Losing Everything
TPM
09.30.08 -- 1:18AM
By Josh Marshall
Despite the campaign's sharp break in Obama's direction in the last week of September, we need only remember the sharp break in McCain's favor in the first two weeks of the month to know that elections can change quickly. That said, I've been thinking over the last few days that if John McCain loses this election he will have lost much more than the presidency. His reputation as an honest and honorable politician will be wrecked, I suspect, for good -- particularly among centrist and independent voters and the centrist commentator class in New York and Washington.
In his current guise, McCain would likely say that what the folks along the Northeast corridor think of him doesn't matter. But I don't think anyone who knows him believes that for a second. The man has spent the last fifteen years of his life assiduously cultivating these people. This after all is what people mean when they used to say that the press was McCain's 'base'. It's a big thing for his political viability and his ego.
Today at work I was flipping through a review copy of Elizabeth Drew's Citizen McCain. I'm sure there are critical passages buried in there. And my point is not to criticize Drew. Though I was never a supporter, I once had a very different view of the man than I do today. But it came right out of the McCain maverick narrative that has so dominated elite political journalism back into the mid-1990s. That read of McCain just dripped off the page.
But little more than a week ago she shows up in the Politico with a sort of public recantation of her one time admiration, concluding, "McCain's recent conduct of his campaign - his willingness to lie repeatedly (including in his acceptance speech) and to play Russian roulette with the vice-presidency, in order to fulfill his long-held ambition - has reinforced my earlier, and growing, sense that John McCain is not a principled man. In fact, it's not clear who he is."
Though not summed up in one neat essay, Joe Klein's change of mind about McCain strikes me as similar. As do those of a slew of other marquee pundits who've either written as much publicly or told me as much privately.
(Continued here.)
09.30.08 -- 1:18AM
By Josh Marshall
Despite the campaign's sharp break in Obama's direction in the last week of September, we need only remember the sharp break in McCain's favor in the first two weeks of the month to know that elections can change quickly. That said, I've been thinking over the last few days that if John McCain loses this election he will have lost much more than the presidency. His reputation as an honest and honorable politician will be wrecked, I suspect, for good -- particularly among centrist and independent voters and the centrist commentator class in New York and Washington.
In his current guise, McCain would likely say that what the folks along the Northeast corridor think of him doesn't matter. But I don't think anyone who knows him believes that for a second. The man has spent the last fifteen years of his life assiduously cultivating these people. This after all is what people mean when they used to say that the press was McCain's 'base'. It's a big thing for his political viability and his ego.
Today at work I was flipping through a review copy of Elizabeth Drew's Citizen McCain. I'm sure there are critical passages buried in there. And my point is not to criticize Drew. Though I was never a supporter, I once had a very different view of the man than I do today. But it came right out of the McCain maverick narrative that has so dominated elite political journalism back into the mid-1990s. That read of McCain just dripped off the page.
But little more than a week ago she shows up in the Politico with a sort of public recantation of her one time admiration, concluding, "McCain's recent conduct of his campaign - his willingness to lie repeatedly (including in his acceptance speech) and to play Russian roulette with the vice-presidency, in order to fulfill his long-held ambition - has reinforced my earlier, and growing, sense that John McCain is not a principled man. In fact, it's not clear who he is."
Though not summed up in one neat essay, Joe Klein's change of mind about McCain strikes me as similar. As do those of a slew of other marquee pundits who've either written as much publicly or told me as much privately.
(Continued here.)
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