The Great Flattening

Hey Ryan,

I'm not going to lie to you, friend, this has been a tough week. I haven't been writing much here because, well, there hasn't been a whole lot to write about. I've found myself upset at times about certain elements of the campaign news, but unable to put it into words.

It feels like The Great Flattening has taken effect--that time when all the news that's going to be truly effective in the final days of the election cycle has come out. And now, most of the airwaves are abuzz with the perceived dissolution of the McCain campaign. But I, for one, don't trust it.

I'm under the impression that this flattening could be more expectation management from the McCain team. Let's face it, the charges of their lacking in ideas is true. They have not thrown anything on the table that hasn't slid off almost immediately in months.

Some people might point to Sarah Palin as their last success, but she is sliding, too. In fact, some say she's even already gone cannibal on the Old Man. I don't doubt that. The $150,000 clothing bill is a clue that this campaign's just a few songs shy of My Fair Lady and one "sacrifice away from Frankenstein. The Old Man's campaign has become pure farce and betrayal.

But who can he blame, except himself? The candidate sets the tone of his or her campaign, right or wrong, just like the President sets the tone for the country once he or she takes office. If John McCain is elected to the presidency, the jerking, confused, and (yes) erratic movement of his campaign will only intensify in his governance. And his policy proposals will, at best, fall victim to that movement, if not be cynically scrapped altogether. (Remember "compassionate conservatism"?)

Why look at the complex issue of McCain's responsibility to set the right tone for his campaign, though? Let's just think about politics in very American terms. McCain is a product that even his creators don't know how to sell, as evinced from this passage from the NYT magazine article out this weekend that you previously cited:

John McCain’s biography has been the stuff of legend for nearly a decade. And yet Schmidt and his fellow strategists have had difficulty explaining how America will be better off for electing (as opposed to simply admiring) a stubborn patriot. In seeking to do so, the McCain campaign has changed its narrative over and over. Sometimes with McCain’s initial resistance but always with his eventual approval, Schmidt has proffered a candidate who is variously a fighter, a conciliator, an experienced leader and a shake-’em-up rebel. “The trick is that all of these are McCain,” Matt McDonald, a senior adviser, told me. But in constantly alternating among story lines in order to respond to changing events and to gain traction with voters, the “true character” of a once-crisply-defined political figure has become increasingly murky.

This quote goes on for a mile, I know, but it helps to have the whole paragraph for context. With all they supposedly had to work with, McCain's team still couldn't think of a reason for the citizens of the United States to elect the Old Man to office? That's the sound of a campaign that's drowning in narratives and bone dry on policy.

And good policy is what we need to get us out the current messes. That, and a smart and solid direction. But we get none of that from McCain's campaign.

Instead, we've had to sit through Joe the Plumber; Neo-McCarthyism; racial, religious, and even geographical discrimination; and, most insidious of all, fictional, hyperbolized victimization.

In effect, in the McCain campaign's tactics (because there's absolutely no strategy), we're seeing a microcosm of the last eight years, complete with the requisite ethics investigations. We're seeing the life of Rovian politics pass right before our eyes, but there are a whole lot of blockheads out there still falling for it.

Maybe that's why I'm so tired. I feel like Scrooge living through his whole life in a single night, seeing all of his misdeeds passing before him. Of course, unlike Ol' Ebenezer, I didn't have an active hand in the direction our "leaders" have taken us. And neither did you. But failure like that rubs off on everyone, even those who sat by and let it happen.

Let's just hope all this useless media chatter now is The Great Flattening...the third act of A Christmas Carol, rather than the first.

Charles