Posted by Jed Lewison on Tue Jul 8, 2008 at 2:27 PM Pacific

I don't think it would work

Chris Bowers and Matthew Yglesias take a look at McCain's best strategy going forward and both conclude that the flip-flop attack is ineffective, and that McCain would benefit (politically speaking) by raising the Wright issue all over again. (They're just armchair quarterbacking -- neither one is endorsing the attack.)

While I agree that the flip-flop attack isn't likely to work (mostly because it's an easy charge to dismiss), I don't agree that McCain -- or his surrogates -- would be well-served by reverting to Wright.

The argument in favor of McCain using Wright is that March -- the month when Wright became an issue -- was Barack Obama's worst month in general election polling versus McCain.

But it's hard to attribute that entirely to Wright alone: McCain had just wrapped up the GOP nomination, and on the Democratic side, things were just starting to get really nasty. Remember, it wasn't until early March that Hillary Clinton started calling into question Barack Obama's fitness to be president. At the time, Obama was facing seemingly coordinated attacks from both Clinton and McCain.

Moreover, Wright didn't emerge as an issue until after Ohio, which Clinton won handily. By the time Pennsylvania rolled around, Obama had improved his performance among white voters, even though he had just been grilled on Wright and Ayers at the ABC debate in Philadelphia.

Then, after Pennsylvania there was another Wright flareup, but Obama not only overwhelmingly won North Carolina -- doing better among white voters than he had in most other southern states -- he also nearly won Indiana (and would have won were it not for McCainiacs).

The North Carolina point is worth noting because Obama did well despite the NC GOP running ads tying him to Wright. (The case of Travis Childers, who won in Mississippi despite GOP attacks using Wright also tends to discredit the use of Wright.)

Another important dynamic to point to during the primary was that Obama was reluctant to hit back against Clinton because he knew that he'd need her support later. My theory is that voters read this as weakness, which hurt his standing in the polls in the short-term. (When he did start hitting back in April, his numbers climbed.)

Bottom-line: I'm not making the case that Wright was a net positive for Obama or anything like that, but it certainly doesn't seem to have been as big a hit as the CW might suggest.

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As far as McCain goes, even if he did want to make Wright a major issue, he'd face a significant obstacle: there's a big difference between the press pushing the story (as mostly happened in March and April) and having the campaign push the story. If his campaign or any of its surrogates were tied to an ad using Wright, I think the backlash would be pretty severe against McCain, because he has repeatedly and emphatically said that such attacks are out of bounds.

The best case scenario for McCain is that if a fringe group ran an attack ad, and he denounced it. The problem is, that by denouncing it, he would blunt some of the ads impact. Moreover, it would be a one-trick pony. If the ad came up again, McCain would look weak and ineffective for not being able to control his allies.

All this being said, there is one aspect of any Wright attacks that would unquestionably be positive for McCain: it would infuriate Obama partisans and distract them from the core issues of the campaign -- as evidenced by this post.

It's good reminder -- to myself, if nobody else -- to always remember that McCain is promising to continue virtually every single policy of the failed Bush presidency, and that Americans do not want those policies to continue. So anything he can do to change the subject from those policies is a win for him.