The Lies And Omissions Of John McCain

I had a chance to finally take a look at the cottage cheese and lime Jello speech from Thursday, and while the AP took a shine to it, I'm not sure what they were watching. This speech tried to sell no policies, no vision for the future, no ideas to restore America at home and abroad, but tried to shame people into not offending a war hero by denying them their vote and their country. The election is not about issues to them, but about a person, a singular figure.

Last week, in an apparent effort to paint Sen. Hillary Clinton as self-absorbed, the AP's Ron Fournier counted the number of times she used "some variation of the pronoun 'I'" in her convention speech. Fournier came up with 17....

... When can we expect Fournier to tally up the number of times John "cause greater than self" McCain used the pronoun "I" in his convention speech? It's well over 100* -- and that doesn't even count variations.

McCain offers nothing but himself, the idea that he can bust heads and crack skulls and somehow come up with plans by accident. Haven't we already had eight years of this?

The way Republicans operate is to make the election about character, and lie about the issues. They obviously want to re-fight the culture wars with a strategy to fire up their depressed base through making them feel resentment against those liberal Eastern elites that are supposedly ruining their life.

One of the key insights in “Nixonland,” the new book by the historian Rick Perlstein, is that Nixon’s political strategy throughout his career was inspired by his college experience, in which he got himself elected student body president by exploiting his classmates’ resentment against the Franklins, the school’s elite social club. There’s a direct line from that student election to Spiro Agnew’s attacks on the “nattering nabobs of negativism” as “an effete corps of impudent snobs,” and from there to the peculiar cult of personality that not long ago surrounded George W. Bush — a cult that celebrated his anti-intellectualism and made much of the supposed fact that the “misunderestimated” C-average student had proved himself smarter than all the fancy-pants experts.

And when Mr. Bush turned out not to be that smart after all, and his presidency crashed and burned, the angry right — the raging rajas of resentment? — became, if anything, even angrier. Humiliation will do that.

Can Mr. McCain and Ms. Palin really ride Nixonian resentment into an upset election victory in what should be an overwhelmingly Democratic year? The answer is a definite maybe.

But let's not underestimate the power of big lies, too. McCain lied about Obama's health care plan, comically so, claiming that Obama would put "a bureaucrat between you and your doctor," when in fact that's what an insurance agent IS. He lied about taxes (even Major Garrett recognized that), neglecting the fact that his own health care plan would tax medical benefits from employers as income, resulting in a huge tax increase on the middle class. He lied about his own record on ethics, claiming he investigated Democrats and Republicans, when he clearly let his fellow Republicans off the hook in the Abramoff investigation. And there was the overarching lie of the whole thing, that McCain is leading those change agents of the Republican Party against themselves, as if they haven't been in power for the past eight years.

In the final analysis, you can easily see the priorities of the GOP by what they discussed at their convention. It was all backlash, personal attacks, POW stories and "drill now" rhetoric, and nothing, of course, about the guy who ran them into this ditch and whose policies John McCain is mirroring. Obama and Biden are absolutely right with their line of attack on the convention, that the economy was the missing elephant in the elephant's room. Especially at a time with 6.1% unemployment, eight straight months of jobs loss and 1 in 10 homes in foreclosure, this is a terrible time to be this out of touch. Joe Biden is on fire in this clip in the city where I grew up, Langhorne.



"What do you talk about when you cannot explain the last eight years of failure?" You lie, and you snark, and you feed the backlash. It didn't work in 2006. Let's see what happens this year.