McCain's houses gaffe

Let's face it, this was a pretty bad gaffe. No matter how much his campaign might explain about his wife's trust owning the properties or counter with Tony Rezko jabs, it just sounds dumb. It is easy to make jokes about and tie to other things McCain has said that feed into the Obama argument that McCain is out of touch. I expect we'll be hearing McCain house jokes for the rest of the campaign.

In a way it's like Kerry's "I voted for it before I voted against it" gaffe. That was something that could be explained by referring to Senate procedure. But it sounded like a flip-flop and like someone who had been in the Senate too long.

The only saving grace for McCain is that he doesn't have the image of a rich elitist guy. He's never dressed or acted that way, even though liberal bloggers are very excited about his expensive Ferragamo shoes. However, there are a lot of people who are just getting to know McCain now and haven't known much about him except that he was a POW and ran against Bush in 2000. And many people didn't know that he'd left his first wife after cheating on her and then married a beer heiress. They didn't know that he had seven or eight properties. And so it all looks bad. And we're heading into the Democratic convention where we'll hear a variant of the joke dozens of times.

It is funny to hear all these Democrats who nominated John Kerry who also had an heiress millionaire wife and quite a few homes now making fun of McCain who married an heiress wife with quite a few homes. However, we have to admit that Republicans had a lot of fun laughing at idea of Kerry as a "kept husband" and now we're reaping the backlash. No matter how many times conservatives point out all the Democratic millionaires from Ted Kennedy to Nancy Pelosi to John Kerry, it doesn't matter. Those guys have noblesse oblige and it's okay for them to be rich. Republicans don't get that same dispensation.

The best thing for McCain to do is to come up with some self-deprecating jokes himself and then move on. His campaign can muddy the waters with the Rezko stuff and they can hope that people get sick of hearing the same joke over and over and just start thinking that, yeah, McCain married into a sweet deal - the American dream of being a guy who marries a rich, blonde beer heiress, but Obama worries about the price of arugula and hanged out with a former terrorist, a pastor who hates America, and a corrupt slumlord.

We'll never know if this was the moment when McCain's momentum stalled or if this provided the set-up for a convention bounce for Obama that would have happened anyway. But it serves as a reminder for any Republicans who had started to get cocky after a round of good poll numbers for McCain earlier this week.