Two months ago, the McCain campaign pounced on Obama's "McCain is losing his bearings comment, even though it meant a loss of direction rather than a loss of one's mind. To jump at something this tangential to a an age-based comment was a sure sign that they were spoiling for a age-based argument.
Now, Wes Clark says
I don't think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president
This causes the McCain campaign, and indeed the entire Republican noise machine, to go apoplectic with claims Clark is somehow demeaning McCain's service record. It is, at best, an extremely tangential and flimsy argument to claim that Clark was attacking McCain's service record with such a quote, especially since, at the start of the quote, Clark said:
I certainly honor his service as a prisoner of war. He was a hero to me and to hundreds of thousands and millions of others in the armed forces, as a prisoner of war."
The argument gets even flimsier when one considers that McCain himself said the following a couple of months ago
It doesn't take a great deal of effort to get shot down."
However, the ferocity with which the McCain campaign and the Republican Noise Machine shot back demonstrates that they have been looking to engage this fight for a long, long time. The campaign is looking to pick fights over both McCain's war record and over his age in order to create two, complimentary backlash narratives: Obama hates seniors and the troops. This strategy is designed to target socially conservative seniors who usually vote for Democrats, but might be uncomfortable with Obama because he is African-American. That is a key, if not the key, swing voting group in this election, and the McCain campaign knows it.
Now, even though the Obama campaign backed down way, way too easy on this one, on the plus side, the attacks against Clark are so flimsy they probably will make Republicans look like idiots. Also, Clark isn't backing down, either. One of the important lessons from the Terry Schiavo affair three years ago is that even if Republicans whip their entire media operation into high form, and even if the national media bows over to them, and even if leading Democrats lend credence to their attacks, sometimes the Republican message is so heinous that the vast majority of the country can see through it anyway. While the McCain campaign is desperate for a prominent Democrat to attack his service record, it doesn't necessarily mean that pretending a prominent Democrat did just that will actually convince people it happened. They really, really want to play the "troop hating hippie" card against Obama and Democrats, but just because they are playing it doesn't mean it is working. Until I see some polling numbers on Wesley Clark's favorables, broken down by partisan self-identification, I am going to hope that this is one of those times. Even if the numbers aren't great, this entire incident has still been very instructive, on several levels. |
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