The Rove Biography Tour

Some provocative indications that Karl Rove may be the architect of the McCain biography tour. Perhaps time will prove me wrong, but this seems like a Rovian too clever by half gambit along the lines of the "let's spend the end of the campaign in California!" move that would have cost Bush the White House had Teresa LePore designed the Palm Beach County ballots differently.

Today we're so far from Election Day that probably nothing McCain does really matters, but the current strategy just stands no chance of prevailing in the face of a sour, anti-Republican mood in the country. It's weird, and it just re-enforces the reality that McCain doesn't have any ideas about how to fix the country's problems beyond a sense that he deserves to be President.

Comments

What else is there to do, though? At least a coast-to-coast tour gets McCain a bit of gauzy press coverage. It's not like he has the money for a national ad campaign.

Posted by Gabriel | April 4, 2008 4:34 PM

Maybe you should say "Beyond the sense that a white man should be President," because that's what I get from the bioraphy tour and associated "American President for Americans" ad

Posted by John DE | April 4, 2008 4:39 PM

McCain has very little money. He can't afford any serious media buys or even serious campaigning if he expects to have funding for future needs (especially if he ends up on public financing).
Unless he's going to start publicizing detailed policy proposals (unlikely), he needs a way to kill time without generating negative publicity that he doesn't have the money to properly combat.
Focusing on his biography is probably the safety way to kill time and stay in the press without risking problems.

Posted by bsci | April 4, 2008 4:41 PM

Matthew, shhh.

Posted by Ari | April 4, 2008 4:43 PM

Karl Rove? Didn't they ship him off to the Lee Atwater memorial hospice yet?

Posted by HeavyJ | April 4, 2008 4:53 PM

With Barack Obama's "postracial" appeal having proved illusory but Democrats likely to nominate him for president anyway, the party faces a difficult problem: how to persuade Americans to vote for the spiritual protégé of a man who espouses crackpot anti-American and antiwhite views.

One response, born less of strategy than of reflex, is to claim that opposition to Obama is racist. A pair of recent posts by prominent Angry Left bloggers show just how intense is the desire to impute racism to the other side, and how far they are willing to depart from logic to do so.

The first post, titled "John McCain's Racist Dogwhistle in Meridian, Mississippi," went up last Friday on the blog of Matt Stoller. He faulted McCain for planning a speech this past Monday in the Mississippi town where, as the candidate said in his speech, "I was once a flight instructor . . . at the air field named for my grandfather during my long past and misspent youth."

According to Stoller, though, that wasn't the real reason McCain went to Meridian:

Meridian, MS, is 40 miles from Philadelphia, MS, the place where three civil rights workers were murdered in 1964. . . . Meridian itself is significant because one of the civil rights workers was actually from the town.

Stoller was echoing his elders, including former Reagan adviser Paul Krugman, who have spent years smearing Ronald Reagan for giving a speech--a "racist" speech, Stoller baselessly calls it--seven miles from Philadelphia in 1980, when Stoller was 2½ years old. (We wrote about this in November.) McCain's planned speech, Stoller wrote before the fact, "clearly looks like a dogwhistle to racists within the Republican Party."

Stoller suggests that it is invidious for a politician to give a speech within a 40-mile radius of Philadelphia, where the three civil rights workers were murdered; and that it is also invidious for a politician to give a speech in Meridian, because one of the murdered activists, James Chaney, was born there. By this logic, it would also be invidious for a politician to give a speech in any of the following places:
• New York City, where the other two murdered civil rights workers, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, were born. (In fact, as David Brooks noted in November, that racist devil Reagan followed up his 1980 Philadelphia speech by flying to New York, where he addressed the Urban League.)

• Within 40 miles of Memphis, Tenn., where Martin Luther King was assassinated 40 years ago tomorrow.

• Atlanta, where Dr. King was born.

Actually, a politician would probably be well advised to steer clear of Mississippi altogether, since Memphis is right on the state line and Medgar Evers, another civil rights activist, was both born and assassinated in the Magnolia State.

Once McCain gave the speech, Stoller sheepishly updated his post: "I was probably wrong on this incident, it doesn't look like a dogwhistle." (Presumably he means it doesn't sound like one.)

Some commentators have given Stoller credit for his honesty, but we'd like to dwell on the metaphor instead. A dog whistle is also known as a silent whistle, because it emits a tone at a frequency too high for humans to hear, although it is within the audible range for canines. A racist dog whistle, then, is a speech that sounds innocuous to the normal human ear but that racist "dogs" are able to recognize as an appeal to them.

