Opinion: John McCain camp’s ‘weapons of mass distraction’ get waylaid
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Shortly after political operative Steve Schmidt took firm control of John McCain’s presidential quest in early July, he and his fellow message maestros more often than not took control of the campaign’s daily dialogue.
They mocked Barack Obama as something akin to a shallow celebrity, they made fun of him as ‘The One,’ they rocked him on his heels by charging that his ‘lipstick on a pig’ crack was a barb directed at Sarah Palin.
Sometimes, however, the ‘facts on the ground’ overwhelm the efforts of even the most talented message machine to have its way. Such has been the case over the last week or so, as so many mainstays of the nation’s financial foundation have floundered.
Evidence of the changed circumstance was vividly provided Monday, as neatly summarized by the astute observers who crank out MSNBC’s daily political note. Here’s what they noted:
Those Pigs Didn’t Oink: Notice how the McCain campaign tried to change the subject yesterday? It cut its first Tony Rezko ad, which tied Obama to the “corrupt Chicago machine”; it angrily denounced the New York Times on a conference call with reporters; and it brought up Obama’s tenuous ties to ‘60s radical William Ayers on that same conference call. But unlike two weeks ago, when the McCain camp’s “lipstick on a pig” and “sex-ed for kindergarteners” TV ad dominated the political discussion, those weapons of mass distraction got very little attention yesterday. The economy and the current Wall Street crisis have become THE story, and nothing right now is going to stop that. ...
The unanswerable question, of course, is whether this will last through election day.
-- Don Frederick