Today’s must read: Hiding the real McCain

Sunday’s New York Times was rough going — the respectful piece on ‘The McCain Doctrine’ and the recycled RNC-and-Hillary talking points that Obama must have ‘specifics,’ not just hope. We can take those issues on later, but the edition was redeemed by Frank Rich’s excellent column headlined, "The Candidate We Still Don’t Know." We’re talking about McCain here. Of the media, he writes,

They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” — as the hackneyed script was reiterated
by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At
Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain
revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes
that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”

Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes,
that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of
policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only
hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

And:

To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and
Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We
have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being “proud” of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about “whitey.” But we still haven’t been inside Cindy McCain’s tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June
that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she
controls, “lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve
public health and safety,” in opposition to groups like Mothers Against
Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain’s
future role in her beer empire won’t be revealed before the election.