McCain is a high-stakes craps player who loves the adrenalised rush of the game, according to Time. Obama is a low-stakes poker player who sizes up his odds methodically and rarely loses money.
"Aides say McCain tends to play for a few thousand dollars at a time and avoids taking markers, or loans, from the casinos. 'He never, ever plays on the house,' says Mark Salter, a McCain adviser. The goal, say several people familiar with his habit, is never financial. He loves the thrill of winning and the camaraderie at the table.... Obama always had his head in the game. He studied the cards as closely as he would an eleventh-hour amendment to a bill. The odds were religion to him. Only rarely did he bluff."
Sounds about right. McCain is the one who has gambled big — staking his claims to the presidency to a single issue, Iraq. Obama has been playing a longer game — betting on this being as a 'change' election from the get go. There's no question who I'd want playing from my pot: Obama. And no question who I'd prefer to play with: McCain. (Former state senator Larry Walsh once slammed down his cards on Obama, complaining, "Doggone it, Barack, if you were more liberal in your card-playing and more conservative in your politics, you and I would get along much better").
"He managed to limit the mechanical hand chops and weirdly timed smiles.... his longtime nemesis, the teleprompter... He is ill-suited to lecterns.... He is working to limit his verbal tangents and nonverbal tics... He is speaking less out of the sides of his mouth.... he is relying less on his favorite semantic crutch, the phrase 'my friends'.... seems to have reined in the sarcasm.... said he was trying to be 'extra vigilant' about not giving unnecessary offense... the only time I would even put him behind a podium at all between now and the end of the campaign is when he’s announcing a policy position" — a NYT report on McCain's recent attempts to improve his public speaking.
It's beginning to resemble the 'what-have-the-Romans-ever-done-for-us?' scene from The Life of Brian. So okay, apart from the hand chops and the weird smiles and the teleprompters amd the lecterns and the verbal tangents and the non-verbal tics and the semantic crutches and the excessive sarcasm and the unnecessary offense and the podiums, what, uh, seems to be the problem?
Things are hotting up. New polls are coming every day. The networks all have 3-hour long marathons of election coverage that begin at 5 or 6pm and let up at 9 or 10pm every evening, with repeats going through until midnight. The press, meanwhile, have dispatched 24-hour reporter pools to cover the candidates' every dash for pizza ("MO and BO flirt. MO hits BO playfully three times in a row...The candidate went inside to change clothes to go to the gym. The pool sat across the street and waited on a wall, later discovered to be covered in fire ants...")
There's only one spanner in the works of this 24-hour, 7-day-a-week electathon: nothing actually seems to be happening.
It's a definite impediment, although not insurmountable. What we have instead is a series of stories hinging on pseudo-outrage from one candidate's surrogates at the not-quite-gaffes uttered by the other candidate's surrogates. The amount of offense-taking is positively Olympian. The latest flap: Obama says he may "refine" his Iraq exit strategy sometime in the next six months or so.
Seeings as its a war and all, and we still have to see out the end of the year before any strategy can even begin to be implemented, this seems like a jolly sensible idea, even an imperative one.
Not so. It is an outrageous "flip flop"! says the McCain campaign. Obama has effected the u-turn to end all u-turns! The man's principles have imploded utterly, leaving nothing but a spineless dark star of anti-mattter and dust! The news media, needless to say, has leapt onto the bandwagon with enthusiasm: How dare he promise to refine his plan! We want him top stick to the exact same plan he came up with six months ago! Who does he think he is, etc etc
The public, meanwhile, looks on, bemused. A recent poll by CNN found that 61% of people found that McCain had changed his mind about something and 59% of people suspected had Obama had changed his mind about something. The same poll also found that 63% of voters have a favorable opinion of Obama and 59% a favorable opinion of McCain. In other words: they couldn't care less. They want a pragmatist.
Today Jim Webb got his Veterans bill passed, despite fierce opposition from Bush and McCain because they thought it was too kind to veterans — rewarding them with a college education, and thus leading them out of army service, rather then keeping them there. Now that the Bill has passed anyway, McCain seems to have changed his tune, telling voters on Friday:
I'm happy to tell you that we probably agreed to an increase in educational benefits for our veterans that not only gives them an increase in their educational benefits, but if they stay in for a certain period of time than they can transfer those educational benefits to their spouses and or children. That's a very important aspect I think of incentivizing people of staying in the military.
He then attack Obama (who voted for the Bill) saying.
