Elder Statesman of Sleaze

Karl Rove, who smeared John McCain out of the presidency eight years ago, finds his victim's use of those tactics now against Barack Obama a trifle too crude for his taste.

"McCain," Karl Rove said today on Fox News, "has...gone one step too far and sort of attributing to Obama things that are, you know, beyond the '100 percent truth' test."

Rove, in effect, is criticizing his own protégés in the McCain campaign, saying "there ought to be an adult who says, 'Do we really need to go that far in this ad? Don't we make our point and won't we get broader acceptance and deny the opposition an opportunity to attack us if we don't include that one little last tweak in the ad?'"

Amid the talk about pigs and lipstick, Rove's remarks call to mind the old saying about thrift--using every porker part but the squeal. As a paid pundit for Fox, Rove has even found a way to profit from that.

It's Not the Stupidity, Stupid

As Barack Obama's spokesman accuses John McCain of "the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history," he is giving Republicans exactly what they want--shifting the focus of the election to personalities and tactics from what should be the main issue.

Ronald Reagan put it succinctly to voters in 1980: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The answer was a resounding no, and he swept a sitting president out of office.

This year the answer to the question, "Are you better off than you were eight years ago?" is so obvious and compelling that some in the Obama campaign seem to be acting on the assumption that it wouldn't be cool to keep harping on it.

They need a wakeup call similar to James Carville's 1992 reminder, "It's the economy, stupid" that saved Bill Clinton's effort against Bush 41 by keeping it on message: "It's not the stupidity, stupid."

It isn't the smear ads against Obama, the coded racial attacks that label him "different," the cynical selection of Sarah Palin, the McCain transition from straight talk to double talk. Those side shows are distractions from the main point that McCain has morphed into another Bush and is getting away with the claim that he represents change.

An ocean away, this seems clearer. The Sunday Telegraph quotes a Democratic Party official: "I really find it offensive when Democrats ask the Republicans not to be nasty to us, which is effectively what Obama keeps doing. They know that's how the game is played."

Of course, the smears and lies have to be addressed and swatted away like flies at a picnic, but that's the part-time work of staff and surrogates. Obama now is spending too much of his own time talking about "them" and what "they" are doing instead of telling voters what he will do to undo what the last eight years have brought them--loss of jobs, homes and health care to a wrong-headed war that has squandered lives and billions of dollars to the point of making most Americans despair about the future.

Obama himself seems to know that. "The McCain-Palin ticket," he said yesterday, "they don't want to debate the Obama-Biden ticket on issues because they are running on eight more years of what we've just seen. And they know it. As a consequence, what they're going to spend the next seven, eight weeks doing is trying to distract you."

He should remind his own staff, too.

Obama's Prose and Poetry

The venue for tonight's historic speech may be a mistake, reinforcing Barack Obama's image as a rock star at a time when he has to make a reassuringly intimate connection with voters who will be bombarded by Republican attacks on him as too exotic to trust.

On the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" oration, Obama is the embodiment of that dream come true. What Americans will want to hear now are not more visions but concrete plans to wake their country from eight years of the Bush-Cheney nightmare.

As gifted a speaker as he is, Obama may find a way to reach those millions with realistic proposals and inspire them at the same time, but the balance of prose and poetry will be exquisitely difficult to find as tens of thousands embrace him as the symbol of their hopes and, yes, their dreams.

The doubters and detractors will be ready to pounce on his words and twist them into sound bites for toxic commercials, but tonight will be the start of a test of American democracy that, for the sake of future generations, Obama must not fail. The prose will have to match the poetry.

Hanoi Hilton to Paris Hilton

The Obama attacks may be damaging the John McCain "brand" in the long run, according to a growing chorus of Republican supporters and admirers, including McCain's mother who calls one of the ads "stupid."

But the candidate himself isn't backing off. On radio today, he compared an Obama speech to "watching a big summer blockbuster, and an hour in realizing that all the best scenes were in the trailer you saw last fall."

Long-time McCain watchers see ventriloquism in all this by Karl Rove protégés who have taken him over. McCain's 2000 campaign manager calls the Paris Hilton-Britney Spears commercial "clumsy, juvenile, and a mistake" while David Gergen parses the Charlton Heston ad calling Obama "The One" as "code for 'he's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is from a southern background."

In the long run, what will all this do to the image of a straight-talking war hero who withstood the pressures of being a prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton and now is a captive of smearers using his name to compare Obama to Paris Hilton?

Perhaps a little time off will give McCain some perspective. “If I put in three or four 18-hour, 20-hour days in a row, then I’m not sharp," McCain told reporters recently. “It’s just a fact."

As Obama visits his grandmother and surfs in Hawaii, McCain is planning some down time later this month back home in Arizona. He may want to think about who he used to be and how to get back to being himself for the rest of the campaign season.

"Little Minds" Assault on Obama

After years of Bush's always-wrong-but-never-in-doubt presidency, Republican swiftboaters are launching their first attack ad on Obama, telling MTV watchers, among others, that he's "Both Ways Barack--worse than a flip-flopper!"

A young generation, some of whom may actually have been paying attention in high school and college, will find irony in having their favorite candidate under fire for what they learned from reading F. Scott Fitzgerald: “The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

It was Obama's unBushlike intelligence that excited the New York Times' conservative columnist David Brooks back in 2006: “He has a compulsive tendency to see both sides of an issue...And yet this style is surely the antidote to the politics of the past several years. It is surely true that a President who brings a deliberative style to the White House will multiply his knowledge, not divide it.”

