The pre-spin for the week has been spun: That John McCain is hitting the "reset" button on his crashing campaign. Like a computer that froze, the spin goes, McCain is rebooting everything, starting today.
Except he's not. All McCain is doing is changing the desktop wallpaper. All he's doing is making a modest style change, as pop-up warnings have melted down his campaign -- "The Program 'Economic Policy' has stopped working; Click Here to Force It To Close..." "Error: Your Campaign Extension File 'Negative Attack' Is Out of Date...." "Warning: Your Preferences File 'Strategy' Has Been Infected With the 'Erratic' Virus..."
No, nothing is changing today, except that McCain is giving a new speech. To wit:
- His campaign argued all weekend about coming out with new policy prescriptions that might help the middle class, and decided against providing any program details that would help America's working families.
- While Senator McCain wants people to think he's turning the page of innuendo and negative smears, just this weekend he refused to say that comparing Barack Obama to Osama bin Laden is beyond the pale. Also, his campaign has done nothing to change the fact that they're running 100 percent negative ads.
- And finally, the speech he is giving today, itself, is just one more bit of evidence of a candidate and campaign flailing around, unable to stick to one strategy, and unable to provide a cogent argument for why the Senator should be President. In fact, it seems that the crux of the speech is McCain arguing that his military service is the reason. And this is a reboot?
A 'reboot' of the campaign would be the Senator announcing that he's dumping his past policy proposals, and introducing an intricate and thought-out policy prescription of America, that he is taking all of his negative ads off the air, forbidding his campaign from bringing up Bill Ayers anymore, and that no matter what, this is what he's sticking with for the final weeks of the campaign, come hell or high water.
Of course, we'll have to see if the media is smart enough to tell the difference between restarting the whole computer and changing the wallpaper from a meadow scene to an underwater scene.