German Village Blues

I know there's been a lot of discussion about the political dichotomy created by Obama's overseas trip vs. McCain's faux-German tour, but there's an angle of McCain's strategy that I don't really understand.

While Obama has been doing the "this-guy-in-no-way-reminds-me-of-George- Bush" European rock tour, McCain has decided to participate in a string of "mirrored" events where he visits a bunch of towns in the U.S. with the name Berlin, or stopping by German Village in Columbus, OH yesterday and eating in a German restaurant/deli. I've heard people like Chuck Todd (who I like) talk about how McCain should have spent his time doing a comprehensive tour of a battleground state like Michigan instead, and how that would have been an excellent juxtaposition with Obama's events. Instead, what McCain has done makes his events look almost like parody (and total fodder for shows like the Daily Show and Colbert).

Though I agree that the outcome of these mirrored stops has been less than favorable for McCain, I think it was potentially a great idea. What has ruined it has not been the concept but the rhetoric. Here's the thing, and it's the thing that has been most responsible for McCain's poor general campaign thus far. He sounds petty. The entire point of stopping in a bunch of small towns and speaking to a couple hundred people while your opponent gives foreign speeches attracting 10's or 100's of thousands of people is that it makes you look grounded by comparison. But...it only makes you look grounded if the message is implicit. If your out there literally saying "we don't need a rock star, we need a president" and trying to throw some more gasoline on the "Europeans suck" campfire, all while directly attacking the patriotism of your opponent, it just makes you look like a nasty old man, an image that McCain should be desperate to avoid. Instead he needs to not intermittently say he's above the fray, but actually try to be above the fray. That makes you look experienced and presidential, which should be the exact image he's trying to perpetuate.

All of this back-and-forth rhetoric is simply off what should be McCain's core message (experience, familiarity, and trust), but even more than that it's counter to his actual day to day strategy.