If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, then the new Obama ad targeting McCain as a celebrity suggests McCain’s Paris/Britney line of attack may have been seen within the Obama camp as successful. That and the day’s other political news in the TPM Election Central Morning Roundup.

Late Update: A longtime reader disagrees that the new Obama ad is a response to McCain’s Paris/Britney ad:

Nope. It means that they know that they can get the national press corps (especially the campaign press corps) to write about “McCain = corrupt establishment, not really a maverick” as long as they throw in the word “celebrity” so it looks like a response to McCain’s ad.

Which it is not.

As has already been pointed out by far worthier observers than I, making the election about Obama is the only way Obama loses. If it’s about Bush? Obama wins. If it’s Obama vs McCain? Obama wins. If it’s about some more vague “are you better off than you were four years ago?” Obama wins. Ah, but what if it’s a referendum about Obama? Can Team McCain/GOP build enough doubts and worries about Obama? You bet. I think that’s where all of those McCain ads want to go.

Obama supporter Bill Richardson floats a new “Washington celebrity” line against McCain, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis attempts to defend his own lobbying record, and some quintessential old Washington pundit flummery. All in today’s Sunday Show Roundup …

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

This is the sort of mind-numbingly banal observation that passes for political analysis these days. Tut-tutting over the timing of Barack Obama’s family vacation, Cokie Roberts yesterday on ABC’s This Week added that Hawaii was not an appropriate destination: too foreign and too exotic. “I know Hawaii is a state, but …” Roberts declared, while insisting Obama vacation in some place like Myrtle Beach, S.C.:

She picked the theme up again this morning in her regular Morning Edition appearance on NPR:

RENEE MONTAGNE: Now Obama is spending the week on vacation in Hawaii, he’s taking a vacation, he says, because it’s good for his family, but is it a good point in the presidential campaign?

COKIE ROBERTS: It’s a little rough to be doing it at this point, although I think he’s feeling somewhat secure, but Hawaii is also a somewhat odd place to be doing it. I know that he is from Hawaii, he grew up there, his grandmother lives there, but he has made such a point about how he is from Kansas, you know, the boy from Kansas and Kenya, and it makes him seem a little bit more exotic than perhaps he would want to come across as at this stage in the presidential campaign.

I drove all the way across Kansas and back last week, and Cokie is right: It’s anything but exotic. But Hawaii as too foreign? Seriously?

It got us to thinking. What is the most white-bread place for a black presidential candidate to vacation, since that’s apparently the new standard? Surely we can do better than Myrtle Beach. The best we’ve come up with so far is Branson, Missouri — so long as he avoids the Shoji Tabuchi Theatre, which is way too exotic.

Late Update: TPM Reader JH suggests:

1) The Wisconsin Dells
2) Wall Drug, South Dakota
3) Wildwood on the Jersey shore.

All of this must be done with Barack driving the family in a station wagon, preferably wood paneled. Just don’t pull a Romney and put the dog on top …

TPM Reader DW continues the Mitt theme:

I nominate Kennebunkport for a white-bread vacation spot. From Wikipedia: The racial makeup of the town was 98.49% White, 0.22% Black or African American …

Failing that, go wherever it is Mitt Romney vacations, that’s gotta be white

Later Update: TPM Reader CG says don’t forget Dollywood.

Latest Update: Some intra-reader squabbling over what constitutes “white bread.” From TPM Reader M:

Wildwood, N.J., may be white — but it sure as hell ain’t white bread!

That’s like saying ‘The Sopranos’ is just too darn WASPy. Too Edith Wharton.

Wildwood was made legendary by working-class Italian-Americans from South Philly and (to an only slighter extent) the swampier regions of the Garden State. Those folks still come out in droves, but now you get working-class Russians and even African-Americans too. (Though, okay, in no great numbers.) It’s the kind of place where women wear make-up on the beach and the boardwalk is fragrant with the smell of Zeppolli [look it up] from all the stands. (Zeppolli — not white bread!)

As a fan of gross cultural ignorance I stand in awe of you and JH.

Man, are you two clueless!

You can see the extremely bellicose statements of Vice President Cheney and Sen. McCain (soul mates on this issue) on the conflict in Georgia. And a number of Democratic-affiliated foreign policy hands are roughly on the same side of this issue, if not quite as utterly nuts and eager to get into a war with Russia as Cheney and McCain.

