When You’re Losing
by BarbinMD
Sat Oct 04, 2008 at 01:43:37 PM PDT

As John McCain watches his last chance to be president slipping through his fingers, he’s decided that it’s time to go South Carolina 2000 on Barack Obama:

Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama’s character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat’s judgment, honesty and personal associations, several top Republicans said.

John McCain is afraid to run on the war, he’s afraid to run on health care, and he’s terrified to run on the economy, so he’s going to go for fear and smear. It’s all John McCain has left. And as McCain campaign manager Rick Davis once said:

“The premise of any smear campaign rests on a central truth of politics: Most of us will vote for a candidate we like and respect, even if we don’t agree with him on every issue. But if you can cripple a voter’s basic trust in a candidate, you can probably turn his vote. The idea is to find some piece of personal information that is tawdry enough to raise doubts, repelling a candidate’s natural supporters. [...]

It’s not necessary, however, for a smear to be true to be effective. The most effective smears are based on a kernel of truth and applied in a way that exploits a candidate’s political weakness.”

Davis wrote that in 2000, decrying George Bush’s smear campaign against John McCain during the South Carolina primary, saying that:

Rebutting tawdry attacks focuses public attention on them, and prevents the campaign from talking issues.

And of course today, the last thing John McCain wants to do is to talk about the issues.

when woodrow wilson showed up i recall he fired a bunch of black federal workers that TR and taft had hired on. the republicans were not the part of charles sumner or thaddeus stevens at this point, but they were most definitely not the anti-black party in the way that the democrats still were.

Indeed. The first was solved in 1933, the second in 1964.

It reminded me more about some of the prepared statements people give during congressional testimony and not the vague, inconsistent, pointless speeches preferred today.

It would be interesting to know whether the candidates actually discussed issues in the same fashion as that on the recording, or whether its just a peculiarity of these particular recordings.