Redstate

By Dave in Fla Posted in Elections — Comments (21) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Or why Obama is acting so stupid right now.

The Obama campaign has launched an all out offensive to try and discredit John McCain. In what would appear to be a mindbogglingly stupid tactic, they are trying to discredit the 5 years he spent in a POW camp along with the rest of his military service. This may in fact go down in history as the worst campaign tactic of all time, surpassing the former winning entry from Walter Mondale, who thought it would be a great idea to promise to raise taxes. Of course, we have many months to go, so there are plenty of additional opportunities for the Obama campaign to surpass even this paragon of imbecility.

The question is, why? What would impel the Messiah to break from his carefully crafted image to conduct such a stupid line of attack? Everyone knows it is his surrogates pushing these attacks and no one believes the transparent denials. The answer lies in the old parable of the scorpion:

A scorpion was stranded upon a small island in the middle of a rising river. Soon the river would rise, drowning him. As he contemplated his peril, a frog swam by.
“Mr. Frog, would you allow me to ride upon your back to the river bank? I shall perish if I remain on this island.”
“Mr. Scorpion, why would I do that? You will just sting me and kill me.”
“But if I were to do that, then I would also die, since I would fall into the river and die.”
The frog considered this, then seeing the logic, allowed the scorpion to climb onto his back.
Halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, paralyzing it and causing it to sink into the river.
“Mr. Scorpion! “, he cried with his last breath, “Why would you do that? Now we will both surely perish!”
“I couldn’t help it, I am a scorpion.”

This parable goes a long way toward explaining why Obama is doing this. He has been stuck at about 44% of the vote for months now. Throughout the primaries and now into the general campaign, all of his hope, change and audacity has been only good enough to convince 44% of the public to vote for him. As was pointed out during the primaries, he can’t close the deal. If we look into the future, what event or act can he take that will make that number move? He has no record, no policies, and the only thing that can happen is that further negatives come out that will either drive the number lower, or at a minimum insure that the undecideds break for McCain. In other words, there are no positive actions that he can take that will bring 5% more of the electorate toward him, and he has to get into the 49% range to win.

So his solution is to fall back on what he knows. He knows the bare fisted politics of Chicago, where he won his first election by getting his opponents kicked off the ballot. When things get tight and he gets desperate, he fights dirty and mean, and tries to tear down and destroy his opponent. Now that we see him in action on a national stage, I wonder if he was somehow involved in getting the divorce records of his Senate opponents unsealed. Now we come to his presidential campaign. He tried to first label McCain as Bush 3, but that didn’t have any traction. So now he is trying a tactic to discredit the war service of a man who spent 5 years as a POW being tortured. He wants to destroy his opponent and win the election virtually unopposed.

The problem with this tactic, is that he has based his entire campaign to date on being a “new” kind of politician. This kind of unseemly attack isn’t going to sit well with the vets and POWs, and they have shown in the past (2004) that they are not going to sit on the sidelines and keep quiet. This tactic has the double edged downside of further eroding his support among those who want him to bring a new era of harmony to Washington and energizing a vocal set of critics that actually AREN’T under the control of the McCain campaign.

Obama is the scorpion, he can’t help himself, even if he drowns as a result of his actions.