Yesterday, Obama pursued a steady course towards election day and unveiled the following economic stimulus proposals:
- Three month moratorium on home foreclosures
- Temporary tax credit for job-creating firms
- Allow withdrawals of up to 15 percent of retirement accounts without penalty.
As Obama demonstrated his competent stewardship, McCain was pursuing a new flail: "the reboot."
This so-called reboot included disparaging Arabs, insisting he had a plan ("I have a plan," he said), decrying his campaigns hateful tenor (while stepping up the mud-slinging) and reciting various disjointed platitudes. The reboot was the latest in a string of feckless hail mary's designed to rescue his imploding campaign.
So how did this morning's press receive McCain's last-ditch CTRL+ALT+DELETE? Four words: Blue Screen of Death.
The following are some takes--
This morning's LA times describes the reboot as just another phase in McCain's now trademark erratic campaign message:
Don Sipple, a GOP strategist sitting out the campaign, said the attacks on Obama for his ties to Ayers had been "trite and petty" and had diminished McCain. "Instead of the statesman he seemed at one time, he's seeming like a desperate politician who's throwing out stuff that is so irrelevant to the American people at this stage," Sipple said.
Even when he pivots to the economy, McCain has seemed less than sure-footed, veering between a laissez-faire approach and a call for more government intervention.
On Sunday, one of McCain's closest advisors, Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, said McCain was considering a "very comprehensive" plan that might include cutting the tax rates for capital gains and dividends to help "jump-start" the economy. But within hours, the campaign backed away from that.
Howard Kurtz grades the baseless smear facet of McCain's reboot strategy a resounding fail, but not without offering the McCain camp some words to grow on:
"Obama has told his bio, a lot of his story," (Republican Strategist) Castellanos says. "It's especially important for the new guy that people don't know. With McCain, it's harder to fill up a glass that's already full."
Even if McCain and the RNC were to boost spending on the ad involving Obama and Ayers, several analysts doubted it would be effective during the current financial crisis.
"It's very hard for people to care about old hippie terrorists when the world is collapsing around them," Tracey said.
Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post calls bullshit on McCain's recent détente, observing that at the same time McCain was giving a "recoil" pose to his supporters' racist remarks, he was perpetuating identical ignorance in his commercials. Hiatt writes:
But McCain rebuked her: "No, ma'am, he's a decent family man, a citizen, who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues. And that's what this campaign is all about."
It's not what this campaign is all about, and as McCain was speaking, his campaign ads were calling Obama a liar. But it's what the campaign could have been about, if McCain had really wanted it that way.
Eugene Robinson, as we might expect, is not convinced by this latest iteration of John McCain either. He offers this prescription for what ails the GOP nominee's campaign and Republicans at large:
When a political party reaches the point of lurching incoherence, the most effective cure is a good, long spell in the wilderness. Americans should help Republicans out by sending them home to get their act together.
In one example of this lurching incoherence, McCain's reboot speech sounds like something pulled from a Simpson's Halloween special. For example, yesterday he said:
"I know what fear feels like," he added. "Don't give up hope. Be strong. Have courage and fight ... fight for what's right for America."
In a new chapter of the ongoing "just words" saga, McCain's latest stump speech appears to borrow heavily from a 1996 stump speech given by the presidential candidate from outer space, Kang. Here's the original text from Kang's 1996 campaign against Kodos:
Kang: (as Dole) We must go forward, not backward. Upward, not forward. And always twirling, twirling, twirling towards freedom.
The video is 49 seconds into this clip, but the entire clip is instructive in light of McCain's recently retooled rhetoric:
And Eugene's colleague at the Post, E.J. Dionne, pointedly wonders if McCain will be able to separate himself from the "kooks" that seem to dominate the Republican party today:
When Christopher Buckley, a novelist and former speechwriter for George H.W. Bush, announced last week that he would vote for Obama (his first vote ever for a Democrat), he referred to words once spoken to him by his late father. "You know," the conservative hero William F. Buckley Jr. said, "I've spent my entire lifetime separating the right from the kooks."
McCain has an obligation, to his own legacy and the country he has served, to separate himself and his campaign from the kooks. Extremism in defense of liberty may be no vice, but extremism in pursuit of the presidency is as dysfunctional as it is degrading.
Separating McCain from the kooks. That's no small order these days.
I would like to close with Gail Collins' statement of the month:
Remember how we used to joke about John McCain looking like an old guy yelling at kids to get off his lawn? It’s only in retrospect that we can see that the keep-off-the-grass period was the McCain campaign’s golden era.