He's an American. He says so himself.

Somerby spies a seismic shift in punditocracy's coverage of McCain: they're circling around a question they infer, but are yet afraid to voice: he's got a character problem.

POP THE QUESTION: Three cheers for Ruth Marcus, who proved on Wednesday that it actually can be done! Omigod! She wrote a column which challenged John McCain’s character—but unlike her colleague, Richard Cohen, she didn’t feel the need to tell us about McCain’s vast integrity first! Her column was headlined, “High Court Caricature.” She pulled few punches as she described the “tired broadside” McCain had offered about those famous old activist judges. How fake and phony was McCain’s presentation? Somehow, Marcus managed to give this example without feeling the need to praise his unparalleled honesty first:

MARCUS (5/14/08): McCain's bill of particulars against activist judges was particularly unimpressive. He assailed one justice for stating "that he was basing a conclusion on 'my own experience.' " This was John Paul Stevens this year questioning the constitutionality of the death penalty—and then, respecting the importance of precedent, voting with the majority to uphold lethal injection.

Grisly—but all too familiar. We don’t agree with every word in this column. But somehow, Marcus was able to describe McCain dissembling and pandering—without first taking a moment to let us know what a vast moral giant he is.

Harold Meyerson did the same thing, although we thought his column was weaker. (He had to drag West Virginia in!) Unfortunately, Meyerson failed to produce a good sound-bite. But he showed us McCain in full demagogue mode, playing the “real American” card. In a column called “McCain’s America,” Meyerson started with what is just gruesome, not with a tribute to McCain’s wondrous soul:

MEYERSON (5/14/08): If the McCain campaign is still trying out songs, there's one by a couple of Brits, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, that it should consider. We have to change the words "an Englishman" to "American" to get it to work, but, that done, the song expresses succinctly and entirely the case for John McCain and, by implication, against Barack Obama:

For he himself has said it,
And it's greatly to his credit,
That he is American!
That he is American!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sum total of the Republican message this year. That is why McCain's first post-primary ad proclaimed him "the American president Americans have been waiting for." Not the "strong" or "experienced" president, though those are contrasts he could seek to draw with Obama. The "American" president—because that's the only contrast through which McCain has even a chance of prevailing.

Why is McCain pimping himself as “the American president?” Must we really ask?

Must we indeed? The loathsome Tony Blankley answers the question. Of Obama (who, he helpfully points out, is black), he writes,

But his associations, and his San Francisco statement, his wife’s seeming anger at America, tend to confirm for some that he is in fact not a sufficiently typical American.

Whee.