Today’s 9/11 commemorations have created a temporary lull in the McCain campaign’s Fall Offensive of whining about the alleged victimization of Sarah Palin and smearing Barack Obama with tactics that might embarass Karl Rove (if it weren’t his own proteges directing the whole effort). And the Offensive is now so over-the-top that even some conservatives are having second thoughts about it.
Over at National Review’s The Corner blog yesterday, Kathryn Jean Lopez, usually among the most reliable cheerleaders for the ideological and party Cause, expressed unhappiness over the Victim Card, recalling that Palin herself hadn’t liked what she called the “perceived whine” over media sexism by Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Lopez’ piece concludes with this interesting prophecy:

[B]efore this election is over, some 25-year-old press aide, or political ally, or candidate is going to innocently refer to the Obama campaign with the phrase “the pot calling the kettle black.” And if GOP complaints about Democrat sexism continue, by then we’ll have lost the moral high ground in the whining wars.

Later in the day, at the same site, Ramesh Ponnuru echoed Lopez’ revulsion:

[T]he Republicans are coming across as whiny grievance-mongers. Don’t they realize that this harping on ambiguous slights is what people hate about political correctness?

On the other hand, there seemed to be no particular concern at The Corner about Team McCain’s broader campaign of substance-free smears against Obama. But to his credit, Ross Douthat, as enthusiastic a Palin booster as you can find, thought the “lipstick” and “sex-ed” ads went over the line and showed weakness rather than strength:

[T]he sex-ed ad…feels more appropriate to a failing, flailing right-wing campaign than a confident, rising conservative ticket….
And even if aspects of the sex-ed claim are technically defensible, the whole thing just feels bullshitty and gross – like a parody of a culture-war ad. I have no problem with campaigning on culture war issues, and God knows Obama has vulnerabilities, but there’s a right way and a wrong way to do it, and this ad falls into the second category.

Since there’s no particular reason to expect the McCain-Palin campaign to clean up its act anytime soon, it will be interesting to see if Whine-and-Smear continues to draw occasional expressions of conservative regret.

One of the more annoying facets of the Cult of Palin that’s been erected over the last two weeks has been the interminable whining by the McCain campaign and the entire conservative commentariat over the alleged “personal attacks” on the vice presidential nominee. Sure, some Democrats and some media observers challenged her qualifications for the high office, but that’s no more “personal” than the identical criticism we would have heard from Republicans had Obama chosen, say, Tim Kaine or Kathleen Sebelius as his running-mate–or for that matter, the identical criticism of Obama’s own credentials. But as part of their longstanding effort to tie the “elitist” Obama to the “elitist” media, Team McCain and its own media allies have artfully filled the airwaves with charges that Democrats and “the liberal media” have sneered at Sarah Palin, her family, her home town, her religion, and–in an unfamiliar pose for conservatives–her gender.
In a Washington Post column today, Michael Kinsley rightly describes the whole thing as a fraud, calling out David Brooks and Bill Kristol by name for making the plenary “elitist snob” charge based on nothing more than random comments by Bill Maher and Marty Peretz, hardly opinion-leaders in the “liberal media” and far from spokesmen for Barack Obama.
This effort to make Gov. Palin some sort of St. Joan of the Tundra being persecuted for her family and faith is especially galling at a time when the McCain campaign, right out in public and with the candidate’s own stamp of approval, is taking a very low road in its attacks on Barack Obama. The latest despicable ad charges him with wanting to subject toddlers to “comprehensive sex education,” referring to Obama’s suggestion that children be taught how to avoid sexual predators.
This ad was the McCain campaign’s response to a wonky Obama speech on education, in which the Democratic nominee belied conservative attacks on him as the captive of teachers unions and bureaucrats by calling for an expansion of charter schools and the institution of merit pay for teachers.
Next time a Republican politician or pundit waxes indignant about imaginary smears against Sarah Palin, he or she should be asked about that McCain ad and others like it. As the Good Book would put it, they have beams in their eyes.
UPCATEGORY: Democratic Strategist

