They Knew They Were Right

There's plenty one could say about National Review's blog The Corner. If nothing else it affords a grim panorama of the decline of the American conservative movement. Decline, at least, in as much as NR is considered the house magazine for mainstream Republicanism. Here, for instance, is Andrew McCarthy on last night's debate:

Now, as the night went along, did you get the impression that Obama comes from the radical Left?  Did you sense that he funded Leftist causes to the tune of tens of millions of dollars?  Would you have guessed that he's pals with a guy who brags about bombing the Pentagon?  Would you have guessed that he helped underwrite raging anti-Semites?  Would you come away thinking, "Gee, he's proposing to transfer nearly a trillion dollars of wealth to third-world dictators through the UN"?

Nope.  McCain didn't want to go there.  So Obama comes off as just your average Center-Left politician.  Gonna raise your taxes a little, gonna negotiate reasonably with America's enemies; gonna rely on our very talented federal courts to fight terrorists and solve most of America's problems; gonna legalize millions of hard-working illegal immigrants.

McCain?  He comes off as Center-Right .. or maybe Center-Left ... but, either way, deeply respectful of Obama despite their policy quibbles. 

Great.  Memo to McCain Campaign:  Someone is either a terrorist sympathizer or he isn't; someone is either disqualified as a terrorist sympathizer or he's qualified for public office.  You helped portray Obama as a clealy qualified presidential candidate who would fight terrorists.

McCain's problem, you see, was that he didn't froth enough. This is howl-at-the-moon madness. The weird thing is that many of these people actually seem to believe all this nonsense. They are perplexed that the rest of us don't see it. What are we missing? Isn't it obvious that Obama is a terrorist-coddling (nay, supporting!) lefty radical? A sort of Baader-Meinhof candidate?

Well, no, it isn't. Of course the genius of this plan - this conspiracy! - to elect Obama is that the plotters should have clad their candidate in such conventional clothes... Anyway, all this helps explain why I doubt that the Bill Ayers attacks will work: Obama neither looks nor talks like a counter-culture 1960s radical. Claiming that he does fails to pass the smell test. And, equally, it has no bearing on any actual issue in the campaign. (The Willie Horton ad in 1988, by cntrast, focused on a real issue: crime, even if it did so in a pretty brutal, even crude, fashion.) Punters are more likely to see this sort of attack as the diversionary tactics of a campaign that has run out of energy, ideas and promise. And they will be correct to come to this conclusion. This election is all but over, barring some cataclysmic event...

UPDATE: Ross Douthat has more.

Comments

[ndm]

The looming Republican disaster at the polls is perhaps explained by McCarthy's assertion that both McCain is also "maybe Center-Left." These guys at National Review are on some pretty skunky weed.

[ndm]

Britain has its own wingnut demon in the form of Melanie Phillips at The Spectator. (God knows, her shit at the Mail could be worse - it will certainly be far more purple.) She foams at the mouth in each and every post she mentions the name Barack Obama. Indeed she is sufficiently obsessed she loses her marbles when she writes:

It is only in the blogosphere where proper journalism has been doing its job in bringing to the surface the deeply troubling evidence of Obama’s dubious associations and the misleading way in which he has sought to play them down. As I have noted before, it's as if there have been two elections going on -the one in big media which (with some honourable exceptions) has been portraying Obama entirely on his own terms as the antidote to the old, failed political order; and the one in the blogosphere, which has steadily joined the dots in Obama’s background to reveal the network of radical, subversive, threatening and corrupt activists who have influenced him all his life and who have brought him to power - and about whom he continues to dissemble.

You know a journalist has totally lost it when she starts a paragraph with an approving "[i]t is only in the blogosphere...."

In an earlier post on the Biden/Palin debate she took starbursts to her lesbian love feast:

Au contraire; she danced round Biden like a matador sticking her knives into a clapped-out old bull -- who was clearly seriously constrained by the terror of making yet another of his jaw-dropping gaffes which appear to have passed the media by. Palin’s talent, and it is considerable, is to appeal over the heads of her media tormentors and speak directly into the camera and straight to Middle America which sees her as one of their own. That is, after all, what she was chosen to do - to shore up the conservative Republican base which otherwise would not come out for McCain, whose heterodox views are regarded with suspicion. Palin’s performance last night will have reinforced that momentum, which is crucial if McCain is to stay in this race.

Someone give that one a strap-on.

[Pasota]

Punters are more likely to see ...

I think I get the gist of what is meant by "punter," but I'm not 100% confident in that, given the dictionary definitions. It gives "gambler" as the meaning in British slang, for instance, but that's not quite right in this context, is it? What is meant by "punter"?

[One Lazy Dog]

The GOP need to find a contemporary US version of Michael Foot. That will complete the metamorphoses into a defunct and irrelevant party. Rise of the US Social Dems, anyone?