Whether Sarah Palin thinks Barack called her a pig remains unknown, but “her campaign advisers and those blushing violets around the uber-sensitive John McCain are more offended than nuns in a nudist romp,” according to Matt Frei of the BBC. Indeed, “[t]he governor of Alaska has become a kind of campaign superhero who can morph like liquid mercury,” while Joe Biden “has clearly been swallowed up by the witness protection programme,” as Frei puts it.
The McCain campaign combines utterly shameless lies and false claims with a posture of victimization towards the Obama camp’s attempts to fight back. The logic of McCain’s attacks seems to have nothing to do with expecting that anyone will believe the lies and distortions. They are now so shameless that FactCheck.org has objected to McCain’s use of its information and language. But the point seems to be to rattle Obama, to keep him on the defensive, and above all to avoid an honest debate about issues.
It will be interesting to see what happens as McCain again campaigns by himself, without his running mate by his side playing the adoring little woman. I may be a sexist, but I think Palin’s chief virtue for McCain is that she is a cipher. I think the McCain campaign will strive to maintain this situation, to avoid allowing her to individualize herself very much. The danger in her talking to the press except in a tightly controlled situation is not that she might appear ignorant or foolish but that she might begin to look like her own person, a situation that would immediately diminish her value to McCain, first as the adoring cheerleader for America’s great hero, and second as a person who can be played off against countless female stereotypes to McCain’s advantage. The Washington Post, on today’s editorial page, delivers a serious reproof to McCain over his pretended feminist outrage.
No matter that Mr. McCain used the lipstick-on-a-pig phrase himself, referring to (female) Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health-care plan, or that (female) former McCain aide Torie Clarke wrote a book with that title. In the heat of a campaign, operatives will pounce on any misstep and play to the referees over any arguable foul. We understand that, and certainly the Obama campaign has not been above such tactics. But this cynical use of the gender card is unusually silly.
The lies in McCain’s current “Original Maverick” video, now the lead at The Official John Mccain YouTube Channel, are also silly.
The Washington Post editorial writers still think McCain is a serious man, but a man who chose his running mate entirely as a political calculation, and a disreputable one at that, a man who comes to believe in his own inflated campaign image and who again and again stands behind lies and distortions regarding his opponent is not a serious man; no more serious, indeed, than a woman who allowed herself to be represented on the cover of Newsweek with a shotgun slung over her shoulder. I didn’t realize until today that the Newsweek cover is likely a deconstruction of this. O tempora, o mores!