If Tocqueville Had Only Known of Karl Rove's Gene Pool

The McCain campaign's assorted, reshuffled strategists may not always know where they or their candidate stands on the critical issues of the day, but you've got to give them credit for this much: They know how to change -- or drive -- the subject.

Their virtuosity in launching high-flying missiles of the lowest common denominator is, of course, only a nostalgic feature of the Rovian politics of 2004 and 2000. And even though John McCain appeared resistant throughout the early stage of the general election campaign to the practice of their dark arts, one must allow him credit as well for finally doing what a losing candidate must do -- go dirty, go petty, go low, and keep going until the odds have at least leveled.

The 'race card' brawl of yesterday -- and, no doubt, today and throughout the weekend -- is the most instructive instance yet of Rovian voodoo emerging from the McCain camp. The campaign was sustaining, barely, the crushing weight of ridicule over its Spears-Hilton ad, but it wasn't so flattened or dispirited that it couldn't stop to think, We need a diversion, a huge one, and quickly. What could it be, whatever could it be?

Well, all they had to do was look around and take note of what Barack Obama was saying contemporaneously on the stump, never mind that it was virtually the same thing he's said innumerable times before. But no, this time it was noteworthy, even narrative-changing, and the media world simply had to be alerted.

Their opponent -- that black guy -- has just "played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck," breathlessly charged McCain’s quasi-campaign manager, Rick Davis. "It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong [thank God]."

Whatever may have occurred so far that is unifying, positive, uplifting and right couldn't possibly hold a candle to that slab of raw meat. So off the media went, like a greyhound after a rabbit with a bull's-eye on its butt. How Pavlovian.

Now, Obama, I should further note, was not entirely blameless in this much-ado-about-mostly-nothing affair, although I doubt he was even conscious of his rhetorical malfeasance at the time. For his sin had to do with little more than the minor matter of an altered pronoun.

"So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me," Obama told a Springfield, Mo. crowd on Wednesday. "You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making."

Obama's "they," however, on previous occasions had always been left at the ambiguous "they," a knowing and unmistakably correct accusation aimed at a scattering of McCain's surrogates and those 527s of a bogeyman-racist bent.

Yet on the occasion of Wednesday, Obama committed -- again, probably rather unconsciously, inadvertently -- a rousing pushback-opening boo-boo. He unambiguously fingered "McCain" beforehand, and not merely "they." Oops. Five will get you ten that if Obama could say it again, he wouldn't say it that way.

For that was all that the newly hired Rovian tacticians at McCain & Co. needed. It wasn't much, but enough, just enough of a suggestive crack at the door to exclaim Oscar-winning shock and horror at the profoundly unfair and scurrilously mean-spirited.

And I can't say that Obama's communications director, Robert Gibbs, helped matters much in his miscommunicated comeback. "Barack Obama in no way believes that the McCain campaign is using race as an issue, but he does believe they’re using the same old low-road politics to distract voters from the real issues in this campaign."

Hey, Bob, just say that Obama misspoke and leave it at that. Just say that your candidate intended to say what he's always said -- "they," not necessarily McCain, are coming -- and then hit the familiar "low-road" stuff.

What you produced instead was a pregnant contradiction that the media can now chew on for another couple days; a McCain-campaignlike communiqué announcing that your candidate doesn't always speak for the campaign.

At any rate, you gotta love it. All of it. This indisputably is Tocqueville's Democracy in America all right, only re-writ large. Politics as sport, not policy; a sport in which the underdog can never be counted out, because the ratings- and circulation-chasing media know precisely what the bloodthirsty multitudes want.

Sure, in a way I blame McCain for feeding the beast, after all his protestations of a new kind of straight-talk politics. But then again, the gladiators don't make the rules. Another ambiguous pronoun does -- We do.