The insignificant person that I am speaking of is, of course, Ashley Todd. Ms. Todd, a Texan working on the McCain Campaign was in Pittsburgh when she made the accusation that a black Obama supporter had attacked her for her choice for President. Drudge jumped on it. This is to be expected. Drudge’s stock and trade is unconfirmed rumors.
Ordinarily, this would be not much more than a young woman making a desperate cry for help and attention. But she did say that a black man had done this, so she may have desired to split white and black voters in her simple little mind. Perhaps she thought that if she could say that a black man had done this, a little fear of black violence would go a long way. In some parts of Pennsylvania, perhaps.
But now we have reports coming in that the communications director for McCain in Pennsylvania, Peter Feldman, was pushing this story to the local media. Feldman gave a salacious version of the story to the local TV stations that had actual quotes from the imaginary assailant. Feldmans world is going to suck for the next few days.
All of this would be little more than a bed news cycle for McCain, if for nothing else than it kept him off-message again even while Sarah Palin made her first policy speech. It would mean very little if it weren’t for the fact that earlier this week, McCain pulled out of several states that he thought he had no shot at winning. Instead, he decided that he was going to put all of his eggs on winning one state that he was fighting an uphill battle in already. That state was Pennsylvania, and this story will play right to McCain’s weakness there.
This young woman thought that she would do her part to help put John McCain in the White House, but I think that this stunt will reveal the underground southern strategy that the McCain campaign was trying to pull in the “Alabama” part of Pennsylvania. That strategy has just been killed by a sick woman with a dyslexic letter B on her face.