If you’ve been holding off on making a decision on who to vote for until Ludacris weighed in, you’re now officially out of excuses. In case you’re wondering, he’s an Obama supporter.

The song is pretty much boilerplate Ludacris, which honestly makes it heads and shoulders above any of the other Obama-boosting hip hop songs out there so far. Even Nas, my current man-crush, turned in a pretty weak number. This one’s good, though, even if it just sounds like most other Ludacris songs. At least there are no falsetto yes we can’s soaring through the hook or anything. Also, he calls Hillary Clinton a bitch, George Bush mentally handicapped, accuses Jesse Jackson of being gutless, and a kinda abstract attack on McCain that declares him unqualified to sit down. But what the hell? It’s catchy, and still less misogynistic than “Ho”, so I guess that’s progress.

Obama, meanwhile, immediately renounced the song, declaring that Ludacris should be ashamed because it’s offensive to Clinton, Bush, Jackson, McCain, and the children… which is true, sure, but it’s just another example of the dumb season in action. A grown man running for President shouldn’t have to address a Ludacris song in any way, just like he shouldn’t have to explain to the American people how a cartoon on the cover of the New Yorker makes him feel, or any of the other dumbness that we insist on from people before we’re willing to let them carry on with an election. But of course he does, because dumbness is a part of the American fabric, whether we like it or not- and we kinda do like it, sure, because we’re not really comfortable with the idea of letting someone lead us unless we’ve thoroughly debased them first, to keep our own egos salved. Only when we’ve seen them act like buffoons are we confident that we’re not giving them too much power. Too much of the American identity is based on having a vague distrust of authority, and letting anyone come off without some dirt on their shoulders is a dangerous thing. So now grown-ass men have to weigh in on Ludacris before we’re willing to trust them to serve as President.

McCain, meanwhile, has switched to fullscale Nixon silent majority mode. It’s widely mocked around the lefty blogs, but it’s dangerous, maybe specifically because the conventional wisdom is that he’s shooting himself in the foot by doing shit like campaigning at the German-themed Fudge Haus in Columbus, Ohio in response to Obama giving a speech to hundreds of thousands of cheering Europeans and American expats, or that he’s stupid for running ads that remind America how popular Obama is around the world. That’d be true, if he were trying to compete on that scale, but McCain has launched himself into the most serious campaign based on the politics of resentment since Richard Nixon in 1968. He needs to very specifically not be popular around the world, to not have cheering crowds, to not be seen traveling around the world and firing up the imaginations of the young… He’s banking n the fact that there’s a segment of the population- what Nixon (in the last major speech written by a Presidential contender himself until Obama’s Philadelphia address, incidentally) termed the silent majority.

The way the silent majority campaign works, you ignore the cheering crowds, the massed demonstrators, the poll respondents, the activists, the politically engaged… anyone who your opponent is targeting, basically, as unreachable. Instead you focus on the people who are maybe just a little bit annoyed by all of those other people. The straights against the hippies, basically, and turn the entire election into a referendum on the types of people who support your opponent. It’s destructive and polarizing, because the whole point of the campaign is to make one half of the country hate the other, but all it takes to work is for the silent ones, who don’t want to hear about it, to outnumber the others. If there really is a silent majority, and McCain’s successful in portraying Obama as a product of the segment of American society that they resent, then he wins. It’s about as simple as that, in the end.

There’s a racial component, too, and about a half-dozen other elements at work, but they’re all in service to the idea that the unengaged are the majority, and if their resentment is stoked properly, then they’ll turn out just to vote against something that pisses them off.

And thus John McCain’s campaign is now run by grown-ups, who see the potential of old white authoritarian as the antidote to young popular black inspiration. Any of those four words, which more or less represent Obama’s strengths, are where McCain’s attacks are going to be focused over the next three months. If he can make the silent majority think that Obama is a silly celebrity popular with a bunch of naive hippies, then he’s got the best chance at winning this election that he’s had yet.

If they stay on-message with this- and with Steve Schmidt, George Bush’s 2004 campaign mastermind and a Karl Rove protege, running the show, they probably will- then watch for a consistent reference to Obama as a flaky pop star, complete with entourage, to stoke the flames of resentment. If it works, McCain not only gets to continue George W Bush’s third term, but hell- maybe Nixon’s, as well.