Still waiting to see what the damage is from the recent spate of resentment-stoking from the McCain campaign? There’s an itty-bitty poll out there that, working from a sample of 320 people, suggests that it’s bringing some Democrats from Obama to undecided, but nobody to McCain. Which is good, as far as these things go, because if the data is at all accurate, it means that McCain’s failed so far to define himself as any sort of alternative to Obama.

That counts for something, but mostly none of this counts for anything. Well, how could it? This is August, and the election isn’t until November. All a candidate can do right now is try to create a definition of himself in the minds of the public, to create a persona that sticks with people. Right now, no single position is worth anything except insofar as it creates that narrative, because circumstances and situations change quickly and drastically. Sixty days ago, Hillary Clinton still had the clout to muscle her way onto the Democratic ticket, if she strong-armed the party into a choice between seeing itself torn apart and acquiescing to her will. The fact that she didn’t speaks well of her, especially given the amount of shit-talking she faced in opposition to seeing her name anywhere on a bumper sticker in 2008, and that shouldn’t be forgotten… But it just goes to show how quickly the world moves. A month ago you could take a bus down to Kentish Town and find any number of reputable bookies who would happily give you 500-1 odds on John McCain nominating Brett Favre as his running mate, which would make him a laughingstock to a certain segment of the population while all but guaranteeing Wisconsin, which would mean that he’d have a path to the White House that didn’t go through Pennsylvania and Ohio…

But now it is August, and Brett Favre’s name is spoken as a voodoo curse in Milwaukee and Madison, and especially Green Bay. John McCain has no reason to declare a running mate at all right now, since any Republican politician he could name would only hurt him in the polls, and Hillary Clinton is safely back in the Senate, voting according to principle on matters like FISA and generally proving herself deserving of better treatment than she got during the spring. See how things change?

Which means that if McCain hasn’t built an image of himself as the down-to-earth, normal fella who just wants you to know that he hates the idea of some presumptuous country-club black (can we still call them black?) getting something he doesn’t deserve as much as you do, his ads aren’t as dangerous as they’ve seemed. Because the thing that makes the silent majority strategy effective is the belief that the candidate operating it is just like them. Nixon was brilliant at that sort of campaign, as was George Wallace, which meant that the only chance anyone had in 1968 was that the two would tear each other apart; by ‘72 Wallace was gutshot and had only the heart for a Democratic primary run, meaning that Nixon took it home with a greater with a greater percentage of the vote than anybody outside George Washington ever had before. Carter and the first Bush were mediocre at convincing you that they were that sort of guy, and they both ended up one-term Presidents who made it on the weakness and strength of their predecessor, respectively.

And that’s the only time I’ll type any derivation of the word respect for the rest of the day, because the other guys- Reagan, Clinton, and George W Bush- were all masters of i’m just like you politics, and were grandly successful because of it. Gerald Ford? Well, hell, nobody elected that guy. In fact, they worked so hard not to elect him that we had a brief anomaly like the Jimmy Carter term.

All of which points to a disturbing trend in American Presidential politics, if you disregard Carter as a failed reaction to Nixon and Ford, and consider the context of Clinton by his opponents. Which is that maybe Americans just like Republicans for President.

It’s hard not to reach that conclusion if you think much about what Americans like their leaders- in any medium, on any scale- to look like. The Republican brand, dented though it may be, still runs on a more authoritarian, it’s-okay-daddy’s-here track. Regardless of their awareness of the realities of a given situation, they’re assumed to be better on foreign policy, especially as it relates to keeping America safe, and, in a post-Friedman world, usually on economics. These are just things that they’re given, no matter what the truth is. Even if John McCain is a bumbling old fool who really can’t tell you the difference between Sunni and Shia, he’s still perceived as better on this because of the (R) next to his name. It’s why those dopey pundits were so keen to link Batman to their brand, to claim that keeping people safe from dangerous bad guys is an inherently conservative trait. In authority positions, maybe Americans just feel like Republicans better fit their perception of a leader. If you look at the campaign contributions of NFL players, after all, you’ll find that wide receivers and running backs and linebackers almost all give money to Democrats, while head coaches and quarterbacks favor Republicans almost exclusively… Dennis Green is pretty much the only exception to that rule, but who wants his support?

It doesn’t prove anything, of course, but I’d wager that any Republican running for President scores some of the same points on perception from the public as leads Peyton Manning and John Elway and Dan Marino and Mike Ditka to identify with them as what a leader should look like.

And when you get down to it, this is probably why it’s such bad news for John McCain that, even as he’s gone full-on Nixonian, he’s failed to successfully frame himself as the antidote to what he’s had a bit of success painting Obama as. Because he’s clearly proven that, even if there’s an inherent American bias towards Republicans for the job of President, he’s got no idea what to do with the extra points that gives him.