Russia has reasserted itself in all sorts of ways of late. Stratfor has a list:

Russia is prepared to completely break ties with the Western military alliance. According to Medvedev, even if NATO chooses to cut ties with Russia, “nothing terrible will happen” to Moscow. Second, Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin announced that World Trade Organization membership no longer interests Moscow. He added that Russia would soon be pulling out of several WTO-related agreements, thereby paving the way for Russia to formally withdraw its membership bid after more than a decade of negotiations. Third, the Russian Duma and Federal Council unanimously approved a nonbinding resolution calling for the recognition of the Georgian breakaway regions of South Ossetia and Abkhazia…

Azerbaijan shipped approximately 200,000 barrels of crude to Iran on Monday. This is no ordinary economic transaction; Azerbaijan is the origin of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline that circumvents Russia and transports Caspian oil to the West. A recent pipeline explosion combined with Russian military action in Georgia effectively have knocked the pipeline offline, leaving Baku with no choice but to look south and sell to Iran to maintain some level of oil income. This energy deal runs completely counter to U.S. strategy to keep Iran in a financial stranglehold. Through both direct and indirect means, Russia has simultaneously thrown a monkey wrench into the West’s plans to evade Russian energy bullying tactics while undermining Washington’s pressure policies against Iran.

The in-your-face attitude of the new Russia does not appear to help the narrative of the Democratic candidate for President. At least that is what the McCain campaign apparently believes, since its new foreign policy attack ad against Senator Obama now characterizes him as “dangerously unprepared to be President.”

The Washington Post asks why the presidential contest is so tight that the race is essentially tied today:

As the Democrats kicked off a convention designed to unite support behind Obama, interviews with several dozen delegates pointed to an undercurrent of anxiety among many from key swing states who will be charged with leading the push in their communities. They expressed doubts bordering on bewilderment: Why, in a year that had been shaping up as a watershed for Democrats, amid an economic downturn and an unpopular Republican presidency, is the race so tight? The sentiment is strongest among former supporters of Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, though it is not limited to them.

GOP mega-cheerleader Hugh Hewitt thinks he has a couple of explanations, and maybe they are valid. But we’re not sure you even have to delve far into Senator Obama’s ideology to see an adequate explanation for his weakness as a candidate. His youth and inexperience suffice to explain his weakness. (Of course if Senator Obama does very well in the debates and Senator McCain does poorly, it is possible for him to win the election. That aside, a media frenzy and fad created by an ad man has a short half life.)

Think about this: most people have someone whom they know or with whom they work, a relative perhaps, who has a thicker résumé and a longer list of achievements than the Democratic presidential candidate. Consider this: if history were different and Senator Obama had decided this year to run to become governor of Illinois, would he have been given rock-star status? Could his Republican opponent have run against him as “too inexperienced” to govern the Prairie State?

The WSJ reflects on the closeness of Senator Clinton’s loss:

Though she lost the delegate battle on the February 5 Super Tuesday primary, she won big in California and New Jersey. A month later she won the crucial battleground state of Ohio by 10 and Texas by 4. She took Pennsylvania by 10. West Virginia, historic ground for Democrats, was a Hillary rout.

Her support, especially in such blue-collar redoubts as Youngstown and southern Ohio, was as enthusiastic as any we have witnessed in modern politics. Lower-middle-class women especially saw her as a pathbreaker, refuting the notion that her symbolic candidacy was limited to upscale professional women. She earned 18 million votes. Joe Biden won something like 9,000.

Perhaps Senator Obama will be the next President, or perhaps he will be in 2012. But is it not at all possible that he may come to be seen, in retrospect, as a flash in the pan — a brief moment of hype and grandiosity that, as time passed, seemed less and less significant until, years later, no one could quite remember just what the fuss was all about?

Here’s a clip from the 1988 campaign of Senator Biden . He says in part:

I think I probably have a much higher IQ than you do…I went to law school on a full academic scholarship, the only one in my class to have a full academic scholarship. In the first year in law school I decided I didn’t want to be in law school and ended up in the bottom two thirds of my class, and then decided I wanted to stay, went back to law school, and in fact ended up in the top half of my class…I graduated with three degrees from undergraduate school.

