Following the presidential campaigns leaves me out of breath, mostly because of the sheer boredom of it all and so I forget that breathing part. In any case, McCain has decided to step into the morass in his latest campaign twist:
I note with interest today, John McCain's new tactic of associating Barack Obama with oversexed and/or promiscuous young white women. (See today's new ad and this from yesterday.) Presumably, a la Harold Ford 2006, this will be one of those strategies that will be a matter of deep dispute during the campaign and later treated as transparent and obvious once the campaign is concluded.
But what I'm most interested in today is the new meme the McCain campaign has been pushing for the last few weeks that Obama is presumptuous, arrogant and well ... just a bit uppity. Ron Fournier picked the ball up early in his reporting for the AP. And John King was pushing it over the weekend on CNN. Is it arrogant or above Obama's station for him to meet with the Chairman of the Federal Reserve? If I'm not mistaken he is a sitting United States senator and also the presidential candidate of the Democratic party. Such meetings are actually the norm.
Now, I note that the Post, which has generally been in McCain's camp, has a front page story today that comes about as close as they feel able to confirming that McCain campaign and McCain personally have spent most of the last week peddling what they knew was a lie about Obama's called-off trip to the US military hospital in Landstuhl, Germany. And there's also this piece in today's Times noting 'concern' among some Republicans over McCain's increasing use of personal attacks on Obama with what are often demonstrably false claims. How many demonstrable lies does the McCain campaign have to push before it colors the portrayal of his campaign?
If the disseminators of all this misinformation were wimmin we'd call this stuff "gossip." As in "ignore it, it's just gossip." But because the sources are mostly not wimmin we call all this serious politicking.
Let's talk about shoes, next:
If I were a right-wing blogger, and I found out that Barack Obama was wearing Ferragamo loafers that cost $520, I would spend about 50% of my waking hours making sure everyone knew this. I would mock him for being an out-of-touch elitist and make jokes like, "If you think that's a lot, you should see how much his purse costs "
It's John McCain that wears 520 smackers on his little pink feet in the form of Ferragamo slippers. I swear. But his expensive shoes don't clash with his policies, because those say that the rich should have expensive shoes and no tax payments.
Weird, is it not? If you are openly on the side of the moneyed in the class war, you can have seven or eight houses and nobody writes about those. You can even wear Ruby Slippers and nobody writes about that, either. Instead, you are called a maverick and the last honest man and stuff like that. The question then rises why anyone not born with a silver spoon in their mouth would vote for McCain, but that is another question most journalists don't write about.
Now John Edwards. He spends too much on his haircuts and his house is too big, too. And John Kerry married money. Spot the reason why McCain gets a pass on all this?
Could it be that it's OK if you are a Republican?