By The Stupid, For The Stupid.
Benen has a good post up talking about the importance of vetting, both in terms of candidates and campaign mascots. And I think that when the history of McCain's campaign is written, a lot will be said about how he tried to appeal to the lowest common denominator in order to win the election.
The fact that McCain was depending on low-information voters while we've all moved on into The Information Age says a lot about how out of touch both he and the people who worked for him really were. You used to be able to lie outright about your opponent on the stump while claiming to run an above-board, 'honorable' campaign, but no more. The 24-hour news cycle, YouTube and blogs have pretty much rendered that type of campaign unworkable these days, because all the aspects of the modern campaign are online, and the amount of information you get is pretty much only limited by the amount of information you want to get.
I've been meaning to write about this for a few days, but I've been unable to summon the words sufficient to explain the utter dumbness of McCain's campaign. From the selection of Sarah Palin and all the inanity that has come with that choice, to the chants of 'drill, baby, drill' and 'mine, baby, mine,' to the grade-school level 'icons' that McCain and Palin have tried to identify with on the later stages of the campaign - Joe the Alleged Plumber, Tito The Builder, and all the rest - it's all been an exercise in stupid.
Where I've had trouble coming up with adequate descriptors is the phenomenon of Republican candidates, certain members of the media and followers of McCain and Palin pointing to Joe The alleged Plumber as if he was some sort of font of wisdom. They have actually been quoting this guy as if he was a modern-day Republican iteration of Mao Tse-Tung, and they've been doing it with straight faces - when all he is is just another mook looking for his 15 minutes of fame and having it bestowed upon him by a presidential candidate who has been completely unable to articulate any good ideas on his own and handed the task over to a fame-seeking fraud with an intelligence level somewhat on par with my dumbest cat.
I've seen a lot of elections in my day and some of them were pretty vapid. But every time I hear McCain or Palin quote Joe The Plumber as if he actually has anything intelligent to say, my jaw drops. It is probably the most desperate and pathetic thing I've ever seen in American politics, and I'm amazed that there are actually some people out there stupid enough to buy it.
The saving grace is that there won't be enough people who buy it to put McCain and his high-heeled moron into office this time. But that in no way makes the phenomenon of running a campaign on the intellectual level of a bad children's TV show any more excusable, or any less embarrassing for those of us with functioning brain stems.