Grasping At Straws

Wow, I thought Patrick Ruffini knew politics.  Where the frigg did he come up with THIS brain fart?:

I'm beginning to think Obama might be the easier candidate for McCain to beat. Why? Because there could be no clearer contrast on the Commander-in-Chief test. ...

he'll ask the question: Who would you trust as Commander-in-Chief? And it will be no contest. Voter discontent with Iraq (which has been abating of late) aside, people like a Commander-in-Chief who acts like a Commander-in-Chief, not one who will have tea with Hugo Chavez.

Hillary denies McCain this angle of attack to some extent. Obama leaves it wide open.

Check the issues surveys lately, Pat?  The war is way, way down the list.  Ditto "terrorism".  When the Iraqi campaign was perceived as going badly, people were open to Democrat demands that we run away; now that the "Surge" has turned things around, the Enemy Media is ignoring Iraq, and the issue has faded into obscurity.  Either way, which candidate would make the better commander-in-chief is a forgotten afterthought.  If Sailor were to bring it up - and I don't see why he would, since he'll never, EVER have a cross, much less partisan, word to utter against his good, close, personal friends Hillary and Barack, unlike that lying, robber-baron, Ken doll mother!#$%^& Romney - he'd just be denounced as a sexist or racist, respectively, for daring to suggest that a woman or an African-American isn't qualified to command the U.S. military.

And they'd be right, you know; the Empress and B.O. are perfectly capable of commanding the military - to shrink, or make big, naked man piles like the ones those perv prison guards did to captured jihadis at Abu Ghraib as official Pentagon policy (It'd give a whole new meaning to the slogan "Army strong"...), or revive the Clinton-era "meals on wheels"/nation-building/do-gooder fetish of sending U.S. forces into conflicts that don't involve any national security interest in order to squander the military resources (and lives) that they can't defund and demobilize.

Unless there's another 9/11 or worse between now and November, presidential command fitness is going to matter in this election less than a mechanic at a rental car lot.  People have forgotten we're at war; 9/11 is ancient history, as was amply demonstrated in the 2006 midterms.  As I have long suspected, what voters want more than anything else is an end to all the "controversy" and "partisan bickering" and "upheaval" of the Bush years.  They want the real world to go away, and the false quiet, false peace, and false prosperity of the Clinton years to return.  And that sentiment evidently permeates the GOP as well, as I can fathom no better explanation for how John f'ing McCain can possibly be the Republican nominee.

And he'll go down worse than Goldwater did, because he'll have no center-right base, and the center-left base he'll be counting on will stampede to Senator Clinton and/or Senator Obama.

Mitt Romney's failure shows yet again the bankruptcy of making the case against your opponent in lieu of making the case for yourself.  Conservatives were united against McCain, but could never unite behind one alternative.  In the same way, McCain will not be able to make an honest case for himself for the aforementioned reasons, and any attempt to go negative on Hillary will fall on deaf ears (and he'd never do that to his "good, close, personal friend" anyway).  Doing the same to Obama will just play right into the latter's "politics of hope" hands, and finally get Darth Queeg exposed and widely acknowledged for the insufferable bastard he really is.

Duane Patterson contrasted McCain and Obama in this video the other day:

His conclusion?

[N]otice the optics here.  John McCain, flanked by his mother, his wife, grey-haired Charlie Crist, and Democrat Joe Lieberman.  The cumulative age of all five in the shot is 332 years old.

Now go to the Barack shot.  There are thirteen people behind Barack.  Average mean age?  Twentysomething. If you add up the ages of all of them, it's still less than the five people in the John McCain shot. 

Our side looked like a 60th high school reunion, and their side looks like the Peace Corps. 

It's going to be a long nine months.

Remember the media's obsession with "gravitas" when Bush was the GOP standardbearer in 2000, and their insistance that Al Gore had it and Dubya didn't?  "Youth, vitality, virility, and charisma" will be the watchwords in 2008.  Gravitas, even if McCain had any, will be irrelevant.

Patterson was wrong about one thing, though; it's going to be a long five years - if we're lucky.  And the way that luck is going, you'll forgive me if I'm not rushing to place any futures bets, and invest instead in a well-stocked bunker in my back yard.

Heck, my grass looks like crap anyway....