when stirred up, and he really does regret it. He wanted to /imply/ that Obama was dangerous and bad for America, but hearing people shout for the death of the Muslim terrorist goes beyond even what McCain’s comfortable with.
It doesn’t even begin to make up for all the less-than-honorable stunts he’s pulled so far, but I do think it shows him “coming to his senses,” at least a little.
I’m torn, because I think subconsciously I want McCain to be the guy I thought he was in 2000--not the guy he actually was, mind you, just the guy I thought he was--and no one likes to give up their illusions. But frankly, I’m sick of their shit, and I’m ready for the next three weeks to be over already. Early voting starts in Florida on the 20th, and I don’t work that day, so I’ll be one of the first in line.
This isn’t electoral strategy. He knows he’s lost. It’s about protecting his so-called “Maverick legacy” in the history books. He doesn’t want to go out as a guy who incited race riots. He wants to be remembered as an uber-awesome patriotic POW Maverick-orama dama ding ding.
Anonymous is right - I suspecthe thought the strategy of firing up the wingnuts might work for him (and no doubt he’s got loads of ex bushies advising him to do just that), but it isn’t, and he’s probably starting to assume he’s going to lose. Now he realizes that the only thing he’s going to have left after the election is his reputation, which he’s been shitting all over for the last few months.
We’ll see though. If Palin keeps telling people what a terrorist terrorizing terrorer Obama is, then Amanda’s right.
I’d be concerned about the good cop/bad cop thing if I felt like people were buying it, but McCain can’t even seem to play that part right. He’s making these noises, but when you see him tell a supporter that he shouldn’t be afraid of an Obama presidency, just look at his body language. He obviously hates having to say it. It’s like that 8 year old kid who just threw a temper tantrum that ended in him throwing a toy truck at his sister and being forced to apologize for it. To your average viewer, I don’t think this comes off as contrition. I think it comes off as both weakness and an admission of defeat.
Skorri, ten years ago I might have agreed with you, but it’s pretty obvious that McCain realizes he doesn’t have enough time left to say “eh, maybe I’ll win the next one”. The negative rallies are just the base jerking off and they’re killing him among undecides and moderates. That’s the only reason he’s backing down.
He doesn’t want to go out as a guy who incited race riots. He wants to be remembered as an uber-awesome patriotic POW Maverick-orama dama ding ding.
That might be true, but he also has to know that starting down the low road was his only chance at moving the poll numbers his way. Most of his decisions have been based on short-term gain--the Palin pick is a perfect example of that--but I think that he fired this attack off a couple of weeks early. He had to, because he was in danger of falling into the 30s in some polls, and no attack would bring him back from that, but there’s too much time for Obama and his fellow Democrats to fight back now. He gambled and lost.
And now that they’re under more pressure, Palin’s pulled out abortion to play to her base (and it is the basest of bases) to play against that radical Obama
“A vote for Barack Obama is a vote for activist courts that will continue to smother the open and democratic debate that we deserve and that we need on this issue of life,” she said.
“So in short, Senator Obama is a politician who has long since left behind even the middle ground on the issue of life,” she said.
Unless McCain reins in Palin, it’s no different than when the head of Hamas says they want peace in English, and then tells their followers to keep fighting in Arabic.
And now that they’re under more pressure, Palin’s pulled out abortion to play to her base (and it is the basest of bases) to play against that radical Obama
Talk about saying up is down and black is white. Because the courts have been falling all over themselves in a rush to make sure that women have the ability to get an abortion when they wish--I’ve become convinced that they think we’re a bunch of fucking idiots, and by “we” I mean human beings with functioning frontal lobes.
There’s a difference between what’s happening here and a Biden/Obama good cop routine (where both messages are completely under the control of the campaign). In this case, McCain has put forward a message (Obama hangs out with terrorists) but is not taking it to the next logical step. His remaining supporters are taking it to the next logical step, and they’re bringing it up at his rallies and his town halls. McCain is far from solid on civil rights, but you have to be pretty far gone to start hearing “Kill him” and “Terrorist” and not be freaking out. You start becoming self-conscious about how vulnerable you are if you keep getting questions about when you’re going to start taking off the gloves, and what they might do if they don’t think that you’re campaigning with sufficient vigor. Believe me, McCain doesn’t like saying, right in the middle of his campaign, that he thinks Obama is a good family man who would be OK as president. He’s doing it because he’s lost control of his campaign, he’s boxed in, and it’s his fault.
Uhm.. He’s just a sad old man who has internalized losing. Believing that this sort of garbage is going to convince otherwise reasonable, Obama-leaning people to vote for McCain is just you playing into their trap. It seems to me, after following this for the last 48 hours, that McCain is simply trying to keep the base motivated to make sure they go out and vote for the rest of the Republicans on tickets across the nation. This is not my idea originally, but it seems too plausible to dismiss out of hand. There’s very little to hope for in McCain’s campaign, except to keep the base motivated and hold on to as many Republican seats as possible.
