McCain performs well on Letterman, but he leads a team of losers

John McCain announced his candidacy on David Letterman last night. Letterman fawned all over him like a love-struck whatever – “a true American hero -- and McCain showed his ability to manipulate applause with well-timed self-deprecating jokes, praise for opponents both Republican and Democratic, references to his superior sacrifices and our duties, and in the end, the need for “bi-partisanship” to fulfill America’s destiny. It was well-honed, the applause sounded real – who really knows? – and he looks like a formidable candidate on his personality and heroic stature alone despite the pandering flip-flops since 2004.

Which gets me back to a thought from some time ago: Democrats need to play the philosophies game more than the character or personality game. Republicans have demonstrated their incompetence in governance because they don’t believe in it unless it’s the rich and management doing all the governing. Their incompetence should always be tied to the bankrupt right-wing Republican philsophies. They gave us the horrendous response to Katrina by gutting a once-respected Federal agency, a stagnant economy for ordinary people that has not produced enough new jobs to keep up with population growth, total inattention to potential environmental disasters and a disastrous foreign policy that has decimated respect for our country throughout the world. McCain has been right there as a very conservative Republican, and he still is – even more so as he bends to appeal to the base of rabid right-wing Republicans for the primaries.

Obama will match McCain on personality and character, and once we get past the Limbaugh-generated assaults on Hillary that even liberals have absorbed and adopted by osmosis, she will prove a lot more engaging than a lot of people expect. It will also be important to undercut the sudden Republican interest in “bipartisanship” by demanding loudly and nastily that the press stop playing the “both-sides-are-responsible” soundtrack, and recognize that it was Newt Gingrich, with his mid-nineties list of nasty words, and Republicans generally with their relentless assaults on Clinton and Gore, followed by the arrogance of Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, along with the divisive politics of Grover Norquist and Karl Rove, who created the excessive partisan atmosphere all by themselves. But it is going to be on beliefs, on political philosophies and principles that the 2008 election can be won.

A slogan? “The self-serving billionaires have had their shot. Now it's YOUR time." That is what it is all about, isn't it? Whether McCain or Giuliani, or Clinton or Obama, allowing the race to be framed as one person against the other -- as Time and Newsweek inevitably will do with their covers -- is playing the game the way the Republicans want it. It should always be Democrats vs. Republicans, Democrats vs. Republicans -- the winning "Team Democrats" who brought almost a decade of peace and unprecedented prosperity and business growth in the 90s, not the incompetent "Team Republican" losers who lost jobs, gave us the Katrina disaster and a Middle east quagmire.