Senator Biden’s claims of achievement above are all apparently false. The clip, which “misstated several facts,” was comprehensively reported on at the time by E.J. Dionne in the NYT, just as Senator Biden was to exit the presidential race because of several scandals. Here are a few of the real facts:

Mr. Biden, who attended the Syracuse College of Law and graduated 76th in a class of 85, acknowledged: ”I did not graduate in the top half of my class at law school and my recollection of this was inacurate.”

As for receiving three degrees, Mr. Biden said: ”I graduated from the University of Delaware with a double major in history and political science. My reference to degrees at the Claremont event was intended to refer to these majors - I said ‘three’ and should have said ‘two.’ ” Mr. Biden received a single B.A. in history and political science…

Mr. Biden said of his claim that he went to school on full academic scholarship: ”My recollection is — and I’d have to confirm this — but I don’t recall paying any money to go to law school.” Newsweek said Mr. Biden had gone to Syracuse ”on half scholarship based on financial need.”

Questions: (a) Does anyone care about such things anymore, as they apparently did in 1988, or can a politician today make such hamfisted distortions without consequence? (b) Can you actually imagine this “windy old gasbag”, so widely ridiculed and parodied in the media until the day before yesterday, as a potential President? We’ll see.

We tend to agree with the observation that in choosing Biden for VP, “Obama has made the first real blunder in his general election campaign.” Biden went nowhere in 1988, and in 2008, he dropped out after finishing fifth in Iowa. It’s hard to see what he adds to the ticket. In our opinion Senator Clinton would have been a much stronger choice, based on her performance in areas where Obama is weak.

Before we get to the rather negative comments from Democrats, we recommend the appreciation of Senator Biden written by David Brooks that appeared yesterday in the NYT. Now we’ll move on. Ron Fournier of AP notes Senator Biden’s unusual comment about his running mate: “I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy”:

Biden pick shows lack of confidence…the question is whether Biden’s depth counters Obama’s inexperience — or highlights it? After all, Biden is anything but a change agent, having been in office longer than half of all Americans have been alive. Longer than McCain. And he talks too much. On the same day he announced his second bid for the presidency, Biden found himself explaining why he had described Obama as “clean.” And there’s the 2007 ABC interview in which Biden said he would stand by an earlier statement that Obama was not ready to serve as president.

Maureen Dowd in the NYT ridiculed Senator Biden’s lifting his speech without attribution from British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock:

Mr. Kinnock, an orator of great eloquence, rhetorically asked why his ancestors, Welsh coal miners, did not get ahead as fast as he. ”Did they lack talent?” he asked, in his lilting rhythm. ”Those people who could sing and play and recite and write poetry? Those people who could make wonderful beautiful things with their hands? Those people who could dream dreams, see visions? Why didn’t they get it? Was it because they were weak? Those people who could work 8 hours underground and then come up and play football? Weak?”…

”Those same people who read poetry and wrote poetry and taught me how to sing verse?” continued Mr. Biden, whose father was a Chevrolet dealer in Wilmington. ”Is it because they didn’t work hard? My ancestors, who worked in the coal mines of Northeast Pennsylvania and would come up after 12 hours and play football for four hours?”…Senator Biden’s Irish relations, it would seem, were similar, though they seemed to stay underground longer.

ABC’s The Note commented on Senator Biden’s “capacity to jabber on and on in high dudgeon and low, without any sense of how he is perceived”:

Today, let it be known that we resolve to make fun less often of a certain United States Senator. Senator X (as we shall call “him”) isn’t the ONLY person in Washington who likes to hear himself talk, but there does seem to be a higher-than-average level of enjoyment emanating from his mouth and eyes as he speaks.

From his assurances that he is being “frank” and “serious,” to his pledges that he is not being “facetious,” this stalwart of the World’s Most Deliberative Body continues to amaze us — and his colleagues — with his capacity to jabber on and on in high dudgeon and low, without any sense of how he is perceived. He will seize any opportunity to pontificate, expressing his views with fervid self-assurance and with little concern for time constraints or his audience.

