UniBrow

1. Lauren Conrad

2. Marion Jones

3. Baby costumes

4. T.I.

5. Halloween snacks

6. Barack Obama

7. World Series

8. Fundraising

9. 2009 Toyota Matrix

10. Socialism

Octogenarian Doc Watson, sounding as good as ever, along with Alison Krauss and Ricky Skaggs.

A welcome whiff of smelling salts from Ta-Nehesi Coates. Well worth reading.

“My center is giving way. My right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I attack!”

That’s the message supposedly sent by General Ferdinand Foch of France to his commanding general, Joseph Joffre, during the crucial First Battle of the Marne in September 1914. The French and British counterattacks succeeded. The German Army, after advancing for a month, was forced back.

Here in the U.S., after more than a month of Democratic advances, it’s the Republican center that’s giving way, and some on the political right who are in retreat. The Obama campaign is marching toward the biggest nonincumbent Democratic presidential victory since 1932, and the Democratic Party is fighting its way toward its best overall presidential and Congressional year since 1964.

Situation not-so-excellent. It’s probably Time for McCain to attack–or, rather, finally to make his case.

Sounds good. The only problem is that, notably unlike the poilus and the Tommies during World War I, the McCain campaign does not seem to be blessed with a superabundance of individuals capable of walking three feet without tripping over their own ba-donk-a-donks.

The heart of that case has to be this: reminding voters that when they elect a president, they’re not just electing a super-Treasury secretary or a higher-level head of Health and Human Services. They’re electing a commander in chief in time of war.

War? You mean that incompetently waged, $3 trillion war in Iraq that has killed thousands with no end in sight, distracted us from capturing bin Laden, reinvigorated al-Qaeda, and diminished America’s standing in the world to its lowest point in … forever? The war that the Bush administration lied us into? The war everybody but McCain and Bush now recognizes was a calamitous blunder? The one Obama got right and McCain got wrong? That war?

The McCain campaign intends, I gather, to return to the commander in chief theme with an event in Florida Wednesday showcasing former secretaries of state and retired senior military officers. But why not showcase young Iraq vets instead? These young soldiers and marines can testify eloquently to the success of the surge that John McCain championed, and to the disaster and dishonor that would have followed Barack Obama’s preferred path of withdrawal.

As for the future in Iraq, the respected foreign policy analyst Michael O’Hanlon, a Democrat, endorsed Obama this past weekend. But O’Hanlon also wrote on Politico that Obama’s Iraq position is “extremely risky,” and that “getting all American combat forces out of Iraq by April 2010, a position he has held while we were losing the war, during the comeback phase, and now while we are winning, is very imprudent and I continue to hope and pray that he rethinks it.”

Got that? Respected foreign-policy analyst Michael O’Hanlon has serious reservations about Obama’s Iraq policy. They’re not serious enough to keep him from voting for Obama, mind you, and in saying he hopes Obama will rethink his position he pays the Democrat a compliment–i.e., that he’s rational and intellectually honest–to which McCain has no longer any clear title after the campaign he has run. But go ahead and vote for McCain on the strength of O’Hanlon’s analysis even though O’Hanlon himself won’t be. 

McCain could point out that hope is nice and prayer is good. But, he could ask: With respect to our national security, do we really want to elect a president on a hope and a prayer?

The candidates’ easily distinguishable records on the Iraq war to one side, in the case of McCain we would be electing the oldest first-term president in American history, a 72-year-old veteran of four bouts with melanoma–of which the senator’s bulging left mandible is a perpetual reminder. And this walking memento mori would be our sole bulwark against the advent of President Sarah Palin. Speak you of hopes? Of prayers?

That has to be the substantive core of his closing argument. But style and tone matter, too. Last week’s New York Times/CBS News poll showed 64 percent of voters saying McCain is spending more time attacking the other candidate than explaining what he would do as president. Just 22 percent say the same of Obama.

Yes. I like where this seems to be going.

When you’re in a hole, stop digging. McCain could order his campaign to pull all negative ads, mailers and robocalls.

For that matter, he might as well muzzle the campaign. McCain campaign senior staff members now seem to be spending more time criticizing one another than Obama, and more time defending their own reputations than pursuing a McCain-Palin victory. McCain should simply say that for the last week of the campaign, no staff member is authorized to speak to the media about anything beyond logistical and scheduling matters.

