McCain's Silly Strategy: Isn't it Just Jealousy?

Aren't they really describing McCain?

Barack Obama’s critics laid down the foundations of the strategy months ago: The Republican National Committee started the “Audacity Watch” back in April, and Karl Rove later fueled the attack by describing the first-term Illinois senator as “coolly arrogant.”

All McCain does is complain about Obama. You can't win an election by whining.

The strategy has very real potential dangers for Team McCain. Obama’s unmistakable charisma and his campaign’s deft brand of stagecraft have created an often lopsided contrast with McCain’s sometimes painful-to-watch public events. As presidents as diverse as Ronald Reagan and John Kennedy showed, Americans do like a touch of celebrity in their commander in chief; though not too much.

It's the economy, stupid. This will be McCain's downfall in the Fall: sluggish economic growth.

The economy grew less than expected from April to June, the government said on Thursday, and it shrank in the final months of 2007, dimming the outlook for a quick recovery.

Gross domestic product expanded at an annual rate of 1.9 percent in the second quarter, the Commerce Department reported, primarily because of a surge in export sales powered by the weak dollar. The government’s tax stimulus package pushed consumer spending higher, but the ongoing pain in the housing market took a sharp toll on overall growth.

But that figure was below the estimate of many economists, who had expected growth of 2.3 percent, and it cast doubt on whether the stimulus package would be able to prop up the economy in the months ahead.

[...]More troubling, however, was news that the economy actually shrank in the last three months of 2007, by 0.2 percent. It was the first time that the economy had contracted since the third quarter of 2001. The government had originally reported growth of 0.6 percent in that quarter.

This explains why all McCain does is attack Obama. He wants to divert your attention from the failures of the Republicans. Maureen Dowd explains the jealousy point.

The image of John McCain in a golf cart with Bush 41 in Kennebunkport — with Poppy charmingly admitting that they were “a little jealous” of all the Obama odyssey coverage — was not a good advertisement for the future, especially contrasted with the shots of Gen. David Petraeus and Obama smiling at each other companionably in a helicopter surveying Iraq. (Asked by a Democratic lawmaker a while back why there weren’t more Democrats in the military, General Petraeus smiled slyly and said “there are more than you think.”)

A foiled and frustrated McCain — trying to get covered when the entire media world has gone fishin’ for Obama stories — took the Hillary tack of mocking the press for having a “love affair,” as his campaign said, with the senator. McCain is hopping mad that the surge that he backed, and Obama resisted, has now set the stage for the Bush puppet Maliki to agree with Obama’s exit strategy. But Obama has a better batting average with his judgment on how we shouldn’t have gotten into Iraq, we should have gone after Osama and we should talk to Iran and other foes, if only to better assess their psychology. Then we might have deduced that Saddam had the “Beware of Dog” sign up without the dog.