The Washington Post confirmed ABC’s assessment:

Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr. (D-Del.), in his first 12 minutes of questioning the nominee, managed to get off only one question. Instead, during his 30-minute round of questioning, Biden spoke about his own Irish American roots, his “Grandfather Finnegan,” his son’s application to Princeton (he attended the University of Pennsylvania instead, Biden said), a speech the senator gave on the Princeton campus, the fact that Biden is “not a Princeton fan,” and his views on the eyeglasses of Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

(We won’t bother to repeat the anecdote at the top of this New Republic article.) Let’s quote the candidate himself in a (very long) conversation from October 2004 at CFR in which he said a great many things. Here are but a few:

as Yeats said, speaking of his Ireland in his poem “Easter Sunday,” he said, “The world has changed — it has changed utterly. A terrible beauty has been born.” A terrible beauty has been born. The world has changed utterly in the last 10 years…

I spent an hour and 50 minutes with Chirac two weeks before Christmas. I told a couple of you this privately. Chirac has an ego as big as this room. He’s an interesting guy. We all understand the French have been less than helpful, and they’ve been a pain in the you-know-what. But guess what? I sat down, I start up the conversation, I said, “Mr. President, let me ask — what can I ask of you — what can I answer for you?” I said, “Mr. President, has your desire to see George Bush defeated yet been overcome by your desire to see France’s interests promoted in the region?” And he went, “Mon dieu, I — ” [Laughter] — yes. [Laughter.] Then I made it very clear I could not negotiate at all, obviously — I’m a minority senator who no one listens to…

We ought to have a come-to-Jesus meeting, as they say in southern Delaware, with Saudi Arabia. We ought to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with them. We ought to have a come-to-Jesus meeting with an old friend, and he is a friend who occasionally calls me at home — I always know it’s him when he says, “Joe, it’s Mubarak. What are you doing?”…

You think foreign policy is a lot more complicated than it is. But, foreign policy is — and I get in trouble with my intellectual buddies on this, because Biden is just an old politician when he says things like this. I’ve only been doing it for 30 years — foreign policy is not a lot more than the logical extension of personal relationships, with a whole lot less information to act upon.

(One might want to ask the leaders of Russia, Iran, North Korea or China if they think that “foreign policy is not a lot more than the logical extension of personal relationships.”)

Senators Obama and Biden would seem to make quite a set of matched bookends. One of their chief differences would appear to be that Senator Biden has a 30+ year history in Washington of making inane or cribbed statements, delivered with great self-importance, and that Senator Obama’s track record of doing so is much shorter — though equally impressive and perhaps even more grandiose.

The Democratic presidential candidate:

“Somebody asked John McCain, ‘How many houses do you have?’ and he said, ‘I’m not sure, I’ll have to check with my staff,’…True quote. ‘I’m not sure, I’ll have to check with my staff.’ So they asked his staff and he said, ‘At least four.’… Now think about that — I guess if you think that being rich means you gotta make $5 million, and if you don’t know how many houses you have, then it’s not surprising that you might think the economy is fundamentally strong…But if you’re like me and you’ve got one house — or you were like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so that they don’t lose their home — you might have a different perspective.”

Question: is one of Senator McCain’s homes a six by nine foot shack in a shanty town, situated behind a “jagged fence built from scraps of timber and rusted bits of corrugated metal.” (Better get Tony Rezko [see point #7] on the case.)

The Democratic candidate speaks:

“Our job in this election is not just ‘win,’ although I’m a big believer in winning…I don’t intend to lose this election. John McCain doesn’t know what he’s up against…He can talk all he wants about Britney and Paris, but I don’t have time for that mess”…

No need to gild the lily on this one.

The AP has a story that manages to insult an awful lot of people:

The U.S. presidential election presents a sharp contrast between two types of patriotism: John McCain stands as a war hero. His rival Barack Obama calls Americans back to the can-do spirit of the nation’s founders…Democratic candidate Obama has made patriotism a core theme of his campaign, seeking to inspire voters to overcome divisions of race and party and using his own story as a child of a Kenyan father and Kansas mother as an example of opportunities available only in America…

Obama grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, an island far from the U.S. mainland. As a result, he could be vulnerable to the charge that his background and values are unfamiliar. One possible method of exploiting this emerged last week in a memo by campaign strategist Mark Penn for one-time Democratic hopeful Hillary Clinton, which suggested she could defeat Obama by running an explicitly patriotic campaign. Obama should be presented as someone not “fundamentally American,” said the memo in advice Clinton did not adopt…

Obama would be the country’s first black president and as such faces an extra hurdle as he attempts to persuade voters. “There is a historic suspicion that African Americans are less patriotic,” Kohn said…”Conservative whites look at them (blacks) as unpatriotic…

Question: what cliche or insult, if any, did the authors somehow manage to omit from the piece?

