I just watched Obama foreign policy advisor Susan Rice hammer McCain on MSNBC’s Morning Joe. Yesterday, of course, McCain gaffed himself on the Today Show, saying "it’s not that important" when troops can come home from Iraq. Rice related the blunder to McCain’s pattern of confused mistakes on Iraq and endorsed Wes Clark’s statement yesterday that McCain is, contrary to his reputation, "untested and untried" on national security.
I felt like a Red Sox fan must have felt in 2004. For years, I’ve watched democratic operatives get drubbed on these shows. Here was a strong performance that cut against the grain of conventional wisdom in a strategic, successful way. Scarborough ate it up and defended Rice when his fembot sidekick wondered if the attack was consistent with Obama’s "new politics" and nice guy image.
The notion that McCain is "strong on foreign policy" is the very bedrock of the media’s coverage of this campaign. In the accepted narrative, the election is a contest between the young change agent (promising but risky) and the old maverick warrior (maybe wrong, but definitely strong). McCain gets away with all manner of mistakes because journalists believe that a blunder on his part doesn’t illustrate anything important about the campaign. Everyone knows he’s respected as an experienced old hawk, so a McCaign gaffe on foreign policy is a slip, not a story line.
Your old school, Bush-era Democrat would have walked right into this trap of a narrative. His or her most skittish consultants would advise ignoring McCain’s comment completely because "the Republicans always win when the topic is national security." A slightly less timid hack would send a blast fax criticizing McCain for his "insensitivity to the troops and their families," reinforcing the general impression that Dems are nurturing and Republicans are tough. Regardless of which tactic he or she chose, the Bush-era Democrat thinks so much like the millionaire pundits that he or she would literally never think about questioning McCain’s fundamental competence on issues of war and peace.
On Morning Joe, Susan Rice won by demonstrating toughness in her own manner and by shifting the story to the part of the accepted story line that we like. She suggested McCain was often confused and couldn’t control his own tongue. By the end of the segment, McCain as "old maverick warrior" seemed more a scary grandpa than reassuring hero. More Frank Castanza than Clint Eastwood.
Scarborough’s sidekick tried to reinforce the old story line when she said that Rice’s critique was inconsistent with Obama’s commitment to a new kind of politics. What she really meant was, "Hey, I thought Democrats are supposed to be doormats!"
Not this year, it seems, not this year....