A Slight Delay

Got an interesting email yesterday from Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager. I should note that it wasn’t to me, as such; it’s not like I have connections, I just signed up for the McCain mailing list on the candidate’s website. Anyway, Davis says of Barack Obama:

Sadly, Senator Obama’s actions are just more politics as usual. I don’t know who should be more disappointed - the supporters whose faith in Senator Obama has already been betrayed, or the people who Senator Obama now expects to believe his new sales pitch. Either way, one thing is clear - Senator Obama has shown that he is just another politician.

And who’s calling the kettle black?

This isn’t to say that Obama is some new breed of politician; we turn those out with such alarming regularity that they’ve lost their irregularity (what would be truly new would be a politician playing the game and admitting it). What Davis’s statement smacks of is a man crying sour grapes, having been beaten at his own game. In a country with the collective attention span of a fruit fly, it’s easy to forget sometimes that much of Obama’s appeal derives from many of the same things that had people taking a serious look at McCain in 2000: what was, or at least appeared to have been, a willingness to buck the party regulars, to take unpopular stands, and to propose (believably, for a change) that government didn’t have to be an albatross around the necks of those it proposed to govern. Yes, I’m aware that there are some deep ideological and practical divisions between the two men; that said, I’d still argue that there are also some deep similarities between them.

And while we’re talking about “just another politician,” let’s take a look at John McCain. The new 2008 John McCain, with all sorts of features added over the last eight years. That peskily principled stance on the environment has been ditched in favor of expanded drilling that–by Conservative economists’ estimates–will have little economic impact, and that little bit will only come years from now. He’s flip-flopped on “agents of intolerance,” welcoming the likes of Hagee, Parsley, and Falwell into the fold. The New Republic, Balkinization, Crooks And Liars and Carpetbagger Report all list several more reversals of position, so I won’t list every last one of them here. To be fair, at least he’s consistent on abortion; he’s still against it, having already reversed his position in time for the primaries in 2000. (more…)

Every once in a great while someone accidentally tells the truth in Washington, and that person’s compatriots/handlers then spend the next few news cycles feverishly trying to stuff the cat back in the bag. So it’s hard to feel bad for Charlie Black, who made the simple mistake of speaking the truth on record.

Black, you’ll recall, recently told a reporter that another terrorist attack would materially help John McCain’s chances in the 2008 presidential election. About the only thing that could be said in Black’s defense is that he didn’t say he wished for the attack. The prospect of an attack is chilling enough, though, and the fact that some would see political gain where the rest of us would see a far more grisly aftermath speaks volumes. (more…)

Listening to John McCain’s speech tonight, I finally figured something out. It always leaves me uneasy when I hear his “my friends…” mantra, and I couldn’t think of why. Tonight it finally clicked. It reminded me of Huxley’s Brave New World:

“Good-night, dear friends. Good-night, dear friends.” The loud speakers veiled their commands in a genial and musical politeness. “Good-night, dear friends …”

Having gone through eight years of an Orwellian presidency (and no, this isn’t lefty paranoia; look at the public, and Congressional, record), are we seeing the first stirrings of someone who wants to govern in the Huxleyan tradition?

God help us.

We’ve been in a more or less constant election cycle since late 2003. We went from being in the run-up to the ‘04 election, to the election itself, to a protracted runup to the ‘06 election, to the run-up to the ‘08 election starting pretty much as soon as the polls closed in November ‘06. I don’t expect that will change; the only thing that will be different, I suspect, is a different opposition party doing the talking.

And there’s been no shortage of talk… the endless rounds of the Sunday talk shows, dozens of commercials (including 3 renditions of the “3am” ad, as of this writing), and 30 or so debates. (more…)