The Circus is in Town--but is Anybody Watching?

Last week was an amazing campaign circus. John McCain and his campaign made so many gaffes that they probably cancelled each other out. The Obama campaign wasn't running too smoothly either, as it creaks along in mostly fund-raising mode, trying to accumulate the means to wage a real campaign beginning next month. Although Obama did rise to the occasion with a zinger of a response to the Gramm/McCain "it's all in your mind" position on economic hardship.

As for the McCainite gaffes, take your pick: Social Security is a "disgrace," Americans are whiners about the recession that is "psychological," etc. etc. But the one gaffe that may have specific consequence was McCain's attempt to pander in Pittsburgh by reminiscing that while being interrogated as a prisoner of war, he "gave up" the names of the Pittsburgh Steelers defensive line instead of his unit. Steelers blogs were apparently first to ferociously note that the great Steel Curtain didn't exist while McCain was a POW, and nobody in their right mind knew the defensive line of the Steelers in the 60s, when they were terrible. Moreover, McCain himself told this story in his autobiography--but the names he gave up were the offensive line of the Green Bay Packers, a team that had just won the Super Bowl.

McCain needs Pennsylvania to win the presidency, and to win PA he will need Pittsburgh. Now he's been caught pandering with a falsehood, but not just about anything--about the Steelers, perhaps the only thing that unites Pittsburghers and western Pennsylvania of all classes, races, ages and political parties. And to make matters worse for McCain, he went directly from Pittsburgh to...Green Bay.

This week is likely to begin with a media firestorm over the caricature of the Obamas on the cover of the New Yorker magazine. The Obama campaign calls its tasteless and offensive, and while obviously meant to be satiric, it is also made-to-order imagery for multiple areas of racism and prejudice. Personally, I can't conceive of New Yorker editors being this irresponsible, but they have been in this case. Is that famous New York tunnel vision so strong that they don't understand how people outside their little orbit of sophisticates are going to see this? This cover is incendiary.

It's possible that this will be a one day or one week tempest, but it could get a great deal bigger, resulting in the cover being withdrawn and/or editors resigning. An early sign will be whether distinguished writers for the New Yorker and other literary and journalistic names go public in condemning it. I'm quite sure that thousands of subscriptions will be cancelled, no matter how many copies of this issue might be sold. This is a sad, sad day for a magazine with such a rich history and tradition.

All that said, you have to wonder whether anybody outside of political obsessives are paying much attention. And that actually makes the New Yorker cover more dangerous. It says everything the bigots are purveying in their emails, but without depending on the recipients' even marginal literacy. No matter what happens now, that cover will be around for the rest of the campaign.

It's been a couple of weeks since the media hyped up some McCain propaganda to accuse Obama of changing his position on Iraq. Now Obama has an op-ed in the New York Times that uses last week's multiple assertions by Iraqi leaders that they want the U.S. out of Iraq to re-state his policy. He notes not too subtly what he has said "many times" about being as careful getting out as Bushites were careless getting in, and adjusting the plan according to circumstances. But the plan is to begin withdrawing troops and getting most of them out in 18 months. The op-ed ends:

"In this campaign, there are honest differences over Iraq, and we should discuss them with the thoroughness they deserve. Unlike Senator McCain, I would make it absolutely clear that we seek no presence in Iraq similar to our permanent bases in South Korea, and would redeploy our troops out of Iraq and focus on the broader security challenges that we face. But for far too long, those responsible for the greatest strategic blunder in the recent history of American foreign policy have ignored useful debate in favor of making false charges about flip-flops and surrender.

It’s not going to work this time. It’s time to end this war. "