Six John McCains, But No Sale

The Instant Information Age goes a step further with a retrospective about the failed McCain campaign in the New York Times Magazine next Sunday, nine days before the election and, true to the spirit of déjà vu on steroids, available online four days earlier.

Time-scrambling aside, "The Making (and Remaking) of McCain" offers a compelling inside view of how the man who might have won the presidency against Al Gore in 2000 will lose it by lurching "from tactic to tactic" this year against Barack Obama, the legacy of George W. Bush and the self he lost in the intervening eight years.

Robert Draper's report is based on talks with "a half-dozen of McCain’s senior-most advisers--most of them more than once and some of them repeatedly" as well as "midlevel advisers and to a number of former senior aides" over the past months.

The campaign, in the classic pattern of losing enterprises, burned through six different narratives about their candidate in a desperate search for a winning formula:

*The Heroic Fighter vs. the Quitters (pumping up the tentative gains of the Surge into Victory with Honor)

*Country-First Deal Maker vs. Nonpartisan Pretender (the maverick who fought his own party as opposed to the newcomer who is all rhetoric)

*Leader vs. Celebrity (to counter the success of Obama's triumphant trip to the Middle East and Europe by picturing him as a celebrity akin to Paris Hilton)

*Team of Mavericks vs. Old-Style Washington (the "Hail Mary" choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate rather than Joe Lieberman, whom he really wanted)

* John McCain vs. John McCain (going along with smears of Obama despite his own misgivings so that he "sometimes seemed to be running against not only Barack Obama but an earlier version of himself")

*The Fighter (Again) vs. the Tax-and-Spend Liberal (a "cobbled together one last narrative with less than a month to go").

All these McCains running in so many different directions make for wistful thinking about what might have been if John McCain, in true maverick style, had overridden all his advisors and campaigned as himself.

A President for a Time of Panic

Barack Obama and John McCain will be debating tonight as the inertia that has always given American society stability, albeit at the price of slow social change, is endangered by a sudden plunge into economic turmoil and uncertainty. Ironically, neither of the voters' possible choices is designed to calm them.

Not since 1932 has the electorate been so roiled by fear of the future and so hungry for change. Yet, in Obama, they face someone relatively new and unfamiliar and, in McCain, an all-too-familiar connection to policies that have failed and, to compound their worries, a volatile temperament.

In the Depression, Republicans tried to tar Franklin D. Roosevelt as a radical who would raise taxes, as they are picturing Obama now but with the added edge of distorting his positions on issues such as health care and questioning his patriotism.

The rougher attacks are coming from the gee-whiz he-pals-around-with-terrorists lies of Sarah Palin, but McCain is hitting similar notes with such innuendo as today's "What does he plan for America? In short: Who is the real Barack Obama?"

Obama himself is pointing out the desperation of these personal attacks yet sadly but understandably responding with an on-line reprise of McCain's Keating Five lapses.

But public panic requires something more and better than that. Obama should be visibly and vocally rallying the best minds--the most respected economists and the real-world experts such as Warren Buffet, Mike Bloomberg et al--to start working on a long-range plan with measures to implement in January that would start lifting America out of its fiscal abyss.

He doesn't have to give it a name like the New Deal, but he should be telling voters in as clear and strong a voice as FDR did that he is ready to use nation's best brains to ease their pain and get the country working again. That's what they want to hear.

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.

The Prince of Dimness

That noise in the background is Robert Novak, the self-styled Prince of Darkness, doing what he always does--nipping at politicians while barking away to call attention to himself.

Instead of slinking off after his Valerie Plame dump on the national carpet, the old dog is still up to his ancient tricks, this time befouling Presidential candidates of both parties.

Weekend before last, he stirred up a Clinton-Obama spat by writing that "agents" of the Clinton campaign had been "spreading the word in Democratic circles that she has scandalous information about her principal opponent." After smearing both Democrats with anonymous dirt, Novak went on Fox News to stand by his "scoop," while admitting it came to him third-hand with no confirmation.

This week Novak is outing Mike Huckabee as a "false conservative" who is really "a high-tax, protectionist, big-government advocate of a strong hand in the Oval Office directing the lives of Americans."

After half a century of "reporting," Novak seems to get most of his dope over expense-account lunches these days and, judging from his past gushes over Fred Thompson, the Huckabee smear may be coming from that direction.

Come to think of it, the canine metaphor may be misplaced. Novak is more of a handy hydrant for political operatives' leaks.