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mc-cain is in a very tight space for manoeuvre---the weight of 8 years of cowboy george is obviously huge, and i don't see anyone who is not a dyed-in-the-wool ultra-conservative buying the premise that the campaign chose to build from, that mc-cain represents an alternative to the bush people. i can kinda see how it might appeal to that demographic, however---but going in that direction for the campaign meant that it really was abandoning the moderates, abandoning independents i think, simply because of the viewpoint you have to occupy to see this alternative thing as substantive.
so the campaign chose to go at the populist right base. that's the centre of the campaign, and that's what it will live or die by.
this business of lobbing these shit-bombs at obama and desperately hoping something will stick appeals to the other potential demographic--people who are inclined to vote against obama--and the reasons for that are various, some of them ugly no doubt. but these are not the same people--those for whom palin is a viable candidate, those who are inclined to vote against obama. thing is that the mc-cain camp seems to be working on the assumption that there's little substantive in this inclination to vote against obama, and so seem to want only to create more spaces that this vague disaffection can find out there to give itself shape.
i don't think there's anything interesting to talk about with the linkage that the mc-cain people have more or less made up between obama and bill ayers. and even if there was such a link, i would have no problem with it. but the fact is that there no there there.
if mc-cain's campaign thinks it can split obama's demographic with this kind of approach, they have to do something different with it. redbaiting appeals only to conservatives. this smear approach appeals to conservatives.
i'm sure that if they had something substantial to play with, they'd have already done it: so i assume they've got nothing.
but if they've got nothing substantive, then the tactic seems an exercise in futility.
and it ain't working.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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