What does it tell us about Matt Stoller that he is able to detect whether the "racist dog whistle" has been blown?

Wait, it gets worse. According to The Atlantic's Matthew Yglesias, McCain doesn't even need to dog-whistle Dixie in order to be making appeals to racism. Yglesias opines that for McCain merely to talk about his military record is "the best way I can think of to try to take advantage of older people's potential discomfort with the idea of a woman or a black man in the White House that doesn't involve exploiting racism or sexism in a discreditable way" (emphasis his).

This is a bit confusing, since it implies that Yglesias believes there are creditable ways to exploit "older people's" purported racial prejudices. Besides, as blogger Tom Maguire points out, anyone who is disinclined to vote for Obama because he is black probably won't have too much trouble ascertaining that McCain is a person of pallor.

But you can see where all this is going. If Obama is the Democratic nominee, the liberal message will be that a vote for McCain is a vote for racism. Our guess it that this will not be a winning campaign strategy: Most nonblack voters will be put off by this kind of crude moral intimidation.

If McCain wins, liberal mythmakers will insist it is because America is a racist country, and their logic will be as airtight as Stoller's and Yglesias's. Whether for political reasons or out of their own moral vanity, those who claim they want "racial reconciliation" are all too eager to practice divisive, if stupid, politics.

Posted by Matt is a Mo'rawn | April 4, 2008 4:54 PM

McCain was booed at his speech today. You can hear it better on some broadcasts than others.

Ouch.

Posted by AKBY | April 4, 2008 5:05 PM

The point is to institutionalize the southern social conservatives as the group that heads the Republican party. I get the sense that the Northern money that fuels the party isn't crazy about their influence. But that's Rove's base, so it's better for him personally, if not for the party, if that's the important group.

Posted by SomeCallMeTim | April 4, 2008 5:49 PM

I have no one to vote for this year. I'm a conservative and there is crap on both sides of the isle. On Democratic side they want to tax me to death and the republican side, they want to give our country away. My choice is stay home or write in? I guess it depends how bad the weather is.

Posted by howard | April 4, 2008 5:51 PM

Maybe Roger Mudd can ask him why he wants to be president.

Posted by Peter Driscoll | April 4, 2008 6:07 PM

"It's weird, and it just re-enforces the reality that McCain doesn't have any ideas about how to fix the country's problems beyond a sense that he deserves to be President."

Yeah, some people think they're getting Eisenhower, but my November they realize they had Bob Dole.

Why should I read a bio of a guy who supposedly has a chance to be president of the U.S. in the near future? It's like reading a biography of Lebron James right before he gets drafted into the NBA. Wait a minute, didn't that actually happen? "My Life: The Boring Part in the Beginning".

Posted by Colatina | April 4, 2008 6:46 PM

"If McCain wins, liberal mythmakers will insist it is because America is a racist country"

Yea, so what's your point ?

Posted by squack | April 4, 2008 10:36 PM

Oddly enough, McCain's 3 am response to Hillary's 3 am economy ad played on MSNBC here in rural Georgia. It's the first political ad I've seen from any candidate since Super Tuesday. It seems rather strange for McCain's empty war chest to be buying either heavy red state or national ads at this point in time.

Posted by Adam | April 5, 2008 12:01 AM

Why doesn't he talk about his military service?
You know, crashed 4 planes stateside, set fire to his own carrier and getting shot down and captured? Then making propaganda films for the NVA? That's kind of heroic, doncha know?

Posted by al | April 5, 2008 10:08 AM

Excellent point Matt. There is this scary 'structure of feeling' that the Democratic nominee will be 'Gore'd' and Swiftboated and people will turn to McCain as the serious Daddy we require in difficult times. I feel in myself the fear the media is already making that happen. But I think in the end, as Atrios regularly notes, PEOPLE HATE REPUBLICANS. A large majority of people don't like Bush. A huge majority don't like the direction of the country (the Republican/Fox doltification of the populace has its limits). McCain is a Republican and cannot separate himself from Bush. There is no way McCain can win a legitimate popular election in 2008 America.

Posted by Brian in OR | April 6, 2008 12:10 AM

So you think he should spend more time on his "i don't know anything about the economy, but i do know you should go fuck yourselves" speeches? Also, this is an essential preface to his vote for the wasp war hero not the black muslim that hates america campaign platform. Please don't tell me you think most people vote on the issues.

Posted by Client #11 | April 6, 2008 6:08 AM