Jake’s Comment Begs an Interesting Question

Yesterday, my friend Jake wrote a comment about my posting of a pro-Obama forwarded email on this here Blog. Jake’s comment, please see the comments in the below blog, notes that all of my postings for the past few weeks have been around McCain’s running mate decision, with the exception of my marathon. That led me to a thought: why is it that she became so noteworthy? Is this an advantage to McCain’s campaign?

Let’s talk about advantages to McCain’s campaign: one, the economy hasn’t been in the gutter this bad since 1991-92; two, we are in an unpopular war fought based on a myriad of lies promulgated by an administration which is exceptionally more secretive than ever—McCain supports this war; three, the positions of the Republican Party on social matters run below average on poll numbers. All of these things added together, it seems to make sense to distract the public from the substance of McCain’s policy positions.

McCain’s policy positions, while he has taken contrary positions in the past, ultimately are his own, and they have led us to where we are today. Right now, when faced with what we have, from political, economic, and militaristic perspectives, the American Public looks down their nose. Alas, a few weeks ago during the convention in St. Paul, a nice looking woman was put in front of the American public to refresh McCain’s campaign’s image. This worked, and indeed this Governor from Alaska did attract a lot of attention, some would argue—this guy included, that this was due to the fact that we knew little about her. These first few weeks have become a discovery section, and there was enough juice about her life in Alaska, we couldn’t help but knock down McCain’s selection choice – largely predicated on playing to his party’s base.

Isn’t that just it? McCain’s policy positions are disagreeable to 72% of the American Public, and his age raises concerns. By bringing in some new blood, which is not so readily deconstructed, like Romney would have been, McCain has diverted attention from his shortcomings. Right now, McCain’s campaign is doing the same thing Bush’s campaign did in 2000 and 2004, which was divert the public from the substance of policy positions, and focus the public on something else—something fascia and remote. If the only way a party can win is by playing games about personalities rather than policy issues, clearly, they are lacking something.

Of course, when it comes to those discussions, let’s not forget the Keating Five and the first Mrs. McCain. Were McCain the Democrat in this race, we’d have heard about those two items ad nauseum. It’s too bad. I just hope this time it won’t work like it did the last two times to put someone so incompetent in office.