Perhaps in an attempt to cover for for a speaking style that makes John Kerry look dynamic, John McCain manages to pack a lot of symbolism into his words.

He used his Saturday radio address to explain how “With all the breathless coverage from abroad, and with Senator Obama now addressing his speeches to ‘the people of the world,’ I’m starting to feel a little left out. Maybe you are too.”

McCain, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, kept up that sardonic tone throughout the address, charging that Obama, who is wrapping up a tour of the Middle East and Europe, has taken “multiple positions on the surge in Iraq.”

The problem is, the message is internally inconsistent, and McCain himself is more vulnerable than his opponent on precisely these issues. Presumably the Republicans are assuming another Gore/Kerry-style campaign, with an equally uninterested population. Because no one who’s paying attention could fail to notice a certain inconsistency, the kind that arises from desperation, in McCain’s attack on Obama:

We’re left to wonder how he can deny that the surge in Iraq has succeeded, while at the same time announcing that a surge is just what we need in Afghanistan. I’ll leave all these questions for my opponent and his team of 300 foreign policy advisors to work out for themselves. With luck, they’ll get their story straight by the time the Obama campaign returns to North America.

First there’s the problem of McCain, of all people, accusing Obama of changing positions. That might betray the hand of Rove; it’s been a trademark of his to hit the opponent on the areas his candidate is weak on. But Obama’s shown both the ability and the willingness to hit back immediately in those situations. If the opponent responds directly and quickly, the Rove bluff is called. It’s way too easy to mashup all those McCain flip-flops over the much longer time he’s been running for office.

Then there’s the apparent hypocrisy of McCain talking about Obama’s refusal to acknowledge that the surge has “succeeded”, despite not having met any of its most important benchmarks. McCain opposes the surge in Afghanistan, perhaps reflexively to distinguish himself from the right-wing Democrat whose plan for Iraq he seemed superficially to endorse last week. And most likely he’s expecting few Americans to put together the two pieces of information. But how can McCain claim that the surge that worked in Iraq is not a good idea in Afghanistan? Well, probably because conditions are different. Which Obama might say as well.

Which leads to the main problem with McCain’s symbolism. The voters he appears to be courting, beyond the defense establishment, are the fearful, the evangelicals, and the blue-collar-comedy fans. That’s a difficult courtship to begin with, because he kind of despises them all.

His conversions to Republican orthodoxy are widely suspected. His prime candidate for Treasury Secretary had to drop out of sight after whining about a “nation of whiners”; this after the candidate had openly confessed to not knowing much about economics, the concern most Americans list first. And in the week when Obama swishes his first try at a three-pointer, McCain is the butt of late-night jokes for his response when asked if he goes online himself:

They [aides] go on for me. I am learning to get online myself and I will have that down fairly soon. I don’t expect to be a great communicator. I don’t expect to set up my own blog. But I am becoming computer-literate to the point where I can get the information I need.

West Wing fans can almost see the aides wincing in the background. “Learning to get online” reminds one of Bush 41’s encounter with the optical scanner at a grocery store. But where it’s not really surprising that a President doesn’t get to the store often, it’s hard to imagine doing much of anything in today’s complex interactive world without a computer. One assumes that candidates for President have access to high-speed connections, and are no longer required to do anything other than sit down in order to be considered online.

If McCain can do his job with paper, that’s fine with me. But he seems severely unhip when he’s unclear even on the basic terminology of something that is part of the daily lives of 88% of Americans, many more than care about three-pointers.

He’s gunning for the less cosmopolitan, less educated, the folks with viewpoints severely restricted by lack of experience; people, in a word, unlike him. These folks are not the best audience for sardonic comments about the opponent; they need red meat. Which McCain will at some point break down and throw them. It’ll get ugly and bitter, because those are fires Republicans seem to congregate around.

And he’ll still lose, big time. Because in the end Americans who see the choice as new hope versus old toughness will break for hope, and worry about how realistic that hope is later. The war machine has already signed off on both, so it doesn’t care.

Posted by Chuck Dupree at July 26, 2008 11:13 PM

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