The Politico discusses Andrea Mitchell’s performance on MTP. In discussing the Saddleback semi-debate, Michell repeated false allegations by members of the Obama campaign that McCain cheated:

Mitchell reported that some “Obama people” were suggesting “that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well prepared.”

The NYT kept the story going, apparently suspicious because “Mr. McCain’s performance was well received.” Must have been cheating, right?

Iran’s OPEC governor Mohammad Ali Khatibi says that the oil market is oversupplied. Apparently he favors cutting production at OPEC’s next meeting in Vienna on September 9. WSJ:

“The market is oversupplied by at least 1 million barrels a day. If OPEC would like to remove this additional oil out of the market, then OPEC has to cut some production,” Khatibi said.

Questions: (a) how did we go from a permanent shortage of oil to a surplus in such a short time? (b) how is it possible for Congress and some Americans to want to be held hostage by the likes of Khatibi and his friends rather than using domestic resources that exist in abundance?

John Bolton writes in the Telegraph:

As bad as the bloodying of Georgia is, the broader consequences are worse. The United States fiddled while Georgia burned, not even reaching the right rhetorical level in its public statements until three days after the Russian invasion began, and not, at least to date, matching its rhetoric with anything even approximating decisive action. This pattern is the very definition of a paper tiger. Sending Secretary of State Condeleezza Rice to Tbilisi is touching, but hardly reassuring; dispatching humanitarian assistance is nothing more than we would have done if Georgia had been hit by a natural rather than a man-made disaster.

The European Union took the lead in diplomacy, with results approaching Neville Chamberlain’s moment in the spotlight at Munich: a ceasefire that failed to mention Georgia’s territorial integrity, and that all but gave Russia permission to continue its military operations as a “peacekeeping” force anywhere in Georgia. More troubling, over the long term, was that the EU saw its task as being mediator – its favourite role in the world – between Georgia and Russia, rather than an advocate for the victim of aggression.

Even this dismal performance was enough to relegate Nato to an entirely backstage role, while Russian tanks and planes slammed into a “faraway country”, as Chamberlain once observed so thoughtfully. In New York, paralysed by the prospect of a Russian veto, the UN Security Council, that Temple of the High-Minded, was as useless as it was during the Cold War. In fairness to Russia, it at least still seems to understand how to exercise power in the Council, which some other Permanent Members often appear to have forgotten…

Russia demonstrated unambiguously that it could have marched directly to Tbilisi and installed a puppet government before any Western leader was able to turn away from the Olympic Games. It could, presumably, do the same to them.

Fear was one reaction Russia wanted to provoke, and fear it has achieved, not just in the “Near Abroad” but in the capitals of Western Europe as well. But its main objective was hegemony, a hegemony it demonstrated by pledging to reconstruct Tskhinvali, the capital of its once and no-longer-future possession, South Ossetia. The contrast is stark: a real demonstration of using sticks and carrots, the kind that American and European diplomats only talk about.

Bolton concludes with a political point: “Obama has assiduously avoided specifics in foreign policy -– other than withdrawing speedily from Iraq –- but that luxury should no longer be available to him. We need to know if Obama’s reprise of George McGovern’s 1972 campaign theme, ‘Come home, America’, is really what our voters want, or if we remain willing to persevere in difficult circumstances.” But is that really the question at hand?

The CFTC is catching on to the notion that there’s been some speculation in the oil market. WSJ:

Last month, the main U.S. regulator of commodities trading, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, reclassified a large unidentified oil trader as a “noncommercial” speculator. As a result, the number of futures and options contracts held by traders counted as speculators…rose to 49% of all crude-oil bets outstanding on the New York Mercantile Exchange, up from 38%.

