“McCain’s ignoble failure to ignite”

I’m sorry if readers are tired of articles about McCain’s failure to lay out the damning truth about his opponent, but it’s the big story of the moment, indeed it seems to be the decisive factor that is propelling America toward the election of a leftist government, and there are good things being written about it. This is from Frank Miele at the Daily Interlake in Montana:

McCain’s ignoble failure to ignite
Oct 12, 2008

What is wrong with John McCain?

No, I don’t mean his physical ailments, partly brought on by age and partly by the vicissitudes of torture at the hands of his captors in Hanoi 40 years ago. And I don’t mean his policies, although God knows he has some explaining to do there as well.

I am talking about his inability to carry the battle to his enemies—to look a man square in the eye and tell him, “You are wrong.” He hasn’t yet determined how to run a campaign aimed against Barack Obama’s many flaws, and time is running out. Heck, even Joe Biden understands that McCain looks weak and ineffective on this score.

Biden, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, pointed to “all of the things they said about Barack Obama… on the TV, at their rallies, and now on YouTube, and everything else they’re doing before the debate, all the things they’re saying after the debate” and noted that “John McCain could not bring himself to look Barack Obama in the eye and say the same things to him.”

But most pointedly of all, a McCain supporter at a rally in Waukesha, Wisconsin, on Thursday stood up and told McCain to his face what almost all of his supporters are feeling—take off your gloves and fight!

“I’m mad! I’m really mad!” said the unidentified man. “When you have Obama, [House speaker Nancy] Pelosi and the rest of the hooligans up there going to run the country, we have to have our head examined. It’s time that you two represent the rest of us,” he told McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, “So go get ‘em!”

McCain, however, clearly didn’t even “get” the man’s message. “Yes, I’ll do that,” he said absent-mindedly, before tepidly sliding off into his usual brand of bipartisan malaise. “But I also, my friends, want to address the greatest financial challenge of our lifetime with a positive plan for action that Senator Obama and I have. We need to restore trust and confidence in America and have Americans know that our best days are ahead of us.”

Huh? A plan that you and Obama have? Say what?

Sen. McCain, here’s the problem. The people who support you for president don’t trust Barack Obama, and if you DO trust him, then they don’t trust you either. The last thing Republicans want is a plan endorsed by Sen. Obama. So how do you win an election that way?

Probably you don’t.

Barring some unforeseen testosterone transfusion, McCain is destined to keep thinking his enemies are his “friends” and that his self-appointed role as the oxymoronic “maverick moderate” will somehow pay off in votes instead of snickers.

It had looked for a while like Pitbull Palin would pull McCain across the finish line, but now it seems safe to assume that McCain will put a muzzle on her and turn the final three weeks of the campaign into a race for last place.

Face it, the McCain campaign is not going to have any help from the national media. With probably a hundred stories or more circulating on the Internet and talk radio about Barack Obama’s past associations and mistaken judgments, the only thing the celebrity reporters can focus on is “McCain’s negative campaign.”

Huh? Say what?

McCain has missed opportunity after opportunity to go after Barack Obama’s tax policy, his education policy, his foreign policy and his fiscal policy, let alone his association with ACORN and its fraudulent voter registration campaigns, his 20 years of friendship with the radical Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his ties to the domestic terrorist and lifelong communist William Ayers.

The national media has already painted McCain as a negative campaigner, but the funny thing is, they do it without ever investigating whether the allegations against Obama are true. Doesn’t the truth play some small role in whether a campaign is negative or not? I mean, if someone in Russia had called Josef Stalin a mass murderer, would that be considered negative campaigning? Yes, it’s a negative statement, but in deciding your future, isn’t the truth relevant?

Ugh. It’s becoming almost ridiculously silly out there.

This time, I am afraid, America will get the government it deserves, and that—my friends—is a scary thought.

• Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake and writes a weekly column. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com

- end of initial entry -

Charles T. writes:

Let’s face it: McCain is an appeaser in the guise of a maverick. Turns out he is not a maverick at all. He has no spine. If he had a spine, he would say that he and Palin have a plan not only for the economy, but for all of the issues facing our nation. But he did not say that. He and Obama have a plan. What useless mush.

I don’t think McCain cares if he wins or loses.

LA replies:

But there is no contradiction between his being an appeaser and his being a maverick. What does maverick mean in McCain’s case? It means that he frequently departs from and works against his own party, and makes nice to the other party. So how does this maverick run for president? By departing from and working against his own party, and by making nice to, i.e., appeasing, the other party.

Spencer Warren writes:

There have been internal disagreements over how far to go, with some advisers pressing McCain to criticize Obama on his relationship with his incendiary former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. McCain earlier had ruled that out of bounds. Some advisers fear charges of racism.

Also note in this AP article that neither in the debates nor, so far as I know, in Palin’s great attacks, has there been mention of:

1. Obama’s opposition in the Illinois Senate to a bill outlawing killing of fetuses born as a result of botched abortions. The same bill passed Congress overwhelmingly with even Kennedy and Kerry voting for it, and NARAL taking a neutral position! So Obama favors infanticide. The nurse who exposed this practice in a Chicago hospital—she found fetuses left to die in the laundry room and later was fired for exposing this—and who was spurned in her efforts to appeal to State Sen. Obama was on Hannity. She met with Obama, who cold shouldered her.

So much for the “conservative” McCain’s pro-life bona fides.

2. Obama’s statement that women shouldn’t be “punished” by giving birth to a baby because they could not get an abortion. (I missed parts of the debates, but heard not one question about abortion or partial birth abortion, not surprising since McCain agreed to three liberal moderators, one of whom had a conflict of interest.)

3. When Gen. Petraeus first testified before Congress on progress with the surge, Moveon.org placed a full page ad in the Pravda NY Times denouncing him as “Gen Betray Us.” Unprecedented attack on a serving military officer/commander except for the extreme left. Obama did not vote on the Senate resolution condemning this ad. As is so often the case, he took a pass.

4. In the debates McCain has done poorly in nailing Obama on his responsibility for the financial crisis, including his work with ACORN, which has been coercing banks to drop underwriting standards.

5. McCain as the article says is fearful of attacking Obama on Wright.

And as the article notes, all this should have been at the heart of his campaign for months, not, weak as it is, a desperate last minute move.

Spencer Warren continues:

If, as now is the case, he appears headed for a big defeat, one could vote for him to hold down Obama’s margin of victory.

Also, I just came across three more devastating points McCain has not used and which could be used to big advantage in a debate:

1. Senator Durbin, Obama’s colleague from Illinois and number 2 Democrat in the Senate, one or two years ago compared our soldiers in Iraq to Nazis and compared our prison at Guantanamo Bay to the Communist Gulag.

2. Congressman Murtha, a senior Democrat in the House, accused some of our soldiers of murder in Haditha even before they were tried by a court martial. To date, those who have been tried have been exonerated.

3. Harry Reid stated earlier this year we were “losing” in Iraq when in fact the surge was producing positive results—it is unprecedented for a senior politician and Senator to say we are losing a war when our soldiers are fighting in the field. It is very damaging to the morale of men and women risking their lives for the free speech of people like Reid. He said it as if he wants to lose for partisan political reasons.

Are these despicable, disloyal statements by the most senior Democrats, like the “Be Tray Us” ad, the true views of the Democratic Party?

Senator McCain should be reciting these at every speech and in every debate and demand Obama repudiate them. If he does not do so, it proves the radical sympathies reflected in his work with Ayres and membership in Wright’s church are still his beliefs.

These could be used to very dramatic effect in a debate. But McCain has ignored them.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 12, 2008 06:26 PM | Send