The panel on MSNBC’s Hardball yesterday offered a novel explanation of why John McCain has gone so sharply negative in the past week or so (link via Talking Points Memo):
ANDREA MITCHELL: I have maybe a counterintuitive view that John McCain also doesn’t like this kind of politics, went along with his new, tougher political advisers, and I think on some of his responses such as saying last week, personally saying that he thought that Barack Obama had retracted some of his previous comments—I think he’s inside a bubble. And he’s not aware that Barack Obama never did say that, and he’s being told by some of his advisers that he did this, he did that, Obama did this. I think he’s been ginned up a little bit.
MIKE BARNICLE: I agree with you.
AM: All these candidates are being handled a bit too much. They’re traveling, they’re giving speeches. They don’t see what we all see when we’re fixated on this stuff. They don’t know.
MB: I absolutely agree with you. Do you agree with that, Roger?
ROGER SIMON: Oh, I do. For a guy who’s supposed to have such a famous temper, McCain really doesn’t like attacking.
Yet another example of the pervasive media bias against McCain!
Seriously, I’m not saying these pundits are biased for McCain, either. (Mitchell, for instance, recently called out a McCain attack ad as “literally not true” on air.) Nor do I necessarily think this spin, while exculpatory, necessarily helps McCain, since the idea of a candidate being kept in the dark by a staff of Iagos whispering dark inventions in his ear is not the most flattering image in the world. (I’ll throw in my I-voted-for-Obama disclaimer here, by the way, so you can take my opinion for what it’s worth.) But I do think it’s an example of the lengths to which journalists will go to make a story fit an established narrative; in this case, the narrative of McCain as reform politician and straight talker.
In any case, I have no special knowledge of the workings of the McCain campaign, or any other, either. But Occam’s Razor would suggest another, admittedly less “counterintuitive,” explanation for when someone goes negative while running for President: He wants to be the President.
Another, simpler explanation: McCain was on the receiving end of negative attacks from Bush in the 2000 primary (in which, second disclaimer, I voted for him), and has realized this time that ’tis better to give than to receive.
A final theory, for which I also have no basis other than intuition, but is at least interesting: If you’re going to go negative in a campaign, isn’t the best time to do it immediately after your campaign has finished a largely successful push to charge that the media is biased in favor of your opponent, thus making it it easier to get your attacks through in a mediasphere worried about appearing in the tank for the other guy? How long after the SNL bias-against-Hillary meme emerged did we see the 3 A.M. ad?