Iby Damozel | All righty, then. We've seen that Obama can round up all the prettiest ponies and fly through space on the unicorn's back. Time for his campaign to start thinking about something other than making pretty pictures and generating stirring rhetoric.
His speech in Berlin doesn't cut any ice with me---except from the 'Oooh, look! Shiny!' standpoint--- because he hasn't got the means to make any of the things he talked about happen unless he wins the presidency. The triumphal march abroad demonstrated that the rest of the world adores him, but people who care about this---I am one---already knew it. It's important, but I didn't need a demo.
I'm still waiting to see him tear McCain's positions to shreds and dance on them. I know he could do it. I just don't know if he will do it.
We've all seen that he looks pretty standing in front of cheering mobs and that he can bring people to their feet. But that isn't going to help the housing crisis, make the nation more secure, address the high price of gas, deal with species die-off or global warming, or otherwise help people see that there ARE ways we can cope with the million and one aspects of the mess Bush has left.
Calling out McCain on all the reasons why he's wrong has been a winning strategy so far. Why won't Obama stick to it?
People who can be swayed by emotional appeals have already made up their minds, I suspect. The scared, paranoid people who are more afraid of terrorists than of losing their liberty aren't going to vote for Obama. The ones who are going to choose him because he looks pretty and sounds inspiring have probably already done so.
Are we so sure that the ones who haven't committed aren't holding back because they can't see how Obama would be better than McCain? Shouldn't he be focusing on demonstrating this to them?
While 'foreigners love me' gets him a point or two, I'm not sure that the points he scored because the campaign posed him in front of cheering mobs and shaking hands with foreign leaders were worth the risks he took. We'll have to see.
Maybe a few extremely credulous people will somehow see this as vitiating the 'no experience' argument for McCain. But it seems to me that McCain himself is doing everything possible to demonstrate why his foreign policy experience, such as it is, hasn't led to any special insight, understanding, or credibility. Why not go with that?
The 'Obama dissipates perfume and rainbows wherever he goes' thing has one drawback, which is that he can't ever be caught not doing that.
The cancelled visit to the wounded troops is a case in point.
McCain's 'Obama won't do anything that he can't turn into a photo op' is, on its face, absurd.
Allahpundit at Hot Air, no friend to Dems, points this out. He says that the ad is of a piece (a crude piece) with the ad a few days back designed to pretend that high gas prices are somehow all Obama's fault. And he notes that anyone who believes that might not have any trouble believing that Obama skipped the visit because he wasn't allowed to take cameras.
Allahpundit points out that the premise of the ad ain't consistent with the facts..
Not only does that not fit the facts — he left his pool reporters outside when he visited Walter Reed a few weeks ago, and as I noted last night, his spokesman says the plan at Landstuhl was to keep the press on the plane — but even under the worst assumptions, it makes no sense.
If you think (and I do not) that Obama’s a sociopath who sees wounded soldiers as nothing but political chips to be played in an election card game, surely we can agree that he’s nevertheless savvy enough to grasp how horribly bad it would look to have photographers with him on a hospital visit in the middle of a campaign. If there were pictures on the wires of him shaking hands with bedridden vets while media vultures crowded around for close-ups, conservatives would have ripped him for it properly and mercilessly and he knows it.
Yep. But of course, when you're flinging mud, the only question is whether some of it will stick. I think some of it will. I think it will do its bit to strip the gloss off the 'Obama brings jelly beans, rainbows, and little smiley sun faces to the troops' part of the trip. When you're campaigning on gestures, you can't afford to put a foot wrong (or scratch your head with your middle finger).
Art Levine has the same question I do: given that it's kind of a stupid, bogus smear, how did his campaign not anticipate and preempt it?
Karen Tumulty's account of how this came about makes sense.
As I have heard the campaign's explanations for this decision over the past few days, I am convinced that it came down to something that campaign strategist Robert Gibbs told reporters on the plane: When the campaign learned of the Pentagon's concerns (Wednesday night), they realized that, however they structured the hospital visit, they were going to come in for criticism.
So they had a decision to make, and they had to do it on the fly. Their choice was to take a hit for going (even if it was a private detour from a very public campaign swing, Obama was going to be accused of using wounded troops for political gain), or a hit for not going (the charge would be--and has been--that Obama didn't care about wounded troops).
Whatever---this might indeed be the case. The call they made, whatever the reasons, was the wrong one. The right one, if they even had the option, would have been a quiet, consciously downplayed visit with no reporters, no publicity and minimal discussion. The better one might have been to give the whole show a miss.
The Liberal Journal
focuses on the 'smear,' which is what McCain's ad is. But who wouldn't have foreseen it? The McCain campaign, impotently
tut-tut-tut-tutting over the 'arrogance' of his triumphal tour, and
substance-free but inspiration-packed speech in Berlin, has nothing to lose by it. They aren't going to lose the votes of people who would vote for McCain anyway, and they can reaffirm the image Obama that they've already succeeded in implanting in the minds of the impressionable, raised-on-Madison-avenue public of Obama that he is a shallow, airy Ken doll of a candidate with no skill but the ability to pose in front of a suitable backdrop.
It's not true. He is clearly one of the most intelligent candidates we've had in my lifetime. I don't love him, but I can see how he might be useful to causes I support, which is why I want him and not McCain. I am not looking for a Messiah, but for a sharp-edged precision instrument made of top-grade steel and exemplifying all the latest and most modern technological advances.
Will he be that candidate? Will he? Will he?
Will he leap into the ring and start routinely and with surgical precision taking apart McCain's arguments---the faulty premises, klutzy arguments, and crude inferences---the way they ought to be taken apart? Or will he just leave this to the bloggers?
He doesn't have to be cruel. In his place, I'd adopt a gentle, compassionate, 'I know you and your friends mean well, Grandpa, but you're a bit behind the times. Here are the changed circumstances that will prevent your plan, such as it is, from working.'
I realize that this is risky too---if you get down to cases, the other side can, and will, argue that you're wrong. But he is never going to be as wrong as McCain, this is a risk he can afford. And the benefits are potentially infinite. The benefits of being seen as a formidable opponent (not just a more appealing or glamorous one) are potentially tremendous.
If he is out there fighting for the rights of wounded vets and their families, for vets generally, and for health care for vets, it will be much harder to smear him with the 'doesn't care about wounded vets' smear---just to take one example.
Every hero of song and story eventually has to get down off his high horse and risk himself fighting real dragons.
I realize that none of this is as easy as just trying to ride the flying unicorn all the way to the White House and hope that the dragons will keep quiet till you get there.
But unless he starts making a case for why he's substantively stronger, he's going to be letting down a lot of people who took big risks to back him. He's going to let down Congressional Dems whose constituents have direct and immediate concerns and are looking for reassurance that the government is cared about the same things they are.
And the unicorn's wings will get tired and he'll fall out of the sky and the GOP blight that has laid waste to the land will remain unhealed.
Bloggers react to Allahpundit's piece here.
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Posted by: BJWhite | July 27, 2008 at 02:59 PM