The leaky rowboat that is Team McCain is really starting to come unglued.
Or so Sam Stein at HuffPo reports in http://www.huffingtonpost.com/... which previews an upcoming piece in the Sunday NY Times Magazine.
The piece, by Robert Draper, will be titled (aptly) "The Making (and Remaking and Remaking) of the Candidate." According to Stein the NYT Mag piece:
breaks some new reportorial ground, including a growing weariness within a campaign that seems more interested in tactical victories and the next compelling narratives than an overarching strategy.
It sounds like they know they're boxed in a corner and don't know where to turn. More below the fold.
It was Chief Strategist (and Rove disciple) Steve Schmidt, the man brought in to "save" the listing McCain campaign back in July, who made the:
perhaps fatal push for McCain to "go all in," leave the campaign trail and head to Washington to work on the financial bailout package.
"Schmidt evidently saw the financial crisis as a 'true character' moment that would advance his candidate's narrative."
Unfortunately for McCain, of course, this moment was the decisive factor in the emerging narrative of McCain's "erratic" character, a narrative cited extensively by Colin Powell in his rationale for endorsing Obama over McCain. That erratic decision also formed the backdrop for Obama's perhaps decisive victory in the debates—where Barack's steadiness and good sense stood out in luminous contrast. No wonder Obama is emphasizing the erratic McCain in his latest ad.
More good stuff from Stein's HuffPo preview, this time about the Palin nomination:
Having interviewed several of the Senator's chief aides, Draper details the process by which McCain ultimately chose his running mate (New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg was surprisingly high on the list). And the decision may have been even more impulsive than initially thought. Gov. Sarah Palin, who had never been on the VP shortlist, was advanced at the last minute by Schmidt and Rick Davis, and was picked after a less-than-hour-long chat in with McCain at his ranch in Arizona.
So if we thought she'd never been vetted, we were probably right. It seems to me the Palin nomination, combined with the erratic decision to "suspend his campaign," are, along with the Wall St meltdown, the primary reasons for McCain's collapse after his brief post-convention spike.
As others have observed, McCain has yet to define a central reason why we should elect him the next president. Maybe Steve Schmidt, "the Rovian genius," is one of the people most to blame for this, since he relentlessly undermined the McCain brand while seeking some kind of magic formula that would make McCain a winner.
Ultimately, Draper defines the McCain campaign in a series of different narratives: the heroic fighter, the country first deal-maker, team of mavericks, etc. [Draper's] reporting will undoubtedly spur an early start to the campaign postmortems. Even McCain aides waxed skeptically about their bosses chances.
If McCain's aides are skeptical of his chances, and if they're speaking out of school to NYT reporters (esp since the NYT has been declared anathema by the McCain campaign) it looks like they're fingering Schmidt as the fall guy for McCain's looming defeat. I wouldn't be sorry if the election of 2008 left Schmidt and (by extension) Rove, along with Mark Penn, sprawled on the scrapheap of American political history.
Ulimately though, the blame should lie with McCain for his persistent penchant for tactics over strategy, a tendency only abetted by Schmidt's similar tendencies. Meanwhile team Obama's consistent strategy and message discipline, appear to have pushed Team McCain into a long series of unforced errors that ultimately seem to have laid his ship of state up on a reef.