One of the things I respect the most about Barack Obama is the courage he shows in treating the American people like adults, capable of understanding thoughts that can't be summarized in a single phrase. At the same time, campaigns can be won and lost by the narratives attached to a candidate and the shape these narratives take is often dictated precisely by vacuous phrases like "appeaser", "flip-flopper", and "maverick".
I think that McCain's maverick label is his only lifeline. If he can make maverick stick in the minds of voters it will distance him from the Bush administration, make him look like a man of integrity, and give people who are fed up with Republican rule, but hesitant about Democrats the reason they need to vote for him. That's why we need a persistent attack on the maverick image that will destroy it in the eyes of the American voter: we have more than enough ammunition to do it.
I put together the image above in about 2 minutes with zero skills, but it's basically a mock up of what I think will be a very simple but effective attack on McCain's Maverickness.
It accomplishes several things at the same time:
- It ties McCain to George W. Bush, that alone is a huge step in destroying any Republican's chances in November. As the special elections in Illinois, Louisiana, and Mississippi attest to, Republicans are in a lot of trouble because of their toeing the Bush administration line for too long.
- It highlights the fact that despite the vicious attacks that Bush and Rove made on McCain in 2000, he swallowed his Maverickness and now has sold out to Bush and his cronies.
- It lays the groundwork for parallel attacks. His flip-flopping on his Maverick stances when it became expedient to do so in order to win the Republican nomination, and his ties to (and favors for) lobbyists which he so vociferously claims to be against even the "appearance" of.
There's a recent diary by vertexoflife that lays out many of McCain's flip-flops, most of them are well known and I won't rehash them, but his 180-degree change on Falwell the "agent of intolerance", his support for torture, and his reversal on the Bush tax cuts are among the most prominent and well-documented. My comment in that diary was that it's important not to use the old and tired "flip-flopper" label, but to go straight at the Maverick moniker. Everyone knows McCain as a maverick, the two are practically synonymous in the media -- the more we make "Maverick" a joke rather than an accolade, the closer McCain is to losing.
The other parallel attack, that goes right along with the Maverick one, is the idea of McCain being a bastion of integrity. He's not. We all know it. What I think is the most effective tact on this front, though, is again attacking the image of McCain's integrity as much as going after the specific substance. With the resignation today of yet another high-ranking McCain campaign official, it's not a matter of making a nuanced detailed case about specific wrongdoing, it's about destroying the perception of McCain's integrity by attacking it from all sides. MoveOn has a great ad out going after Charlie Black, McCain's campaign manager, and the Washington state Democratic Party has one going after him for costing Boeing the military contract that ended up going to Airbus, a company that several of his close advisers lobbied for.
Which brings me back to my original point: Yes, we should make a substantive case, not only against a McCain presidency, but for an Obama presidency. However, an effective assault on McCain's maverick image will go a long way in laying the groundwork for a debate on our terms, not theirs.