The scale of the recent revision and questions about the reliability and transparency of data in this market are feeding into efforts by Congress to impose restrictions on energy trading. Four Democratic senators on Thursday called for an internal CFTC inspector-general investigation into the timing of a July 22 release of a report led by the agency. That report concluded speculators weren’t “systematically” driving oil prices. Oil prices soared until mid-July…

Talk about shutting the barn door after the horse is long gone. The spike started almost precisely a year ago when the hedge funds saw going long oil was a good way to short the dollar in the risk-free environment created by the Fed, and things got really crazy earlier this year as others piled on. Months ago oil traders and hedge fund managers detailed their findings about speculators in the market. It’s nice that the apparently blinkered CFTC appears to be catching up on the news.

Karl Rove says the election may come down to about four states. WSJ:

Mr. Obama is best positioned to pick up Colorado’s 9 electoral votes…The GOP now has just 68,507 more voters on the rolls in Colorado than Democrats, down from a 176,572 edge four years ago….McCain…needs to run up votes in the GOP strongholds of El Paso (Colorado Springs), Douglas (south of Denver), Weld (Eastern Plains) and Mesa (Western Slope) counties, while appealing to Democratic and independent Hispanics and Catholics.

The last time Virginia (13 electoral votes) went for a Democratic presidential candidate was 1964. In 2004, the GOP’s margin was eight points. That makes Virginia an uphill climb for Mr. Obama, but not out of reach. He’s focused on increasing African-American voters in Hampton Roads (in the southeastern corner of the state), Richmond and Petersburg, and on deepening his strength in Northern Virginia, where Fairfax was one of only 60 counties in America to flip from Republican in ‘00 to Democrat in ‘04…

With 17 electoral votes, Michigan is an attractive target. But it is also a complicated state. The Democratic machine is in near meltdown in Detroit, where the city’s mayor is fighting felony charges stemming from an alleged cover-up of a sex scandal (he recently spent a night in jail). The party is also hurt by adverse reactions to Democratic Gov. Jennifer Granholm’s $1.5 billion tax increase last year, which dampened economic growth. Mr. McCain needs Reagan Democrats and independents in eastern Michigan. These working class, culturally conservative, mostly Catholic voters are how the GOP elected an attorney general, a secretary of state and a state Senate majority…

Ohio. Ground zero in ‘04, its 20 electoral votes will be hotly contested again this year. No Republican has won the White House without winning the Buckeye State. How can Mr. McCain take Ohio? He can appeal to swing voters in the northeastern part of the state. Cuyahoga, Summit and Lucas counties and the Mahoning Valley are full of culturally conservative, working-class voters. In addition, Mr. Obama was wiped out in the primary among the blue-collar Reagan Democrats of southeastern Ohio. Outside of the university town of Athens, he won less than 30% of the vote in southeastern Ohio. This Appalachian region remains bad turf for him…

Mr. Obama needs to pick up 18 electoral votes more than John Kerry received, meaning Mr. Obama must carry Colorado or Virginia and add another small state to his column. If Mr. McCain carries Michigan as well as Ohio, it would make Mr. Obama’s Electoral College math very difficult.

Maybe it’s just us, but we found it hard to read this piece without thinking that Mr. Rove is making his suggestion on who McCain’s running mate should be.

The NYT reported that, in Georgia, “both sides appeared to take tentative steps to back away from further fighting and adhere to the framework of a cease-fire brokered on Wednesday,” but that Russia’s tough talk continued:

Russia’s president, Dmitri A. Medvedev, held a televised meeting with the leaders of the two breakaway regions, South Ossetia and Abkhazia, and pledged that Russia would provide whatever they needed to secede lawfully from Georgia.

The Russian foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, said separately in a radio interview that Georgia “can forget about” its territorial integrity because the Georgian government under President Mikheil Saakashvili had committed so many atrocities that the two breakaway regions could never live under Georgian rule.

Is this a return of the bad old days? Or is it a definitive response to repeated provocations by a blowhard? An awful lot of smart people seem to have reached firm conclusions on this matter, pro, con, and some version of both at the same time. Was it a smart move or an exercise in hubris?

