Demobilization

Perhaps there’s a backstory here I don’t know about, but Mark McKinnon, John McCain’s “senior campaign adviser” and media guru, says he’ll quit McCain’s staff rather than campaign against Barack Obama. McKinnon, the media guy for Bush in 2000 and 2004, says he would feel “uncomfortable” working in a campaign that inevitably would wind up attacking Obama.

One of the reasons people like me think that Obama would be the stronger of the two remaining Democrats in a general election is that his presence at the head of the ticket would tend to demobilize some voters who would would otherwise vote Republican. But I’d been thinking about some of the Christian Right types and a some of the money-cons and practitioners of crony capitalism who don’t start out being inspired by McCain.

It never occurred to me that Obama might be carrying some sort of Teflon that would make people like Mark McKinnon reluctant to go after him. If he is, that gives him a very big edge going into November.