Breaking up is hard to do, particularly with a lover you’ve idealized to the point of pathology. So what if the reality is as jarring, even dangerous, odds with the ideal? So it is with the mainsteam media and John McCain.
We were treated to this once again in the Sunday New York Times. A front page story described how this "maverick," "insurgent," "one of the most disruptive figures in his party" and "rebel" is now trying to be a standard-bearer who can unite his party. There was mention of his "volcanic" blowups, but in an admiring way.
On the op-ed page, Nicholas Kristof writes, "Even for those of us who shudder at many of John McCain’s positions,
there is something refreshing about a man who wins so many votes
despite a major political shortcoming: he is abysmal at pandering."
Such is the scary fog of McCain worship that envelops even smart people writing for the best newspaper in America. The reality is quite different.
Where to begin? First, it doesn’t take much to be a rebel in what the Republican Party has become, a rigid ideology reminiscent of nothing so much as the leftism and communism the right inveighed against. In fact, McCain has been a reliable conservative on nearly every issue. McCain’s life voting record, tallied by the American Conservative Union, was 83. This is hardly Nelson Rockefeller.
Not pander? McCain first opposed Bush’s tax cuts, rightly pointing out that it was unprecedented to cut taxes in wartime, and to give the benefits primarily to the richest. Now he fully supports all tax cuts. He hugged the man whose operatives destroyed him in 2000 using despicable tactics. He rigidly supports the Iraq war and even war with Iran without any nuance or sense of strategy — the same old fear strategy successfully used in 2002 and 2004. All this panders to the worst of the orthodox right.
I’m waiting to see if there’s any serious examination of McCain’s record or policies. He offers nothing to seriously address such critical issues as health care, rising inequality, the loss of real middle-class jobs or poverty. Most he doesn’t discuss at all. It’s hard to see him as a breakthrough on global warming when he wants to abolish passenger rail, one of the easiest ways to help ease carbon emissions. His policies: cut spending and taxes. This is a maverick, a rebel?
Some of the right hates McCain for immigration, where he’s been somewhat a realist, but also pandered to the business wing of the GOP, which wants cheap labor. That hardly makes him a liberal.
He is good at keeping the romance going with big media. Back in Arizona — where he’s rarely engaged on any issue, except to refuse to help — it’s a very different story. There he ignores and has contempt for the local media. He is, in his mind I suppose, a figure of national stature, not a public servant of the citizens of Arizona. It’s left to Sen. Jon Kyl to actually represent the interests of the state, albeit as a doctrinaire conservative. McCain is "a lunatic," one civic leader told me, marveling at the free ride he gets from the national media.
He feuded for years with the Arizona Republic because the paper had the audacity to raise legitimate questions and demand answers. In other words, to treat him like any elected official. After being bought by Gannett — a large media corporation with business interests before Congress — the newspaper completely backed off. It has few resources committed to the campaign of the first (nominal) Arizonan to be the likely party nominee since Barry Goldwater. Editors assigned a reporter whose bona fides was being a reliable conservative editorial writer. Now never is heard a discouraging word.
So the romance goes on. It would merely be grotesque if the stakes for the nation were not so high.
POSTSCRIPT: Perhaps the New York Times and Washington Post stories about McCain’s relationship with a lobbyist will sour the romance. They will see how McCain reacts to "negative" press.