RobertEmmet

By Bree Hocking

The final days of a losing campaign inevitably lead to rounds of finger pointing. Already, unnamed McCain advisers have called Sarah Palin a “diva” and decried her “rogue” behavior, terms more typically associated with demanding actresses and terrorist states than vice presidential nominees. In turn, Palin associates have fired back, criticizing her roll-out by the campaign’s top brass. Over the weekend, the New York Times magazine ran a cover story attributing the flagging McCain effort to its failure to settle on a central theme. Barring some last-minute miracle for John McCain, polls indicate that Barack Obama is on track to be the president-elect this time next week.

McCain deserves to lose on execution alone.

His was a campaign that pulled so many high-profile and ill-considered stunts that at times you had to wonder if McCain’s chief strategists were on somebody else’s payroll. That McCain, who prior to this presidential run had cast himself as a tough but moderate maverick with a no-nonsense persona, went along with their ham-handed advice is also curious. Indeed, the spectacle of inanity that the campaign produced over the past few months is unparalleled in recent presidential election history.

It all started in the dog days of summer with the McCain campaign’s unveiling of the infamous Paris Hilton ad, which dubbed Obama “the biggest celebrity in the world.”

Initially, I found it amusing. Amid the wave of fawning Obamamania sweeping the globe, the ad captured the zeitgeist and proved effective.

Buoyed by this success, the McCain campaign entered a new, more troubling phase — let’s call it the “all gimmicks, all the time” phase.

It tapped Palin, a virtual unknown who turned out to be as vacuous as she is determined, for veep, staged a Republican National Convention around a disingenuous “throw the bums out” premise, created a tempest in a teapot over Obama’s “lipstick on a pig” remarks, and made a half-hearted and bizarre attempt to suspend the entire presidential campaign and single-handedly save the bailout’s day during the onslaught of the money market crisis. Boy, did that ever work out for McCain.

Obama derided the behavior as “erratic.”

And the McCain campaign worked overtime to prove him right.

Palin accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists,” of being different and scary. The mood at some McCain/Palin rallies turned sour, and at least initially, the “mavericks” did little to rein in the ugliness. Then during the final presidential debate McCain introduced the viewing audience to “Joe the Plumber” — a man who was neither a licensed plumber nor a Joe nor poised to make $250,000 per year — adopting this semi-fraud as his mascot and spawning a cottage industry of similar blue-collar archetypes including “Doug the Barber” and “Tito the Builder.”

Pretty soon the McCain campaign had assumed responsibility for determining what exactly it meant to be “pro-America.” There was a “real America” and a “real Virginia,” apparently, and it alone controlled the litmus test. Note to McCain: This is not how you win friends and influence people, assuming that was the intention.

As McCain and Palin stepped up their last-ditch effort to paint Obama as a “socialist,” intent on spreading the wealth, we learned that the RNC had been doing its part to redistribute its wealthy donors’ funds: It doled out $150,000 to outfit the self-described “Joe Six-Pack” vice presidential nominee in the most “elite” of threads. (In this instance, it was a case of the empress having too many clothes, it seems.”)

Unfortunately, the McCain campaign does have a narrative. It just happens to be better suited to a reality TV show given its plentiful supply of shocking revelations, nifty makeovers, sweeping accusations, temper tantrums, hurt feelings, grudges, backstabbing and unbelievable (and improbable) meteoric rises. That this presidential campaign is being fought against a backdrop of a global economic slump, international instability and ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan is often lost in the drama.

Perhaps McCain saw the ratings for “American Idol” and thought he was just giving the country the campaign it craved, or perhaps the one he thought it deserved.

By the time we learned last week that Palin’s make-up artist was the campaign’s highest paid staffer during the first two weeks of October, the news no longer held the power to shock.

Palin, whose selection in itself hints at an alarming disrespect for the American people, may be back to “wearing [her] own clothes from [her] favorite consignment shop in Anchorage, Alaska,” but with a week to go before the election, its hard to interpret her latest incarnation as anything more than another McGimmick.