Third Way and Greenberg Quinlan Rosner have recently conducted a survey of public attitudes on national security issues that should be a bright red blinking light for Democrats.
The bad news is that the ancient “credibility gap” between Ds and Rs on national security issues has reemerged during this presidential campaign. The good news is that is can be reduced or erased if Democrats continue to show they are willing to use military force when necessary, support the military in its essential roles, and have a “smart but tough” strategy for defending the country. And the present opportunity for Democrats is that Americans are open to the argument that Republicans, including John McCain, have “reckless” views on national security issues. Here’s the key paragraph from the study:

As suggested by the most effective political ads from the past—from the “daisy ad” against Barry Goldwater, to the ads showing images of Michael Dukakis in a tank—the central question when it comes to national security is usually “which party represents the greater risk?” To change the historic perceptions about Democrats and Republicans for the first time since Vietnam, Democrats must win that argument. They must prove that they are just as tough as Republicans—unblinking in their willingness to use every tool at their disposal, including force, to protect the country. But now Democrats also have an opportunity to prove that Republicans pose a greater risk on security by defining their own approach as smart and contrasting the approach of Bush-era Republicans as reckless and out of touch.

In the end, this issue represents a subset, and perhaps the most important subset, of the election’s key question: at a time when Americans are very unhappy with their governance, who offers the best chance for “responsible” change: the supposedly “mavericky” Republican ticket that actually maintains the domestic and national security policies of the current administration? Or Democrats who have learned the key lessons about their own past political weaknesses, and the real-life failures of the GOP?

It took me a while to read it, but Mark Schmitt’s meditation on the Republican National Convention at the American Prospect site nicely captured the essence of the McCain-Palin campaign, as reflected in McCain’s own acceptance speech:

[B]y stripping away in embarrassment all aspects of his own party, by declaring independence without new ideology, and allegiance to nothing but a self-defined notion of “Country First,” it was McCain who was left standing alone, the raw individual, resting everything on his own story, his own honor, his own instincts. It was a far bigger claim than the man or his speech could deliver.

I’d note that McCain has added Sarah Palin’s “own story, [her] own honor, [her] own instincts” to the rationale for the GOP ticket, but that’s exactly why her selection represented a doubling-down of McCain’s strategic gamble of posing as a “maverick” while championing Bush policies, not some audacious history-making tilt to the center. Picking Palin guaranteed him among conservative activists all the slack he needed to say and do whatever he needed to get elected. It was an added bonus that Palin herself is perhaps even more adept than her running-mate at using her “story” to disguise her actual views, which wouldn’t command more than a small minority of voters if put to a direct test.

The headline from Jonathan Martin and Jim VandeHei of The Politico says it all: “McCain, Palin push biography, not issues.”

When John McCain’s campaign manager said last week that this presidential election “is not about issues,” it wasn’t a Freudian slip. It was an unvarnished preview of McCain’s new campaign plan.
In the past week, McCain — with new running mate Sarah Palin always close by his side — has transformed the Republican campaign narrative into what amounts to a running biography of this new political odd couple.
In the duo’s new stump speech and their first post-convention ad, the impression campaign strategists hope to leave is unmistakable. McCain is the war hero. Palin is the Every­mom. And together, they will rattle Washington.
Considering the big challenges the country faces — two wars and a wobbly economy, for starters — the focus on personal narratives might strike some as jarringly superficial for the times.

