Wednesday, July 02, 2008

Gaper Delays Ahead




Okay, so "Gaper" and "Shipwreck" are mixed metaphors. But have you ever tried to find a picture of "Gaper"?

Anyway, you read it here first. And really, I'm so far out in front of the news that you could win bar bets about what's gonna happen next, just based on what you read here.

Last month I had a couple of posts about what a poor campaign McCain is running, and speculated that the Republicans would want to replace him before their convention (it's still TWO months off!). Today we learn that McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis, is being bumped upstairs to think about deep, long-term things, while a guy named Steve Schmidt will be taking over the helm.

According to Josh Marshall:

They are reportedly also scrap [sic] their system of 11 largely autonomous regional managers to run the campaign, an approach to running a national campaign that I do not believe has ever been tried before.

That sounds a lot like they're scraping [sic] the whole operation and starting again from square one, thus squandering the huge advantage they got by sealing up the nomination months in advance of the Democrats.

No doubt, they're talk [sic] about retooling and logical evolutions. But this sounds much more like scrapping the whole org chart and starting from scratch.


In other words, the campaign organization is in absolute turmoil.

Which just might be the answer to a question I've been pondering all day:

Can anybody tell me what the heck McCain is doing in Columbia? Did he want to be out of the country when all this was coming down, or what? [Update: Surely this can't be the reason, can it?]

And while we're on the subject of my uncanny ability to foresee the future, take a look at this story about how the GOP is getting nervous about Obama's overseas trip. They're afraid he will remind people of what it was like when the American President acted ... Presidential! Something we haven't seen for 8 years.


2 comments:

sjm said...

What's the photo?

Sempringham said...

Actually, I didn't have the vaguest idea what the picture was of, except that it was a shipwreck, so your question sent me on an expedition.

I found it in the Brittingham Family collection of photographs in the State of Wisconsin Archives. It was taken on March 27, 1904, in Fara, Sicily. I've tried enlarging the photo to see if I can read the ship's name, but the picture doesn't have enough resolution, so all I get is squares of black and white. It looks like it might be Ansbruk or something close to that.