McCain Brings Out The Big Guns, Shoots Self In Foot

Reason's David Weigel opines:

I don't know why McCain is doing this. There was a reason that President Bush made a dig at the "angry left" in his Republican convention speech. Voters can get angry, but they don't want to think they're part of a mob. To make a really outsized analogy, historians of the 60s agree that the thuggery of cops on the Edmund Pettus bridge and video of ugly whites attacking blacks had the biggest impact on shifting mainstream white attitudes on civil rights. Obviously McCain supporters aren't attacking Obama supporters, but the unidentified man who yelled "terrorist!" when McCain asked "who is the real Barack Obama?" has gotten more ink than Palin's coaxed attack on Wright.

It's all a bit mystifying because in the Tuesday debate McCain had the makings of a successful anti-Obama attack on the economy. He warned against Fannie Freddie abuses, Obama didn't, Obama is their political project, I'll save your home and he won't. Did he cede some of this battlefield when he voted for the bailout? Sure. But this is still the battlefield that the election's being fought on. It's as if Iranian troops rolled into Iraq at the end of the 2004 election and John Kerry started attacking Bush's National Guard service. Unless the economy rebounds in three weeks, this will not be a referendum on Obama's character, and McCain's attempts to make it that will tempt this kind of backlash.