Redstate

in your guts you know he's nuts

By streiff Posted in 2008 — Comments (25) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

We all knew it would happen.

The romance between the media and Senator John McCain was shallow and superficial as any relationship conceived in the wee morning hours and fueled by alcohol and dim lights tends to be.

So long as Senator McCain was dissing the Republican base, making life difficult for the administration, and giving great interview he was “maverick John McCain” and a hero to all. Now that McCain looks like he’s within a red-faced meltdown of the Republican nomination for president in 2008 all that is changing.

Richard Cohen writes:

Earlier this year a close friend of John McCain gave me fair warning: McCain was about to become much more conservative, and I would not like what was coming. He was right. I did not like McCain's speech at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, and I think his support of intelligent design is -- sorry, John -- just plain brainless. But it is not the supposedly new McCain that bothers me, it's the old one: His incessant sword-rattling has gotten just plain rattling.

Read on.

With so much more material with which to criticize McCain it was a bit sad to watch Cohen’s lack of imagination at work.

The media seem to have synthesized their attacks of Republican presidential contenders into two easily mastered genres.

Stupid and cowardly

Anyone who has been alive for the past six years should instantly recognize this line of attack. We all know the main points. National Guard during Vietnam. Mediocre student. No intellectual curiosity. In thrall to his advisors. Etc, etc.

But one only has to look back at George Bush 41 to see the same themes trotted out. The “wimp factor.” Unfamiliar with a supermarket scanner. In thrall to his advisors. Let his TBF Avenger crew die to save his own skin.

Gerald Ford was beaten about the head and shoulders for a misstatement on Poland.

Bob Dole dodged this category mostly because of the perceived sacrificial nature of his candidacy though his being unfamiliar with bills he had cosponsored and voted for in the spirit of go-along-get-along collegiality were briefly a newsworthy item. By and large the media were content to portray Dole as doddering-old-guy and endlessly recycle the film clip of him doing a header off a podium at a campaign stop.

Unbalanced and Dangerous

Barry Goldwater. Richard Nixon. Ronald Reagan. Bob Dole nearly made it into this category in the early stages of his campaign when whiffs of Watergate swirled around him and his role as Gerald Ford’s running mate and slavering attack dog in the 1976 campaign was recalled.

John McCain isn’t a great fit for the “stupid and cowardly” label. He might not have been a preternaturally talented pilot but his physical bravery in unquestioned. After these past years lauding McCain’s political acumen the media were also going to find it difficult to attack his intelligence without calling their own into question. “Unbalanced and dangerous” seemed like a perfect fit.

His LegendaryTemper^™. He was a PW and he was tortured and we all know what that means. His inability to accept criticism (gasp! BCRA wasn’t to save the Republic it was just to protect McCain). The inevitable comparisons with Captain Queeg lurk on the horizon.

Now Cohen continues.

At the moment McCain is probably the most prominent proponent of the pour-it-on school regarding Iraq…But his position regarding Iraq is really no different from the one he once held, and still does, about Vietnam -- "a noble cause," he has called that misbegotten war…

[…]

…What's more troubling in McCain's case is that too often in the past he has played the role of the sword-rattling heckler. Back in 1994 his plan for what to do about North Korea's developing nuclear program was a version of the old "bomb 'em back to the Stone Age" threat. If sanctions did not work, he said, he had another idea: "I know what they understand, and that is the threat of extinction." Similarly, and later in the decade (1999), McCain was urging the Clinton administration to pour it on with ground troops in Kosovo. Not only did the president disagree but so did the military and much of the Republican leadership.

[…]

…For some -- particularly the political independents who launched him into the political firmament back in 2000 -- McCain may now seem scary…

For a long time those values -- a belief in public service, a visceral hostility toward the ways of Washington's K Street lobbying crowd and a sense of honor that his Vietnamese captors came to appreciate -- obscured the always present, but muffled, sound of drums and bugles.

But the martial music grows louder and more insistent as McCain leads a charge whose mission cannot be defined and whose sound is increasingly grating to the American people….

There you have it. A preview of the McCain ’08 campaign press coverage.