Extremely Lame

Despite John McCain being a perpetual gaffe machine, we’ve seen the Obama campaign hesitate on attacking him too much. Maybe they felt that people would see them as picking on an old man. Apparently enduring McCain’s negative and dirty campaign was too much once it was shown to have had an effect on voters. The Obama campaign has focused on John McCain’s latest gaffes and has unleashed a healthy dose of whoopass.

First we have McCain saying that the cutoff between middle class and upper class is $5,000,000 a year. He said that as a joke. He even said that it would be taken out of context, and it was. In my opinion, the full context is what makes him seem more woefully out of touch.

The man thinks that rich is to have a house, a job, and the ability to provide for your children. I don’t know, maybe it’s me who’s completely out of touch, but I thought that was pretty much the definition of middle class. If that’s his scale, then it would seemingly make being on WIC and food stamps John McCain’s definition of middle class, and you won’t be at the John McCain poverty level until you’re sleeping on the street and eating out of a dumpster.

I’m not allowing him to re-define rich by saying that he knows about unhappy billionaires and calling them poor because that wasn’t the definition of rich in the initial question.

Oh, and his railing against Congress for taking too many vacations and constantly referring to Congress as a scary “THEM” really sends me over the edge. Mr. McCain, you are the senior Senator from Arizona. You have been a member of Congress for the better part of three decades. You have no right to complain about how much Congress sucks. Why? BECAUSE YOU ARE PART OF THE PROBLEM! You, Mr. McCain, have missed a total of 407 votes during this session of Congress. That’s over 60% of the total votes. In fact, you haven’t made a single vote in the Senate since April.

In the interest of fair play, Barack Obama has missed 290 votes this session for a total of 45.5%. His last vote was in early July. However, Obama’s not the one who’s lamenting over little work Congress does and how corrupt they are. Hell, Obama could actually pull off a rebuke of the corruption of Congress by K Street since he’s not been in the legislature for almost as long as I’ve been alive.

The second of McCain’s supposèd gaffes, and the first actual one (well, the first one today), can be found in an interview with Politico. John McCain is so well off that he can’t remember just how many houses he owns. He has to ask his staff. Survey says? Four, at least four. Correct answer? Seven. John McCain owns seven homes, which is so many that he just can’t keep track of them.

This is the point that is being driven home by not only the Obama campaign, but by Democrats pretty much everywhere. It’s like the machine has finally built up enough steam from the steady stream of bile erupting from John McCain’s lips that Democrats are finally on the attack. Note that there’s a difference between going negative and dirty politics. Negative campaigning focuses on existing flaws and gaffes made by an opponent. Dirty campaigning fabricates negative things to say about the opposing candidate. The Democratic leadership and candidates have gone negative, but they haven’t gone dirty. Not yet, at least. Of course, Democratic supporters haven’t hesitated from doing that, just as Republican supporters haven’t.

Andrew Romano puts a good bit of sense into the entire rabble-rousing that’s likely to be ignored. He brings up the point that his wife was the one who purchased all of the homes and he’s probably only visited some of them once or twice. Of course, while it explains the gaffe, it doesn’t really make it go away, and it also doesn’t address the fact that he has seven homes. That fact makes it look like he’s completely out of touch when he says that the economy is “fundamentally strong.”