Daniel Larison makes an excellent point about the naivete of certain journalists now disappointed that the noble John McCain they loved has turned into -- wait for it -- a politician. Excerpt:
Of course, the "fiercely independent" McCain spent the bulk of 1999 and the early months of 2000 (and many years after that) trying to please other people. The difference then was that Ignatius and other members of the Washington press corps were the ones he was trying to please and unironically, accurately referred to members of the media as his base. During the 2000 campaign, he referred to the GOP establishment as the "evil empire," which seemed perfectly fair and satisfactory to his boosters in the press because they thought this was simply a description of reality and not a slur. Pretty much every "maverick" episode in McCain's career has involved staking out a position in opposition to his party in the interests of attracting good press and cultivating a reputation as one of the "good" Republicans-the "noble, tolerant" McCain that Conason refers to in his piece-and he has done this by adopting a haughty, self-righteous tone as a champion of reform fighting against the forces of corruption (campaign finance) and bigotry (immigration "reform") within his own party. By endorsing the worst prejudices about his party held by his party's political opponents (while enabling some of their genuinely worst attributes in his warmongering), he became renowned for his integrity...
What a day it's going to be when those who believe that Barack Obama really is going to give us a new kind of politics find out that deep down, he's just a politician. Did you have the chance to read Ryan Lizza's long New Yorker piece about how Chicago politics made Barack Obama? It led with this anecdote from longtime black Chicago politician Toni Preckwinkle, who no longer is dazzled by Obama:
Preckwinkle is a tall, commanding woman with a clipped gray Afro. She has represented her slice of the South Side for seventeen years and expresses no interest in higher office. On Chicago's City Council, she is often a dissenter against the wishes of Mayor Richard M. Daley. For anyone trying to understand Obama's breathtakingly rapid political ascent, Preckwinkle is an indispensable witness--a close observer, friend, and confidante during a period of Obama's life to which he rarely calls attention.
Although many of Obama's recent supporters have been surprised by signs of political opportunism, Preckwinkle wasn't. "I think he was very strategic in his choice of friends and mentors," she told me. "I spent ten years of my adult life working to be alderman. I finally got elected. This is a job I love. And I'm perfectly happy with it. I'm not sure that's the way that he approached his public life--that he was going to try for a job and stay there for one period of time. In retrospect, I think he saw the positions he held as stepping stones to other things and therefore approached his public life differently than other people might have."On issue after issue, Preckwinkle presented Obama as someone who thrived in the world of Chicago politics. She suggested that Obama joined Jeremiah Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ for political reasons. "It's a church that would provide you with lots of social connections and prominent parishioners," she said. "It's a good place for a politician to be a member." Preckwinkle was unsparing on the subject of the Chicago real-estate developer Antoin (Tony) Rezko, a friend of Obama's and one of his top fund-raisers, who was recently convicted of fraud, bribery, and money laundering: "Who you take money from is a reflection of your knowledge at the time and your principles."
Later:
The same month Mitchell endorsed Clinton, the Obama campaign reached out to Preckwinkle, and eventually she signed on as an Obama delegate. I asked her if what she considered slights or betrayals were simply the necessary accommodations and maneuvering of a politician making a lightning transition from Hyde Park legislator to Presidential nominee. "Can you get where he is and maintain your personal integrity?" she said. "Is that the question?" She stared at me and grimaced. "I'm going to pass on that."
Take a look at this graf:
Many people who knew Obama then remember him for his cockiness. He had good reason to be self-assured. A number of his accomplishments had been accompanied by adoring press coverage. When he was named president of the Harvard Law Review, in 1990, he was profiled by, among others, the Times, the Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, Vanity Fair, and the Associated Press. Even then, the essential elements of Obama-mania were present: the fascination with his early life, the adulatory quotes from friends who thought that he would be President one day, and Obama's frank, though sometimes ostentatious, capacity for self-reflection. ("To some extent, I'm a symbolic stand-in for a lot of the changes that have been made," he told the Boston Globe in 1990.)
Emphasis mine on that last quote. There's a direct line between that and his recent remark to Congressional Democrats that he has become the "symbol of the possibility of America returning to its best traditions."
This is another key passage from the Lizza report:
Perhaps the greatest misconception about Barack Obama is that he is some sort of anti-establishment revolutionary. Rather, every stage of his political career has been marked by an eagerness to accommodate himself to existing institutions rather than tear them down or replace them. When he was a community organizer, he channelled his work through Chicago's churches, because they were the main bases of power on the South Side. He was an agnostic when he started, and the work led him to become a practicing Christian. At Harvard, he won the presidency of the Law Review by appealing to the conservatives on the selection panel. In Springfield, rather than challenge the Old Guard Democratic leaders, Obama built a mutually beneficial relationship with them. "You have the power to make a United States senator," he told Emil Jones in 2003. In his downtime, he played poker with lobbyists and Republican lawmakers. In Washington, he has been a cautious senator and, when he arrived, made a point of not defining himself as an opponent of the Iraq war.
