McCain's Dishonorable Strategy

John McCain has saved up his money as best as he can, and the RNC is pitching in too. He’s doing a last minute ad blitz, focusing on a few key states, especially Pennsylvania.

Polling in Pennsylvania has consistently shown Obama with a comfortable lead, and yet McCain has made Pennsylvania a centerpiece of his strategy, causing most in the press to simply shake their heads. Michigan was a closer race than Pennsylvania, when John McCain pulled out of there. A host of other states have looked closer, but no, the McCain campaign kept insisting that it was Pennsylvania that was going to put McCain over the top.

Now we know why.

The conventional wisdom is that, while you want to have some advertising in the last few days, you want to have more before that, because it takes time for your arguments to seep into the consciousness of the American public. Even if your arguments aren’t particularly sound, or are appeals to some prejudice, they will gain currency if repeated often enough by true believer columnists, bloggers, and talk show hosts.

There is a reason for waiting, however, and that’s if you know that your accusations are more likely to be refuted than supported. Those kinds of arguments you want to make at the very last minute. In today’s world of the internet, the "very last minute" is closer to election day than ever, and McCain’s camp may have tipped their hand too soon by starting in today.

As expected, Jeremiah Wright is part of the plan. The Pennsylvania State GOP is cutting that ads, with the very kind of soft money McCain theoretically despises, doing the very kind of attack he, also theoretically, despises. This had to be saved for the last minute, in the hope it sticks to Obama without McCain having to be confronted with the choice of disowning the ad campaign. It’s fine with the Republicans if America wakes up on Nov. 5th with a feeling of regret for having voted for a candidate who has flung his much vaunted honor into the fire, as long as McCain has 270 electoral votes to show for it.

But that doesn’t explain Pennsylvania. The key there is coal, and the fact that Pennsylvania is not an early voting state. Sarah Palin is the attack dog of choice, once again trying to make McCain’s hands look clean.

In January Obama gave an interview in which he talked about a cap-and-trade proposal for reducing greenhouse gas emissions. In the interview, he pointed out that under this system it wouldn’t be illegal to open a coal plant – just financially unfeasible, because of what you would have to pay for the emissions. Hey Pennsylvania, Obama is anti-coal! And the media is covering it up and has made the tape unavailable, according to Sarah Palin.

Except that the media wasn’t covering it up, and the audio has been available continuously since January, and the only people who made a decision to not mention it until now are the people who run the McCain campaign. It isn’t “just now surfacing,” as the disasta from Alaska would have it. John McCain actually favors the same kind of cap-and-trade system, in any case. But that, they hope, would require another “media cycle” to reveal, and by that time, it will be too late.