We really don’t know the answers, because this is not Iraq, nor the Sudetenland, or any of the other back ends of metaphors that have been so easily offered. Let’s see what happens in the next period. Let’s see if and how the Russians withdraw. Let’s see, for example, what Gori looks like in a week or two before we propose long lists of ultimatums and sanctions. Is that unreasonable?

VDH talks about oil and power in his excellent review of the messages sent by Russia in its long and well planned invasion of Georgia:

We talk endlessly about “soft” and “hard” power as if humanitarian jawboning, energized by economic incentives or sanctions, is the antithesis to mindless military power. In truth, there is soft power, hard power, and power-power — the latter being the enormous advantages held by energy rich, oil-exporting states. Take away oil and Saudi Arabia would be the world’s rogue state, with its medieval practice of gender apartheid. Take away oil and Ahmadinejad is analogous to a run-of-the-mill central African thug. Take away oil, and Chavez is one of Ronald Reagan’s proverbial tinhorn dictators.

Russia understands that Europe needs its natural gas, that the U.S. not only must be aware of its own oil dependency, but, more importantly, the ripples of its military on the fragility of world oil supplies, especially the effects upon China, Europe, India, and Japan. When one factors in Russian oil and gas reserves, a pipeline through Georgia, the oil dependency of potential critics of Putin, and the cash garnered by oil exports, then we understand once again that power-power is beginning to trump both its hard and soft alternatives. Military intervention is out of the question. Economic sanctions, given Russia’s oil and Europe’s need for it, are a pipe dream.

The lack of greater energy self-sufficiency is arguably the foremost national security issue facing the United States. Even if Europe were not pacifist, it is held hostage to Russia due to its energy needs. The US imports 70% of its oil; not fixing this constitutes gross negligence and a shocking level of irresponsibility on the part of the American political establishment.

Paul Krugman in the NYT has an opinion about many of his fellow Americans:

the G.O.P. has found its issue for the 2008 election. For the next three months the party plans to keep chanting: “Drill here! Drill now! Drill here! Drill now! Four legs good, two legs bad!” O.K., I added that last part. And the debate on energy policy has helped me find the words for something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Republicans, once hailed as the “party of ideas,” have become the party of stupid…

Sad to say, the current drill-and-burn campaign is getting some political traction. According to one recent poll, 69 percent of Americans now favor expanded offshore drilling — and 51 percent of them believe that removing restrictions on drilling would reduce gas prices within a year…one of America’s two great parties believes that when it comes to politics, stupidity is the best policy.

Compare and contrast: Mr. Krugman and his colleague Mr. Herbert.

We’ve generally liked the ads by Senator McCain. This one, featuring praise for the Arizona Senator by Democrats, seems potentially very effective. It’s funny too. Also, the soundtrack is better than in some previous commercials. (HT: Roger Simon)

The Obama campaign is doubling down on the ridiculous business about inflating America’s tires, claiming that “every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent.” How absurd He says of his opponents: “it’s like these guys take pride in being ignorant.” (Probably those bitter clingers.) And here’s TIME Magazine carrying water:

the Republican National Committee is sending tire gauges labeled “Barack Obama’s Energy Plan” to Washington reporters.

But who’s really out of touch? The Bush Administration estimates that expanded offshore drilling could increase oil production by 200,000 bbl. per day by 2030. We use about 20 million bbl. per day, so that would meet about 1% of our demand two decades from now. Meanwhile, efficiency experts say that keeping tires inflated can improve gas mileage 3%, and regular maintenance can add another 4%. Many drivers already follow their advice, but if everyone did, we could immediately reduce demand several percentage points. In other words: Obama is right.

In fact, Obama’s actual energy plan is much more than a tire gauge. But that’s not what’s so pernicious about the tire-gauge attacks. Politics ain’t beanbag, and Obama has defended himself against worse smears. The real problem with the attacks on his tire-gauge plan is that efforts to improve conservation and efficiency happen to be the best approaches to dealing with the energy crisis — the cheapest, cleanest, quickest and easiest ways to ease our addiction to oil, reduce our pain at the pump and address global warming.

Even dumbing down has been dumbed down. (And Time ought to try getting its statistics right on how much incremental oil can be produced in America — at least 1-2 million bpd can be added over the medium term.)

