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.
By the way, yesterday I was saying out loud, “I don’t see how this election can get crazier, but I have faith in the wingnuts that they’ll always find a way.” My faith is always rewarded—-they’re discussing whether or not Obama is a Maoist or a Stalinist at NRO.
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.