For all the hyperventilation on the left about Mr. Obama’s rush to the center — some warranted, some not — what’s more alarming is how small-bore and defensive his campaign has become. Whether he’s reaffirming his long-held belief in faith-based programs or fudging his core convictions about government snooping, he is drifting away from the leadership he promised and into the focus-group-tested calculation patented by Mark Penn in his disastrous campaign for Hillary Clinton. Mr. Obama’s Wednesday address calling for renewed public service is unassailable in principle but inadequate to the daunting size of the serious American crisis at hand. The speech could have been — and has been — delivered by any candidate of either party in any election year since 1960.
You have to wonder if the Obama campaign has lost its nerve because I know the people running it are not stupid. With the exception of the FISA flip flop, which was unconscionable, it’s not that any one of the other moves they’ve made in the last two weeks were so bad, it’s the hamfisted pattern that’s disturbing. I agree that the media is overreacting to his Iraq comments as flip flopping, but it’s understandable that they are because it’s in the context of all these other flips to accommodate himself to the Beltway Village (right-of-) Center. I really thought the campaign was going to be nimbler, smarter, and just better than this. It’s become a predictable, unimaginative, leadership-challenged, paint-by-numbers affair.
But then there’s the astonishing cluelessness of John McCain. Rich again:
What Mr. Obama has going for him during this tailspin is that his opponent seems mortifyingly out-to-lunch. Mr. McCain is a man who aspires to lead the largest economy in the world and yet recently admitted that he doesn’t know how to use a computer, the one modern tool shared by everyone from the post-industrial American work force to Middle Eastern terrorists to Pixar animators. Getting shot down over Vietnam may not be a qualification for president in 2008, but surely a rudimentary facility with a laptop is. What Mr. McCain has going for him is a press corps that often ignores or covers up such embarrassments.
I hadn’t known that McCain doesn’t know how to use a computer. Boy that really makes him seem old. He’s like my 86- year-old-father whom I could not convince to get a computer for email and other things I know he’d enjoy. Or as Rich says, “The Republican’s digital ignorance is not a function of his age but of his intellectual inflexibility and his isolation from his country’s reality.” It suggests to me that old-fashioned convention that important people don’t know how to type–that’s for the secretaries and assistants. I wonder if McCain was bragging when he admitted to not knowing how to use a computer. Wouldn’t surprise me.
Leave a Reply