February 10, 2008
Will McCain Go to the Mat with Obama?
By Steve Sailer
The collapse of
long-time frontrunner
Rudy Giuliani allowed rival
invade-the-world invite-the-world candidate Sen.
John McCain to squeeze out plurality wins in
winner-take-all primaries, while his hapless foes were
winning races where delegates were allotted
proportionally. The
Mainstream Media (MSM) has now anointed McCain as
the presumptive Republican nominee.
Yet Republicans
clearly aren't happy about McCain's flukish luck.
That was shown by his dismal performance on Saturday,
February 9th, the first election day after Super
Tuesday. Even with only
Mike Huckabee and
Ron Paul left in the race,
Senator McMentum received just 42 percent of the
vote in Louisiana, 26 percent in Washington and 24
percent in Kansas.
The odds still favor
McCain scraping across the line, due to his early
windfall of delegates. But I would guesstimate that,
even without a Huckabee miracle comeback, there's about
a 5%-15% chance that McCain won't actually be running
for President when Election Day finally grinds around—nine
long months from now.
Does anybody have a
contingency plan? One may be needed, because McCain is
71 years old. He has twice been struck by cancer—in 1993
and in 2000, when he underwent a 9-hour operation.
And McCain doesn't
have the most placid, reticent of
personalities in an era that has made crucifying
white males for "gaffes"
into a national spectator sport (James
Watson,
Don Imus,
Trent Lott, etc.
etc. etc.)
At this point,
responsible immigration-restrictionist opinion-molders,
such as
John O'Sullivan,
Mickey Kaus, and
Randall Parker, tend to favor a Democratic victory
as the least awful outcome, especially a win by the
uninspiring Hillary Clinton rather than by the
dangerously charismatic Barack Obama. They argue
that
McCain would muffle
GOP Congressional resistance to a revived
Amnesty/ Immigration Surge bill. They think a
Democratic president would galvanize Republican
opposition, as did Bill Clinton when he defeated George
I, leading to a
GOP Congressional victory in
1994.
But I'm in no mood to
be responsible. I'm looking for only one thing from
Election 2008: entertainment. I want to see mud slung
everywhere.
Obama currently leads
McCain in head-to-head polls by
7-8 points. So I'm going to offer McCain a little
unsolicited advice on what he'd have to do to win.
I don't, however,
expect McCain to take my suggestions. I expect him to
choose to lose, in the politically correct manner
that will preserve his image in the eyes of his
Main Stream Media acolytes, rather than to do what
it takes to get elected President.
Back in 1992, the
"Year
of the Woman", the Clintons won by running on
the themes of "change"
and "hope",
exactly the same woozy twaddle that Obama is peddling in
2008. I guess some things never, well,
change.
The media loved Bill
and Hill back then. But they eventually figured out that
the
power couple were only it for themselves. Today,
most elite liberals who aren't actually on the Clinton
payroll seem to despise the Clintons. So, this time
around, the media, those eternal suckers, are enraptured
by the exotic Obama.
The 2008 press bias
just goes to show once again what O.J. Simpson's defense
attorney, Johnny Cochran, understood but feminist D.A
Marcia Clark didn't: race trumps gender in the
victimology sweepstakes. (Cochran wanted
blacks on the jury while the clueless Clark wanted
women. So Johnny let Marcia throw him in the
briar patch by packing the
jury with
black women.)
The Clintons rode
feminist resentment over
Anita Hill into the White House. But playing the
gender card is
getting old with the media. This is not to say that
the feminists don't retain vast power—ask
Larry Summers!—just that they are now viewed as
tedious, unsexy old harridans.
But race is still
very much with us.
Thus Obama can insult
Hillary without being called a "chauvinist", but
when President Bill asserts that one aspect of Obama's
image is a "fairy
tale", he's denounced as a "racist". (The
term "fairy tale" is racist because fairy tales
are about African Americans, such as Snow White,
Goldilocks, and Rapunzel … Oh, uh, maybe that's not such
a good explanation of why "fairy tale" is racist.
