McCain's Confused And Confusing Campaign Is Bogged Down And Sinking

Next Sunday's NY Times Magazine features an absolutely devastating piece on the now pointless, divisive, shameful, directionless, chaotic McCain campaign. After the concept of America First was disposed of with the cynical selection of a patently unqualified-- and tragically unvetted-- Wasilla housewife, the campaign morphed into just some kind of vehicle for McCain's blind ambition. It got ugly-- fast. Now McCain is pointing fingers and blaming everyone.

I'm thinking the villain of the piece is chief campaign strategist, Steve Schmidt-- Rove's guy-- who, like McCain, get a thrill out of gambling big time. He has a reputation as a smart guy but he claims the smartest political wisdom he ever heard came from George W Bush. He thinks he would win this if he could just control the narrative... if only the world were really as plastic, scripted, and malleable as the Republican Party imagines it to be! Given his shot to paint McCain a hero in the financial bailout crisis, McCain instead came off as McCan't-- "more like a stymied bystander than a leader who could make a difference. Judging by the polls, the McCain campaign has yet to recover."

Schmidt has been in charge of strategy for the McCain campaign since early this summer, and his effort to prevail in the battle of competing story lines has been considerably more problematic. The selling of a presidential “narrative” the reigning buzz word of this election cycle has taken on outsize significance in an age in which a rush of visuals and catch words can cripple public images overnight... Schmidt and his fellow strategists have had difficulty explaining how America will be better off for electing (as opposed to simply admiring) a stubborn patriot. In seeking to do so, the McCain campaign has changed its narrative over and over. Sometimes with McCain’s initial resistance but always with his eventual approval, Schmidt has proffered a candidate who is variously a fighter, a conciliator, an experienced leader and a shake-’em-up rebel. “The trick is that all of these are McCain,” Matt McDonald, a senior adviser, told me. But in constantly alternating among story lines in order to respond to changing events and to gain traction with voters, the “true character” of a once-crisply-defined political figure has become increasingly murky.

It's a campaign with no philosophy and not even a strategy, just a series of disjointed and confusing, generally unsuccessful, tactics.

Yesterday's Times explained why McCain is faltering-- and faltering badly-- among Hispanic voters he has courted so assiduously. Only about a quarter of Hispanics-- and that includes elderly right-wing Cubans in Florida-- plan to vote for McCain in November. Four years ago Bush took almost 45% of the Hispanic vote. The tactics-- playing the divide and conquer card to foment tension between Latinos and blacks, and playing up social conservatism and his ambiguous, balancing act policies (between GOP nativists and corporatists) on immigration reform-- have all backfired and washed up on the shoals of Republican Party economic catastrophe for working families. Hispanic voters, like all other voters other than blinded religious fanatics, see McCain and his campaign as "up and down and all over the place." McCain confuses them. He confuses everyone. In fact he is confused himself.

Late last night Reuters reported that the newest polling from Zogby is showing an increasing gap between Obama and McCain for voters across the board. Obama now leads McCain by 12 points-- 52 to 40%. Among independent voters, upon whom McCain based his claim to GOP leadership, there is now a 30 point margin and the campaign is unfocussed and floundering. The Public Policy Institute of California poll, also released late last night, shows that California is way out of McCain's grasp-- 56-33% in favor of Obama. (The poll also shows that Californians are probably going to reject the homophobic Prop 8.)