The NY Times McCain booster-in-chief op-ed columnist William Kristol calls for the mother of all Hail Marys:
It’s time for John McCain to fire his campaign. 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.
His prescription:
[L]et McCain go back to what he’s been good at in the past – running as a cheerful, open and accessible candidate. Palin should follow suit. The two of them are attractive and competent politicians. They’re happy warriors and good campaigners. Set them free.
Provide total media accessibility on their campaign planes and buses. Kick most of the aides off and send them out to swing states to work for the state coordinators on getting voters to the polls. Keep just a minimal staff to help organize the press conferences McCain and Palin should have at every stop and the TV interviews they should do at every location. Do town halls, do the Sunday TV shows, do talk radio – and invite Obama and Biden to join them in some of these venues, on the ground that more joint appearances might restore civility and substance to the contest.
Of course, he knows that nothing like that is going to happen. McCain has gone way too far down the road he’s on to make the kind of drastic change Kristol is talking about. And Palin is simply not the person Kristol is making her out to be — she is obviously quite happy in “barracuda” mode, and has openly resisted being reined in on certain attack lines that she thinks would be beneficial. In fact, she openly resisted McCain’s prohibition on using Jeremiah Wright in Kristol’s own column, published eight days ago when Kristol thought more aggressive attacks would be a good idea.
Now, apparently, Kristol has completely changed his mind. Eight days ago, on Palin’s desire to use Wright and to “take the gloves off”: “Hockey Mom knows best.” Five days ago: “Character is a legitimate issue…. It’s fair to ask whether Barack Obama is personally trustworthy enough to be president, and the McCain campaign shouldn’t be intimidated from going there.” Today: “[T]he other attacks [i.e., Ayers, Rezko, and everything other than Wright] on Obama just aren’t working. There’s no reason to think they’re suddenly going to.” It’s quite extraordinary for Kristol, having actively encouraged Palin to engage in more aggressive personal attacks only eight days ago, now declares the “failure of the McCain campaign’s attacks on Obama,” and that the campaign, in addition to radically changing strategy, should “pull all the ads – they’re doing no good anyway.”
Poor Bill. He’s lurching from one strategy to another as dramatically as the McCain campaign that he once again claims to know how to save. With friends like that …
And who exactly are these people that Kristol thinks are desperately hoping for an invitation to pilot the McCain campaign? Heck, Palin would quit if she thought she could get away with it.
at the thought of Palin being 100% accessible to the media at all times! I bet SNL would love that move too.
Good post about Kristol’s flip flop.
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p>I disagree with your premise that “nothing like this is going to happen.”
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p>McCain might still have one more Hail Mary in him. Perhaps not Kristol’s, but something.
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p>If a team is behind by 2 touchdowns in Q4, it knows it is likely to lose. However, the handful of comeback victories is almost exclusively among teams that threw Hail Marys, and some mistakes by the other side. If you do that, maybe you have a 5% chance to win. If you don’t, maybe you have a 2% chance.
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p>So I think McC has one more 64-yard heave in him. Thankfully, Obama’s defense is more Asante Samuel than Delta O’Neal.
To track down Bill Ayers and bring him to justice, thus winning the War on Terror.
… at this point will only lead to the asking of questions that they would rather not address. And just when the news cycle grows bored with those questions, the activities of the regular staffers subordinated to the state campaigns will spawn new rounds of questions they would rather not address.
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p>It seems to me that 100% media access, without an event to change the narrative, would only result in more negative exposure. This is complicated by the notion that the staffer activities in the state campaigns could become that new narrative and that ain’t any prettier.
He has the blood of thousands on his hands. No bad thing that will happen to him will be enough to make up for it.
I’ve been reading and hearing various pieces of advice for the McCain campaign from GOP columnists and strategists and I’m left wondering if some of them have totally forgotten how to win an election based upon their own candidate’s merits.
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p>Here Grover Norquist chimes in:
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p>Wait, doesn’t this sounds a lot like the frame that McCain will be W’s third term? A strategy rooted in negating a frame that is already well established – good luck with that. Even if that weren’t the case, it seems a stretch to try to tie a candidate of the opposing party to the incumbent’s record.
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p>Newt follows up in the same article:
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p>Um, this is the bill over which McCain “suspended” his campaign. The one for which he claimed credit before the House even voted (when they voted it down). The one he and Obama eventually voted for in its Senate version.
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p>More from Newt:
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p>Tax cuts for people with enough money to buy stocks! Why didn’t anyone else think of that? What outside-the-box thinking!
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p>Don’t misinterpret my sarcasm for cockiness. McCain could still win this thing, but he’s going to have to find some better advice I think.
As McCains campaign has gotten more and more strident in its attacks against Obama, his crowds have become less and less mainstream. His campaign has allowed the lunatic fringe to become incited…and exposed. This has made for some very embarrassing news video.
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p>The Republican brand, as we know, is already damaged. However, many forms of Republican life have succeeded in distancing themselves from the brand, including right wing conservatives.
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p>When the general public sees a bigot holding a monkey with an Obama sticker on it on CBS news, they arent thinking “that wacky republican”, they are thinking “what a right wing whack job”.
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p>Bill Kristol has to protect his own brand, that of a right wing conservative, its the only thing he has left.