But let me briefly (I hope to come back to this later today) register my deep skepticism about a great deal of the coverage we’re seeing about what’s happening. We’re hearing analogies to Czechoslovakia and Kuwait (which was of course supposed itself to be a latter-day Czechoslovakia) and many other charged incidents of the past. But this strikes me as a lot of crap.

To the best of my understanding, the separatism in these ‘breakaway’ regions of Georgia is not something ginned up by Russia, though certainly they’ve exploited it in their effort to either reclaim or dominate parts of what was the Soviet Union. And the Georgians themselves triggered this crisis, however ‘disproportionate’ the Russian response may be.

This is a vexed part of the globe we’re talking about, with a host of overlapping ethnic and separatist conflicts that can make the difficulties of Kosovo and the Palestinian territories seem tractable by comparison. As the standard line goes, my point is not to justify Russian actions. And I should be clear that I have not researched the details of this conflict nearly as deeply as I would now like to. But we should be clear that there are small state actors in the region (Georgia being one of them) interested in making high stakes gambles vis a vis the Russians and they are trying to do it on our dime — that is, both literally on our dime but more importantly by trying to involve us militarily in their defense.

Meanwhile, there are players (largely, though not perfectly, overlapping with the folks who got us into Iraq) in the US who want to use this period of relative (though diminishing) Russian weakness to push American security guarantees (primarily NATO) not just to the borders of the old Soviet Union (which we’ve largely already done) but actually within the borders of the old Soviet Union (which we’ve begun to do in the Baltics). John McCain has been a supporter of inducting Georgia into NATO. And it is worth noting that had we done that we would currently be in effect in a state of war with Russia since we would be obligated to see the treat the attack on Georgia as an attack on us. Indeed, McCain is saying now we should move ahead quickly and bring them into NATO.

It’s worth asking McCain whether he thinks we should be sending American troops into Georgia because in the current circumstances the two moves are close to synonymous.

As I said, there are many complexities to this current situation. And the Russians have a crass and brutal way of expressing their pretensions to regional hegemony. But we need to think closely and carefully just whose defense we’re signing on to and whose risk-taking behavior we’re underwriting.

As I said, do you want to go to war with Russia over Georgia? John McCain, and unfortunately quite a few others, seem to be saying yes, they do. The hawks will say that the example set in Georgia will foreshadow that to be applied in Eastern Europe. But that’s a highly, highly questionable leap. We’re in the midst of being led very far astray.

James K. Galbraith, professor of government at the University of Texas at Austin, sits in at the TPMCafe Book Club this week to discuss his new book, The Predator State: How Conservatives Abandoned the Free Market and Why Liberals Should Too.

Writes Galbraith:

The judicial coup of December 2000 that installed Bush and Cheney brought back some of Reagan’s men and his most extreme policies – tax cuts for the wealthy, big increases in military spending, aggressive deregulation. But it didn’t bring back the ideas. Instead, it became clear that Bush and Cheney had no real ideas, no larger public justification. … Under Bush and Cheney, oil and gas, drug companies and defense contractors, insurers and usurers control the government of the United States, and it does what they want. This is the predator state.

McCain is up by a single point in the latest SurveyUSA poll of Virginia.

Late Update: New polling from Colorado today as well. It shows Obama up 4 points.

TPM Reader WM responds to my post below …

There is no question in my mind that this is about OIL (as is so much else that happens in this world). There is at least TWO major pipelines in Georgia control of which would give Russia much more control over caspian sea oil.

Russia recognizes (as do the hawks in our admin – all oil people) that at least for now OIL = POWER. Russia has clearly taken over state control of its natural gas and oil resources, is earning major bank from them and is now doing exactly what we did in Iraq; using aggression to secure more. It is not a major leap to think Russia will move further against other neighboring states if this isn’t stopped now, but this alone may accomplish their goals. My recollection was the BTC pipeline’s purpose was to bypass Russia altogether. If Russia takes Georgia over or more likely institutes a regime change then they will have accomplished something detrimental to the rest of the world and will be encouraged to do it again.

I don’t agree with the hawks on going to war with Russia, but there has to be a painful consequence for Russia’s actions, especially when it becomes clear their interest is in taking oil resources over by force. Bush & Cheney being against this is the surest sign is about oil since they haven’t given a crap about Russia for the last 8 years. I also have major suspicions about how this all got starte — and given Russia’s history (as well as our own) in starting wars of agression on false pretenses — and so should you.