In fact, I guess there is no rational
explanation. Which is the point: criticizing Obama for
any reason, other than a vague "lack of
experience", is "racist".)
For example, consider
the respectful greeting the press has given Obama's new
quasi-musical video
Yes We Can, hosted on Obama's website
here. It features celebrities shouting along with an
Obama stump speech about hope and change. This "song"
was dreamed up by hip-hopper
Will.i.am, who, as frontman of the Black Eyed Peas,
was previously liable for the
worst record in the history of the world,
My Humps. In it, Will.i.am raps with the lovely
Fergie, who famously rhymes "my humps" with
"my
lovely lady lumps".
Now, you might think
that for a Presidential candidate to associate himself
with
My Humps would invite derision. But the press
has
skipped over that easy bit of copy. (Wouldn't want
to be accused of being racist!…)
Of course, so far the
media has been strongly on McCain's side because they
see him as a "maverick"
Republican. But now that he is Mr. Republican, press
coverage is likely to become less fawning … especially
if Hillary is edged out by the media's new crush, Obama.
If Obama gets the Democratic nod, the
press adulation that McCain has been so addicted to
over the last couple of decades is likely to dry up.
Nine months from now,
the economy probably isn't going to be doing any better.
And McCain sure isn't going to be getting any younger
and handsomer.
There’s only one way
for McCain to win: he will have to have to go to the mat
with Obama—even though his Bigfoot press friends would
be aghast.
Republican strategist
Lee Atwater showed how it's done in George H.W.
Bush's 1988 victory over another fresh face with a funny
name,
Michael Dukakis.
In 1988, the
Massachusetts governor had won the Democratic nomination
and opened up a 17-point lead over the Vice
President—largely because he was getting credit for the
"Massachusetts
Miracle".
Dukakis, of course,
had almost nothing to do with the mid-1980s prosperity
in Massachusetts. In reality, data processing technology
had merely evolved to the point that the minicomputer
industry, led by the four Massachusetts firms of
DEC,
Data General,
Prime, and
Wang, had been taking business away from mainframe
computers. (Indeed, late in 1988, the Massachusetts
economy began to nosedive again as the modern
microcomputer started to drive minis toward extinction.)
But whoever said
politics was fair?
If you had been
paying attention back then, you would have already known
that Dukakis was likely the most liberal governor in the
history of the most liberal state in the union.
(Granted, Dukakis may not have noticed. He thought of
himself as a technocratic centrist. Which he
was—relative to other upper middle class Bostonians.)
The relatively few
voters who understood how liberal the Massachusetts
Democrat tended to hold strong opinions on whether that
was a good thing or a bad thing. But most voters don't
know much about politics. So they were clueless about
Dukakis's liberalism. Nor was the Main Stream Media
going to tell the public, because they largely shared
Dukakis's liberalism.
To get through to the
folks who didn't immediately grasp the implications of
the phrase "Massachusetts Democrat", Atwater put
together a notoriously lowbrow campaign emphasizing
easily understandable issues. For example, Dukakis, an
ACLU member, vetoed a bill making the
Pledge of Allegiance mandatory in Massachusetts
public schools. That's why one of the central events of
the
1988 Republican convention was the candidate's
12-year-old
mestizo grandson George P. Bush leading the
delegates in the Pledge.
This made MSM
sophisticates roll their eyes. But they weren't smart
enough to understand that the public needs to have
things spelled out for them using tangible symbols.
Atwater, however, understood this. He piloted Bush to a
crushing victory.
Atwater's most famous
issue was of course
Willie Horton. In 1974, Horton robbed 17-year-old
filling station attendant
Joey Fournier, then stabbed the boy 19 times and
stuffed him in a trash can where he bled to death.
For this murder,
Horton was sentenced to life without parole. But
Massachusetts had instituted a "furlough" program
in 1972, giving jailbirds vacations from the big house.