Well, you go to war with the candidates you’ve got, and the McCain-Palin ticket has no policy ideas other than those which are identified with the Bush-Cheney administration and/or the right wing of the Republican Party. I’m reminded of a comment that William F. Buckley once made about a photo-laden biography of his political nemesis, New York Mayor John Lindsay: “If I were commissioned to write a favorable biography of Lindsay, it would consist entirely of photographs.”
There’s a school of thought, particularly strong among Democrats, that says issues “don’t matter” in presidential elections; that it’s all about character, and narrative, and striking the right emotional chords. We are often told that Al Gore and John Kerry lost because they didn’t understand this “truth.”
I don’t buy it, especially this year. Sure, elections are not public policy seminars; many voters are unversed on policy, and/or don’t trust that politicians will do what they promise when in office; and the majority of voters have made up their minds on party ID grounds before any debate on issues occurs. But voters do have concrete concerns that are connected to specific needs, for themselves and their country, and specific grievances about the performance of those in power today. It need not be an exercise in sterile wonkery to point out, for example, that John McCain’s health care plan is a carbon-copy of Bush’s most recent proposal, that would undermine job-based health insurance, drive millions of Americans into expensive individual policies, and make it even harder than it already is for people with pre-existing conditions to get coverage. This argument can and should be made with passion and even anger. But it needs to be made, against the effort by Team McCain to get across the finish line without discussing or defending what the man might actually do as president. (The debates will be a high hurdle for this effort).
Bring on the passionate wonkery, the compelling talking points, the policy debates wrapped in narrative and the needs of “real people!” To a remarkable degree, the Republican ticket is ceding the whole vast ground of America’s future agenda to Democrats. Let’s use it.

Our staff post earlier today cited a Tom Toles cartoon as perfectly expressing the absurd “maverick” message of the Republican National Convention.
Barack Obama apparently thought so, too; he quoted much of the cartoon’s script on two occasions today. But he should have gone on to say that the real cartoon is the McCain-Palin ad claiming the ticket as “original mavericks” who are devoted to fighting Republicans and corporate interests. It would have been more credible if Daffy Duck had narrated.

This isn’t important in the larger scheme of things, but as a longtime convention worker, I did want to comment on the strange technical difficulties that seem to have bedevilled some of the biggest speeches at the Republican Convention.
Yesterday we were informed that Sarah Palin had to fight a runaway teleprompter that didn’t pause for applause during her speech. The article on the subject cited “new equipment” as a problem (can’t imagine why they’d want to debut it during this particular speech), so maybe the GOPers were using some novel automated ‘prompter. The kind of teleprompters used in Denver, and so far as I know, everywhere in the past, are scrolled mechanically by an operator who closely follows the pace of the speaker. Moreover, in Denver a staffer was always on the podium with a hard copy of every speech, ready to run it to the lecturn if there are ‘prompter issues (that’s what happened briefly with Gov. Ted Strickland). Palin apparently had to rely on an older version of her speech that a campaign staffer happened to have in his coat pocket.
It’s to Palin’s credit that these problems didn’t affect her delivery; indeed, one of her signature lines, about hockey moms being pit bulls with lipstick, was reportedly ad libbed when some sign blocked her sight lines to the ‘prompter.
John McCain also appeared to have struggled with his teleprompter, though it’s not clear whether he had the same issues as Palin, or just hasn’t overcome his longstanding aversion to the technology. As I can tell you from countless rehearsals, some speakers simply can’t master the use of side-prompters, those transparent plates at the podium that many viewers mistake for bullet-proof glass shields. In shorter speeches, we always advise them to stick to the center ‘prompter, the giant screen at the back of the hall, and not worry about turning from side to side. But that gets pretty tedious-looking in a long speech like McCain’s.
‘Prompters aside, a lot of bloggers are having great sport today discussing some of the weird backdrops during McCain’s speech: first of all, a field of grass that in a narrow-frame shot looked just like the infamous “green screen” that drew so much mockery in an earlier Big Speech by McCain; and then, a photo of a North Hollywood middle school that appeared for no obvious reason, and that was apparently used in a West Wing episode.
Beyond production values and podium mechanics, I wondered several times during the Republican Convention about its speechwriting/vetting/rehearsal system. While some speeches were very good (Palin’s, Giuliani’s, and Huckabee’s, by most accounts), and others erratic but at some points effective (arguably McCain’s) there were an unusual number of poorly written and delivered speeches, not just in the bipartisan convention tradition of endless “message” redundancy, but in terms of grammer, coherence, and minimal oratorical competence. Hawaii Gov. Linda Lingle’s Wednesday speech, just before Rudy Giuliani’s successful attack-fest, was one of the worst written and delivered convention addresses I’ve ever watched or heard. She paused for applause after virtually every line, and often had to wait a while for it. Democratic speakers are always advised to forget about applause unless it’s thunderous, since television understates ovations. It really did look like Lingle hadn’t rehearsed at all, and that no one with much of an ear had reviewed her text.
There’s a lot of talk today that McCain’s acceptance speech showed signs of massive overworking, with the emotional power of the Mark Salter ending vitiated by the long, boring policy iteration that preceded it. But in addition, I noticed one very simple speechwriting error: in a relatively long and key passage comparing his views to those of Barack Obama, McCain began with his talking point and then rushed into his construction of Obama’s position, eliciting, predictably, a “boo” from the audience. Had he reversed the order, each graph would have elicited a cheer. And that’s what you want when you’re trying to sound like a post-partisan “maverick” who’s fighting “politics as usual.”
Again, none of this stuff matters much in the long run. But it’s worth noting for Democrats who chronically fear that bad as Republicans are at governing, they’re flawless at politics.