Run as the outsider who's going to "change" everything, because that's what people want, but in truth be a conventional politician. Smart. Remember how Obama was nobly going to stay within the public financing system of his campaign -- until he discovered that he could rake in a lot more campaign cash by opting out? I don't blame him; I would probably have done the same thing. But please, let's drop the belief that this is the second coming of JFK. Even JFK wasn't "JFK," as we now know. Both Obama and McCain are extremely successful politicians who got where they got in part by being able to manipulate their public images in a media-dominated culture.
As long as it benefits Obama to be seen as too good to fight dirty, he'll be too good to fight dirty. And when he needs to fight dirty, he'll do that. Same as McCain. McCain lost in South Carolina in 2000 because the Bush people slimed him. That's where high-mindedness gets you in American politics. That's a shame, but it is what it is.
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Also as I noted before there are different varied strains of conservative thought.
Because we've never really tried McCain's conservatism, right? Because we didn't have a president who signed on to CFR, pushed for amnesty for illegal aliens and has advocated one of the most belligerent foreign polices since Teddy Roosevelt? Gosh, if only we could try that conservatism in the White House. We'd see a rapidly growing economy, a world at peace and in love with Uncle Sam, and a president with record high approval polls.
Back to the real world. McCain's strain has been tried, and found seriously wanting. For the good of the country and for the good of the Republican party, conservatives should let McCain fail. Indeed they should work for it.
I suspect the question a lot of people have in regard to Obama is whether the country is ready to take a chance with the first affirmative action president. The man has a record of actual accomplishment as thin as a reed, he's never been in charge of anything significant (or insignificant for that matter), and he is the presumptive nominee of a major political party solely because of the color of his skin. Shouldn't we be concerned?
Barack H. Obama is nothing more than a con man in a Brooks Brothers suit. If I were an Obama supporter with any capacity for critical thinking, his comments over the last few weeks, particularly in the area of energy policy and the Conquest War in Iraq, would start me wondering if I'd been the target of consumer fraud.
In any event, I learned long ago not to take any national- or provincial-level politician's statements seriously, on any issue. They are so far removed from the real Human beings that make up their actual constituencies that said real people are just abstractions to them. At least if a town- or county-level politician does something you don't care for, you can go down to their offices rather easily and give them a little "accountability" in the form of a knuckle sandwich.
Neither of these poseurs is going to be able to accomplish much in the upcoming four-to-eight years in any event; the financial strictures that the retirements of the Boomers will impose will see to that. Politically speaking, the ship of state is on autopilot, and the bridge controls are locked. The iceberg is approaching, and the impending crash is going to be a civilizational-level (maybe even a species-level) prizewinner.
Why on Earth anyone would WANT to be in charge in such circumstances is utterly beyond me.
Your servant,
Lord Karth
Horrors! Neither Mccain nor Obama got as far as they did by virtue of their intellectual rigor or angelic natures.
Horrors!
The various profiles of Obama all paint him as a shrewd and pragmatic politician consciously heading straight for the top. He is a leftist, but he is also focussed on achievement, and as such he will shed those elements of his leftist agenda that prove to be politically untenable.
I think this should be acceptable to most... Mccain, I won't even get to his pluses or minuses because during this cycle in particular, I could not fathom voting for a republican. And this is what I don't understand about most conservatives these days: How can one seriously entertain the idea of voting Republican after the various acts of criminality and incompetence and disdain for the constitution that have been at best abetted and at worst encouraged by most of the party? Putting a Republican in the White House after Bush essentially teaches each political party this: play your cards right, and the American public won't punish you no matter how egregious the transgression. If the Republicans can get away with BushAndCo without punishment, everything is on the table!
Is Obama really so terrible that voting against him justifies sending this message?
If this were a European country, Bush would have long ago been forced to resign and his party forced out of a major role in government. We, on the other hand, don't even have the balls to impeach him or hold his party in any other way accountable.
Oh and Karth,
Your recent fondness for knuckle sandwiches sounds a little knuckle-dragging, to this liberal. You're on the internet - big muscle posturing falls a little flat when conveyed through text. FYI.
Sincerely,
An Obama supporter with a capacity for critical thinking
If John McCain really expected the media to fawn over him this year as they did in 2000, he was very foolish.
Truth is, if McCain had managed to win the GOP nomination in 2000, the media would almost immediately have remembered, "Oh wait, we forgot- we're liberals and he's a Republican. He was a nice story for a while, but it's time to start pumping up Al Gore and trashing McCain."
It was already starting to happen, just before Bush started winning primaries (dig up some old Anna Quindlen columns from 2000, and you'll see that the Left was starting to snap out of its infatuation with McCain).
The media are liberal. McCain is a politician. Both the media and McCain are opportunistic. No big surprises there.
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