My hunch is this is going to end up being one of the worst moments in the entire campaign for one of the candidates but it’s Barack Obama. […] I believe that this opened the door to not just Tony Rezko in that ad, but to bring up Reverend Wright, to bring up his relationship with Bill Ayers.
For starters, it's not like McCain needed provocation to engage in gutter politics, as he's gotten his hands dirty already, with the Britney/Paris celebrity ad which his own mother called "stupid" and "The One" ad which portrays Obama as some sort of Anti-Christ.
They just weren’t doing it because they didn’t think it was the correct time, strategically, to raise those issues. But you’d have to be extraordinarily naive to believe that the McCain campaign was genuinely just not going to mention any of this stuff until Mean Ol’ Barack came along to make fun of the idea of being so rich that you can’t keep track of your mansions. And whatever you may say about Halperin, he’s not a naive guy.
Even the others at the roundtable were incredulous at Halperin's brand of logic:
Stephanopoulos: Don't you think that was going to come up anyway?
Halperin: I think it would have been hard for John McCain, given the way he says he's going to run his campaign, to do all this stuff without the door being opened.
Oh, the toolbaggery. It burrns.
As Kevin Drum points out, McCain hired Karl Rove's protege Steve Schmidt. Did Halperin really believe that Schmidt wouldn't follow the steps of the smearmaster?
The ugly fact is, McCain now embraces the tactics of those who, back in 2000, spread the vicious rumor that he "fathered an illegitimate black child. In his desperate quest for the presidency, he has become like the very kind of people who slandered his family and who according to him, have "a special place in hell". McCain has sold his soul. Toolbags like Halperin may refuse to see it, but that's the glaring reality.
"We live in an era in which both major parties share an intoxication with executive power which has led them to abandon the otherwise natural efforts to restrain it and to insure an alternative power base in the legislature. This explains why a party which, possessed of the executive power, favors the unbounded power of the presidency, when removed from that power turns simply to the politics of obstruction. Their conduct focuses not on wise policy or decision-making for the state, for indeed they are now open and notorious in their obstruction. They have one sole object, which is to recapture the executive power."
