The Wright Stuff

Like some kind of elaborate striptease, the McCain campaign, having already flashed its Ayers, is now hinting that they’ll show us the full Wright. I hope they get on with it already!

But I find the idea that they’ve been holding back from this out of a sense of virtue a little non-credible. Rather, they presumably haven’t been talking about Jeremiah Wright because it’s not clear what they’re going to say about it. When Hillary Clinton brought this up, her main point was that (a) this was an electoral vulnerability that the Republicans would exploit and (b) Obama didn’t have a track-record in big-time politics that showed he could handle the attacks. Neither of those, however, can actually be the point of a McCain attack. With, say, Willie Horton, the point was that Dukakis was soft on crime. With Wright the point is . . . what? Maybe I just lack imagination. But McCain is paddling up river at this point, with everything we know about American politics suggesting that the deterioration of the economic situation makes it hard for him to win. At a minimum I would think that any spectacular campaign gambit would have to somehow connect to some point about the economic situation.