An analysis in the New York Times points out some alleged elements of the McCain campaign that we completely missed when reviewing his ads:

from the hapless but increasingly venomous McCain campaign, comes the slimy Britney Spears and Paris Hilton ad. The two highly sexualized women (both notorious for displaying themselves to the paparazzi while not wearing underwear) are shown briefly and incongruously at the beginning of a commercial critical of Mr. Obama.

The Republican National Committee targeted Harold Ford with a similarly disgusting ad in 2006 when Mr. Ford, then a congressman, was running a strong race for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. The ad, which the committee described as a parody, showed a scantily clad woman whispering, “Harold, call me.”

Both ads were foul, poisonous and emanated from the upper reaches of the Republican Party. (What a surprise.) Both were designed to exploit the hostility, anxiety and resentment of the many white Americans who are still freakishly hung up on the idea of black men rising above their station and becoming sexually involved with white women. The racial fantasy factor in this presidential campaign is out of control.

Someone appears to be having some sort of fantasy. Perhaps it is Mr. Herbert. (Question: using Mr. Herbert’s odd mode of interpreting McCain’s ads, what would be the hidden meaning of using Charlton Heston as Moses in another of the commercials?)

Dick Morris thinks that Senator McCain is doing a terrible job in his run against Senator Obama:

When is the McCain campaign going to get serious? It seems to be marking time with softball ads, more appropriate to the soundbites campaign media spokespeople exchange with one another than to strategic paid media hits. One ad talks about how the media loves Obama. Another mocks him as a celebrity. Each throws pitty-pat punches, far short of the kind of knockout blows one would expect from a presidential campaign. Were I a donor to McCain’s campaign, paying for these pathetic spots, I would demand a refund. Or sue for malpractice…

Are the McCain people waiting for September to get serious? If so, they are making a big mistake and missing an important opportunity. History indicates that the best time to beat a new candidate is in the summer. August to be precise.

Dukakis, Mondale, and Kerry all were destroyed in the summer, long before the fall campaign began. In 1984, the offensive against Geraldine Ferraro crippled Mondale well before Labor Day. In 1988, the pledge of allegiance, revolving door, and Willie Horton ads all ran in the summer. Dukakis was dead by September. And the swift boat attack on Kerry defeated him well before the summer was over.

McCain needs to make voters afraid of Obama. Not, as he suggests self-servingly, by emphasizing that he “doesn’t look like all the other presidents on dollar bills,” but by hitting him on the two fronts where it would really hurt — the economy and national security. Obama’s inexperience and the wildly liberal proposals he has made in his primary campaigning, both set him up for a crippling blow this month.

Perhaps Morris is correct. But it seems to us that Senator McCain might actually be doing a pretty good job of preparing the battlefield for the fall election. One of the first of his ads mocked the media’s mad crush on Obama, which might put them on the defensive if they had any shame. Subsequent ads compared the Democratic candidate to nitwit girl celebrities, and parodied his messianic pretensions by using the candidate’s own words. To the extent that the ads are effective, they are effective, in our view, because they amplify true things about the candidate, namely, his celebrity appeal and his grandiosity.

So the underlying messages of these ads have been that you can’t trust the media, and that Senator Obama is a pretentious windbag and a lightweight. Perhaps Morris is correct, and McCain should be attacking Obama more substantively. But portraying Obama as a fellow you shouldn’t take too seriously, whatever he says, might be a useful way for McCain to prepare for the fall. In any event, it’s hard to argue with success, and Senator McCain is certainly doing well against his opponent at the moment. Indeed, Roger Simon wonders if Senator McCain might be peaking too soon.

Addendum: Morris is wrong in his characterization of the Kerry campaign, by the way. Senator Kerry’s campaign was not destroyed “in the summer.” It is true that Kerry’s campaign was pretty badly hurt in August and September by the SwiftBoatVets, Christmas in Cambodia, and other such gaffes. But Senator Kerry’s excellent performance in the first debate, where President Bush stumbled around, brought him back strongly. Indeed, the third debate, in mid-October, was said to be do-or-die for the Bush campaign. People forget how effective the Kerry campaign actually was.