"Why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer — and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it — is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is."
It's when you add up who McCain is that he really gives you the shivers. So why isn't Obama's campaign going after him? Because they don't need to persuade the persuaded. We know who McCain is and we are already very wary of the senator, his anger, his followers, and his lies.
But McCain's "base" -- such a good adjective for the knuckledraggers on the right! -- love him for who he really is. And, as Frank Rich points out, that's the McCain who practically never stopped supporting the Iraq war, the McCain who licks his lips at the confrontation with Russia, who never got upset about what happened in New Orleans, who embraces religious intolerance, whose campaign is "essentially" run by lobbyists, including Blackwater's boys on the Hill.
And that doesn't even include McCain's volatile temperament.
"Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration’s first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama — temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others — are missing in McCain. 'He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,' Hauser told me. 'If John says ‘I’m going with so and so,’ you can’t count on that the next morning,' she complained, adding, 'That’s not the man we want for president.'”
Always, for me, the strong doubts expressed about their senator by his hometown newspaper have been persuasive. They know who on earth John McCain is.
Then there's the scuttlebutt from Jerome Corsi. Jerome Corsi is that loverboy who helped promulgate the lies of the Swift Boat Veterans and who's now out there (#1 on the Times best-seller list) cleansing the air of admiration for Obama with his version of Obama's personal history. Corsi will do it to anybody for money and attention.
"In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received 'strong' financial support from a 'group tied to Al Qaeda' and that 'McCain’s personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.'"
Whatever. The bottom line is, as Rich points, the media have decided now that Obama is losing the election. Well, if you're the popular media, you've got to print something that keeps your revenue stream, keeps the "narrative" exciting. The media's profits are fed by revelations and crises. If there aren't any, then invent some! Frank Rich notes:
"As I went on vacation at the end of July, Barack Obama was leading John McCain by three to four percentage points in national polls. When I returned last week he still was. But lo and behold, a whole new plot twist had rolled off the bloviation assembly line in those intervening two weeks: Obama had lost the election!"
