http://www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com/archives/16421.html#more-16421‘This is not a cost-free exercise’
Posted August 2nd, 2008
Josh Marshall encouraged readers this morning to stop what they’re doing and read John Heilemann’s take on the state of the campaign in New York magazine. I’ll second Josh’s endorsement — this is one of the sharpest analyses I’ve read this week.
The race is, obviously, constantly changing and evolving, day by day, hour by hour, but as of right now, Heilemann’s piece is spot-on. The headline and the lede suggest it’s another piece noting how relentlessly negative John McCain has become over the last week or so, but the piece has considerably more depth than that.
Many of McCain’s advisers from 2000, such as John Weaver and Mike Murphy, express qualms about the campaign’s newly nasty tone. (One can only imagine the sigh of relief emanating from Mark McKinnon, the heralded adman who helped McCain win the nomination but whose aversion to taking a cleaver to Obama caused him to sit out the general.) “In this kind of year — a change election, with big issues at stake — that sort of campaign is not gonna be in a voice the American people can understand,” Weaver tells me. “And at some point, John will need the goodwill that he spent years achieving.” And you think he’s in danger of losing that? “This is not a cost-free exercise,” he says.
But Weaver, Murphy, and McKinnon are no longer guiding McCain. Instead, the motor behind his operation now is Steve Schmidt, the shaven-headed strategist who earned his bones running Karl Rove’s war room in 2004, Frenchifying and de-war-heroizing John Kerry. What Schmidt and his associates have apparently concluded is that McCain’s weaknesses — on the election’s most salient issues and as a candidate — are so pronounced and Obama’s vulnerabilities so glaring that the low road is their guy’s best, and maybe only, route to the White House. They’ve concluded, in other words, that even if McCain may not be able to win the election in any affirmative sense, he might still wind up behind the big desk if he and his people can strip the bark off Obama with sufficiently vicious force.
If this sounds like an admission of a certain kind of defeat, that’s because it is. But in the prevailing political circumstances — the hunger for change in the electorate, the abject bankruptcy of the Republican brand, McCain’s positions on the wrong side of the public on the war and the economy, his age, and his pitiful performance skills — it may reflect a cold-eyed realism that’s an asset in any campaign. Moreover, at least in the short term, it actually seems to be working. Measured against the generic Democratic ballot, Obama continues to underperform dramatically.
We talked the other day about a point Jonathan Chait emphasized — the likelihood of Obama needing to match McCain’s, shall we say, tone. Heilemann fleshed out Obama’s options, and likely reluctance to pursue them.
The alternative, of course, is to get on offense, to batter McCain for his gaffes and incoherence, hammer him for his flip-flops, highlight how his maverick status is a thing of the past, and turn him into a combination of Bush and Grandpa Simpson. God knows there are those in Chicago champing at the bit to do just that—not least, one imagines, Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, who can wield the cudgel of negative ads with as much vigor and glee as any Republican. Yet Obama seems reluctant to go there. Tough pol though he is, he’s a conciliator and not a confrontationalist at heart; he seems to believe that once undecided voters know him better, he will have them eating, along with so many others, out of the palm of his hand.
And who knows, even if Obama stays above the fray, he might still pull this thing off. Because as unwilling as he is to get down and dirty, McCain may simply be unable to drive a consistent negative message.
It’s a great piece. Read the whole thing here:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x6573964
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