The Enlightened Despot

There has been more and more talk, both laudatory and disapproving, of McCain ‘running against the media’. As I mentioned earlier, the media will not, in fact, be on the ballot in November. It is the Obama-Biden ticket that they have to defeat. And while the appearence of a feud with the media might be helpful, insofar as it makes McCain look good or Obama look bad, there is absolutely zero intrinsic value to scoring victories over the press corps. What the public thinks of the people feeding them news is irrelevant; it is only how the news affects their thoughts on the actual candidates that is of interest.

This should be painfully obvious - indeed, I feel silly for having written the preceding paragraph. But it apparently needs saying because it renders much of what the media-hating members of the media on the right are saying these days. Consider K-Lo (never fun, I realize, but take your medicine):

On Gwen Ifill, Palin said, “I’m not going to let it be a concern.” She said it will “make us work that much harder. She talked about her ticket being the “underdog,” presumably because of the media.

Don’t tell me folks won’t be motivated by this. They will. And the more the media criticizes, it feeds the campaign’s anti-media campaign. It may just be a winning strategy.

If you’ll forgive me for saying so, Kathryn, you are talking drivel again. The “anti-media campaign” very obviously does not become ever more effective as the volume and severity of media criticism increase. Rather, it works best when there are a small but noticeable numbre of clumsy attacks coming from fairly visible but not overly-respected journalists, along with a higher volume of defensive stories about how unfair the media is being by members of that same media who don’t want to be viewed as partisans. There is no shortage of voters who are capable of forming the opinion that the press is being unfair to candidate x based on the press telling them that the press is being unfair to candidate x.

If, on the other hand, everyone in the media were to repeatedly and viciously attack a candidate, there would be no upside there at all. Most voters can’t possibly know when charges against a politician are unfair unless someone in the MSM is reporting on that fact.

What I’ve laid out above are the two extreme states the media could be in in the context of a “campaign against the media”; obviously things will never look quite like either. The problem for McCain is that the current reality is much closer to the latter case than the former. Having the press this unhappy with you isn’t a strategy, it’s a liability.

So that happened. From a purely economic standpoint, I remain unqualified to have much of an opinion on what the failure of the bailout bill means. I’m inclined to agree with the consensus that, while deeply flawed, the bill was a lot less terrible than nothing, that the House Republicans’ alternative would have been worthless, and that the list of things Democrats want added contains a mixture of sensible and pernicious measures.

In terms of presidential politics, everyone seems to think this will be very bad for McCain, though his campaign is of course working hard to spin it in his favor. Even at the Corner, the saner and more sincere folks are blaming House Republicans, which can hardly be a good thing for their party’s chances in November.

I don’t disagree that this will likely be bad for McCain: it probably will be. But I recently argued that the only explanation for the McCain Gambit that is consistent with treating his campaign as a more or less rational actor is that he went to DC to kill the bailout deal, while making sure to look as if he were doing his best to rescue it, in the hopes of spinning the failure as the result of Democratic partisanship. If that was right, then things went perfectly for him; the bailout failed, and no one thinks that he wanted it to.

He will probably lose the spin war on the issue, but his case isn’t really that hard a sell. The Democrats do have a majority in the House, after all, and the explanation that politicians need bi-partisan cover to hand $700 billion to Wall Street - while perfectly true - is a little abstract for public consumption. The idea that McCain’s campaign suspension proves he did everything he could while Obama played politics is ludicrous, but has some superficial appeal.

Regardless of whether or not this was his strategy, spinning it this way is absolutely vital for McCain, and under slightly different circumstances, I would have said he had a decent chance of pulling this off. His rocky relationship with the media of late will hurt him, though, and with a major opportunity for each side to press its case coming up on Thursday, is Sarah Palin the woman you want as your spokeswoman? No, no she is not.

