The New Republic: McCain's Low Road to Victory

[flpoljunkie]

The New Republic

McCain's Low Road To Victory
by Drew Westen

The effort to make this campaign about voters' unconscious fears of Obama has already begun.


Seldom has a presidential candidate faced such long odds. John McCain has repeatedly allied himself with the most unpopular president since the history of modern polling. He has embraced the most unpopular war since Vietnam. The U.S. economy continues its downward slide. Polls show generic Democratic candidates leading by double digits at all levels of government.

And those are just the beginning of McCain's problems. He is caught between a rock and a hard place in the core narrative about what he stands for. Moderates are turned off every time he takes a right turn to bow to a base whose ideology has proven destructive, while the GOP base is distinctly unenthusiastic about a candidate they suspect is really not one of them. Add to the mix an extraordinarily charismatic candidate running against an extraordinarily uncharismatic one, and it's no surprise that Republicans are openly expressing angst.

With all that stacked against him, the only road that could take McCain to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue is the low road, one of the few pieces of infrastructure left in good repair by President Bush. His father paved it against Michael Dukakis, George W. Bush repaved it running against John Kerry, and the GOP repainted the dotted line in now-Senator Bob Corker's 2006 contest with Harold Ford. The path to success for McCain is to make the election a referendum on his opponent, by working in silent concert with 527 groups and media outlets such as Fox News to pursue character assassination, guilt by association, and, most of all, the effort to paint Obama as different, foreign, unlike "us," and dangerous (and did I mention that he's black?).

Over the last several weeks, McCain has been running "The American President," an ad with all the trappings of positivity, but that actually sets the stage for all future attacks. The attacks will not come from McCain. They will come from the momentarity dormant 527s behind them, giving McCain plausible deniability while they make the presidential contest about Barack Obama's differentness and activate unconscious racial sentiments that Republicans have preyed upon for four decades.

The name of McCain's ad itself suggests both its positive message and its more insidious subtext: What other kind of President is there? An un-American President, someone who is not really "one of us"? An anti-American President? Or perhaps just an African-American President. Bob Corker ran an entire campaign against a man born and raised in Memphis (Harold Ford, Jr.) with the premise, "Who's the real Tennesseean?" (and did I mention that he's black?). McCain was apparently so impressed with the race-baiting "Harold, Call Me" ad that he hired the man who produced it to run his campaign (although he left when McCain's bus seemed to have run out of gas before it eventually refueled in Iowa and New Hampshire).

So what is the message of "The American President"? The announcer asks, "What must a president believe about us?" This seems innocuous enough, until you realize that it implicitly sets Obama up as "not one of us" and lays the ground for the RNC and the 527s to remind Americans of Obama's "elitist" comments about average Americans, which McCain is already riffing on in stump speeches, and Michelle Obama's gaffe about being really proud of her country "for the first time," to which Cindy McCain responded that she has always been proud of her country. (Apparently her country's refusal to let black people vote for a century after the Civil War, including during her lifetime, never touched her sense of national pride.)

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=8536aa6e-9df0-4e2d-aef3-0acb42807caf

[speedoo]

1. K&R, and bookmarked. nt

[jazzjunkysue]

2. Gramps couldn't find the high road if they drove his plane into it..

It's boring on the high road. You can't sing songs about bombing people. What fun is that?

[Coexist]

3. well put.