McCain Shake-Up Off to Shaky Start

I touched on this earlier, but the evidence is starting to pile up that when John McCain shook up his campaign last week, he didn't shake hard enough. Even in a turtle-orgy-slow news cycle, McCain is managing to do damage to himself through inept campaigning, while failing to leave a scratch on opponent Barack Obama.

The biggest disaster, from a campaign standpoint, is McCain's sloppy and poorly-received new economic plan, but the latest is a complete dismantling of McCain's most recent Spanish-language radio ad by Factcheck.org:

McCain's new radio ad, in Spanish, aims to show Florida would benefit from the Colombia Free Trade Agreement, which he supports. But every number in the ad is wrong, except one, a prediction of job gains taken from a group favoring the trade deal. And even that number is rounded upward so generously as to flunk third-grade arithmetic.

I also noticed, the fact that McCain's new economic plan contains a proposal for a gas tax holiday to begin on Memorial Day, 2008. I initially chalked that up to McCain simply wanting to score those points regardless of the fact that it is July now. Upon reflection, I'm starting to think it was more sloppiness than anything else. The McCain campaign admitted that there was really nothing new here, and that this was a repackaging. I think they forgot to check the expiration date.

The McCain campaign also fumbled the Wesley clark story badly. Whatever you thought of Clark's remarks, there were a finite number of points to be gained there, as Clark is not connected to the Obama campaign, and actually does have standing to talk about military service.

Instead of just letting the mainstream media attack Clark, and forcing Obama to defend McCain, the McCain campaign sounded the alarm, scheduling multiple press conferences, forming a "Truth Squad" with a member of infamous smear-merchants "Swift Boat Veterans for Truth" on board, and ending with McCain himself, who should have stayed above this, demanding that Clark be "cut loose."

At best, this becomes a wash for McCain, but I think it hurts him. I think he played the victim here a little too hard, and made himself look bad.

Finally, today he released an ad in which he declares the economy to be "in shambles," when just yesterday, it was easing into a "slowdown."

With this race as tight as it is, and with dwindling opportunities to open up some daylight between him and Obama, John McCain can't afford to have a campaign team that allows these types of easy mistakes. He had better hope this is just residual, pre-shake-up incompetence, because he needs to make some inroads before the conventions, where Obama is sure to get a huge bounce.