Because surely none of them would think to speak anonymously to the media about everything that’s gone wrong and whose fault it is and what a disaster Sarah Palin has been. Those who have been compulsively doing exactly that must have thought, in default of a crisply worded interdiction from the nominee, that McCain wouldn’t mind.

Then McCain and Palin can spend the final week speaking for themselves. They should throw themselves open full time to the media. Could the press coverage get worse? Next Sunday, McCain and Palin could divide up the talk shows. Sarah Palin live! Lots of people would tune in.

Many would, indeed–just as they tuned in to her interviews with Charlie Gibson and Katie Couric. And those went well.

There could be one other big moment this week. Obama has bought a half-hour of television in prime time Wednesday. McCain and Palin could buy time Thursday night–giving voters some incentive to keep an open mind at least until McCain and Palin get to make their case.

Wait … Thursday night? I know McCain’s behind, but disrespecting My Name is Earl can’t be the answer. 

Palin could speak first, reprising her fine recent speeches on women’s issues and special needs kids–speeches that got almost no press coverage.

I don’t know about that. Last Saturday’s address on special-needs children, the one that culminated in a swinish condemnation of fruit-fly research, got some attention. Hitchens had some thoughts, and P.Z. Myers got very excited about “the wackaloon from Wasilla.” I step aside for a bracing excerpt: “This idiot woman, this blind, shortsighted ignoramus, this pretentious clod, mocks basic research and the international research community. You damn well better believe that there is research going on in animal models–what does she expect, that scientists should mutagenize human mothers and chop up baby brains for this work?”

She could then introduce her running mate, reminding people of his heroism, and pointing out, as she does on the stump, that he is the only candidate “who has truly fought for America.”

Apart from his maverick image, McCain’s service in Vietnam and the five years he spent as a prisoner of war are offered as his foremost qualifications for office. This is of course an admirable and honorable aspect of McCain’s personal history, but it is neither a qualification nor a disqualification for the office of president of the United States. However, since he’s the “the only candidate” in this race who has served his country in war, Obama’s lack of similar experience–so the thinking seems to run–must figure as something approaching a disqualification for office. A crucial, and obvious, point must be made–that the one absolute requirement of the American commander-in-chief, apart from the basic qualifications of age and so forth, is that he (one day she) must be a civilian. Past military service may be among the various kinds of experience that would be useful to a president, but the generals answer to civil authority. The implication that a lack of military service makes one less qualified for the top job than a veteran is simply ignorant.   

As for McCain, he needs to speak about America’s greatness and its future; about how the ingenuity and toughness of the American people will turn around this financial crisis just as the ingenuity of General Petraeus and the toughness of his fighting men and women turned around Iraq; about how America’s spirit was not undone by a terrorist attack, and will not be undone by a financial mess; about how the naysayers will once again be proved wrong; about how America will emerge from its troubles stronger than ever and will win its battles at home and abroad.

Now I like what Bill’s doing here, the way he’s anchoring everything McCain should say about the economy in a military/foreign policy analogy, as though McCain’s perceived expertise on the latter should give him credibility, via some kind of halo effect, on the former. Maybe, instead, it simply shows that Kristol, too, knows that McCain is out of his depth whenever he ventures into the roiling waters of domestic policy or contemplates the mysteries of the financial markets, and that all roads have to lead back to foreign policy in order to impart an illusion of gravity to his domestic/economic agenda. Since the public generally seems very well satisfied with the country’s fortunes in the Iraq war, the number-one foreign-policy issue of the day, this strategy impresses me as diabolically astute. Well played indeed.

McCain has a chance to close this election in a big and positive way. He has a chance to get voters to rise above the distractions and to set aside the petty aspects of the campaign. He has a chance to remind them why they have admired him, and perhaps to persuade them to vote for him on Nov. 4.

Right. Because Obama’s been responsible for the “distractions” and the “petty aspects of the campaign.”

Would this turn things around? Unlikely. But why not take a shot?

No reason I can think of.
 
Thus Kristol, fisked.

Over the last few days I’ve been vaguely considering a post on that small but hallowed fraction of the voting public who at this late date cannot make up their minds between Obama and McCain. The burden of the thing would have been essentially that these people may be receiving too much respect. (Or: wtf?) David Sedaris has now relieved me of this disagreeable chore with a must-read in The New Yorker. (I’m at my best when I’m linking to the work of other people.) He nutshells it right here:

I look at these people and can’t quite believe that they exist. Are they professional actors? I wonder. Or are they simply laymen who want a lot of attention?

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.