Every day, Nate Silver uses his polling data to simulate the election 10,000 times. He then puts up a graph of the number of simulations that showed each possible electoral vote tally. Here is today’s:

Obama’s overall chances of winning have been holding fairly steady in the 70-75% range, but, as you can see here, the likely margins are becoming absurd. Look, for instance, at the spike just shy of 390 electoral votes for Obama. That tally is almost twice as likely as any individual scenario in which McCain wins. Silver doesn’t give detailed information about the results of his simulations, but it’s fairly easy to reconstruct based on polling data and elementary electoral math. Here is what that result - which, again, is twice as likely as the most plausible McCain victory - would look like:

That’s still a far cry from Dukakis country, and he probably won’t ever get there, but remember that today’s polls have barely begun to register the McCain Gambit and the Couric-Palin fiasco. If there were any doubt that McCain needed to knock it out of the park tonight, consider this: if the election were held today, McCain would have a better chance of turning in a Bob Dole performance than a George W. Bush.

Jonathan Chait has altered his assessment of the McCain Gambit from crazy-like-a-fox to crazy-like-Tom-Cruise. I quote in full:

I’ve been writing a series of blog posts trying to figure out exactly what John McCain was after with this campaign-suspension gambit. My premise is that McCain is a savvy operator who knows how to protect his own political interests. I figured he was looking for some way to shuffle the debate schedule, to move the foreign policy debate until later (when it could have more impact) or to bury/cancel the veep debate. Another theory was that he was trying to claim credit for a bailout bill that appeared on track to be done this week.

But instead, McCain seems to have made no effort whatsoever to bring the bailout legislation to closure. Indeed, he may possibly have sunk the whole thing. On the radio this morning, I heard David Corn of Mother Jones speculate that McCain may be settign himself up to rail against the bailout onm populist grounds. But McCain and his running mate have already stated publicly that a bailout is needed to avoid a depression!

And now, after insisting it would be unpatriotic to campaign and debate before bailout legislation had been completed, is debating anyway, even though a deal is further away than it was when he suspended his campaign.

So I’m abandoning my assumption that McCain had some grand method behind his campaign suspension gambit. I don’t see any method at all.

Now this may be right. The Politico team wrote a piece last night that used the time-honored euphamism of ‘erratic’ in scare quotes to suggest that McCain has just gone batshit crazy. If that’s right, his aides are presumably pretty upset with the Gambit and the rest of it, but are doing their best to create appropriate spin for everything he leaves in his wake.

Again, I’m certainly not ruling this out. But the failure of the talks and McCain’s reversal on the debate don’t rule out strategy behind the Gambit altogether. There are a few things he might be up to that would be more or less rational. First, there’s Nate Silver’s theory: McCain never wanted the debate moved at all. Rather, he wanted to draw attention to it, and force Obama to demand that it proceed, thus making his victory all the more fruitful.

My main problem with this theory is that it would represent massive overkill on the Republicans’ part. Even a debate that draws twice as much attention as it otherwise would have is a relatively low stakes prize next to the economic crisis; handling the bailout politics right is worth far more points than getting people to watch you win a debate, so why sacrifice the former in favor of the latter?

He hasn’t done anything irrational, however, if his plan was the one I suggested last night: he went to D.C. for the express purpose of blowing up the bailout negotiations, forcing the Democrats to do nothing (when they hold a majority in both houses and have the president on their side) or to pass an unpopular bailout in a party-line vote. The man who, as Sarah Palin reminded us yesterday, is known as “The Maverick” could say that he’d fought the good fight against politicking Democrats and that awful Bush guy, so don’t blame him when things fall apart. It’s unlikely to work, of course, but - as we have repeatedly argued here - high upside plans that are unlikely to work has to be the name of the game for McCain from here on out. Skipping the debate and trying to postpone a Palin-Biden matchup would have been a wonderful cherry on top of this, but with public opinion heavily opposed to a cancellation, he can go to Mississippi having accomplished his primary objective.

If the alternatives are that the presidential candidate for a major political party has lost his mind or that he is happy to watch the economy burn for an outside shot of gaining some ground in the polls, I’m not sure which is the more charitable interpretation.

(h/t Caddyshack)

Not only is McCain going to the debate tonight, he’s apprently already won it:

Although the fate of tonight’s presidential debate in Mississippi remains very much up in the air, John McCain has apparently already won it — if you believe an Internet ad an astute reader spotted next to this piece in the online edition of the Wall Street Journal this morning.