When the Massachusetts Supreme Court extended this
privilege to all criminals in 1976, the Massachusetts
legislature passed a bill denying furloughs to
first-degree murderers (like Horton). But Gov. Dukakis
vetoed it.
Not surprisingly,
when Horton was given a "weekend pass" in 1986,
he didn't return. Nor was it surprising that in 1987
Horton raped a woman in Maryland.
Maryland judge
Vincent J. Femia refused to send Horton back to
Massachusetts,
noting: "I'm not prepared to take the chance that
Mr. Horton might again be furloughed or otherwise
released".
The
Lawrence Eagle-Tribune ran 175 stories on the
scandal of Massachusetts's unique furlough system. They
won the
1988 Pulitzer Prize for "an investigation that
revealed serious flaws in the Massachusetts prison
furlough system and led to significant statewide
reforms".
Ironically, Bush aide
Jim Pinkerton
heard about this loony left excess from Democratic
presidential contender (and future Nobel Peace Prize
Laureate)
Al Gore. He had first
injected it into the 1988 campaign running against
the New York primary. When Atwater tried it out in focus
groups, voters immediately woke up to Dukakis's
liberalism.
In other words,
the Willie Horton story was a perfectly legitimate issue—the
kind of anecdote that helps the public
comprehend larger issues, such as what kind of
federal judges a President Dukakis would nominate.
Finally, it came as a
surprise to nobody that Horton was a member of the
minority that commits the majority of homicides in
America (52.2 percent since the
federal government began tracking homicide offenders
by race in 1976).
But, because Horton
was black, the Democrats were able to rewrite history.
Instead of the Willie Horton incident being about
Democrats being soft on crime, it became the
conventional wisdom that it was about Republicans being
racist. Wikipedia
claims [as of February 10, 2008]: "There were
more references to Horton in the 1992 campaign between
Bill Clinton and George H.W. Bush than there were in
1988," and the New York Times published a story
titled
In 1992, Willie Horton
Is Democrats' Weapon (by Richard L.
Berke, August 25, 1992)
If Obama wins the
Democratic nomination, McCain will face a similar,
although even trickier, challenge.
Judging from Obama's autobiography
Dreams from My Father, he was far, far to the
left of the American public—even far to the left of the
average Democrat, when he wrote his book in 1995.
Perhaps he's changed greatly since then, perhaps not.
But if the GOP candidate could force him to admit he had
recently outgrown his puerile leftism, it would take the
wind out of the sails of his campaign: his naïve
volunteers would feel sucker-punched.
In contrast to
Dukakis, however, Obama is a brilliant manipulator of
other people's impressions of him. Obama is extremely
intelligent and thus facile at summarizing his
opponents' views at least as well as they could
summarize them themselves. This flatters the vanity of
conservatives who assume that the reason liberals don't
agree with them is because they just don't understand
conservative arguments.
New York Times
reporter Jodi Kantor interviewed Obama's fellow students
at Harvard Law School, where Obama was elected president
of the Law Review. In her January 28, 2007
article "In
Law School, Obama Found Political Voice,"
she summarized his career there: "People had a way of
hearing what they wanted in Mr. Obama’s words".
This discrimination
lawyer has played it close to the vest with his deepest
beliefs during his rocket-propelled ascent, not
antagonizing anybody into strongly resisting his rise to
supreme power. For example, the Illinois GOP was
mau-maued into rolling over and
bringing in a joke (black) candidate from out of
state to run against him for the Senate in 2004—his
first and only federal election victory, it is easy to
forget. (The Bush White House helped by
lobbying against a stronger GOP candidate,
Jim Oberweis, because he had dared to campaign
against illegal immigration.)
The NYT’s
Kantor, though, gives a clue to the inner Obama:
"In dozens of
interviews, his friends said they could not remember his
specific views from that era, beyond a general emphasis
on diversity and social and economic justice".
Let me translate that
from
Harvard Lawspeak into English:
