Postscript to Beating McCain

• The fact that the US and Iraq have a draft deal in place to withdraw troops by 2011 gives Obama an opening here to paint McCain as more extreme than Bush in his foreign policy. "At the end of this disastrous administration, cooler heads have begun to prevail in the White House. The only hothead left is John McCain."
• Part of the reason why I think I like Joe Biden so much -- not just as a potential VP -- is that he looks a little like an Irish Paulie Walnuts. And Paulie Walnuts is exactly who Obama needs.
  

How Obama Beats McCain

This ad blasting McCain's inability to count all his houses is a good start. But here's my five-point plan.

1. Give a speech specifically about McCain. Attack everything that voters think they know about him, every perceived strength. Begin by telling America, "If you think you're voting for John McCain who ran for President against George Bush in 2000, you're wrong." Detail every backtrack McCain has made, every position he's reversed himself on, every move he's made to cozy up with the Bush administration, the Republican-led congress, and the base of his party. Attribute it to a combination of ambition and delusion. Call him by his first name whenever possible.
   
2. Refer to his attacks on you and say "John McCain is lying." "Apparently I'm a flip-flopper who's too stubborn to change his mind." "He can't win by attacking my real positions and my real record, so he invents one." Tilt him. Tilt him hard and watch him sputter.
   
3. McCain doesn't know anything about economics, he is insulated from real Americans, and his economic plan would lead to budgetary and employment ruin. "Until a few years ago, Michelle and I made ____. We just paid our student loans. So we know what it's like to work in this economy, and we know what the American people need!" Education, infrastructure, etc.
4. Emphasize how dangerous McCain is. Go mushroom cloud on him. Say he wants to pick a fight with anyone and everyone without a thought to the consequences for the country or the ability of the military to stretch itself any thinner. Point out that it's been seven years since September 11th, but besides tough talk McCain can't offer anything new to capture Osama Bin Laden. Tell the American people that you think a McCain administration would be a disaster.
5. At this point, note that you're breaking with Democratic party precedent now and for the rest of the campaign. "In the past, Republicans and their operatives have used these kind of smears, these attempts to frighten the American people, in lieu of real ideas and serious solutions. And Democrats have politely asked them to stop, privately gotten indignant, and hoped the American people wouldn't notice. Well that's not me. I'm skinny but I'm tough. I'm through asking John McCain to tell the truth about my record, about my patriotism, and about our plan for the country's future. He can say whatever he wants. But I'm going to tell the truth. And every time he does it again (and he will do it again) we're going to say, 'John is lying.'"
   

At this point, leave it alone. Let the cable networks show it over and over again, along with McCain and the Republicans' furious reaction. Let them get rabid, let all of their worst attributes come out.

Then you send Joe Biden out to continue the attack, to get in the pit and fight them every time they say a word. Let Bill and Hillary Clinton get in a fight that they understand against an enemy they hate. Turn McCain into an angry old man, George H.W. Bush with his son's temper and limited attention span.

You spend the rest of the election cycle offering a positive vision of the country's future under an Obama administration. You make it a referendum about McCain's capacity versus yours.

And we win.

(Knock on wood.)

What Makes That Good Blog So Good

Merlin Mann has a provisional list:

1. Good blogs have a voice. 
2. Good blogs reflect focused obsessions. 
3. Good blogs are the product of “Attention times Interest.” 
4. Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. 
5. Good “non-post” blogs have style and curation. 
6. Good blogs are weird. 
7. Good blogs make you want to start your own blog. 
8. Good blogs try. 
9. Good blogs know when to break their own rules.

My favorite of these is number two, which I think (along with talent + work) is the motor that drives the other eight. Here's what Mann has to say about it:

People start real blogs because they think about something a lot. Maybe even five things. But, their brain so overflows with curiosity about a family of topics that they can’t stop reading and writing about it. They make and consume smart forebrain porn. So: where do this person’s obsessions take them?

"Forebrain porn" instantly makes me think of a historian's craft, but this "focused obsession" formula also holds true for all of my favorite blogs: Sullivan, Silliman, Al Filreis's 1960 blog, if:book back when Ben Vershbow was in the house, Snarkmarket when it's really cooking, FiveThirtyEight, Mark Ambinder, In the Middle, Obsidian Wings.  There are other blogs that go beyond this to become simultaneously curatorial and informational: Lifehacker, Kottke, Arts & Letters Daily, Talking Points Memo, all of which I think of more as bloggy news services than "personal" blogs as such. There are also the diaries of my friends, which I don't expect everyone else to read, but which more often than not turn up something as interesting as I read anywhere else.

The tenth criteria I would add: "Good blogs are humble." I can't stand Boing Boing, The Huffington Post, DailyKos, Gawker and its ilk, plus most well-regarded author/journalist blogs in no small part because they are all clearly too impressed with themselves. You have to have a sense that the blog is about the person's interest in ___x___, not their own role in ___y___, and it's because of x and not y that personality gets into the mix. If you make that substitution, or if there was nothing to substitute to begin with, it's all just death.

