Where Have You Gone, John?

In the middle of John McCain's dopey Britney & Paris attack ad, the announcer gravely asks of Barack Obama: "Is He Ready to Lead?" An equally good question is whether McCain is ready to lead. For a man who will turn 72 this month, he's a surprisingly immature politician--erratic, impulsive and subject to peer pressure from the last knucklehead who offers him advice. The youthful insouciance that for many years has helped McCain charm reporters like me is now channeled into an ad that one GOP strategist labeled "juvenile," another termed "childish" and McCain's own mother called "stupid." The Obama campaign's new mantra is that McCain is "an honorable man running a dishonorable campaign." Lame is more like it. And out of sync with the real guy.

Of course, it might work. Maybe depicting Obama as a presumptuous and vaguely foreign presence will resonate. (Why else would one of McCain's slogans be "An American president for America"?) Maybe voters will agree with McCain campaign manager Rick Davis, who played the fussy card last week by arguing the central importance to the future of the republic of Obama's taste for "MET-Rx chocolate roasted peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew called Black Forest Berry Honest Tea." (Davis somehow forgot to mention McCain's own preference for $520 Ferragamo shoes.) Maybe convincing nervous white voters that Obama is another Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson in his use of racial grievance politics will carry McCain to the White House.

But this is not 1988, when Vice President George Bush turned Michael Dukakis into an unpatriotic coddler of criminals. (Bush that year had a popular president and a strong economy behind him.) And it's not 2004, when his son Swift-Boated John Kerry. (The president would have likely won anyway by playing on post-9/11 fear.) This year, McCain is running under a tattered Republican banner, with more than 80 percent of the public thinking the country is on the wrong track. Without some compelling vision beyond support for offshore drilling, the negativity may well boomerang. "It's hard to imagine America responding to 'small ball' when we have all these problems," says John Weaver, McCain's chief strategist in 2000 who was pushed out of the campaign last year.

To Read More, go to Newsweek.com.

Comments

[realpolitic]

Reporters keep insisting that McCain is better than his campaign- maybe he is not.

[nomobull]

he never existed except in the biased msm

[certainot]

the talk radio monopoly determins the media flavor of America and has been doing it for years. that is where the groundwork for GOP swiftboating of progressive candidates and causes is done. as long as progressive can't even see the invisible 2x4 of talk radio, of course the swiftboating and mudslinging can work.

[Rosey]

McBush is not ready to lead.... he thinks Czechoslovakia is still a country....cannot tell what countries border Iraq.....has to have GI Joe Lieberman correct him on who is terrorizing whom.... admits the economy is not this thing and thinks people will respond to ads with heirhead Paris and wacky Britney will turn folks off to Obama.... Clearly McBush is not Presidential material.

[CitizenE]

The same question was asked about Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld. The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind backstage in Oz. This is where these guys have always been, and it's time for those on the left to stop portraying them as once honorable, America loving pols, and call them out for the disaster of decades of their tearing down the body politic to keep their grubby fingers on the buttons of power.

[flrbase1]

Imagine if we had a national primary, who would have won? Senator Clinton of course. Because she knew how to fight a nasty campaign by slinging the mud right back. I support Barack and HOPE he wins but if Americans Really wanted change, McCain would be behind by double digits.

[booker52]

McCain is running a soiled campaign, a bad campaign. McCain is behind and it shows. Will he be the candidate after the GOP convention in August?? I doubt it.

[NYprairiedog]

Isn't one of the signs of senility a regression to childlike behavior? I am disgusted by the campaign the McCain gang are running. After 7 1/2 years of stupid in the White House, we're in desperate need of some smart and that sure ain't McCain!

[Ozarks]

Why else would one of McCain's slogans be "An American president for America"? Funny, Since McCain was born in Panama

[rhondadavis28]

In addition to the irascibility, stumbling and forgetfulness, understandable in a man of 71, there seems to be a sense of entitlement, tinged or fueled by prejudice against a young upstart, who is also GREAT post...repeating it...


African-American. Sen. McCain, at his core, a conservative, at a time when conservatives are viewed as incompetent ideologues, who cannot be trusted with power. Aside from using racially coded terms and images, he has no possibility of winning
His braggadocio surely exceeds Sen. Obama's "presumptuousness," a codeword for "uppity." How could a man who never led anything larger than a peacetime squadron, know how to win a war?
His past is full of reversals which question his integrity: what did he really believe about the Confederate flag? How much did he compromise over the use of torture by our government, not just by the military?
Examining Sen. McCain's record does not lead me to believe that he is "out of sync with the real guy," rather the public is getting to know more about the real guy, only now.

[DaOne]

off the deep end, that's where he's gone.

[luvangelHussein330]

PREACH ON BROTHER!!

[LaFilleEnRose]

Yeah, I've been hoping the Obama team would start helping to define him, instead of the reverse. Ads like "the real John McCain" or "the McCain you knew" etc. to focus on him and who he was and who he's become. The anti-Bush who embraced Bush. Leaving him to coast on his war hero laurels and Maverick status that is sadly gone isn't despicable politics but truth telling.

[edelmira]

Jonathan Alter is right on target when it comes to John McCain's "lame" campaign", but I need to add that the biggest problem is that McCain has no policy direction, no weltanschauung, no philosophical insights into the country's standing in the world, HE JUST WANTS TO WIN A CAMPAIGN. He is an average thinker with mean tacticians working for him; paid hired guns who can think os sarcastic clever ads. This is nothing to America.

[pfc1369]

Enough of this "real guy" crap!

We're seeing the real guy now!