But ambivalence is too complicated a concept for the 527 smearers who trashed John Kerry, a decorated war veteran, for his Vietnam service in favor of George W. Bush, who dodged going there, and they are banking on voters to be easy marks for their shell game again.

Their new commercial shows headlines ("Obama's Changes Raise Issue: Can You Believe Him?") with a voice-over, "People are saying that Senator Obama's recent changes of position have made him a flip-flopper. He's not! Flip-floppers only hold one position at a time. Senator Obama is different: He holds two positions at the same time."

If voters want to go further back in seeing through the smokescreen, they can check Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1841 essay on self-reliance, in which he urges "Trust thyself“ and observes that "To be great is to be misunderstood” and “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Obama-McCain Family Values

In warning Republicans to "lay off my wife" in their ads, Barack Obama yesterday was challenging John McCain to call off the dogs who are nipping at Michelle Obama just as they attacked Cindy McCain to give George W. Bush the nomination in 2000.

Opponents, Obama said on Good Morning America, "can say whatever they want to say about me, my track record. I've been in public life for 20 years," then added that if "they're going to try to make Michelle an issue in this campaign, they should be careful. Because that I find unacceptable."

The subtext of Obama's warning could be a reminder that, as late as last summer, Mrs. McCain was speaking out against such tactics, as the New York Times reported in an interview with her: "Ugly accusations about her family, she insisted, will not be tolerated this time. 'If that were to even bubble its head up again,' she said, "we’d knock that flat.'”

In 2000, the Rove smear machine attacked with slanders and push polls about everything from Mrs. McCain's one-time addiction to pain killers to rumors that their adopted daughter from Bangladesh was a black child McCain had fathered.

Eventually, Bridget, now 16, learned about that in a Google search of her name and went to her mother in tears. “She wanted to know why President Bush hated her,” Mrs. McCain said. “And I had to explain to her...how nasty campaigns can be.”

Now the question for the Republican candidate is: Can he control those same groups who also did the Swiftboat ads against John Kerry in 2004, which McCain publicly denounced?

On GMA, Obama praised his wife's patriotism and said that for Republicans "to try to distort or to play snippets of her remarks in ways that are unflattering to her I think is just low class...especially for people who purport to be promoters of family values."

McCain no doubt agrees, but will the man who claims to be strong enough to protect Americans from their enemies abroad be able to shield them from the sleazebags who make those commercials?

Hillary's Hallmark Card to Voters

On the eve on Super Tuesday, the Clinton campaign will be airing the longest election commercial ever--an hour-long segment of a "town meeting" on the Hallmark cable channel that will continue for another 30 minutes online.

With so many voters going to the polls on February 5th, it was inevitable that candidates would have to use national advertising to reach them. No word of what Obama, McCain and big-bucks Romney will do, but the long-form Clinton approach is much more promising than sound-bite attack ads.

Is Huckabee Clinton or Carter?

His campaign chairman wanted to knock out Mitt Romney's teeth, but Mike Huckabee decided to turn the other cheek.

Internal struggles are common in the heat of campaigns, but this week's press-conference melodrama in Iowa suggests that Huckabee is (1) a man of principle who turned away from stooping to attack ads at the last minute or (2) ambivalent and indecisive or (3) devious in the extreme, having it both ways by publicizing the ads and renouncing them at the same time.

Like the first national politician from Hope, Arkansas, Huckabee elicits meaning-of-is ambiguity as voters attempt to parse the man beyond the slick surface of his good-boy image as opposed to Clinton's bad-boy charm.

If what you see is what you get, Iowa and New Hampshire voters will have to decide if Huckabee is the antidote to what they may have disliked in Bill Clinton or another Jimmy Carter, who promised never to lie to them but couldn't handle the complexities of the real world.

In-Fighting by Innuendo

They're trying something new in this political campaign--subtlety. The '08 candidates are using this unlikely weapon out of fear that voters may be turned off by the customary sledgehammer attack ads.

So reports Howard Kurtz in the Washington Post, citing commercials that ooze with good feelings about themselves but hide embedded barbs for their rivals.

A Romney ad features his super-wholesome family, hoping to remind viewers that Giuliani has been married three times with a second divorce that has left him alienated from his children.

"It's just essential," Romney intones, "to have a home where faith, where love of country, where determination, where all these features that are so much a part of American culture are taught to our kids."

Giuliani stresses his record as a mayor and prosecutor while telling voters they "are not going to find perfection" and, on the stump, suggests that candidates like Romney who don't admit mistakes in their lives may make some big ones in the Oval Office.

In his commercial, Obama says the country needs "a real honest conversation" about Social Security. "I don't want to put my finger out to the wind and see what the polls say," he reminds us, an oblique reference to Hillary You-Know-Who.

John McCain attacks pork-barrel spending by citing Clinton's effort to obtain $1 million for a Woodstock museum, noting that he missed the 1969 music festival because he "was tied up at the time" while the screen shows him as a wounded prisoner of war in Vietnam.

Political strategists seem to have concluded that blatant Karl Rove attack ads and Swift Boat commercials may backfire this time, but there is no guarantee that snide will be better. After being fed red meat for so long, voters may not lap up pablum.