Believe Your Eyes

by digby

Kevin is right when he says that painting McCain as a rich, hypocritical warmonger is not going to get the job done. This country has proven more than once that it likes rich, hypocritical warmongers just fine. That line of attack shows that the Democrats aren’t merely playing the game less effectively than the Republicans, they aren’t even on the same playing field.

Kevin offers this advice:

Why not concentrate on character critiques that have some real grounding in reality? Just to give a few examples:

• McCain is old and gets confused occasionally.
• McCain is running an ugly, smear-based campaign.
• McCain has a legendarily short fuse.
• McCain is annoyingly self-righteous.
• McCain’s straight talk has evaporated in the face of his need to win evangelical votes.

I couldn’t agree more. He also treats women like chattel, is cozy with lobbyists even though he’s built a reputation as a reformer and has marched in lockstep with every one of George W. Bush’s bad policies over the past seven years.

But, let’s face it. That’s not likely to happen. The Obama campaign does not want to be involved in negative campaigning on this scale and perhaps, as the new, lesser known guy, Obama has to be more careful of such things.

That, needless to say, is why the independent expenditure groups would have been so important. It’s now rumored that the donors have been set free to finance some non-campaign related efforts, but it would be a miracle if they could pull it off at this late date. These things have to be planned — something I’m sure Freedom’s Watch and their advisor Karl Rove have certainly been doing for months.

We can hope that all these McCain character traits are self-evident and that nobody believes the onslaught of character assassination and outright lies about Obama. It could happen. People believe what they want to believe. But I’d feel better if there was something a little bit more that “hope” on this one.

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