John McCain’s acceptance speech last night really did return his campaign to the same Square One it occupied when he nailed down the Republican presidential nomination so many months ago: a candidate with highly conventional Bushian policy positions on almost every issue, but who asks Americans to accept him as a “maverick” and a “reformer” based on the character forged by his horrific experience as a POW, as evidenced by a few heresies against party that he has largely since foresworn.
The most revealing detail of the speech was that for all the talk about serving country rather than party, and of wanting above all to clean up Washington, the only specific criticism of Republicans McCain could bring himself to make was one from the Right: that GOPers of the DeLay/Bush era came to power, forgot their conservative principles, and spent too much money. While true, the criticism isn’t very comforting to the majority of Americans who would now like their federal government to do more, not less, to deal with a variety of big national challenges, particularly coming from a candidate whose tax cut and defense spending promises would guarantee huge structural budget deficits for a long, long time.
Thus, his plea to swing votes last night to trust that he won’t represent “more of the same” came down almost entirely to his POW experience, which he did indeed talk about in an unusually raw and powerful way. To his credit, he tried to avoid the suggestion that Americans should award him the presidency as thanks for his personal sacrifices. His central argument was that his sufferings in the Hanoi Hilton freed him forever from allegiance to any cause other than country. But that claim runs up against the inconvenient reality that he wasn’t much of a “maverick” in Congress until he ran for president in 2000 against the candidate of the Republican establishment, and hasn’t shown any “maverick” tendencies at all since deciding to run for president a second time.
That’s why the balance of the McCain-Palin campaign is almost certainly going to resemble Wednesday night’s “message” more than last night’s: relentless attacks on Barack Obama. In close general election races, if you can’t occupy the “center” with your policy positions, the next best thing is to push your opponent out by describing him or her as extremist, or as fundamentally untrustworthy–a strategy that has the added benefit of making your own party base very happy. For all the “maverick” self-labeling by McCain and Palin during this convention, the very conventional attack politics of Karl Rove and company is where they are heading between now and election day.

