Thursday, July 3, 2008

5¢ McShrink Rap

P.M. Carpenter

There are some politicians whom advisers should never permit to run their own campaigns, and John McCain is one of them. Watching him, I get the sense, at times, that he still sees himself as the macho, hotshot naval cadet whose picaresque adventures install him as the truest man among men, which voters are bound to see, acknowledge and swoon over.

Keep thinkin; that way, Johnny me boy. I think yer doin' a wonderful job!

There has always been, and so it remains, only one slim way in which McCain can control his destiny and thereby win this thing: to blast away at Obama with unremitting assaults on his character, his inexperience and his "liberalism" (in anticipation of which, of course, the Obama campaign has already launched a concerted flanking maneuver to the center-right).

But above all, the McCain campaign must blast -- blast anything and everything, go as negative as the almost limitless boundaries of poor taste can take it.

Yet, there may be a problem with this Rove-Schmidtian strategy.

Buried, I sense as well, in McCain's macho-cadet code of manliness is the nagging political anachronism of personal honor: that is, a few hijinks are OK, but a sustained campaign of outright dishonesty -- the very species of fraudulence deployed against him by Bush in 2000 -- is for McCain, perhaps, beyond the pale.

Don't bet on it.

Because, I further sense, even deeper in McCain's psyche is the emotional undercurrent of recognition that he has already lost. So why not go down with a little honor intact?

Very little. I like the rest of that though. A man who thinks he has lost, has.

Just look at McCain; watch him, on the stump, and you see a man almost clinically depressed and already defeated. His performance is so unstintingly morbid, it's as though he just wants to get the inevitable over with.

And if I'm correct, Steve Schmidt is about to encounter a lot of internal flak, guaranteeing yet more campaign confusion, if not more rearrangement of the deck chairs.

McCain has been screwing up so badly that I actually had the thought that he was hired by the Dems so they'd have have someone demonstrably and positively worse than the candidate they thought they were going to have.

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