Dan Savage is one of the smartest writers working today, and he’s got a particularly keen grasp on American culture. But he’s totally wrong when he says that the way for Obama to win is to hit back at McCain with a Rove-style blitz designed to highlight the age thing. In a response to an Andrew Sullivan post he recommends playing the age card as brutally as some republicans play the race card.

The same thing pops up all over the lefty blogs- Bob Cesca even made a video response to the McCain “celebrity” ad on the subject.

It’s a funny video, but this sort of thing is a bad idea for two reasons.

One- Americans don’t have inherent prejucides and resentments about old people to exploit in the same way that they have them about black people. You can’t run the age card the way they ran the race card because there’s not really such a thing as “the age card”. There’s no grand stigma attached to being old, and it’s consider impolite to ever bring it up. Partly that’s because we all fear aging, and we all know it’ll happen to ourselves, our parents, our grandparents, etc… And everybody has either got old people in their lives that they love, or people who’ll be getting there before long. Attacking McCain as an old man is going to cause people to identify him with the old people in their lives. McCain’s race card smear works because it causes more Americans to identify with him, through their own fear of being branded a racist, than it does to identify with Obama. If Obama starts playing up McCain’s massive oldness, it’ll have the opposite effect. Americans don’t have deep-seated fears of losing everything to undeserving old people. You can’t exploit age the way you can exploit race, because all you’re doing when you start working the race thing is giving people permission to access their own prejudices. Those prejudices aren’t nearly so pronounced when it comes to the very, very old.

Two- Even if he effectively frames McCain as a senile old reptile only dimly aware of where he is at all times, led around by lobbyists and campaign staff and hoping only for a chance to blow Iran to hell before Alzheimer’s sets in (see? I know making fun of him for being so old is satisfying), it establishes for a generation that sort of campaign as the only kind capable of winning the Presidency. Make no mistake, if McCain wins with the campaign he’s run, it’ll have the same effect. But if Obama beats it- and the odds are still in his favor, even if the past week hasn’t been great to his poll numbers- then the hope of the American Presidency being determined by something other than who can exploit voters’ prejudices and fears most effectively lives on.

And this is important. Not because I’m some starry-eyed idealist, but because winning here means that the people who spent the past forty years tearing America into pieces lose. This is how you beat Pat Buchanan and Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater and Dick Cheney and George W Bush and Karl Rove and Steve Schmidt… It’s a cycle that started with Buchanan and Atwater when they were working for Nixon, drafting his silent majority strategy. It’s continued through Rove, who learned at the feet of Atwater, first for Bush in Texas, and then his Presidential campaigns with Nixon loyalist Dick  Cheney. Now Schmidt, Rove’s apprentice, who ran Bush’s 2004 hit squad, is managing McCain. This is the strategy, as expressed in 1971:

“Bumper stickers calling for black Presidential and especially Vice-Presidential candidates should be spread out in the ghettoes of the country,” Buchanan wrote. “We should do what is within our power to have a black nominated for Number Two, at least at the Democratic National Convention.” Such gambits, he added, could “cut the Democratic Party and country in half; my view is that we would have far the larger half.”

If Obama wins this way, then it’s because right now, the cut he made was larger. But Americans are fickle, and there’s no reason to believe a country divided into two halves who resent the hell out of each other is going to agree with you for much longer. Four years, or eight years, and then Schmidt or Rove or whoever come up under them will be back to the same game, finding other ways to make the next guy something half of America can’t stand.

This is the hope that they’re so desperate to make Obama seem naive for talking about. He can win without giving it up, and if he does, we all lose. We just might not know it until 2012.