McCain Campaign Should Heed The Wisdom of Napoleon

by Rossputin | 1:43 am, September 11, 2008 | Comments Off

As I prepare to take two airplane flights on the 7th anniversary of 9/11/01, here are a few thoughts on the most recent example of Sarah Palin throwing the Democrats into confusion…

I don’t believe for a moment that Barack Obama was referring to Alaska Governor Sarah Palin when he talked about “lipstick on a pig” during a campaign stock on Tuesday. I’m sure he intended, as he said, to refer to John McCain’s economic policies. (There are people, such as a former Hillary Clinton supporter I saw on Fox News, who are arguing that Obama’s words were not a slip of the tongue. I have to discount that substantially because I believe committed Hillary supporters, and probably the Clintons themselves, want Obama to fail so that their candidate can run again in four years.)

Still, for a guy who is widely perceived as a “talker” (as compared to John McCain as a “doer”), it’s quite a mistake to say something which anyone with a shred of political sense would know is red meat for the opposition. Someone like McCain with a reputation as a mediocre public speaker might get some benefit of the doubt if he made a modest misstatement. But Obama is perceived by many as being better at, or at least best known for, speaking than anything else; he doesn’t get a rhetorical mulligan.

So the media grabbed onto his error and it became the lead story on TV and the talk of the web for the better part of this week. While most Americans probably believe Obama’s explanation that he wasn’t referring to Palin, this incident exemplifies the political maxim “if you’re explaining, you’re losing.”

Obama is having to spend too much time explaining himself, in a difficult position of fighting people who claim that he called a woman a “pig” or just wonder if he did. It takes him off message, off the offense. It makes him look undignified and damages his veneer of being a new sort of politician. Indeed, just putting the question into undecided voters’ (especially women voters’) heads as to whether Obama might be capable of such a slight is very damaging to a candidate who desperately needs the support of white suburban women to win.

The “lipstick on a pig” uproar also continues one of the major strategic benefits to John McCain of his selection of Governor Palin as his running mate: The political comparisons continue to be between the Democratic presidential nominee and the Republican vice-presidential nominee. Every day that happens, with McCain seeming above it all, is a day that burnishes McCain’s presidential credentials and tarnishes Obama’s.

Of course, the Democrats desperately want the issue (which they might rightly describe as objectively a non-issue) to go away…but not like this. On Wednesday, the Chairwoman of the South Carolina Democratic Party, Carol Fowler, said that Sarah Palin’s “primary qualification (to be McCain’s running mate) seems to be that she hasn’t had an abortion.”

Political foot-in-mouth seems to run in the family: Mrs. Fowler’s husband is former Democratic National Committee chairman Don Fowler who infamously said that the timing of Hurricane Gustav which aimed for the Gulf Coast at the beginning of the Republican convention “demonstrates God is on our side.”

The Obama campaign and other surrogates backed away from the statement very rapidly, but at some point the public is going to put together many small anecdotes and wonder whether the trend of nearly-sexist statements, or at least statements which the McCain camp will try to portray as sexist, reflect an inherent hypocrisy in the Democratic Party: Is all their feminist talk, all their so-called support for women, really only support for liberal women? Can women only be good mothers and have careers if the women are not Republicans?

It’s like Obama’s association with one unsavory character after another. Anybody can have an odd duck among his friends, but when you are surrounded by person after person whom the average American would find objectionable, it’s hard not to wonder about your true values.

Maybe a 527 should keep reminding women about Carol Fowler’s idiotic statement. But, the McCain campaign shouldn’t pile on regarding Obama’s lipstick gaffe. It’s too easy to believe that Obama didn’t mean anything other than that McCain does not represent change. Just letting Obama stew in it, rather than pushing it, is the most likely thing to make Obama look not sexist but just not “The One”. Especially when the target audience is suburban women, it’s important not to seem mean. At the moment, Obama and the Democrats seem meaner than John McCain and the Republicans…a true feat of political alchemy.

Napoleon is quoted as saying, “If your enemy is destroying himself, don’t interfere.” The McCain campaign should take heed. As I write this on Wednesday evening, John McCain and Barack Obama just traded the same price (49.4%) on intrade.com, and multiple polls show McCain ahead for the first time. Whether because of her own positives or her role as a catalyst in getting the Democrats to exemplify Napoleon’s maxim, the Republicans couldn’t be happier about the Palin effect and how Palin has caused Democrats to show if not their true colors then at least an ugly underbelly.

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