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Maureen Dowd had an amazing op-ed in the New York Times yesterday.  You should definitely give the whole thing a read (it’s not all that long), but here are some excerpts to give you a feel of the narrative:

Not since Iago and Othello obsessed on the comely Cassio, not since Richard of Gloucester killed his two nephews, not since Nixon and Johnson glowered at the glittering J.F.K., has there been such an unseemly outpouring of boy envy.

Bill Clinton, Jesse Jackson and John Edwards have all been crazed with envy over the ascendance of the new “It” guy, Barack Obama.

…

Now John McCain is pea-green with envy. That’s the only explanation for why a man who prides himself on honor, a man who vowed not to take the low road in the campaign, having been mugged by W. and Rove in South Carolina in 2000, is engaging in a festival of juvenilia.

The Arizona senator who built his reputation on being a brave proponent of big solutions is running a schoolyard campaign about tire gauges and Paris Hilton, childishly accusing his opponent of being too serious, too popular and not patriotic enough.

Even his own mother, the magical 96-year-old Roberta McCain, let slip that she thought the Paris Hilton-Britney Spears ad was “kinda stupid.”

…

McCain upbraids Obama for being a poppet, while he’s becoming a puppet. His mouth is moving but the words coming out belong to his new hard-boiled strategist, Steve Schmidt, a Rove protégé, nicknamed “The Bullet” for his bald pate.

Schmidt has turned Mr. Straight Talk into Mr. Desperate Straits. It’s not a good trade.

The whole thing’s not much longer and fleshes out the argument a bit better, give it a read.

Here’s my quick 2-cents: These ads and the narrative the McCain campaign is trying to weave does have a lot of bite to it.  I think they have been effective and they’ve given McCain a lot of free play in the press.  But, look, there are 90 days left in this campaign — an eternity — and these ads are the equivalent of sacraficing your queen in the first three moves.  A large part of McCain’s appeal has always been that he’s an above the fray consensus builder, but now he’s systematically displaying his own conventionality to the whole nation.  Maybe the Obama camp is dumb enough to let this narrative ride without turning it around, but no one who’s just watched them upset what was arguably the most potent political machine of the last 4 decades is going to place their bet on the Obama camp’s stupidity…