Slate’s John Dickerson is offering a trenchant analysis of a Move On ad targeting John McCain’s Weird Al Jankovic treatment of the Beach Boys classic tune, “Barbara Ann,” in which McCain substituted “Bomb Iran” for the eponymous intro. Move On’s take is that McCain’s little joke bespeaks a potentially reckless president. Dickerson’s take is that the Move On ad “backfired” by driving otherwise skeptical Republicans into McCain’s arms because “a Republican struggling to court conservatives could probably not ask for a better gift than to be attacked by Move On.”
Dickerson’s assumption appears to be that Move On is attempting to dissuade Republican voters from supporting McCain in the GOP primaries. I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that the organization’s message is aimed at Democrats and independents who may still be suffering from the McCain crush that has its origins in the elegiac coverage the senator enjoyed for years from Dickerson and his colleagues; McCain’s only chance of winning the general election in the exceedingly unlikely event that he survives the primaries is to garner a significant chunk of independent and Democratic voters, and ads like Move On’s are designed to chip away at whatever’s left of the uncritical centrist lust for the erstwhile maverick. In order for the ad to backfire, it would have to subtract money and votes from the Democratic field and deposit them in the McCain camp. Is that going to happen? Nuh uh, even if we weren’t a year out from the primaries.
The subtext of Dickerson’s analysis is that attacks on harsh criticism of Republicans inevitably help usually benefits Republicans more than Democrats, which is the default position of Washington pundits. That was his premise in May of last year when he hyperventilated about then-House minority leader Nancy Pelosi’s promise to inaugurate investigations of the Bush administration.
Pelosi announced that her new Democratic majority would also launch a series of investigations reaching all the way back into the first months of the Bush administration. Across the country, vulnerable Republican candidates are saying thank you to Pelosi. The GOP congressional majorities may now be secure.
Um, yeah.
Dickerson also assumes, I think, that McCain is the Republican Democrats don’t want to face in the general election. That may be true now; I don’t think so, but if it is, discrediting him among potential supporters outside the GOP makes perfect sense. The specific logic behind Dickerson’s thumbs down on the ad is that two thirds of Republicans favor attacking Iran, but locking up 20% of the vote at the expense of the other 80% isn’t a recipe for success. So no matter what Dickerson’s starting premise is, rational or magical, he arrives at a hallucinatory conclusion.
The particular issue here isn’t especially significant but it does represent a larger one, which is the tendency of the press to seize upon minor flaps and misinterpret the significance of them while avoiding or ignoring or simply missing larger and more important events or trends because they’ve convinced themselves of things that aren’t true, such as the trope that Democrats lose when they criticize Republicans. People in Dickerson’s position get paid to think about politics and policy, and you’d think that just as a point of pride they’d want to track how well their ideas held up over time and perhaps adjust them when they consistently fail to parallel reality.
And on top of that, the video accompanying the piece is more than a bit cheesy.
Dickerson makes the valid point that he’s not among that class of pundits who suffer the vapors at the first hint of an assault on Bush or Republicans, hence the strikeouts.
Wow, John. When we debated at Swampland, not being at all familiar with your work, I thought you were just being loyal to a friend. After reading posts like this I am beginning to to think something else.
Chris,
Weldon may be right about my McCain video. It’s debatable. I don’t think his larger argument is sustained by the facts. Do I think attacks on Republicans inevitably help Republicans? The idea is disproved by the very article Weldon links to which has this sentence:
“When Russ Feingold called for censuring the president a month ago, it seemed like a smart political move…”
That sentence can’t exist in a world in which I think it’s inevitable. Neither can other articles I’ve written which say a version of the same or, in some cases echo Democratic attacks against the administration or in some cases (http://www.slate.com/id/2148033/) confect my own lines of attack.
Sometimes I think such attacks are stupid. Sometimes I think they have unintended consequences. Sometimes I’m right and sometimes I’m wrong. I hardly think it’s inevitable.
This is why Weldon, since he is honorable and intellectually honest struck out those passages, as he has modified previous posts in the past in light of new facts. (In a perfect world these corrections would make their way through to the places that have crossed posted or prevent the charming comments about my mother’s corpse that popped up at Eschaton.)
I would also argue that the Pelosi piece was not about what Weldon says it was. It was not about whether Pelosi or Democrats should investigate but whether it made tactical sense for her to talk about investigations on the very day, the very day, she and her strategists were trying to show that they had a non-investigations agenda. Again, I may have been wrong in my argument, but I think I’m right about what my argument was.
I would also argue that his charge that I go for the shallow instead of the meaty—which is a potentially valid claim almost any day of the week– at least in the McCain case is wrong. I wrote about his speech at VMI a week ago (http://www.slate.com/id/2163956/) at far greater length than the piece we’re talking about and discussed some of the very issues, like loss of support from independents, that he suggests I missed in this post.
Minor correction: It’s “Yankovic.”
Are there any centrists left, do you think, on the matter of the war? I don’t know if McCain would ever have grabbed much of the left, but over seven years, he’s pretty much sold his political soul for this war effort. Were he to win, he’d almost be stuck campaigning on continuing the Bush effort. Some maverick.
A local radio show had him on this morning (the price of being late to work–I loathe BBC World Service). McCain was quite confident that if we relax our effort in Iraq, the terrorists will follow us to these shores. (I am not quite so confident, needless to say.)
K
…win the Republican nomination, I mean
John, thanks for stopping by, sorry we couldn’t get a conversation going. Greg, thanks for the correction.
Keifus, I’m not even sure what a centrist on the war would be. We’re either there, with all that that entails, or we’re not. Maybe there are opposing camps of hawks? Anyway, my guess is that at some point between now and the end of the year, one of the GOP candidates will decide departure is the better part of valor and come out for peace with honor. McCain said something last week about withdrawing if that’s what the public wants, but that seems like an awkward stance — “We’re doomed if we leave but okay, if that’s what you really want …”