Bill Kristol To McCain: Fire Your Campaign
By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Bad Decisions, McCain, Palin, Partisan Hacks, Partisan Nonsense
The slo-mo implosion continues…
He has nothing to lose. His campaign is totally overmatched by Obama’s. The Obama team is well organized, flush with resources, and the candidate and the campaign are in sync. The McCain campaign, once merely problematic, is now close to being out-and-out dysfunctional. Its combination of strategic incoherence and operational incompetence has become toxic. If the race continues over the next three weeks to be a conventional one, McCain is doomed. [...]But I’m not convinced by such claims of inevitability. McCain isn’t Bush. The media isn’t all-powerful. And the economic crisis still presents an opportunity to show leadership. [...]
What McCain needs to do is junk the whole thing and start over. Shut down the rapid responses, end the frantic e-mails, bench the spinning surrogates, stop putting up new TV and Internet ads every minute. In fact, pull all the ads — they’re doing no good anyway. Use that money for televised town halls and half-hour addresses in prime time.
Yeah, that’ll do it. Because McCain got such a good response from his only televised town hall meeting so far in prime time.
Also, firing everybody is exactly the type of leadership Americans are looking for in a time of crisis. That won’t make McCain seem more erratic at all.
No, the biggest problem here is that McCain simply isn’t a very good presidential candidate and Obama could turn out to be one of the best in history.
Oh, and there’s the fact that he supported the decisions of one of the worst presidents in modern times over 95% of the time.
Also, no amount of “straight talk” can change the fact that he chose a, unethical, uncertain disaster for a VP nominee. And don’t discount the impact of Palin on the independents and moderates. Poll after poll have shown that those voters are saying “no way” to McCain’s celebrity pick, especially white women.
In the end, what this temper tantrum is really about is Bill Kristol trying to play CYA. Because let’s remember that he urged McCain (via Palin) last week to hit Obama with Rev. Wright and hit him stronger with Ayers. And now he’s backing away because they didn’t do it correctly?
You know Bill, maybe the reason the attacks didn’t work is because their messages were thin, dumb and completely unimportant to voters. You know, like most of your columns.
This entry was posted on Monday, October 13th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Bad Decisions, McCain, Palin, Partisan Hacks, Partisan Nonsense. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
October 13th, 2008 at 7:44 am
Usually I only comment when I disagree, so I now do an about face and say I liked this column and agree, and even better; I hadn’t thought of most of your points when I read BK’s column, but you convinced me.
October 13th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Yes, Kristol’s article was a bit of CYA, but in my opinion, it’s something else, too: he’d caught wind of the news of McCain’s new “campaign reboot” and called for it before it became public.
So tomorrow, or sometime later this week, he can come off as both astute and influential and can crow about it.
October 13th, 2008 at 1:27 pm
McCain: OK. Let’s see… CTRL+ALT… hmmm hmmmm where’s that? OH! DEL!
2 minutes later…
McCain: Ohhhhh it’s not working. These damn computers. Sarah. Sarah! Can you help me reboot this thing?
Palin: Gee-darn. I just got back into my yahoo. Maybe. Have you tried CTRL+ALT+DEL?
McCain: Of course, you bat-brain!
Palin: I thought Apple was easier to use?
McCain: Try unplugging it. *GASP* It runs without electricity?! We have to make cars like this!!! THIS IS IT!!! We can WIN THIS! Call Bill Gates. We need to know how he made this Macintosh run without the electric!