Another McCain Shake-Up

As they used to say in the Peanuts comic strip, “Good grief, Charlie Brown!”

Here we go again, more shifting of the deck chairs on the Titanic-McCain.

The problem, folks, is not the legion of lobbyist-advisers, the loads of Bush-Cheney-Rove hangers-on who are coming back, the constant “re-tooling” … the problem is John McCain.

He is failing. He is calling the shots on his campaign and on his locked-at-the-hip-with-George Bush policy positions. This one starts at the top, people.

McCain says we are going to Canada and Colombia and Mexico to talk about free trade agreements, when our economy is tanking here at home. He brings his lobbyist aide-de-camp Charlie Black on these trips — since he has lobbied for those foreign interests and knows them so well. Even Charlie is a little dumbfounded by all of this: “John McCain says he wants to go to these places, and we say, of course” (today’s New York Times).

While Obama is in Michigan and Missouri and Ohio, McCain is in Toronto and Cartagena and Mexico City. Gee, that is good strategy.

But, remember, this is the candidate who told the autoworkers of Detroit and those who lost their jobs in Michigan that “these jobs aren’t coming back” and lost to Mitt Romney because of that attitude. Oops, the jobs have gone to Mexico and Colombia. Might as well go and visit them there then!

And this is the candidate who now, you watch, will try to tell us he is an “independent” Republican. Right. With all of Bush and Cheney’s folks taking over, with his economic policies not one iota different from Bushes’ disaster, with his foreign policy, if anything, more Iraq-Iran focused than Afghanistan-Pakistan-al Qaeda-focused than Bush’s. He is the candidate of “change” — no, not even close. And he is still trying to suck up to evangelicals after calling them “agents of intolerance” and telling Republicans what a disaster it was to “pander” to these interests in 2000. Make no mistake, John McCain may try to distance himself from Bush in the next four months, but his policies, his people, and his persona are not really any different.

Bottom line: shake-up or no shake-up, if you liked George Bush, you’ll love John McCain.