08:45 am
Has Steve Schmidt Run Out of Ideas? (#1 of 2)
Is McCain’s attack messaging machine grinding to a halt? Steve Schmidt, McCain’s new guru, has been on a roll lately, but those days may be coming to an end. We’ll cover this question in two posts. Part One will look at the events of the past few days and how the McCain campaign has responded. Part two will look at how these responses fit into Schmidt’s broader strategy.
We’ll start with the past week, which really was the worst one McCain has had in quite a while.
First came Estategage, which painted McCain as rich and out-of-touch, a story so good that, as Ezra Klein speculates, it probably convinced the Obama team to delay the VP announcement by as much as 36 hours.
How did the McCain campaign respond? First, they suggested that Obama was attacking Cindy (which just made McCain look bad). Then they played the POW card. Finally, they announced that the ad meant the “gloves were coming off,” and that everything in Obama’s past — Rezko, Wright, and other issues raised during the primaries — were now fair game.
In the end, however, the knuckle-baring consisted of only one (albeit particularly nasty) commercial, which suggests, falsely, that Tony Rezko helped the Obamas buy their (one and only) home, in return for which Rezko got certain political favors. The ad was widely panned (with the strange exception of Mark Halperin on ABC this morning) and did nothing to slow the “McCain is rich and out of touch” meme.
Next came Obama’s selection of Biden, who by many accounts, is the Republicans’ worst VP nightmare. Biden is smart, articulate, funny and capable of shredding opponents. (My favorite: “There are only three things [Rudy Giuliani] mentions in a sentence: a noun, a verb, and 9/11.”) We saw his talents on display Saturday, when he said that McCain couldn’t decide which kitchen table to sit at.
The McCain team responded to the news with a new commercial showing Biden criticizing Obama and praising McCain:
This ad did get some attention on the Intertubes (500,000 YouTube hits), but most of the mainstream media ignored it or mentioned it only in passing (and as I’ve noted in the past, most viewers of McCain YouTube videos appear to be Obama supporters). Furthermore, this approach leaves McCain pretty vulnerable should he choose Mitt Romney as his running mate: there are dozens of Romney quotes attacking McCain that are far worse than anything Biden said about Obama.
Now we have what appears to be a transparent attempt to woo disaffected Hillary voters:
Nate Silver highlights just how problematic this ad is:
I could see the ad being very effective. But it also tosses a big softball to Hillary Clinton, who will speak to a national audience on Tuesday. The risk to the Republicans can be summarized in five words: “Shame on You, John McCain”. A finger-wagging, how-dare-you moment by either of the Clintons at the convention — but especially Hillary — could be both effective and therapeutic, especially when coupled with a reminder that McCain voted against measures like SCHIP (and voted to impeach her husband).
As Nate predicted, the Hillary camp didn’t take much time to fire back:
Hillary Clinton’s support of Barack Obama is clear. She has said repeatedly that Barack Obama and she share a commitment to changing the direction of the country, getting us out of Iraq, and expanding access to health care. John McCain doesn’t. It’s interesting how those remarks didn’t make it into his ad.
All good points, but here’s one they miss: in the past twenty-four hours, the McCain campaign has produced two commercials: one that suggests Obama was too thin-skinned to pick Hillary because of her past criticism of him, and one that highlights Joe Biden’s criticisms of Obama. So if you follow McCain’s own logic, Obama passed over Hillary because of her past critical comments. . .in order to pick someone who made equally if not more critical comments.
Steve Schmidt has never let consistency get in the way of a good story, but self-rebuttals are a bit too much, even for him.
More on this a bit later.