Senator John McCain's campaign has been slinging lots of mud at Obama. In the end, though, it should be careful; it might just get dirty itself.
Okay, I'm ready to go hard and deep. This campaign has become nasty enough that, for the next four weeks, I'm willing to lean hard left and fight dirty, if necessary.
I mean, come on: John McCain -- the self-proclaimed maverick and believer in All Truth, All The Time -- has become a win-at-any-cost sleaze-monger. First, he insults the intelligence of the American people by choosing a rank amateur as his vice-presidential running mate. Then, he starts spreading -- with a straight face -- all kinds of untruths about Barack Obama, such as his record on taxes and his "plan" to raise taxes on most voters. And now, we're told that he has unleashed Steve Schmidt and his Rovian political destroyers to bring down Obama no matter what, instead of building up McCain.
I've lost the respect I had built up over the years for John McCain -- for his stands on campaign finance reform, on the Bush administration's overspending and on the torture issue. Even though I know Obama is far from perfect, for me, McCain has shown himself to be too much of a slave to the attack dogs. It is time to take the gloves off.
Obama, a Garden-Variety Politician?
As many in the McCain camp have pointed out, Obama is more of a garden-variety politician, Chicago-style, than one would have guessed from his high-flown rhetoric. But let’s analyze the garden-variety way he’s gone about trying to win this election. While inspiring the inspirable, he has built a political organization on the ground -- especially through the Internet -- that this country (this world!) has never seen before. Not only does it arouse the faithful and the enthusiastic; it also generates a wave of online financial donations that, no matter how small, tend to bind the donor to the candidate emotionally. The combination of Obama’s high-flown rhetoric and his proximity to the voters through the Internet (I get an e-mail every day from Barack that begins with the address “Peter”) does more than charge them up to vote for him on November 4. It makes them feel connected to something larger -- a “movement,” as Obama’s fund-raising machine still calls it -- that will last beyond Election Day.
Obama has, in effect, created an alternative Democratic Party. Even if he loses in November, the Democratic Party will never be the same. And if he wins -- and if Democrats succeed in winning 60 seats in the U.S. Senate -- this reshaped party will have the potential to do more than just transfer White House power to Democrats. It will be in a better position to implement fundamental reform than any administration since perhaps Franklin Roosevelt’s first term beginning in 1933.
The gathering momentum of the global financial crisis makes the need for fundamental change seem more palpable to more people. That’s why Obama’s poll numbers have soared in the last 10 days. If the election were held today, Obama would win. To win four weeks from now, he needs to sustain his momentum and not make any bad mistakes.
The Onslaught of the McCain Machine
Still, there are plenty of pitfalls in his way. The immediate ones will be McCain’s attempts to tie Obama to some shady characters in his past, including Rev. Jeremiah Wright (“God damn America!”), former Weatherman terrorist William Ayers and convicted real estate mogul Antoin "Tony" Rezko. For a man with long-term political ambitions, Obama made some dumb rookie errors by allowing himself to be connected with any of these three, and he’d better have some good explanations for why. His association with the former Weatherman is thin and meaningless, as the New York Times explained a few days ago. But the other two are worse. The 20-year, close personal association with Wright -- who spewed too much anti-American, anti-white and anti-Jewish rhetoric over the years for Obama not to have known about it -- is the most troubling. My advice would be for Obama to do a full mea culpa, bigger and deeper than the one he did in April.
The onslaught from the McCain machine will become a test of character for Obama. He needs to weather it with dignity and restraint and, where possible, let the McCain campaign sully itself with its own mud. He can leave the hard and dirty stuff to others, like bloggers and even the mainstream media. Today’s detailed, straightforward, full-page story in the Washington Post on McCain’s two marriages goes straight to that issue: It shows how McCain not only cheated on the wife who stayed loyal throughout his years in a Vietnamese prison, but also got a license to marry his present wife, Cindy Hensley, four weeks before his divorce from his first wife, Carol Shepp, was finalized. "This rapid-fire sequence of events raises a question about John McCain’s path to the White House: Would he be where he is today had he not changed his life, and his wife, when he did?"
Whooeee! Nasty stuff. But that’s where this campaign is today.
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