McConfused running a contradictory, muddled campaign

By GottaLaff

Good lord, if this is what a maverick is, then Jon Lovitz's conflicted character Tommy Flanagan (see video) is a maverick:

Senator John McCain is so quick to pick up his gold-colored cellphone to solicit advice — from senators, campaign consultants, even the stray former deputy press secretary — that aides, concerned about his tendency to adopt the last opinion he has heard, have tried to cut back on the time he has to make calls.

Mr. McCain is known to sign off on big campaign decisions and then to march off his own reservation. Two weeks ago, he publicly disagreed with his own spokeswoman, Jill Hazelbaker, after she used a line of attack against Senator Barack Obama that he had approved after careful strategizing within his campaign. Ms. Hazelbaker raced out of the Virginia campaign headquarters and refused to take Mr. McCain’s calls of apology, aides said, and a plan to have Republican members of Congress use the same critical line about Mr. Obama’s foreign trip fell apart.

Yeah, I'd want him running the country.

Even now, after a shake-up that aides said had brought an unusual degree of order to Mr. McCain’s disorderly world in the last month, two of his pollsters are at odds over parts of the campaign’s message, while past and current aides have been trading snippy exchanges debating the wisdom of attack advertisements he has aimed at Mr. Obama.

Why, if I didn't know better, I'd say the candidate of hopeless is starting to sound a little like-- dun dun dun-n-n-- Hillary! Uh-oh, read on, it gets better:

[His campaign] offers a contrast to the more rigidly controlled and nearly corporate management style that has marked the campaign of Mr. Obama, his Democratic counterpart. If anything, it recalls the freewheeling ways of the last Republican senator to win his party’s presidential nomination, Bob Dole in 1996.

While he avidly seeks advice and contrary opinions, he routinely resists basic political counseling, such as when aides pleaded with him not to campaign sitting on a horseshoe-shaped couch in the back of his bus because they feared it made him look like an old man rumbling around the country in an R.V. He refused.

What a maverick.

For now, Mr. McCain’s executive style looms as a potential obstacle to his hopes of getting to the White House. His campaign has been rocked by personnel changes and often well-publicized differences. And for all the efforts to maintain discipline, he continues to be plagued by misstatements and apparent gaffes as he at times bucks what his own campaign is trying to do.

What a bumbling, disorganized, confused leader he would make.

In recent weeks, Mr. Murphy and another former top aide, John Weaver, were critical of Mr. McCain’s advertisements attacking Mr. Obama. The two men privately urged Mr. Schmidt and Charlie Black, a senior adviser, to get off that course and spend as much time building up Mr. McCain as tearing down Mr. Obama, advice also offered by a member of Mr. McCain’s panel of outside advertising consultants, Alex Castellanos. They met stiff, angry resistance, several people familiar with the episode said.

Confused, mixed messages, angry resistance... yeah, that's the ticket.