The campaign has reached the non-reality based stage:
John Feehery, a Republican strategist, said the campaign is entering a stage in which skirmishes over the facts are less important than the dominant themes that are forming voters’ opinions of the candidates.
“The more the New York Times and The Washington Post go after Sarah Palin, the better off she is, because there’s a bigger truth out there and the bigger truths are she’s new, she’s popular in Alaska and she is an insurgent,” Feehery said. “As long as those are out there, these little facts don’t really matter.”
‘The bigger truth’ is the narrative that the Republicans want to tell, and the facts are unimportant to their task. They don’t care…they explicitly don’t care, that the major newspapers and cable news programs are calling them liars. They even are so bold as to argue that getting called liars by the media helps them.
Now, a lot of people have been warning the Obama campaign not to get bogged down in an argument over Sarah Palin. They think it is a distraction and that it allows the Republicans to make the election about personalities rather then issues. That’s the wrong advice. The candidate does not need to talk about Sarah Palin, but his campaign does…relentlessly. Palin is McCain’s second greatest weakness, after the fact that he is a Republican. Public opinions about Palin are forming right now. If they see her as a scrappy Everymom with a maverick streak, she’ll emerge as an enormous asset to McCain. But if she is seen as a pathological liar who is afraid to face the people alone or the press at all, she’ll emerge as an anvil on McCain that can sink him in even supposedly safe Republican states.
The Obama campaign in on their heels right now because they are not sure how to deal with an unqualified female candidate that is spewing lies like she’s an assembly line. Here’s the answer: attack.
I just watched part of a McCain-Palin rally on CNN. They are still joined at the hip. Palin is still spewing bullshit. It’s weak, but at the same time they are very, very aggressive. That aggression needs to be met head-on. Paging Joe Biden.
On a different note, the McCain-Palin rallies have a distinctly Nationalist Front feel to them. They have the ‘COUNTRY FIRST’ signs in the backdrop and the crowds chant ‘USA, USA, USA’ at inappropriate times. The whole scene has the whiff of gas chambers about it. At the very least, it seems a more appropriate setting for a gathering of skinheads than fat, old, white people.
It’s time to take the gloves off. The McCain campaign has explicitly moved on to a new phase in the campaign where the facts don’t matter. In such an environment it would be irresponsible not to speculate about all kinds of things that sully the reputation of McCain and Palin. I know that my usual standards will drop for the remainder of this campaign. I am not coming to a gunfight armed with just a knife. If they want to appeal to White Nationalist sympathies and send out their Georgian thugs to scream overtly racist shit into the airwaves, then it’s time to grab our baseball bats and meet them in the center of the street.
We’re in the home stretch, and some kneecaps are going to get shattered.
