More McCain Plans for a Dirty Campaign

By now we all know that John McCain has abandoned his promise for a clean and respectful campaign for President this fall. Everyone knows about the Paris Hilton ad, everyone knows about the McCain campaign whining about the “race card,” and everyone knows about the comments by McCain accusing Barack Obama of putting his election ahead of the country. And everyone knows all sorts of other false attacks waged by the McCain campaign. David Broder, not seeking any sort of judgement, probably because he thinks that’s the journalist thing to do, interviewed both Obama and McCain, and let McCain whine that Barack Obama brought the negatives on himself. What a whiner. Here it is from Broder’s column in the Washington Post:

The first question I asked John McCain and then Barack Obama was: How do you feel about the tone and direction of the campaign so far?

No surprise. Both men pronounced themselves thoroughly frustrated by the personal bitterness and negativism they have seen in the two months since they learned they would be running against each other.

“I’m very sorry about it,” McCain said in a Saturday interview at his Arlington headquarters. “I think we could have avoided at least some of this if we had agreed to do the town hall meetings” together, as he had suggested, during the summer months.

John McCain says he’s sorry Obama made him resort to negatrive and ugly campaigning? No, we’re not going to take that, not when campaign memos are leaked showing the next McCain negatives against Obama. No, this McCain strategy is to go all negative all the time. We get McCain’s plans for further negative planning from Sam Stein at Huffington Post:

In a McCain campaign “Economic Communications Plan” that was obtained by the Huffington Post, an aide to the Senator lays out several themes, tactics and objectives to shore up the Arizona Republican’s standing on the economy and paint Barack Obama as a “job killing machine.”

“Our polling tells us that Americans are still not tuned into what the candidates might do to fix the economy,” reads the memo. “We have an opportunity to fill in that gap.”

The strategy, which was authored by Taylor Griffin — a veteran of the Bush White House and Treasury Department who serves McCain as a senior adviser — seems built around traditional themes. The McCain campaign will paint Obama as being “aligned with trial lawyers” and “unions (card check, trade, education reform),” and push the frame that he “raises taxes” and “will kill jobs.”

Of course, all of this is unrelated to facts and policy. John McCain has been allied with the Bush Administration for the last seven years, and we know what happened to jobs in that time, we know what happened to paychecks and we know what happened to prices at the pump and in the grocery aisles. Again, McCain is whining. He won’t take personal responsibility for his negative campaigning or his distortions. But something may force him to take responsibility, I suppose.

As John Aravosis notes, there are a lot of newspapers out there writing editorials against McCain’s negative thrust in the campaign. I like Obama’s comment at the end of Broder’s column, which is mostly drivel. Yet to Broder’s credit, there’s a bit of a hint (a little tiny hint) that he endorses the Obama view:

“My general point,” Obama continued, “is that both the conventions and the debates will offer formats for Senator McCain and myself to make our best case to the American people at a time when the American people will be paying attention.

“And ultimately, the best corrective to overly negative campaigns are the American people, who are not interested in a lot of bickering but are interested in who’s got the best answers for the country.”

I think everybody would agree with that last point.

Now Broder could certainly have done what any sane columnist would have, note the rampant and ugly campaign that McCain is running and call the old wrinkled white guy on it. It is not a valid excuse, even if it is the standard Republican whine, when McCain says that Obama not scheduling town hall meetings is what forced him to go negative. But Obama has it right. The negative campaigning is not going to serve McCain. That strategy is going to chase independents away from supporting McCain in the long run, especially if Barack Obama keeps to a positive message. Americans like to be optimistic, after all. Isn’t that why they voted for Reagan overwhelmingly, after all?

McCain will discover someday that the negative campaigning he is running is going to backfire badly on him. I suggest if we don’t see a bloodletting in the McCain campaign by Labor Day, with a complete reversal of course, then McCain may lose this race for President by far more than a narrow margin. What, most polls are giving Barack Obama a 6 point lead nationally, or thereabouts. I predict ten points unless McCain does a flip flop (again) on the practice of negative campaigning.

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