09:45 am
McCain: Whatever. It. Takes.
In a number of previous posts, particularly back in July, I suggested that McCain’s campaign had been taken over by Steve Schmidt and a bunch of other Rovians, that he was now letting the very people who smeared him back in 2000 run his campaign. I wondered how he could be in bed with such people.
Then something I read during the latest kerfuffle around his campaign’s lies got me thinking about a passage in Christopher Buckley’s most recent novel, Boomsday. One of the main characters is Randolph K. Jepperson, who is loosely modeled on John Kerry. There is one scene early in the book, which takes place after Jepperson has lost his first run for the Senate, that reminds me of the McCain we’re seeing now:
[After the defeat, p]eople around Randoph K. Jepperson remarked on the change that came over him. He went into what is usually called “seclusion,” with no movie-star girlfriend or ex-rocker’s wife. When he emerged, he had a look in his eyes that one staffer called “kinda spooky.”
On his first day back in Congress, he fired everyone in his office. . . . He replaced his loyal staff with the equivalent of Capitol Hill mercenaries. He lured away seasoned pros from other congressional offices, paying above-standard salaries. He hired expensive lobbyists and operatives from K Street; trade association sharks and hired guns; legislative dogs of war. By the time his restaffing was complete, his office colleagues were referring to his office as “the Death Star.”
When Randy called Terry several weeks after his defeat, Terry assumed it was to fire him, too. But instead, in a voice that Terry also thought kinda spooky, “Next time we win. Whatever. It. Takes.”
Sound familiar? John McCain concluded after the 2000 race that all politicians are mean and nasty, and that if he wanted to win, he had to be meaner, nastier, and faster. Think of it as a perversion of the OODA loop:
The OODA loop (for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act) is a concept applied. . . .at [the] strategic level in both the military and commercial operations. . . . [D]ecision-making occurs in a recurring cycle of observe-orient-decide-act. An entity (either an individual or an organization) that can process this cycle quickly, observing and reacting to unfolding events more rapidly than an opponent, can thereby “get inside” the opponent’s decision cycle and gain a military or business advantage.
That pretty much describes McCain’s strategy right now.
So the problem isn’t that John McCain is surrounded by Rovians. The problem is that he has become the Rovian-in-Chief.