BETWEEN THE LINES
Jonathan Alter
Where Have You Gone, John?
His zesty attacks on corporate greed and inspiring plans for national service are no more.
In the middle of John McCain's dopey Britney & Paris attack ad, the announcer gravely asks of Barack Obama: "Is He Ready to Lead?" An equally good question is whether McCain is ready to lead. For a man who will turn 72 this month, he's a surprisingly immature politician—erratic, impulsive and subject to peer pressure from the last knucklehead who offers him advice. The youthful insouciance that for many years has helped McCain charm reporters like me is now channeled into an ad that one GOP strategist labeled "juvenile," another termed "childish" and McCain's own mother called "stupid." The Obama campaign's new mantra is that McCain is "an honorable man running a dishonorable campaign." Lame is more like it. And out of sync with the real guy.
Of course, it might work. Maybe depicting Obama as a presumptuous and vaguely foreign presence will resonate. (Why else would one of McCain's slogans be "An American president for America"?) Maybe voters will agree with McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, who played the fussy card last week by arguing the central importance to the future of the republic of Obama's taste for "MET-Rx chocolate roasted peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew called Black Forest Berry Honest Tea." (Davis somehow forgot to mention McCain's own preference for $520 Ferragamo shoes.) Maybe convincing nervous white voters that Obama is another Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson in his use of racial grievance politics will carry McCain to the White House.
But this is not 1988, when Vice President George Bush turned Michael Dukakis into an unpatriotic coddler of criminals. (Bush that year had a popular president and a strong economy behind him.) And it's not 2004, when his son Swift-Boated John Kerry. (The president would have likely won anyway by playing on post-9/11 fear.) This year, McCain is running under a tattered Republican banner, with more than 80 percent of the public thinking the country is on the wrong track. Without some compelling vision beyond support for offshore drilling, the negativity may well boomerang. "It's hard to imagine America responding to 'small ball' when we have all these problems," says John Weaver, McCain's chief strategist in 2000 who was pushed out of the campaign last year.
With the exception of Mark Salter, who is still friendly with Weaver, the rest of McCain's high command says Weaver is just bitter and disloyal. "Actually, it's being loyal," Weaver says. "I want him to win." He's despondent over the destruction of a priceless maverick brand. McCain's zesty Theodore Roosevelt-style attacks on corporate greed and inspiring plans for expanding national service are gone, replaced by Karl Rove's playbook. "When was the last time you heard the word 'reform' or 'service' come out of his mouth?" Weaver asks. "We need to return to the John McCain who speaks his mind. Instead, it's Dick Butkus running a West Coast Offense or Wilt Chamberlain playing point guard. It's not going to work."
That's because McCain is patently insincere when his heart's not in it, like a little boy who eats his peas when his parents tell him to but remains transparently unhappy about the experience. It's not clear how committed McCain himself is to this latest assault on Obama. Does he genuinely believe that Obama is an out-of-control egomaniac who thinks he's Moses? McCain no doubt comforts himself that the ad making that argument—an argument that is beneath a major-party candidate for president—was not part of a big media buy but just chum thrown to the media piranhas via the Drudge Report.
McCain's erratic campaign has GOP strategists scratching their heads. The obvious play for him was to tack right during the primaries, then navigate back to the center, where American general elections are always won. Conservative base voters can rarely be turned into McCain enthusiasts. But most will reluctantly vote for him. So why jeopardize his standing with independents by being grouchy and partisan? Makes no sense.
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Member Comments
Posted By: DUMPLIN @ 09/26/2008 5:11:46 PM
Comment: FM/FM PAID OUT MONEY TO DEMOCRATS SUCH AS CHRIS DODD, BARACK OBAMA AND OTHERS SO THEY WOULD KEEP QUIET ABOUT HOW BADLY FM/FM WERE FAILING, GIVING THOSE IN CHARGE TIME TO GET OUT WITH MILLIONS IN THEIR OWN POCKETS. CROOKS ALL OF THEM. AND YOU WANT TO REVIEW MCCAIN'S AIDE AND HIS ASSOCIATION WITH FM/FM? HOW ABOUT OBAMA'S SENIOR CAMPAIGN ADVISOR, RAINES GETTING OUT WITH NINETY MILLION DOLLARS? GIVE ME A BREAK. DO YOUR JOB AND REPORT THE TRUTH ON BOTH SIDES.
Posted By: mwzephyr @ 09/23/2008 1:21:04 PM
Comment: Both candidates have lost their center because of their coaching staffs. Obama lost his fire and genuiness, and my respect. McCain lost his focus and his ability to communicate.
Both were better before the "team" was set in place.
The problem is we the people have lost the opportunity to see the future clearly because of their missteps and "flash-dancing". I don't care about lipstick, shoes, cars, ministers and allegations, I want answers we can bank on for our future!
Posted By: melbee1971 @ 09/20/2008 5:17:25 PM
Comment: Smart, regulatory policies are an unfortunate necessity (and can boost confidence) when human beings have unlimited wants and organized GREED will always seek to be unbridled. History teaches this when you analyze any large market system with many competing interests.
As a public high school teacher, the current state of our public institutions reflect our values as a society, from my point of view. I ask Newsweek readers to PLEASE consider the following comparison of our institutions: our pubic schools and our private financial "powerhouses" that are now being bailed out with our taxpayer dollars.
We are bailing out these failing institutions with taxpayer dollars while the state of our public school system continues to decline. Think about this, voters PLEASE! Not just for the sake of your own personal interests, but for the sake of our country.
Good teachers are being laid off and class sizes are growing. No child left behind is a law that requires improvements without funding to implement these improvements. Schools are listed as "failing schools" (terrible for morale) because of unrealistic goals/unfunded mandates funded by politicians seeking to score political points. What is often "left behind" in our public schools is often a stressed out skeleton staff that does not have the ability to properly educate our students.
Meanwhile, these corporate lobbyists that effectively secured deregulation and what they consider "optimal" conditions for success (deregulation). And a few well-connected people have lined their pockets with enormous amounts of other peoples' money.
John McCain has a record of being a major player and advocate of deregulation and has taken money TIME AFTER TIME from the deregulation lobbyists - the very same "fat cats" he's now criticizing! NOW McCain is calling for change, when his deregulation in part has created this mess?
This sort of short-term gain at the expense of long-term growth way of thinking has infected our entire way of running our society.
Unfortunately, young people (the MAJORITY) of our future do not have the money or the resources to hire corporate lobbyists. Their teachers and their schools have limited resources. And there are little organized efforts to reform and progress/ lead our public schools into the 21st century. In every other developed and developing country we compare our students' progress with, there are sustained efforts to improve, fund, and prioritize education.
In America, we are starving our schools while bailing out reckless fat cats who've thrived on greed. Is this the American Way? Or have we lost our way?
Let this difficult period be a lesson. We all want healthy money markets and retirements. We must see the connection between healthy public schools and a healthy economy that is investing in human capital. Hopefully (as we say in class) we will learn from all of this and use it to improve, grow, and succeed.