Choose your targets carefully

Half the battle in any competition is shooting at the right target. (Remember the US biathlete who lost a gold medal a few years back because he got that wrong?) With the Democratic convention concluded, it’s clear they’ve chosen theirs: George W. Bush. They figure they don’t have to actually attack John McCain, which is not such an easy thing to do; they can just beat up on the easy target, the unpopular departing president, and then say that McCain is just the same. Superficially, it sounds like a good approach—after all, Barack Obama tells us, Sen. McCain voted with the President over 90% of the time! Wow, right?Well, not exactly. Sen. Obama’s dirty little secret here is—so did he. You see, what he knows and most Americans don’t is that some 90% of all Senate votes are unanimous: votes to adjourn (heh!), votes on resolutions to honor the Super Bowl winner, the team that won the NCAA tournament, etc. The political stuff that really matters amounts to less than 10% of the votes. Thus, to say that Sen. McCain voted with President Bush 94% of the time, let’s say, is to say that he opposed him roughly 60% of the time when it counted. That may also be misleading, of course; the great problem with tracking Senate vote totals is that you get multiple votes on different versions of the same bill, and grandstanding votes, and a whole lot of junk that accumulates in the voting record that really doesn’t help you understand anyone’s real positions. It’s still more meaningful than implying that Sen. McCain and President Bush agree on 90% of the major issues in this country, because they clearly don’t.This is why Dick Morris is saying that the Democrats blew their convention on the wrong target, because John McCain isn’t George W. Bush, and he can prove it; Morris even compares it to the GOP’s lousy aim in 1992 and ’96 that was such a help to Bill Clinton, since “McCain is the most unlike Bush of any of the Republican senators.” All Sen. McCain needs to do is to make that case clearly, and the Democratic efforts will be so much hot air. They’re already hard at work doing so, along with deflating some of the other claims Sen. Obama made in his speech.Of course, the problem for Sen. McCain is that Sen. Obama is an even harder figure to attack directly—because he’s a gifted politician, because it’s tricky to do so without looking like a racist, and because he just doesn’t have much of a record to look at; he, too, needs a broader target to which he can link Sen. Obama. I’ve been arguing that that target should be Congress, as a way of highlighting Sen. Obama’s clear and strong identification with the Democratic agenda; Karl Rove agrees, and notes the particular vulnerability of this Congress, and particularly the fights that are looming. As Rove concludes,

The end result of all of these messy fights is that a Congress—which hit a record low 14% approval rating in a July Gallup Poll before its members left on summer vacation—may become even more unpopular.Inevitably, John McCain and Barack Obama will be drawn into these fights. And, although both are sitting senators, the advantage may go to Mr. McCain. Democrats control Congress, so they are accountable. Mr. Reid and Mrs. Pelosi are two of the worst advertisements for Congress imaginable. And Mr. McCain has an impressive record of political reform he can invoke, whereas Mr. Obama, who has yet to complete his first term in the Senate, has no accomplishments to point to that demonstrate that he is an agent of change.The 110th Congress is an excellent target for Mr. McCain. He ought to take careful aim at it and commence firing.