The McCain Strategy
Posted by: Tiffany
I’ve been watching the McCain/Palin ticket just go to town on an inflated Bill Ayers/Obama connection. I have been thinking that it is simply an attempt by their campaign to distract low-information voters from the real issues of the economy and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yesterday I watched many videos of people in the crowd at McCain/Palin events. I heard people telling McCain they wanted to hear MORE about Ayers, chiding him for not spending more time talking about Reverend Jeremiah Wright. I heard people say they don’t want to hear about the economy, they want to hear about Obama’s “shady associations”.
This says to me that they are not just low-information voters. These are low-understanding voters. These are voters who can’t see the impact of what is happening. They seem to think that the problems of the economy will not affect them. How can they not see this? My husband pointed out that a lot of lower-income people who do not have 401(k) and do not have any investments think that this crash will not affect them. I can see how they would think that. But they don’t seem to see the big picture.
What’s worse is that the McCain camp is giving out bad information. I saw a video of a woman who said that Obama created ACORN (which was created in 1970 by Wade Rathke). In the last week, I have heard many people talking about ACORN being the reason for the housing crisis, which is the reason for the recent free fall of the stock market. So many things wrong with this idea. I can almost see the logic… people who could not afford homes bought them and now they are in foreclosure. However, this makes it sound like it was just a bunch of Taco Bell employees out there maliciously buying million dollar homes for the sole purpose of defrauding the innocent banking industry. That is just not the case. I’m sure that a lot of people (myself included) got into homes that were out of their price range, but that is not the entire reason for this disaster. Someday I might be brave enough to tell my story of foreclosure and the personal touch that this crisis is having on my wallet, but it’s not the point of this post.
I don’t want to get off track here (I know, too late). My point is that I have been laboring under the delusion that McCain was just being sneaky, trying to use scare tactics about terrorists to distract the people from the fact that he’s got nothing. He has no plan. He has no strategy. He has nothing. Every policy he produces is immediately debunked. Every person he says he looks up to, admires, relies on either speaks out against what McCain is talking about (Petraeus) or personifies the problem he is trying to fix (Whitman).
Although I’m sure this is the reason that the things were brought up in the first place, McCain has this tiger by the tail, and now that the crowd is riled up, he has no choice but to keep it up, to hold on to this for dear life. He’s backed himself in the corner where he has basically been called out to bring these distractions up at the next debate. And once again, the media (and the people – myself included) will spend time debunking the bologna rather than discussing the issues. No wonder we’re in this mess. Are we an entire country of ostriches? Just bury your head in the sand… ignore the problem and it will go away. Yeah. That’ll work.
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I watched part of a McCain rally on CNN this morning. The contrast could not be more stark with the several Obama ones I’ve attended. Obama rallies are fun and full of positive energy. McCain’s are full of angry, sneering people booing at every mention of Obama. McCain had nothing, literally nothing, good or optimistic to say.