There is a lot I agree with in this email. And I don’t really see anything that contradicts my earlier point. First, the energy resources issue is hugely significant, perhaps even the primary issue in play here. (As I side matter, I actually think that Russia’s massive and not unsuccessful reliance on resource extraction is a long term weakness. And those who see controlling Caucasian natural resources as critical to American power in this century are shortsighted. But that’s another question for another post.) I also agree that what now appears to be an invasion of Georgia will undoubtedly cast a big shadow over the other post-Soviet successor states in the region. Nor do I have any illusions that the Russians are fair-dealing players in this matter.

The people around Putin — and many others in Russia — believe that the immediate post-Soviet leadership (mainly Yeltsin) impotently and unwisely allowed recalcitrant border regions of their former country (Czarist Russia > USSR, etc) to break away when they never should have. They may not feel the need to forcibly reabsorb these countries. But they certainly want to reassert effective hegemony over them. I’m sure a localized war that confirms that hegemony would be far from unwelcome to them.

Among many other things, what the Iraq war reminds us is the need to distinguish between critical national security interests and wish-lists that may be nice to fill if they come at little or no cost and all the grey areas in between. My concern here is that we’re getting ginned up into signing on for things we don’t fully understand or fully grasp the price of.

To paraphrase the old saw, those who learn their history from Sean Hannity are condemned to repeat it (and/or do a long list of other stupid things.)

Andrew Sullivan provides some helpful color commentary on the nutballs.

A contrary view from TPM Reader VI …

I have to respectfully disagree with you on your post “Beware”. I never thought I would be agreeing on Cheney and McCain, but here I am, as weird as it seems to me.
First of all your comparison with Kosovo is flawed. Sure it is a “vexed” region as you say, but some areas are more vexed than others. In this case, there is really no history of ethnic strife between the breakaway region Ossetia (home of ethnic ossetians) and Georgia. Even now there is a notable absence of any ethnic based violence, as one would expect to see. Pretty much all of the fighting is between Russian military and Georgians. In fact, the only reason this is a breakaway region is because Russia invaded that part of Georgia in early 90’s and setup a puppet regime. The government that runs Ossetia almost entirely consists of former Russian regional governors, former officials of Russia’s ministries, military and FSB. So this is pretty much an artificial ‘breakaway’ situation.

Secondly, how far exactly are we willing to go to avoid a conflict with an aggressive government, like Russia? Would we be willing to let Russia trample a real, legitimate democracy (one of so few in the region) and a true U.S. ally, who is not just another sketchy ‘friend of Bush’ (like Pakistan, for example)?

If Russia gets to win this one, they will surely feel encouraged to pursue their other territorial ambitions. They have ambitions toward parts of Ukraine and Moldova. They frequently express desire to protect allegedly oppressed ethnic russians in the Baltic states, as well as Ukraine and other parts of former USSR.

Russia’s foreign policy is a real threat to regional and world stability. This should not be allowed to stand.

Disagreeing is TPM Reader RC …

A few things need to be considered about possible Georgia adventures:

1) When Kosovo declared independence on Feb. 17, 2008, the United States and most European nations rushed to support it, ignoring Russia’s energetic complaints. This support was the logical outgrowth of nearly two decades of Western backing for the breakup of the former Yugoslavia. In the 1990s, the West also gave clear support to the breakaway republics of the former Soviet Union.

2) Russia has long charged, with apparently some justification, that Georgia gave covert support to the rebels in Chechnya during the 1990s.

3) From most accounts, the South Ossetian and Abkhazian people genuinely support secession from Georgia.

4) The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline, which traverses Georgia and opened in 2005, was intended expressly as a way to export oil from Azerbaijan, Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to the West while bypassing Russia. A growing share of Israel’s petroleum imports traverses this pipeline – surely one of the reasons why Israel has joined with the United States to train and arm Georgia’s military. Israel is also planning to link this pipeline to Israel’s own Ashelon-Eilat pipeline from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea, thus creating an oil export conduit to Asia.

5) Since the 1990s, and accelerating under the Bush administration, Georgia has avidly become an arch-loyal ally of the United States, hosting U.S. military training teams and what is reputed to be a major CIA station. Its 2,000 troops in Iraq (now hastily withdrawn) were a sign of this fealty.

All these factors should give us reason to suspect that U.S. support for Georgia, its tacit opposition to South Ossetian and Abkhazian independence, and its pious complaints about Russian conduct are deeply hypocritical. Democracy and self-determination are fine concepts, but in this case they’re mainly being used by Washington as weapons in a latter-day Great Game of oil geopolitics and lingering Cold War attitudes.

Having found most pundits to be incorrigible morons on racial/sexual messaging, McCain decides to push a bit further …