Well, it took a while, but the Republican National Convention sure woke up last night, inspired by Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin into a howling, sneering, fist-shaking state of rage at the temerity of Barack Obama in offering himself for the presidency.
National political convention delegates of either party, heavily weighted with activists, always love red meat and whine or sit sullenly when they are deprived of it. But I witnessed nothing in Denver, not even during Brian Schweitzer’s stemwinder, that resembled the reaction to Giuliani and Palin. Feral roars greeted every thrust at Obama. At one point, delegates anticipating Palin’s pre-leaked shot at Obama’s community organizer background made so much noise that she struggled to get the line out. Since television tends to understate crowd noise, I can only imagine what it actually felt like down on the floor. These people are really furious and contemptuously dismissive about Barack Obama in a way that significantly exceeds Democrats’ antipathy towards John McCain. And you got the sense that they cheered (much more mildly) the positive lines about McCain’s supposed “reform” and “maverick” credentials as little more than the essential framing necessary to make invidious comparisons to Obama.
The big question is whether the attitude towards the Democratic nominee we saw expressed from the podium and the floor last night is communicable beyond the ranks of the party faithful.
Throughout Giuliani’s speech, I kept thinking, as a sometimes speechwriting professional: “He really needs to dial this down; he’s overdoing it.” Like the late comedian Red Skelton, Rudy was so cracked up by his own snarky humor that he interrupted his lines repeatedly to chortle at himself, and at the unbelievable thought that anyone could consider Obama qualified for the presidency. Giuliani’s always struggled with the perception that he’s at bottom a gloating bully who lives to humiliate his many enemies, and his performance last night may well have been undercut by his manner. More practically, his self-indulgence at the podium forced the cancellation of a biographical video about Palin, which might have tilted the balance of her presentation in a more positive direction.
As for Palin herself, no question, she’s passed her first big test, as most everyone anticipated. Her rapturous reception from the floor would have happened even if she had read the delegates the Minneapolis-St. Paul phone book, thanks to the strong belief among conservative activists that her selection represented a major victory in their struggle to control the GOP. But she delivered her lines well, and showed an impressive ability to keep smiling as she savaged Obama and excoriated the shadowy demons of “Washington.” Some people I know think her voice is grating, and while she did occasionally sound like she was channeling Frances McDormand’s character in Fargo (“You Betcha!”), maybe that will attract some votes right there in Minnesota.
But as with the whole evening, Palin’s performance must ultimately be judged by reactions outside the arena. At least two focus groups of persuadable women convened by Stan and Anna Greenberg reportedly showed a mixed response, with some viewers uncomfortable with Palin’s “mudslinging” towards Obama and still unconvinced of her own qualifications for high office.
Up until now I’ve been discussing these speeches in terms of style and tone. But it’s the substance, or lack thereof, that will now begin to get some serious scrutiny.
The Obama campaign quickly got out a very thorough truth-squad piece on the various attack lines deployed by Palin. Suffice it to say that those lines spanned the spectrum from light snarky jibes to distortions of Obama’s record and views, to bold-faced lies. Palin’s already getting hammered near and far for her fully rebuttable claim that she fought the “Bridge to Nowhere,” and to a lesser extent, for her naked pander to the parents of special-needs children (not the best appeal to make explicitly, given her record in Alaska). But more important in the long run are the assertions both she and Giuliani made about Obama’s lack of legislative accomplishments (much of the Obama truth-squad document is composed of a long list of these), and the gross mischaracterization of his tax proposals, which would actually cut taxes for families earning less than $250,000.
On a much broader front, the speeches we’ve heard in St. Paul are remarkable for how little they’ve involved discussions of policy, particularly on the economy. In Palin’s speech, oil drilling and the ancient totemic appeal to the magical properties of tax cuts were the only prescriptions offered for the U.S. economy. Health care? Not a word. The housing crisis? Ditto. Income inequality? Nada, or, to use the word chanted by delegates during Rudy’s attacks on Obama’s record, “zero.” As for foreign policy, the main thrust of the entire Republican Convention has been the dubious claim, unshared by a majority of Americans, that we are on the brink of total victory in Iraq, unless Obama takes office and continues the troop withdrawals that both Iraqi and U.S. leaders are already undertaking.
Finally, the entire “maverick” and “reform” and “change” mantras of the GOP convention, which we’ll hear a lot more about in McCain’s own speech tonight, are astonishingly audacious. You’d never, ever know from last night’s speeches that John McCain and Sarah Palin represent the incumbent party in the White House, the party that’s largely controlled “Washington” for the last eight years (and in Congress, until 2006, much longer than that), or that both of them support virtually all of George W. Bush’s domestic and international policies.
In the end, the Obama campaign’s big challenge now is to rebut the lies and slurs about his own record and views; expose the pattern of evasion and deception about the McCain-Palin ticket’s relationship to a deeply unpopular GOP; and get the contest refocused on issues, particularly the economy. Those delegates last night were undoubtedly “energized” by the Giuliani-Palin show, but they only get to vote once in November. It’s their friends and neighbors on the fence that matter now.