McCain can’t remember how many houses he owns

It’s about bloody time. The Obama people are finally taking John McCain to task for championing his “man-of-the-people” bona fides and still believing, against all evidence and logic, that “the fundamentals of the economy are strong” because not one of his seven houses has been reposessed yet. When asked by Politico yesterday how many houses he has, McCain stumbled into this little gem:

“I think — I’ll have my staff get to you,” McCain told Politico in Las Cruces, N.M. “It’s condominiums where — I’ll have them get to you.”

The correct answer is at least four, located in Arizona, California and Virginia, according to his staff. Newsweek estimated this summer that the couple owns at least seven properties.

The man couldn’t (wouldn’t?) answer a question about how many houses he owns. His staff then lowballed the “correct answer”. John Aravosis is right on the money when he says that the Democrats absolutely must capitalize on this:

NOTE TO DEMOCRATS: This is manna from heaven. Run a freaking ad about this, non-stop. Unless of course you think it’s too mean and you just can’t touch it, then we can just have an independent group do it. Oh, that’s right - you killed the independent groups. Never mind. I hear the White House isn’t all it’s cracked up to be anyway.

I’m glad to see that the Democrats actually appear to be listening to this little bit of advice. They came out with an ad about this very quickly—a turnaround of one day, for a change!—and it’s pretty powerful:

About bloody time they did something like this in the time in which they did it. Next step: repeat this meme over and over again. The blogosphere has picked it up (and even started to question whether the number seven is, in fact, too low an “estimate”). The so-called liberal media, which you’d think would have always been more than eager to find indictments like this against the conservative candidate, has slowly started to pick this up. They’ve got to keep going with this. The precise number is less important than the idea: the meme that McCain owns many more houses than you (i.e. the average Joe Schmo) own has the potential to be extremely damaging to McCain—if the Democrats play it right. Use McCain’s own words against him. The audio is available via Politico. Hit McCain hard with it. (Aravosis thinks there ought to be a dance remix.) Hoist him by his own petard. String him up with his own idiocy. And for the love of Pete, don’t stop doing it until Obama gets elected.