Posted by Jed Lewison on Mon Apr 28, 2008 at 4:50 AM Pacific

Pick your "poison"

Thought experiment. You're managing a presidential campaign and you have to rank the following three options in order from most harmful to least harmful, purely on the basis of electoral impact:

  • Weakness A: Your candidate has a pastor who has made remarks that many white voters will find offensive, and he also once went to the home of someone who was involved with low-grade domestic terrorism.
  • Weakness B: Your candidate supported the Iraq war from the very beginning, takes credit for the urge to surge American forces there, and also said he was fine with spending one hundred years in Iraq.
  • Weakness C: A majority of Americans don't believe anything your candidate says, and the $109 million your candidate has earned in the last eight years has just entered the vetting process.

Perhaps not surprisingly I'd rank them (in order from least damaging to most damaging: A, C, and B.

Ultimately, I think John McCain won't be able to run away from the nightmare he helped create in Iraq. (Not to mention all the other policy disasters of the Bush years.)

Over time, as people get to know Barack Obama, they'll realize that he isn't Jeremiah Wright. (That's one of the reasons he went on Fox News Sunday, I'm sure.)

As for Hillary Clinton, I think she'll win re-election to the Senate easily...but I'm not sure for which party. (Rim-shot, please...)

::

The thing that really is going to crush McCain is his one hundred years gaffe. I just don't see how he gets around it. Watch this new DNC ad:

It's just totally devastating -- and it's a reminder  that the biggest reason why the DNC won't be running any ads featuring John McCain and his pastor John Hagee is because they don't need to.

I'm 100% certain that John McCain would trade Wright and Ayers in a heartbeat if he could just turn the table on the issues.

Pick your "poison"

Thought experiment. You're managing a presidential campaign and you have to rank the following three options in order from most harmful to least harmful, purely on the basis of electoral impact:

  • Weakness A: Your candidate has a pastor who has made remarks that many white voters will find offensive, and he also once went to the home of someone who was involved with low-grade domestic terrorism.
  • Weakness B: Your candidate supported the Iraq war from the very beginning, takes credit for the urge to surge American forces there, and also said he was fine with spending one hundred years in Iraq.
  • Weakness C: A majority of Americans don't believe anything your candidate says, and the $109 million your candidate has earned in the last eight years has just entered the vetting process.

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