With seven days until Barack Obama likely makes history as the first African American president of the United States, the TV ad wars are in the home stretch. John McCain, out-gunned across the board by Obama's big Internet money, is still pushing the "Joe the Plumber" theme even as he tries to broaden to an argument that Obama is just too dangerous a choice for president.
But he's not going with the Wright Stuff, a rehash of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's seeming anti-American jeremiads played incessantly on cable during the primary, though one 527 committee is trying to stir the embers. And the Bill Ayers attacks are over.
The Bill Ayers stuff has been pushed incessantly by the right-wing blogosphere and talk radio. And now it has fallen flat.
I predicted from the beginning that the Ayers attacks wouldn't work. The connection between the presidential frontrunner and the long ago Weather Undergrounder is far more attenuated than the fervid imaginings of the far right had it. And the issues at hand are so much bigger. Like many of us, I could be linked to be both the far right and the far left if someone wanted to play that silly assocation game about my views. The attacks reflected a non-serious view of politics, much less life.
McCain's campaign attacks against Obama for his attenuated relationship with ex-domestic terrorist Bill Ayers have backfired, according to the Republican-owned Rasmussen poll. The numbers show that only 28% of likely voters felt the attacks hurt Obama, 15% had no opinion one way or another, and a whopping 50% felt the attacks actually hurt McCain!
So Democrats are poised on the verge of an historic, across-the-board victory. Last week, top Republicans told me they expect not only an Obama victory, but also the loss of 5 to 8 seats in the U.S. Senate and 30-plus in the U.S. House of Representatives. And that was before Alaska Senator Ted Stevens -- McCain running mate Sarah Palin was a co-director of his political action committee -- was convicted on multiple counts of political corruption.
The campaign this week is playing out mostly in longtime red states, where Obama is on the offensive. I wrote last week that Obama's national lead was likely to dip last week, then expand again. It didn't dip last week. There are a few signs it is dipping now. But not much.
McCain is trying to win Pennsylvania, a blue state where Obama's notorious San Francisco fundraiser "Bittergate" comments hurt him in the primary against Hillary Clinton. But McCain's not Clinton. He has yet to articulate a credible economic message in times of economic turmoil, falling back repeatedly on the tried and true Republican standby that Obama, like all Democrats in Republican campaigns, is a big tax-and-spender. That won't work in Pennsylvania.
What's he doing in Pennsylvania? Trying desperately to get a blue state takeaway to make up for the red states Obama is taking away from him. I've spent time in Pennslvania, and it won't happen.
Meanwhile, Obama is on the offensive in the Mountain West, which is turning for him as Gary Hart hoped it would turn and anticipated would happen for Democrats 20 years ago.And in the Midwest and selected Southern states, most notably Virginia.
Bill Clinton, incidentally, joins Obama on the campaign trail tomorrow in Florida and perhaps elsewhere.
Team McCain is left to play a mixed game of limited offense and a lot of defense. The McCain themes this week seek to paint Obama as closet socialist and McCain as the best commander-in-chief, with McCain belatedly trying to separate himself from the albatross known as Bush/Cheney.
And a helping of fear about what unquestioned Democratic control of the Presidency, the Senate, and the House would mean. In a bad way, of course.
I keep hearing that Tony Rezko will come into play again, but I haven't seen it.
As you can tell, there is no kill shot in the Republican arsenal.
For all the endless rumor-mongering about Obama as a purported "Manchurian candidate," there is no silver bullet to defeat the vampire that haunts the nightmares of the far right. Reality is dawning. And the ad wars are drawing to a not especially dramatic close.
McCain is separating himself from President Bush and Vice President Cheney, speaking to camera in a new ad about how bad the past eight years have been. But it's extraordinarily late in the game for such positioning. That needed to be done last May, when McCain was cleaving to the extraordinarily unpopular White House incumbents so as to up his then anemic fundraising.
Meanwhile, Obama is closing out the campaign with a mix of positive and negative ads.
On the one hand, the campaign has another hard-hitting ad saying that McCain is out of touch, out of ideas, and running out of time, hitting the veteran Western senator for his halting response to the financial crisis and close ties to Bush.
On the other hand, Obama has an unusual new 2-minute ad in which he speaks directly to camera, telling viewers what he will do to jump-start the American economy.
This gets at the fundamental flaw of efforts to paint Obama as a Manchurian candidate. We've seen so much of him that it is hard to imagine that the dank conspiracy theories about him are any more than the fevered imaginings of paranoids eager to believe the worst about someone with a name and a look quite unlike their own.