Informed Speculation

I’m not going to get bogged down in petty crap like this, but this is pretty pathetic.  You probably know by now that a radio talk show host, Bill Cunningham, kicked off a McCain rally the other day with an inappropriate diatribe against Barack Obama that repeatedly stressed his middle name of “Hussein”.  It was a blatant smear tactic, and McCain immediately and unequivocably apologized for it, said it was completely inappropriate, and promised he’d do his best to make sure it didn’t happen again.  Obama’s camp graciously accepted the apology and said it was a hopeful sign for a civil general election.

That’s not good enough for award-winning lefty heavyweight Josh Marshall:

Hopefully, everyone can now see the McCain strategy for running against Barack Obama. Yes, we have some general points on taxes, culture wars and McCain as war hero who can protect us in ways that flash-in-the-pan pretty boy Barack Obama can’t.

But that’s not the core. The core is to drill a handful of key adjectives into the public mind about Barack Obama: Muslim, anti-American, BLACK, terrorist, Arab. Maybe a little hustler and shifty thrown in, but we’ll have to see. The details and specific arguments are sort of beside the point. They’re like the libretto in a Wagner opera, nice for some narrative structure. But it’s the score that’s the real essence of it, the point of the whole exercise.

Now, a good deal has been made out of John McCain’s repudiation of talk radio yakmeister Bill Cunningham, who led off for McCain at one of his rallies with the full run of Obama sludge. But don’t be distracted or fooled. This is more like an example of what the digital commerce folks refer to as ‘channel conflict’. You’ve got your multiple distribution channels. You’ve got the way McCain’s selling the product. Broadcast. Broad and thematic about McCain. But you’ve got a number of other product channels to sell through, most of them a lot grittier, but no less essential for ultimate success.

Both can work simultaneously. In fact, in the kind of campaign McCain’s running, they’re both essential for success (see the 2000 Republican presidential primary in South Carolina). The key is just that the channels don’t cross. Because that’s when the trouble starts and they can begin to undermine or even short-circuit each other. And that’s what threatened to happened here.

Don’t insult your intelligence or mine by pretending that John McCain’s plan for this race doesn’t rely on hundreds of Cunninghams — large and small — across the country, and the RNC and all the GOP third party groups, to be peddling this stuff nonstop for the next eight months because it’s the only way John McCain have a real shot at contesting this race.

Well, that’s bullpoop of the highest order, and it frankly makes me angry.  Nothing gets the lefties more riled than when a conservative pulls out an extreme statement and passes it off as representative of all people of a liberal bent.  What Marshall is doing here is, in fact, a smear in and of itself.  By associating McCain with a tactic that he has specifically called out as inappropriate and wrong, a tactic that most smart conservatives, myself included, see as not only repugnant but tactically disastrous, Marshall is playing ‘lowest-common-denominator’ politics and covering his own head in shame.

McCain can’t control every statement made by his supporters, and he was very quick to condemn Cunningham.  What more could he do?  The fact that Cunningham spoke at a McCain event does not mean McCain had foreknowledge of his remarks, or even that he knew he was on the schedule.  Reports that the McCain camp advised Cunningham to ‘throw out some red meat’ change nothing – presumably, red meat doesn’t mean inappropriate remarks, and that still says nothing about McCain’s knowledge of the speaker’s presence or his comments.

Let’s judge the candidates by the issues and by their own words – but let’s apply the standard to both sides.  And I repeat for the record for any knuckleheads out there that don’t get it – lay off the gutter tactics, you’re hurting your own side, and besides, it’s just plain wrong…