Gosh, Eric, I’ve already seen a number of liberals congratulate McCain for being a good guy. The mainstream media is desperate to praise him for something, to be fair and balanced. It’s naive to think that this isn’t about getting them back in his pocket.
Rising above the craziness of the GOP when the cameras are on him has been McCain’s signature political move for years. That’s how he got to be the favorite Republican of every Democrat with a bipartisanship fetish for so long, even if the vast majority of his votes were those of a party line Republican. So this has to feel pretty natural to him.
Now, there’s no way that he’s going to win the election off of moves like this, not with the possibility of economic collapse in the offing. Amanda’s Palin point is the important one. When Palin can’t put a complete sentence together without McCain’s people feeding it to her, full responsibility for anything she says has to fall directly on McCain.
There’s something about this moment that seems genuine to me. Which is not to say that it lets McCain off the hook for the kind of campaign he’s decided to wage. He bears full responsibility for that - even now. But what I saw here was the brief glimpse of some part deep inside him that knows its wrong and is a little scared of what he’s unleashed. No, I don’t think we’re going to see him cracking down on surrogates, and that would be the true test of whether he’d had a change of heart. You’re absolutely right about that. I’m not convinced he has full control of his surrogates, for one thing, but even that, ultimately, is his responsibility. He has chosen these people to represent him and speak for him. I think he’s just too deep in it to turn it around or give it up, but even so, I felt this moment at the town hall was a genuine, brief flash of conscience. No, I can’t see into his heart, but that’s my gut reaction.
I haven’t even finished this piece yet and I’m struck by what a brilliant break down you’re making of the rabid-right’s self image of victim to the politically correct ‘elite’. As I scrolled down to see who wrote it and post a ‘thanks for being awesome’ message, I kept saying to myself ‘it has to be Amanda writing this’. And it was. Thanks for being awesome.
Regarding McCain: whether or not it is a deliberate ‘good cop/bad cop’ strategy on his or his handler’s part, to this viewer yesterday’s defense of Obama as a decent human being to his own “scared” supporters looked a lot like McCain throwing up his own white flag of surrender.
Looking at those deranged far-right-wing wackaloon fuckups cheering on Palin and her depraved drivel scares the fucking shit out of me. These shitbag right-wing GOP smugfucks are a motherfucking cancer on our polity.
The only people left in the Republican Party are depraved racist misogynist theocratic wackaloon scuzbuckets, irretrievably poisoned delusional fuckwit victims of decades of sick-fuck right-wing propaganda, and a smattering of greedfuck plutocrats. (Although the latter are beginning to flee to the Democratic Party in droves, seeing newer softer flesh to sink their vicious fangs into.)
I was wondering if maybe the secret service had a chat with the campaign after the whole “kill him!” incident and suggested McCain back off if he knew what was good for him.
McCain has the power to rein in Sarah Palin, and he has the power to rein in surrogates like Frank Keating, who called Obama “a guy of the street”.
But as you point out, the media have spent the whole %#%# campaign buying the line that he is too much of a straight-talker to restrict the first amendment rights of his supporters and associates. In fact, his willingness to let them say things he so clearly disagrees with is a sign of what an honorable, diversity-promoting president he would be.
It’s sort of like a postmodern version of Mission Impossible, where the boss doesn’t have to disavow anything, just say “it would be wrong to tone down their enthusiasm.”
Uhm just a thought - this past week in a Chicago ‘burb, there was a racially motivated attack on a Muslim student at Elmhurst College. within 48 hours, there was a hatecrime vandalism in an adjacent ‘burb on a Muslim school (4th or 5th this year). I’d be curious to know if anything like this is happening elsewhere, and if perhaps someone (not necessarily McShame) realized what would happen if someone connected all the dots - wouldn’t look really good on that legacy to be known as the campaign that singlehandedly started a Muslim holocaust in the US.
Regarding McCain: whether or not it is a deliberate ‘good cop/bad cop’ strategy on his or his handler’s part, to this viewer yesterday’s defense of Obama as a decent human being to his own “scared” supporters looked a lot like McCain throwing up his own white flag of surrender.
Taylor, I don’t think it’s a white flag of surrender I think he now realizes what an angry mob he has and how his campaign has kept throwing fire on the flames. My guess is he’s afraid someone will actually act on all that vitriol and that he [McCain] will forever go down in history as someone who incited horrible acts that are emblazoned in the memories of all Americans with shock, humiliation and profound regret.
Yes, phylosopher, there has been a lot of vandalism and violence but not just against Muslims. Cars with Obama stickers are being spit on or keyed, Obama offices have been broken into, black are being verbally abused. There’s a list of scary infringements and hate slander all over the country that come up on liberal sites.
I don’t really know what McCain is reacting to with his half-hearted attempts to tamp down the hate - like we say of babies, they are either smiling or they have gas - but these “appeasements” are really the last straw for the rabid base. They have given up on McCain and have chosen to vote for Palin. Or perhaps, if McCain doesn’t pull a gun on Obama in the last debate, they will call that the last straw.