“McCain Wins Debate!” declares the ad which features a headshot of a smiling McCain with an American flag background. Another ad spotted by our eagle-eyed observer featured a quote from McCain campaign manager Rick Davis declaring: “McCain won the debate– hands down.”

McCain’s decision to pick her, that is, though this excerpt from the Couric interview might make you wonder:

. . . where it is the taxpayers looking to bail out. But ultimately, what the bailout does is help those who are concerned about the healthcare reform that is needed to help shore up our economy. Um, helping, oh — it’s got to be all about job creation too. Shoring up our economy, and putting it back on the right track. So healthcare reform and reducing taxes and reining in spending has got to accompany tax reductions, and tax relief for Americans, and trade, we’ve got to see trade as opportunity, not as a competitive, um, scary thing, but 1 in 5 jobs being created in the trade sector today. We’ve got to look at that as more opportunity. All of those things under the umbrella of job creation. This bailout is a part of that.

So I’m going to have to disagree with my colleague and say that even if McCain had actually suspended his campaign for a few days in some meaningful way, it wouldn’t have been as crazy as asking Sarah Palin to be on the ticket with him. We’ve seen what happens when she is allowed to speak to reporters that aren’t Sean Hannity. Sheltering her from this has been one of the major causes of the anti-McCain backlash in the media which will make all his future crazy tactics much less likely to succeed. Eventually she will have to debate Biden, and while they’ve tried to ensure that it will involve as little actual interaction as possible, it’s hard to see how that could fail to be a major fiasco.

Then there’s the fact that she’s corrupt, and that there’s tons of evidence lying around. Of course, not having vetted her, McCain didn’t know this, but surely he knew that she was in Alaskan politics, which is at least as suspect an industry as ‘waste management’. There was already an ongoing ethics investigation into whether or not she had improperly fired someone for refusing to improperly fire someone else over a family feud. She had a solid track record of firing people for reasons unrelated to job performance, and there may well be hard evidence that she’s lying in the present case. Meanwhile, her old buddy Ted Stevens might be convicted of corruption a few days before the election.

She has the related problem of being a compulsive liar. This may seem like hyperbole, but I want to stress that I’m not talking about the fact that she lies frequently, but rather about the fact that she lies in situations when it doesn’t benefit her at all and when it is obvious that she will be caught. This works very poorly in combination with the McCain campaign’s never, ever retract anything or admit to any mistakes. A simple press release before her speech at the convention could have been the last anyone heard about the Bridge to Nowhere. Instead…

And while I’m tired of hearing about everyone’s nutty preachers, the possible anti-semitic remarks (it’s not as obvious to me as it is to Sullivan) made by Muthee minutes before he blessed Palin, asking that she be protected from all forms of witchcraft, aren’t going to be much help in Florida.

Palin is already an embarassment for McCain’s campaign, while minimizing that embarassment has helped turn the press against them. In the future, there will be either more embarassment, more backlash from an increasingly cut-off press corps, or both. She is almost a sure thing to crash and burn at her debate. Details of her dishonesty and corruption will continue to generate negative press, and there remains the non-negligible possibility that a smoking gun will emerge and sink the campaign altogether.

McCain could spend the next month in Ibiza and it wouldn’t be as crazy as picking Palin.

Ben Smith’s latest suggests that McCain may be in D.C. on a mission to torpedo the bailout negotiations:

John McCain’s campaign put out an extraordinary memo just now, denouncing a proposal that, by all accounts, was supported by all parties but the House Republicans, promising to return tomorrow, and casting the debate in serious doubt.

There is zero detail about what he’d like in a bailout package. He doesn’t like what the administration produced or the revisions by Dodd and Frank, but it’s not clear if he wants something along the same general lines, or if he’s pushing for a drastically different approach like that favored by the House Republicans.

The best case scenario is that he’s simply creating the impression that the negotiations are in jeapordy so he can pretend to rescue them tomorrow morning. Alternatively, he might try to keep things up in the air long enough to avoid tomorrrow night’s debate. Then he can push hard for his proposal to bump the VP debate, which is likely to be a fiasco.