Since I started writing Short Schrift, I've always tried to accomplish 1-9 -- number four in particular was and remains important to me, even if I've gotten over my early reluctance just to include a video or link without lengthy commentary. And I'm delighted to have my 500-odd readers. Your taste is excellent -- not because you've chosen to read me, but because you want to read what I want to read too.

Nothing But Tears

Speaks for itself. [The Onion]

Writerly Roundup

• Milton's 400th Anniversary. Warning: Robert Pinsky's essaylet is actually kinda bad, but he quotes Pound and DuBois a lot, so on average, it's all right.
  
• The ongoing saga of Franz Kafka's papers. Because if anybody knows what it's like to negotiate with a recalcitrant party, it's the state of Israel.
• Lawrence Ferlinghetti's "Baseball Canto":
  
  

  Watching baseball, sitting in the sun, eating popcorn,
  reading Ezra Pound,
  and wishing that Juan Marichal would hit a hole right through the
  Anglo-Saxon tradition in the first Canto
  and demolish the barbarian invaders.

• Frank O'Hara, ON SEEING LARRY RIVERS’ WASHINGTON CROSSING THE DELAWARE AT THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART. Simply beautiful.
• Ron Silliman reading The Alphabet. I've preordered my paperback for the end of September. It's got more pages than Ulysses!
  
  

Beat That Mahogany God

It's a shame that Tyson Gay didn't make the finals for the 100-meter dash, but it is totally awesome that the gold medalist and world record holder is a Jamaican named Usain Bolt. BOLT!

Look at him! He's 6'5", and he ran 100 m in less than 9.7 seconds! And he even looks like Futurama's Barbados Slim:

Colbert Was Really Cooking On Thursday

Here's the proof:

McCain's Reticence

Hilzoy's post at Obsidian Wings on the contested claim that McCain is reluctant to speak about his experience in Vietnam reminds that reporters really mean two different things by this, and it's a distinction worth remembering.

First, it's clear that McCain is not at all adverse to talking at length about his military service; on that record he's based his congressional, Senate and Presidential campaigns, multiple books, positions on issues, etc. Nor does he refrain at all from referring to or joking about the well-known fact that he was a POW in Vietnam. This is all well-documented.

What McCain is generally reluctant to do is to describe in detail what happened to him while he was a POW; in particular, being tortured and attempting suicide to escape that torture. That's the story that journalists who've befriended him and heard many, many stories from him on and off the record want -- the gory, cinematic details.

Actually, McCain's refrain from describing his own torture is a net positive for him in many ways. For one, it helps quash rumors that McCain was driven crazy by his tormentors. It also keeps the public's mind off of the fact that US personnel have been and most likely still are engaged in torture of enemy combatants.

Ironically, McCain's firm opposition to torture and permanent detention at Guantanamo during the primary won him the plurality of decent-minded Republican and Independent voters, since it provided a clear moral contrast between him and Mitt "double Guantanamo" Romney, totalitarian Rudy Giuliani, and the Bush Administration to boot. Now that McCain is holding together the fraying Republican coalition, he has to downplay his opposition to torture and turn the unconstitutionality of indefinite detention into a point of conflict between himself and Obama. He has to rely on the cognitive dissonance of the American voter, who will somehow associate him with the nobility of his positions even as he liquidates the positions that actually lent him some nobility.

As Josh Green's postmortem of the Clinton campaign continues to rightfully attract attention, I can only hope that three months from now someone, anyone, will be looking at the McCain campaign and wondering what might have been. I think that's the only way for the Republican Party to pull itself back from the disgusting, self-destructive edge to which it's slithered. If they just chalk it up to bad luck and not a fundamental failure of ethical standards and political strategy, they will learn precisely nothing.

Anniversario Felice

I have little in the tank for Short Schrift this week, but I did want to wish a happy seventh anniversary to Gavin at Wordwright and his wunderbar wife.

As I told Gavin this week, if one of you were a Hebrew slave, you'd be free by now.

[And maybe even you'd have been free for a year already. In which case, I'd still say, "Happy Anniversary!"]

Sparkling Wits

William Carlos Williams, The Autobiography:

There was a story current in Paris at the time of the rival partisans of Joyce and Proust, who had arranged a meeting at a reception one evening between the two great men. Two chairs were placed side by side in the middle of the room. There the heroes were seated while the partisans ranged themselves right and left, waiting for the wits to sparkle and flash.

Joyce said, "I've got headaches every day. My eyes are terrible."

Proust replied, "My poor stomach. What am I going to do? It's killing me. In fact, I must leave at once."

"I'm in the same situation," replied Joyce, "if I can find someone to take me by the arm. Good-bye."

"Charmé," said Proust, "oh, my stomach, my stomach."