Know your audience
Sean Braisted on McCain’s ad: Why would the McCain campaign be doubling down on childish mockery and contempt?
Well, because Barack You Put Da Lime In Da Coconut Obama caters to a particular demographic that seems to appreciate childish mockery. Or so I’m told.
HopeChange, Bitches!
August 6th, 2008 at 10:01 am
boo-urns!
August 6th, 2008 at 11:21 am
Actually, it is simpler than that. McCain is sitting back at his office, shouting, “Ayers… you magnificent bastard, I read your book!” He knew that ridicule was the next step in Obama’s playbook, so he went there first so that even if it is clumsy, it makes Obama look like a copycat if he starts. He probably defused Obama’s entire September strategy.
August 6th, 2008 at 12:03 pm
A long exposition on exactly that, covering Alinsky’s _Rules For Radicals_ point by point, can be found at the always excellent Classical Values: Obama Be.
The author concludes that McCain is “inside Obama’s OODA loop” (oops!) (although as commentators note, McCain was an attack plane pilot, not fighter, and I’ll add that Boyd’s OODA Loop almost certainly would not have been taught to McCain given the dates (to my memory). But it’s well known now, and the general idea is plenty old.) “Evidently Boyd is beating Alinsky. Or to put it another way. The … pilot is beating the community organizer.”
And a commentator reminded me of a relatively concise (!) essay by Bill Whittle, Forty Second Boyd and the Big Picture, which is a pretty good exposition, it and Wikipedia will tell you if you want to get Boyd’s books, etc.
All this has to with the ugly fact that our kill ratio vs. North Vietnamese pilots, sometimes flying an obsolescent plane by choice, were achieving a 1-1 kill ratio vs. our pilots, which was quite a reversal compared to the Korean War, and there where the plane they flew arguably had a edge over the Saber (although we didn’t know that at the time).