The McCain Bashing Blues

Thanks to the heated primary battle between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, it's a lonely time for anti-McCain bloggers such as myself. Try as I might to expose some of McCain's weaknesses to the liberal blogosphere, it is incredibly hard to break through the chatter of Obama vs. Clinton. Plenty of others, from Rachel Maddow to JedReport to OpenLeft, have expressed similar frustration about McCain's free ride up to this point.

We can't wait for Hillary to get yanked off the stage, so the real battle can begin.

But in the bigger picture, this isn't a bad thing. For Obama, he is getting a full speed warmup to the smears and attacks he'll face in November. Hillary is a better politician and candidate than Old Man McCain, so if Obama can take down her machine then he'll have a pretty good chance of taking down McCain. People seem to forgot how weak a candidate McCain really is. He's basically the Lieberman of the right, despised by 70% of Republicans for his disloyalty. Even after Romney dropped out, McCain had a tough time pulling 50% in many primaries against the likes of Mike Huckabee. He still hasn't raised jack shit as far as campaign funds (relative to Democrats), his ads suck, his speeches suck, his policies suck, and his only real asset seems to be that he fought in the War of 1812. I'm sure most Democrats would rally behind Lieberman if he somehow stole the nomination by default against a weak field, but we sure wouldn't work all that hard for him. McCain is facing the same problems.

The x-factor, of Republican Swift Boat 527 groups, is a real danger. But probably not so much as Republicans wish. Obama's already faced two months of attacks on whether he is Muslim, crazy Christian, Marxist, elitist, etc. And he is still leading McCain in the majority of polls. If we see ads full of Jeremiah Wright or actors pretending to be offended rural folks, there will be concern in the press but not so much from the Democratic campaign. Why? Because Americans have been suckered twice by Karl Rove type hatchet man politics, and all they have is a recession, a war, record gas prices, and plummeting home values to show for it. If there is any year for people to get real about how horrible the Republicans are, this would be it.

So despite our impatience to rip into John "Dole" McCain and his full embrace of Bush's policies, we are content to lay the groundwork for the fight ahead. There is lots of fertile ground here, not just in emphasizing McCain's advanced age and backwards policies, but also his bullshit regarding his so-called maverick straight talker status. There is only a matter of time before the real McCain, the war-mongering Bush-hugging flip-flopping McCain, is exposed to the independents and Democrats who currently think he is a good guy.