Redstate

By Repair Man Jack Posted in 2008 — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The world outside the newspaper publishing industry and the McCain for President Campaign Headquarters pretty much agrees that the Senate Immigration Fiasco put John McCain’s White House aspirations in the hurt locker. The media will tell us otherwise. They see the world as the world is not and broadcast that misinformation far and wide.

The Inside the Beltway version of McCain’s demise blames his catastrophic decline on his support of the Iraq Surge. If a politician says too many nice things about a general who won Senate confirmation by over 80 votes, that campaign is clearly headed for the toilet and then rapidly into the sewage system. The authors of this convenient myth have walked through too many DC Metro parking lots where the authorities seem to tow the cars without Jim Webb or John Kerry bumper stickers.

The McCainiac version of the story involves two profligate aids, who mismanaged John McCain into dire straits, while the noble patrician senator labored in the sweaty vineyards of good and responsible governance. Terry Nelson, the wags all say, spent McCain’s campaign into an impecunious quagmire. Ron Paul has more in the bank.

Good governance, in the strange and mysterious world of Citizen McCain, has included the McCain-Feingold 1st Amendment Repeal, The McCain-Lieberman Carbon Cartel, and a commitment to Federally-Funded embryonic stem cell research. This was how John McCain served the GOP base prior to his drive across the immigration reform bridge with Edward Kennedy.

John Weaver has also been tossed unceremoniously under the bus. Weaver, unlike Nelson, probably deserves to get turned into axel-grease. His prior campaign experience involved a jaunt with General Wesley Clark in 2004.

Weaver supposedly poisoned the atmosphere of McCain’s campaign operation because of his mean and vindictive personality. The fact that Jimmy Carter did that in 1976 and actually won the election lays this specious argument to nines. If McCain really knows how to run an administration, why did he hire Weaver in the first place?

What these excuses don’t explain, in fairness to the aforementioned Mr. Nelson, is that McCain’s fundraising was going along pretty well until recently. Then it went off a cliff. Terry Nelson was not reading from the Howard Dean manual of campaign budget execution. He just ran out of receipts, before Senator Macbeth stopped sending him the obligations.

These receipts ran dry for a very specific reason. The $2,000 checks look great in the campaign treasury, but they rarely, if ever, come in a large enough volume to finance the fifty-state media marathon that a presidential campaign requires; just to make it to the national convention. The donations that provide that much rocket fuel come in increments of $10 to $50 a pop, and aren’t being sent in from Manhattan, San Francisco or Beverly Hills.

To get the small checks in bushel baskets, a campaign has to connect with the citizens of small town America. Those people did not approve of Senator McCain’s work on the immigration bill. Even more importantly, they hated his arrogant demeanor. They tend not to send checks to some guy who calls them hicks or bigots. McCain implied both throughout the entire rancorous debate over immigration reform.

But McCain’s failure to even politely disagree with his voters on immigration is symptomatic of why I don’t want this man to be the GOP nominee. He believes that he, not the people, always knows best. This attitude will always get even highly intelligent people in trouble.

John Nash, subject of the biographical movie A Beautiful Mind, and Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University, has to be one of the smartest men in modern America. Even for Nash, smart wasn’t always good enough; his arrogance could get in the way.

At one juncture, Rand Corporation decided to help validate Dr. Nash’s future Nobel Prize-winning work on Nash Equilibriums in Economic Game Theory. Two of the smartest, most capable nerd-wrestlers Rand could field in Nash’s weight class, played the game Nash wrote about several hundred times.

The two men played Nash’s games and kept getting different results than Dr. Nash described as the optimal one in his work. Rather than examining the facts surrounding the experiment, Nash preemptively accused the two analysts of not playing the game properly. People took note of how Dr. Nash responded to having his findings challenged and viewed him less favorably as a result. Nash waited a long time to receive his just recognition as a Nobel Laureate. His McCain-like demeanor played a role in that attenuation.

To put it nicely, I doubt Senator McCain will win any Nobel Prize for his work on immigration, unless he gets the same judges that honored Yassir Arafat. He acts as if he is John Nash and can swat his detractors like flies. He doesn’t take the time to notice that those detractors are the same guys that he needs to write him donation checks. If he can’t get that much straight, he doesn’t deserve the nomination to run for President.