McCAIN MESS

Posted at 8:43 a.m. ET

I must tell you how little good journalism is available today.  It's as if journalists themselves are holding their breath, waiting for this week's economic news.  The presidential candidates aren't saying anything they haven't said before, and don't seem to have any great ideas to deal with the crisis before us.  There is a sense of emptiness and drift, rather than resolution.  I'm reminded of William Goldman's comment about Hollywood:  "Nobody knows anything."  If someone knew, maybe this economic trauma could have been averted.

On the political front, the main story seems to be frustration with Senator McCain's campaign.  He is getting advice from all quarters, much of it conflicting.   There is no unifying theme.  Some say attack.  Others say don't attack.  Some say question Obama's character.  Others say come up with a coherent economic plan.  Three weeks from Tuesday, America will elect a new president.  I suspect many Americans are waking up to the reality that this new president will probably be Barack Obama.  Will this recognition ignite a backlash, a realization that we are heading down an unknown path with an unknown candidate toward an unknown destination?  I don't know.  But some one had better articulate the danger. 

Frank Miele, a highly intelligent Western editor whose work is often quoted here, has one of the best appraisals of the McCain campaign: 

No, I don’t mean his physical ailments, partly brought on by age and partly by the vicissitudes of torture at the hands of his captors in Hanoi 40 years ago. And I don’t mean his policies, although God knows he has some explaining to do there as well.

I am talking about his inability to carry the battle to his enemies — to look a man square in the eye and tell him, “You are wrong.” He hasn’t yet determined how to run a campaign aimed against Barack Obama’s many flaws, and time is running out.

McCain must fight:

But most pointedly of all, a McCain supporter at a rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Thursday stood up and told McCain to his face what almost all of his supporters are feeling — take off your gloves and fight!

“I’m mad! I’m really mad!” said the unidentified man. “When you have Obama, [House speaker Nancy] Pelosi and the rest of the hooligans up there going to run the country, we have to have our head examined. It’s time that you two represent the rest of us,” he told McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, “So go get ’em!”

But the problem is that there's no clear vision for the campaign.  Analyst Dick Morris has said, correctly, that there are tactics, but there's no strategy. 

Barring some unforeseen testosterone transfusion, McCain is destined to keep thinking his enemies are his “friends” and that his self-appointed role as the oxymoronic “maverick moderate” will somehow pay off in votes instead of snickers.

It had looked for a while like Pitbull Palin would pull McCain across the finish line, but now it seems safe to assume that McCain will put a muzzle on her and turn the final three weeks of the campaign into a race for last place.

No matter what McCain does, he seems to get the blame:

McCain has missed opportunity after opportunity to go after Barack Obama’s tax policy, his education policy, his foreign policy and his fiscal policy, let alone his association with ACORN and its fraudulent voter registration campaigns, his 20 years of friendship with the radical Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his ties to the domestic terrorist and lifelong communist William Ayers.

The national media has already painted McCain as a negative campaigner, but the funny thing is, they do it without ever investigating whether the allegations against Obama are true. Doesn’t the truth play some small role in whether a campaign is negative or not? I mean, if someone in Russia had called Josef Stalin a mass murderer, would that be considered negative campaigning? Yes, it’s a negative statement, but in deciding your future, isn’t the truth relevant?

Wonderfully stated.  No, apparently it's not relevant, especially when the mainstream media is shaping what we see and hear.  Obama has two parties behind him - the Democratic Party, and the media party. 

Finally...

Ugh. It’s becoming almost ridiculously silly out there.

This time, I am afraid, America will get the government it deserves, and that — my friends — is a scary thought.

No doubt.  Wait 'til the day after election day.  Even scarier.

October 12, 2008.