The most frightening possibility, but the one that makes the most sense to me, is that he plans to blow up the negotiations altogether, forcing the Democrats to either give up entirely, or - more likely - to pass a bailout in a party-line vote. He could then spend the rest of the campaign attacking Obama for playing politics in a crisis.

I’m not exactly predicting this - I’d like to think my first explanation is the most likely, mostly because this would be completely sociopathic. But, though it would probably destroy his campaign, the potential upside is huge; this is exactly the sort of high-risk tactic McCain’s camp is going to be using.

Whatever his strategy, I’ll repeat what I said yesterday: all of this relies very heavily on how the media chooses to present it - McCain couldn’t have picked a worse time to declare war on them.

UPDATE 11:22PM: I forgot to mention: the one sentence in the press release which discusses what McCain does want from the bailout is worth reading:

John McCain simply urged that for any proposal to enjoy the confidence of the American people, stressing that all sides would have to cooperate and build a bipartisan consensus for a solution that protects taxpayers.

Sarah Palin is apparently copy editing press releases now.

Most people seem to think that choosing Palin was crazier, but I disagree.  It is a cliche that VP picks have little influence on campaigns. It is not a cliche that presidential campaigns are not affected by not campaigning. That being said, the suspension is actually much less crazy, because they aren’t actually doing it, in much the same way that picking Palin would have been a lot less crazy if they’d actually picked Huckabee.

One of the strangest effects of the economic crisis has been its injection of sporadic bouts of intellectual honesty into the folks at the discourse at the National Review. Almost no one over there wants anything to do with W’s version of the bailout. Some of them have been pretty skeptical of McCain, and K-Lo even went through a phase of thinking Obama looked better than McCain on the campaign-suspension issue. They all panned McCain’s posturing over firing Cox. Mark Krikorian has returned to his former position of refusing to vote for a man who, let’s face it, has never displayed a healthy hatred of Mexicans.

But not everyone has completely lost their cool:

Gimmick? No. Hell No. [Michael Ledeen]

I’m with Newt. I think we sometimes get so involved with inside baseball that it becomes impossible to see real leadership. McCain is right: if this crisis is as grave as most everyone says, it should be the only thing, not just the most important thing for those who would be president.

It’s hard to go wrong with a post that begins: “I’m with Newt.”

(h/t PM Dawn)

This is much, much worse than what we saw last night, which was already very bad. The McCain camp’s suggestion that the first presidential debate be pushed back to the vice-presidential debate’s time slot may not be their last attempt to prevent this train wreck. They are in deeper trouble than I thought:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nokTjEdaUGg&hl=en&fs=1]

UPDATE 4:52 PM: Some speculation as to what Palin was thinking when she started talking about Alaskan air space.

Our blog’s moratorium on obvious jokes.

Barney Frank called McCain’s decision to claim that he’s suspending his campaign “the longest Hail Mary pass in the history of either football or Marys”, while Yglesias and the folks at TNR have been posting videos of Chris Webber’s notorious time out. While the early signs are that this is playing poorly for McCain, the former is the better metaphor (though still not the correct one, for the same reasons it wasn’t right for the Palin selection, as explained by Frederick here). Webber never thought to himself “Sure, we don’t have any time outs left, but I’m going to call one anyway. It’s so crazy it just might work.” He made a mistake, one that couldn’t possibly have turned out other than it did. Whereas what the McCain camp has done is clearly a strategy.

This isn’t to say that they’ve been executing it well. They haven’t. For one thing, they should have struck much earlier. It’s not clear at this point what danger he could be responding to that didn’t exist a day or two ago. Worse, their announcement came when the three biggest headlines were Warren Buffett’s investment in Goldman, the holes in McCain’s story about Davis and Freddie Mac, and a poll from ABC and the WaPo giving Obama a 9 point lead. The case for this being a gimmick more or less wrote itself.