Unlike Senator Obama, my admiration, respect and deep gratitude for America's veterans is something more than a convenient campaign pledge. I think I have earned the right to make that claim.
It's hard to know what to say to this. Sometimes a lie comes along that is so bold and blatent that it just bowls you over. A lie that was any less blatent it might have left me scowling, but this one actually brought a smile to my face. There is no other reaction, really. And it got me thinking: McCain is, I believe, a man of some integrity, and yet here he is, coughing up stuff like this. He can't really be enjoying it. This isn't fun for him. And that led me back to Peggy Noonan's terrific piece in the WSJ, this week:
There is a sense about his campaign that John McCain has already got what he wanted, he got what he needed, which was to be top dog in the Republican Party, the party that had abused him in 2000 and cast him aside. They all bow to him now, and he doesn't need anything else. He doesn't need the presidency. He got what he wanted. So now he can coast. This is, in the deepest way, unserious. JFK had to have the presidency—he wanted that thing. Nixon had to have it too, and Reagan had to have it to institute his new way. Clinton had to have it—it was his destiny, the thing he'd wanted since he was a teenager.
I think this is spot on. When you see McCain campaigning the think he most resembles is a man standing in the middle of a bar-fight, taken aback by the brawl going on around him. There's a certain taken-aback glee at seeing this punch land, or that person go over, but his heart is not really in it. I'm not really sure he would have fun being president. I know having fun is a strange criterion to use when it comes to the high office in the land, but it isn't totally off the mark, either: fun tends to be the most observable sign that someone is right for a job, that the match is so exact, they can't but enjoy themselves.
I don't think Bush enjoyed it: I think he wanted to win the presidency more than he wanted what followed. The presidential bit. Obama would enjoy it I think. When his campaign was really humming along, around the time of the Indiana primary, when McCain was coming out with his duff gas-tax idea and Hillary was knocking back whiskey shots like her life depended on it, Obama was having such a blast taking them both on, you couldn't help but smile.
God. I'm getting nostalgic for the Primaries. The Ggeneral election is a little dull by comparion, truth be told — the two candidates in a holding pattern, making speeches nobody listens to, watching the surrogates make pseudo-gaffes.
Hendrik Hertzberg is puzzled by outrage over the latest "gaffe" by Charlie Black, the McCain advisor who recently said that a terrorist attack on American soil would be helpful to McCain’s candidacy.
"Black merely stated the conventional wisdom. The view that terrorism is good for McCain is supported by polling data and is shared across the board—hence, for example, the widespread calls from within the Obama camp for a running mate with strong military or national-security credentials. I share this c.w. myself. So, too, we may assume, does Al Qaeda, which has people who read the internets if not the actual papers.... Obviously, this is not something that Obama or his people can say. But commentators can say it, and I hereby do so."
Have gaffes always been this fleeting, this slight? The real gaffe, of course, would have been for Black to say "I hope there's another terrorist attack so McCain wins". It's been the same way with most the so-called gaffes of this campaign — Hillary's RFK assassination comment, her use of the word "white," Obama's "bittergate". They weren't in and of themselves controversial statements. But they lay close enough to other statements that would be deemed controversial, were they to be made, that the media simply split the difference and cried foul.
Its like the magnetic hum that you pick up off of live electricity cables, or the dives you see in football (soccer, whatever): you may not have actually fouled the other guy, but you allowed yourself to get into the sort of situation in which the other guy might reasonably fall to the ground, rolling around, clutching his knee. The other day Obama said the GOP would probably play the race card and the GOP instantly hit the deck, saying "he played the race card!" Even saying someone else is going to play the race card is playing the race card, apparently. What kind of card is that exactly — the Joker? What they really mean, of course, is that he used the word "race" — a slightly less remarkable observation. Victimology has become such a double-jointed, reverse-current, topsy-turvy art form that certain words — black, white, terrorist, assassination — don't even have to be organised into meaningful sentences any more. They just need to appear, and computers crash, minds blow, the space-time continuum buckles and breaks.
My friend Nick, who knows more about football than I do, adds:— "Your football analogy is about right, although in football there almost always has been a mistake on a defender's part, even if he didn't touch anyone, or not enough to make them fall over. In politics, it's as if you're not even allowed in that part of the pitch."
McCain is a high-stakes craps player who loves the adrenalised rush of the game, according to Time. Obama is a low-stakes poker player who sizes up his odds methodically and rarely loses money.
