It’s a tactic the GOP has carefully developed. Andrew Sullivan sums it up well:
[I]t is hard to avoid a sense of deep concern about where we’re headed. We have war criminals as president and vice-president, and a constitution staggering after one serious terror attack. But the campaign is about whether Obama is like Paris Hilton.
The threat of Rove and his ilk is not that their petty, deceptive and irresistibly subjective tactics are evil in a petty, deceptive, childish kind of way. It’s that their venial sins distract from their mortal ones. It’s the mortal ones we have to be worried about. And the mortal ones that they are getting away with.
Once we clean out the non-issues, McCain has very little to say. McCain’s now infamous celebrity ad is Exhibit A.
Case in point, by Marty Kaplan at Huffpo:
Go here for the full story.
Another footnote, this one from Drew Weston:
Obama has a voice, and he has the microphone to say anything he wants anytime he wants to say it. But as his opponent "distracts" the media–and hence the public–daily with a relentless drumbeat about what's wrong with Obama–that he isn't strong, that he isn't American, that he isn't patriotic, that he doesn't have the judgment or experience to be president, that he didn't have the balls to serve in the military, that he eats arugula, that he is the most liberal member of the United States Senate, that he isn't "one of us"–what story has Barack Obama told that could possibly catch the public attention? That he has a slightly amended plan for dealing with the energy crisis? And what story is his campaign telling about why voters should worry as much about John McCain as they are beginning to worry about Barack Obama?
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/drew-westen/why-vot…
Here's a recent post by Arianna Huffington:
It now appears that the bigger the problem, the more likely it is that they'll be completely ignored. So here we are: huge problems and a correspondingly empty election. It's the politics of nothing. The McCain camp knows that the only way they can win the election is to turn it into a carnival sideshow.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/arianna-huffington/…