John McCain's Campaign: More Anti-Obama than Pro-McCain

So it has come to this: U. S. Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain has had his phone privileges hemmed because he's been a bad boy.

Or so reports the paper of record: "McCain is so quick to pick up his gold-colored cellphone to solicit advice [from outsiders] that aides, concerned about his tendency to adopt the last opinion he has heard, have tried to cut back on the time he has to make calls."

It seems the senator is easily distracted from the little things of a big campaign -- like a coherent message. He and his staff huddle telephonically every morning, decide with reeducation-camp certainty on the agitprop of the day, and then, John hits the campaign trail and says whatever pops into his inelegant mind.

A couple weeks ago there occurred an illustrative episode. According to the Times, "after careful strategizing within his campaign," McCain's spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, hit the fax machines in a flurry of approved ridicule of Barack Obama regarding his "first-of-its-kind campaign rally overseas." But within minutes, the spokeswoman's boss was publicly undoing all the sinister good that had been done: "I can only give you my opinion, and I will talk to her," said the Grumpy Old Man. "The fact is that I'm glad he is going [and] it's long, long overdue if you want to lead this nation."

Tragically, "Ms. Hazelbaker raced out of the Virginia campaign headquarters and refused to take Mr. McCain's calls of apology, aides said, and a plan to have Republican members of Congress use the same critical line about Mr. Obama's foreign trip fell apart."

And that, my friends, is the new and improved version of the campaign's message-of-the-day discipline.

If its internal confusion and discord reminds you of another, recently concluded campaign, then your political synapses are in good working order. McCain's staff hasn't been shy about noting that it has studied Hillary Clinton's spectral campaign as a key to unlocking a winning strategy, but one wonders what his organization -- or more precisely, he himself -- has learned.

For Hillary, as Atlantic editor Joshua Green wrote in "The Front-Runner's Fall" (via politico.com), the evolution of a winning campaign strategy was less problematic than her own leadership skills, which failed to pull her organization into a single, consistent and unified whole.

It's not quite this bad at McCain HQ, but one sees the Clintonian lineaments: "[H]er advisers couldn't execute strategy; they routinely attacked and undermined each other," wrote Green, "and Clinton never forced a resolution.... [S]he never behaved like a chief executive." At one point a veteran Clinton aide was moved to write others: "This circular firing squad that is occurring is unattractive, unprofessional, unconscionable, and unacceptable." Within the McCain camp, however, the firing squad's formation appears to be more traditionally linear, and it's McCain himself holding the gun.

But here, I think, is the even bigger problem for McCain: When eleven out of 10 Americans see that Republican rule has had the nation charging down the wrong track, and six out of five detest the sitting Republican president, and, furthermore, you happen to be the Republican nominee, it's hard to remember with clarity and consistency just whose vote it is you're realistically asking for, or to whom you're trying to appeal.

Is it the old right-wingers? The evangelicals? The GOP moderates? The libertarians? The independents? Or perhaps those disgruntled Clintonites, whose reported numbers range from the vast to minuscule? Each subgroup of electoral possibilities calls for its own tailored message. And I can see how, while on the spur-of-the-moment trail, and out of the sudden enthusiasm of propinquity, McCain might feel unavoidably possessed to appeal to one over the over.

And then, bingo, you find yourself saying one thing, your staff saying another, and your humiliated spokeswoman won't talk to you. Strong and committed leadership on MCCain's part could indeed mitigate the message conflicts, but not altogether. There are too many externalities pulling in different directions.

So what's a campaign staff to do? Simple. Precisely what the McCain staff is doing: go singularly negative. Make the election about Barack Obama, keep a critical focus on him, and let's everyone pay no attention to that other man behind the curtain pulling all those conflicting-message levers.

When you get right down to it, the McCain staff doesn't really have a candidate. It has, rather, an enemy. And that's all those good little Rovian staffers need. Leadership? They don't need no stinkin' leadership. They have a human being to dismember -- their sole professional purpose.