Given the headline, I hadn’t expected something quite so ironic and lightwieght. I don’t mind. I’m a fan or irony myself.
But the headline is serious enough that some things can be said. First, I haven’t heard “peep” out of McCain/Palin about anything in foreign policy besides, “Obama wants to surrender in Iraq and negotiate with terrorists.” Oh, yes, and Sarah Palin can see Russia across the Bering strait.
Your candidates have made the election about “character” and not “issues”. So 9 days from the election is really a fine time for you to trot out that there is a gap in Obama’s approaches to foreign policy. Where were all these McCain foreign policies at the RNC? Yes, I know, “drill, baby, drill.”
Character and not issues. What this essentially means is that you are going to convince people to vote against Obama, rather than for McCain.
The only problem with that is that everybody has been trying to do this since January. In fact, Hillary Clinton lost trying it. Albert Einstein defined insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.
It hasn’t worked.
Sometime when you have a free moment go back through the archives of PJM of the headlines from the RNC forward, You will find that the name Obama appears in them most, Palin is next, and McCain a far distant third.
The downside of constantly trashing Obama, if it doesn’t work, is that you are constantly adding to his celebrity. Obama. Obama. Obama. Over and over.
So people get interested in Obama, and not McCain.
The Obama campaign has produced a highly effective set of ads with nothing but Obama talking straight to the camera. People who see them come away convinced that they know who and what Barack Obama is. Whether that conviction is right or wrong is beside the point. It is there.
And no amount of portentious commercials with scary voiceovers ["Who is Barack Obama?"] is likely to erode that conviction, which seems to those viewers to be based on first hand experience.
And the McCain advertising is, once again, repeating over and over, Obama, Obama, Obama.
If Obama is a celebrity, he has largely been made so by his political opponents, just like Republicans [back when they had more sense] kept putting out the message over and over; Nixon’s the One or I Like Ike.
