The coach of my very successful football team believes that you win by taking away your opponent’s greatest strength. His is the football equivalent of the Rove philosophy of running against your opponent’s strength. I don’t run a football team or a political campaign, but my experience in watching Bill Belichick and Karl Rove in action is that this strategy of theirs has some merit.
This morning I watched the crew on "Morning Joe" have a group orgasm over McCain’s new Second Coming of Huey Long anti-Wall Street ad. You know the one where he finishes by looking all Clint Eastwood into the camera and snarling, "I’ve taken on tougher guys than this before." I’m thinking to myself, "The guy was a frickin’ prisoner. He was tortured. By his own admission he was broken." But here he is boasting about "taking on tougher guys than this" (which may be the first honest words he’s uttered during the whole damn campaign. No doubt his North Vietnamese tormentors were a tougher crew than the fancy pantsers from Wall Street. No doubt.) But Jesus H. Christ, there was Banjo Boy literally busting a string at that closing line. And then I thought—much more to the point—there is nothing that has happened in this campaign—or that will happen in the final weeks of it wherein McCain’s answer is not going to ultimately be a reminder of how he suffered on the cross for five and half years for our sins--Senator Agnus Frickin’ Dei! That is HIS ballgame. In Belichick’s world that is his Peyton Manning. And that is what Obama absolutely, positively has to shut down if he’s ultimately going to beat him.
A week from now they meet in the first of their three playoff games—or debates, as The League of Women Voters would call them. And if Obama’s been watching the game tapes, he knows that McCain will always...ALWAYS...play the POW card (hell, he even played it to the point of self-parody when Leno asked him about how many houses he owns!!!) If Obama’s vanity doesn’t get in the way where he still feels he has to prove YET again to everybody what a paragon of virtue he is and how above it all he is, he will take the POW card and shove it down McCain’s lying, mucous-coated throat. These debates, as we well know, pivot on sound bites, and McCain has now set Obama up to finally--at long, mercifully last--deliver some memorable sound bites. I humbly offer the following game-changing possibilities:
John McCain is a prisoner of special interests.
John McCain is a prisoner of Neoconservative warhawks
John McCain is a prisoner of Sarah Pailin’s charisma
John McCain is a prisoner of George W. Bush’s legacy
John McCain is a prisoner of The War Party
John McCain is a prisoner of Republican anti-regulators.
John McCain is a prisoner of his own contradictions
John McCain is a prisoner of his tough guy answers to all the world’s complex problems
John McCain is a prisoner of 26 years of inside Washington politics
John McCain is a prisoner of Sarah Palin’s high-handed rule over big Alaska and little Wasilla
John McCain is a prisoner of his media fan-base
John McCain is a prisoner of his tormented past
John McCain is a prisoner of the Religious Right
John McCain is a prisoner of the lobbyists on his payroll
John McCain is a prisoner of a delusional secret plan to capture Osama bin Laden
John McCain is a prisoner of the Vietnam War
John McCain is a prisoner of self-proclaimed ignorance on the economy
John McCain is a prisoner of impulsive behavior around women
John McCain is a prisoner of phony straight talk
John McCain is a prisoner of a new, unrecognizable John McCain
John McCain is a prisoner of blind, ruthless ambition