What's Slated for the Right's Attack Machine

If you, like I, have been trying to imagine how utterly low and unimaginative the right-wing attack machine can get, your labors are over, courtesy this piece from The Politico.

I was of course happy that my quest for the most pitiable slime job scheduled by the right was finally over, yet I also read the story -- "Obama's own voice may haunt him" -- with a certain stirring of letdown and disappointment.

Is this, I asked myself, the best the right can do, after lo these many years of perfecting the art of smear?

We all expected the right would go after Obama for real or perceived hypocrisies, if for no other reason than to divert attention from those of their own candidate, who, for at least a year now, has been flip-flopping around on issues from fiscal to foreign like a red-necked wallaby.

Now that would have called for some creativity, especially since Obama's flips and flops have merely been strategic encroachments into their own ideological territory -- leaving the right to attack what they also adore.

I'm sure those assaults are still to come, in spades, and legitimately so. But one cannot properly call them smears. Obama's "refined" positions will likely be twisted out of all recognition, naturally, but still, such attacks will be issue-related. So fair game.

No, for the ideal smear, the right always looks elsewhere each election cycle. And this year it thinks it has found it in Obama's own words, and his own voice, in "the Grammy Award-winning audio version of his 1995 memoir, 'Dreams from My Father,'" as The Politico reports.

"In [one] passage," The Politico explains, "describing his high school experience in Hawaii, for example, Obama explains the allure of drugs: 'I kept playing basketball, attended classes sparingly, drank beer heavily, and tried drugs enthusiastically.... If the high didn’t solve whatever it was that was getting you down,' Obama intones, 'it could at least help you laugh at the world’s ongoing folly."

Honesty and remarkable insight for a pol -- positive qualities the electorate demands and then laps up as negatives.

Said "conservative activist" Floyd Brown, whose least authentically conservative but best known activity was in designing the 1988 Willie Horton ad: "What we’re doing now is test marketing messages.... And I would highly encourage other independent efforts -- or the [McCain] campaign itself -- to do the same thing."

For now, Mr. Brown is biding his time. "Most people will only start focusing on this race after Labor Day. Most Americans don’t give a rip yet," which is something of an electoral truism, I'll give him that. "They don’t know Barack Obama. It’s all about delivering messages to those people during that moment in time when they’re listening" -- you know, "the simple folk," to quote Gene Wilder from "Blazing Saddles": the "morons."

Yet one of the right's more sententious darlings, talk-show host Hugh Hewitt, is already airing selected excerpts on his program. "I think the audio version makes a much more immediate impact," he told The Politico. "It turns out to be very jarring to many ears to hear Obama talking about his youthful adventures, his attitudes on race."

Yes, especially when the selections are taken out of all social, cultural and historical context, which of course is what the right specializes in.

But this? It just seems so lazy for the right. I guess I expected more -- something far more tawdrily creative.

When informed of the coming "audio-tape" campaign, Obama spokesman Nick Shapiro said "It will be no surprise if the right wing once again resorts to the politics of distraction, because they know that the majority of Americans trust Barack Obama to end the war in Iraq, provide affordable access to universal health care and find real solutions to lowering gas prices, the issues that matter most to them."

We'll see. But sometimes the least creative is the most effective. See, again, Wilder quote.