Regardless, the fear in the country stemming from the financial crisis, escalation in Afghanistan, ricing prices, loss of jobs, lack of health insurance, the overall sense that we are on the wrong track is being funneled into a great repeat of the red scare. Here comes Obama and the commies.
As it is proclaimed on all the right sites, we are bound for socialism (ooh scary!) if Obama wins. The demographics work in McCain’s favor here. Those old enough to remember the bogeyman socialism (40 plus) are buying the conservative crap they’re hearing. Better to fear something you know than to have to think about how to change something you don’t understand.
It’s an old bogeman and easy for the McCain campaign to restuff with terms like domestic terrorist, elitist, liberal, and the horrors of a diversified and more equal society. I would love to ask any one of the Country First gang what exactly they think socialism means....
Reminds me of the story in Faulkner’s The Mansion about the kid who goes off to he army and learns that the world isn’t flat. I wish we could send all these folks afraid of commies and pinkos off to Iraq or Afghanistan. They might benefit from knowing that the rest of the world out there really does exist.
There’s something about this moment that seems genuine to me. Which is not to say that it lets McCain off the hook for the kind of campaign he’s decided to wage. He bears full responsibility for that - even now. But what I saw here was the brief glimpse of some part deep inside him that knows its wrong and is a little scared of what he’s unleashed.
Right wingers and bullies are often afraid of what they’ve unleashed. Why wouldn’t they be? They generally prefer all unleashings to happen in strict privacy, and when what they’ve unleashed spills over into the public realm, they often show a flash of fear. They are, after all, very emotional people, capable of great mood swings.
I think a lot of people here are giving McCain far too much credit. He’s not reigning in the crowds because he suddenly has become concerned about the “tone” of his campaign and his legacy— he’s doing it because his poll numbers are tanking. Glenn Greenwald of Salon has a great article about this:
As Greenwald points out, undecideds and swing voters are becoming turned off by the whole lynch mob vibe emanating from the likes of Palin and her crowds. McCain and Palin’s negatives are shooting up while Obama remains unhurt.
Also, Amanda, while I think you are right about the whole right wing victim myth thing, I think you are grossly overestimating the competency of the McCain campaign in trying to play this. I see no strategy being employed beyond the whole “lets throw anything and everything at Obama and see if it sticks” tactic. If the polls showed that equating Obama with terrorism was working, you would not see McCain attempt to reign in the crowds. This is a poll-driven campaign with a serious case of Teh Stupid. Some commenter somewhere on the internets said about strategy: “Obama is playing 3-D chess while McCain is playing tic-tac-toe”. The surrogates are continuing the Ayers line because the campaign has lost it’s message control. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Ayers ads are pulled and the campaign never mentions it again while McCain attempts a dramatic mea culpa to try to win back some independents and reclaim his straight-talking Maverick label.
There isn’t a chance in hell that woman wasn’t set up to give McCain a cheap opportunity to play the role of opposing the insane bigotry he unleashed. This wasn’t somebody in the crowd shouting insane death threats and racial slurs, this was someone McCain gave the mic to. There isn’t a chance in hell they just take questions from random nutjobs, especially not from someone who looks the part of the crazy.
The whole thing was an act, an attempt to pretend to do the right thing while avoiding doing anything at all.
I think the secret service had a talk with McCain. And they read George Will.
the test will be to see if Palin continues with this ‘Obama doesnt see America as you and I do’ line, or the ‘palls around with terrorists’ line.
Even if she is forced to stop by the SS, the message has been sent. We ‘sink, wink, know Obama is not one of us. They need to validate all the LIAR and SMEAR emails that have been circulating among the wing nuts for the past year about Obama. Theey did that as ecplicitly as they could get away with, but it is transparent.
McCain has always been an opportunist. He only said the minimum of what he needed to say. He needs to come out and say, “no Obama is not a Muslim, he is not tied to terrorists, he is patriotic, he is a good American”. But he will not do this.
He cannot have it both ways. It looked like it about killed him to make that statement. He is a bumbling fool. His political career is over after this.
I won’t give him a lot of credit, but I think it could be an honest effort to rein in the crazies (time will tell of course). The reason I won’t give him much credit is because it’s obviously failing. If letting loose the crazies had moved poll numbers in his favor then you wouldn’t even be seeing this walk back. The strategy was obviously failing, because Americans are scared shitless about the economy right now, so stupid guilt by association attacks are just going to make the attacker look worse. We’ll see if Palin and the other surrogates back off too.
I think Obama/Biden do the good cop/bad cop thing better because they aren’t saying anything Obama wouldn’t bring up in a debate. McCain could have easily fit the Ayers crap into the debate if he wanted to, but he chose not to. Obama did bring up McCain’s erratic behavior and the need for steady leadership in times of crises. So, their strategy works a lot better in that regards. Their strategy of attacking McCain for only offering up smears when the economy was in trouble also proactively defended against these latest attacks, and McCain just walked right into the trap.