Brand McCain

Sullivan is certainly right on this one. McCain didn't go McSleazy because Obama refused to meet him in Town Halls last summer (that's especially evident after watching McinCheese's performance the other night). He was just as much a douche nozzle in the 2000 GOP primaries, as Somerby observes.

For the record, McCain wasn’t exactly “driven out of the 2000 Republican primaries by this sort of smear.” The editors seem to refer to the South Carolina primary, which featured a great deal of nasty, underground sliming. But McCain continued campaigning after that, winning subsequent primaries in six states (including Michigan and Massachusetts), losing primaries in eleven others (including a 61-35 drubbing in California). (For the full list of primaries, click here, scroll down.) McCain got waxed in a string of states—but there was never any particular claim that “smears” decided those races. McCain was substantially outspent by Bush, and Republican voters tended to prefer Bush’s more conservative posture. (In most of those states, independents couldn’t vote, unlike in New Hampshire, where they’d given McCain his big win.) But in the press corps’ treasured novel, a deeply noble, wonderful man was driven from the race by a goon squad.

Such things did occur in South Carolina. But at the same time, the greatest man in the world was doing these things himself:

• He was baldly misstating Bush’s budget proposal.
• He was running negatives ads which so offended Republican voters that he had to take them down—dramatically, of course.
• He was boiling over with obvious anger in the South Carolina debate—moderated by Larry King.
• He was lying about his actual views concerning the confederate flag. (Or so he later said.)
• He was paying large sums to two race men—presumably, to build his in-state conservative bona fides.
• He was making a series of bogus claims about negative flyers his campaign was distributing, in contravention of previous pledges.
• He was running anonymous phone calls in Michigan, painting Bush as anti-Catholic.
• He was lying, right in the face of the press, when asked if he was running those phone calls. (His campaign finally fessed up—the morning after the Michigan primary.)
• He was parading about, repeatedly saying he was going to “beat Al Gore like a drum”—even as the press corps praised him for his wonderfully uplifting politics.
• He was repeatedly telling a story about Gore and the Buddhist temple that was baldly inaccurate.

We’re not quite sure what made the press think they’d met the most wonderful man; it seemed to involve the stories he told them about his stripper ex-girl friend. (And about that model in Rio. And let’s not forget the free donuts!) But they had their novel—a novel they loved—and they recite it, right to this day. They insist that they met the most wonderful man. And that he’s changed, as men will.

Only difference then was that it was assumed he was merely giving as good as he got from Bush and Rove.

The problem for McCain, then and now -- and what makes the McCain brand's longevity so puzzling to many of us -- is that he has never learned the trick that Atwater and Rove excelled in: concealing the hand putting the knife in.