But the biggest problem with what most are now calling ‘the McCain Gambit’ is that it puts him in a position where he absolutely needs the media to privilege his spin on at a time when he has just declared war on that same media. Not surprisingly, the coverage has been pretty skeptical so far. It’s far too early to evaluate now, but the gambit has not begun well for him, and it could well prove a disaster.

Indeed, even if the gambit had been executed perfectly, the most likely effect would have been to make McCain look terrible and hurt his efforts to become president. That does not, however, mean that this was a bad idea. McCain is losing. The margin isn’t huge, but it’s too big to go away unless something unusually good happens to him, something unusually bad happens to his opponent, or both. He could have run a clean-cut, conventional campaign and hoped for lightning to strike, but at this point his chances are probably better using every high-risk/high-reward tactic he can think of.

Whatever this might do to our opinions of McCain as a human being, as sports fans, we should all be delighted. Several points down with a few minutes left on the clock, McCain has already pulled his goalie.

From Drudge:

David Letterman tells audience that McCain called him today to tell him he had to rush back to DC to deal with the economy.

Then in the middle of the taping Dave got word that McCain was, in fact just down the street being interviewed by Katie Couric. Dave even cut over to the live video of the interview, and said, “Hey Senator, can I give you a ride home?”

Earlier in the show, Dave kept saying, “You don’t suspend your campaign. This doesn’t smell right. This isn’t the way a tested hero behaves.” And he joked: “I think someone’s putting something in his metamucil.”

“He can’t run the campaign because the economy is cratering? Fine, put in your second string quarterback, Sara Palin. Where is she?”

“What are you going to do if you’re elected and things get tough? Suspend being president? We’ve got a guy like that now!”

Not so smooth at a time when McCain desperately needs to get the media to spin this his way. The blogosphere is on fire with reaction to McCain’s gambit. More on that later. For now, for the first time in my life, I have some Katie Couric to watch.

John McCain is calling for Barack Obama to join him in calling a halt to all campaigning and returning to DC to work on the bailout negotiations. He sees a deal being struck by Monday, but his plan would include cancelling the first presidential debate this Friday. The early unofficial word from the Obama camp is that they want nothing to do with it, but there hasn’t been a statement from a named source yet.

Instead, Harry Reid has said thanks, but no thanks on this bridge to nowhere:

This is a critical time for our country. While I appreciate that both candidates have signaled their willingness to help, Congress and the Administration have a process in place to reach a solution to this unprecedented financial crisis.

I understand that the candidates are putting together a joint statement at Senator Obama’s suggestion. But it would not be helpful at this time to have them come back during these negotiations and risk injecting presidential politics into this process or distract important talks about the future of our nation’s economy. If that changes, we will call upon them. We need leadership; not a campaign photo op.

If there were ever a time for both candidates to hold a debate before the American people about this serious challenge, it is now.

Perhaps this was entirely Reid’s idea, but it seems like the perfect response for Obama. This was a high-risk, high-reward tactic on McCain’s part. On the one hand, he has everything to gain from halting the campaign at this point, and he can try to hit his opponnent over the head with his ‘country first’ line if Obama balks. But the timing isn’t so great; the two major pieces of news from late yesterday were Buffett’s investment in Goldman, and the worst national tracking poll McCain has ever seen. So the case that this is a gimmick is even stronger than it would otherwise have been.

As things stand, Obama can simply defer to Reid and say that the show must go on. He doesn’t have to make the case too aggressively himself until he is attacked, at which point he can say that the people working on this have already said they don’t want the candidates around and that McCain is trying to profit off the country’s disaster.

UPDATE 5:31 PM: Obama has hit back:

“It’s my belief that this is exactly the time the American people need to hear from the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsible with dealing with this mess,” he says.

“What I think is important is that we don’t suddenly infuse Capitol Hill with presidential politics,” he said.

Even K-Lo, who agreed with McCain on the merits of postponing the debate, thinks Obama looks better here. McCain is in the midst of halting all campaign advertisements. It’s obviously early yet, but it looks like this tactic is backfiring before it gets off the ground. My first instinct is that, on balance, a quick reversal wouldn’t look as bad as staying the course, but that the McCain camp will go with the latter strategy until things get much worse.