Sunday, May 11, 2008
Opinion
What John McCain told me
A medical professional in Pennsylvania shows John McCain a “Life Book” for cancer case management.
Chris Gardner/Getty Images
By Arianna Huffington
At a dinner party in Los Angeles not long after the 2000 election, I was talking to a man and his wife, both prominent Republicans. The conversation soon turned to the new president. "I didn't vote for George Bush" the man confessed. "I didn't either," his wife added. Their names: John and Cindy McCain (Cindy told me she had cast a write-in vote for her husband).
The fact that this man was so angry at what George Bush had done to him, and at what Bush represented for their party, that he did not even vote for him in 2000 shows just how far he has fallen since then in his hunger for the presidency. By abandoning his core principles and embracing Bush—both literally and metaphorically—he has morphed into an older and crankier version of the man he couldn't stomach voting for in 2000.
McCain's fall has been Shakespearean—and really hard to watch for those, like me, who so admired and even loved him. His nobility and his true reformer years have given way to pandering in the service of ambition. But a large portion of the electorate hasn't noticed the Shakespearean fall. How else to explain "The 28/48 Disconnect”—wherein only a diehard 28 percent of voters still approve of Bush, but 48 percent say they'd vote for McCain, who is running on the "more of the same" platform?
The main reason for The 28/48 Disconnect is the mainstream media's ongoing membership in the John McCain Protection Society. Look at the slack they cut him after his infamous stroll through a Baghdad market was revealed as an utter sham. Or the slack they cut him after his repeated confusion of Sunni and Shia. Or the slack they cut him when his promise to run a "respectful" campaign ran aground on his sleazy attempt to connect Barack Obama and Hamas.
Every time McCain screws up, the media jump all over themselves to make it better, as if Grandpa had said something embarrassing at the dinner table and it needed to be smoothed over as quickly as possible.
The latest example came late last week, when the Straight Talk Express hit an oil slick and skidded off the road. In short, McCain implied that Iraq is essentially a war for oil, then tried to take it back, explaining that he was actually talking about the first Gulf War, then, when pressed, denied that he was actually talking about the first Gulf War.
And, by and large, the media gave him a pass. Chris Matthews called the original war-for-oil comment "an astounding development," but most everyone else was too busy picking over the bones of the Wright/Obama carcass to give it much play.
Interestingly, McCain's mental meltdown over the reason we invaded Iraq was prompted by a comment from a McCain supporter who said he hoped a group called "Swift Boats for McCain" would be formed to help McCain in the campaign.
The gentleman needn't worry. The group already exists. It's called "the media." Witness the reaction to McCain's repeated declarations that he thinks we should be in Iraq for "100 years." The DNC had the gall to use McCain's own words in an ad, causing McCain to flip out: "My friends, it's a direct falsification," he said, "and I'm sorry that political campaigns have to deteriorate in this fashion."
McCain tries to wriggle away from his "100 year" comment by saying that he wasn't talking about a hundred-year war, but a very long-term commitment of U.S. troops, like we have in Germany or South Korea. Maybe so, but the last time I looked, no one was blowing up American soldiers in Wiesbaden.
The New Yorker's Rick Hertzberg, a writer who hasn't drunk the "It's Still 2000" Kool-Aid, sums up McCain's Strangelovian "vision": "McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal—that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we'll stay."