Turn Him Into An Alien

That was Mark Penn's advice to the Clintons about Obama this spring. Money quote from Penn:

“All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light. Save it for 2050. ... Every speech should contain the line you were born in the middle of America American to the middle class in the middle of the last century. And talk about the basic bargain as about the deeply American values you grew up with, learned as a child and that drive you today. Values of fairness, compassion, responsibility, giving back.

Let’s explicitly own ‘American’ in our programs, the speeches and the values. He doesn’t. Make this a new American Century, the American Strategic Energy Fund. Let’s use our logo to make some flags we can give out. Let’s add flag symbols to the backgrounds."

It's Rove-Morris in a nutshell. The McCain camp is now trying the same thing. In my view, a critical issue in this election is whether we are going to reward this kind of politics - rooted entirely in feeling, in prejudice and in group loyalties - or whether we can return to a greater emphasis on how to win this war and how to restore the Constitution. At this point, only Obama represents any kind of move forward from this. McCain has signaled he'll do whatever the Clintons tried - and then some.

(Photo: Chris Hondros/Getty.)