As a degenerate gambler, John McCain must feel snakebitten. He makes the completely mavericky move of tapping a moose, I mean moose HUNTER, as his VP, only to find out she is really a washed up beauty queen whose main attributes are a sparkly smile for Doughboy Goldberg and the ability to make Katie Couric into Walter Conkrite. He even suspended something, not his campaign, mind you, but something, in order to solve the bailout morass. Unfortunately, he discovered knots on a dog's leg are pretty useless on the Hill. But the ship seemed righted after Palin did not flee in tears in the midst of her recitation of talking points as Biden debated. The quite estimable Schmidt braintrust, after apparently hiring Baghdad Bob, assured the faithful that the campaign's strategic advance in retrograde out of Michigan meant that resources were now available to define Obama as a black guy who "pal[s] around with terrorists". This was the tactic that the team had been counting on, this was the one to double down the bet on.
And then a couple of funny things happened.
As Ms. Wasila 1984 delivered her screed with her teeth bared the other day, promising all Wright, all the time, serious people around the globe were discussing how the Eurozone economy seemed to be slowing down at an accelerated rate. Fortis needed a bailout, and that did not go particularly well, with the Netherlands finally stepping up after a coordinated bailout with Luxembourg and Belgium went down in flames. Hypo in Germany went down this morning, and my inbox is full of semi congratulatory emails about my forecast from 2007 on Iceland shutting down its banking sector. I think we woke up this morning not just to a sharp and coordinated global recession, but coordinated global deflation, which should be scaring the pants off every central banker from Washington to Beijing.
But meanwhile, back in Candyland, aka the McCain campaign headquarters across the bridge in Virginia, they are going to change the focus from the economy to Ayers. Whatever. As I type we are down on the DOW 465 points, below 10,000, and the NASDAQ is at dotcom crash levels. In the next week or so, as the 401K statements arrive, no one will care if there are photos of Obama and Wright kissing, only that the next president will have some adult level of understanding the challenges the economy faces. Meanwhile, McCain will pour precious dollars into convincing voters who never were going to vote for Obama, even if he were the only name on the ballot, to (drumroll, please) NOT VOTE FOR OBAMA. In the words of the immortal Bugs Bunny, "what a maroon".
In a stroke of genius and fortune, the attempt to change the focus has allowed Obama's people to finally take the gloves off about McCain's associations. In contradistinction to the base pleasing Ayers/Wright ads, Obama kneecaps McCain among independents with the "Keating 5" ad. By accurately tying past performance with future results, Obama makes the clear case that McCain is simply too risky to trust. And he does it without lying. The more people understand how the S&L crisis went down, the more they will see how incompetent and untrustworthy McCain really is.
McCain just rolled snake eyes.