Lost Honor

There really is a moment here for Obama to step up in that first debate and quote Joseph Welch from the 1954 House Un-American Activities Committee, only with a slight variation. "Have you no honor, John McCain? At long last, have you no honor?" I don't think he'll do it, but if he wants to win the Presidency, he should.

A lot of people said this better today that I could, so I'm going to repeat some excerpts from them.

Andrew Sullivan:

For me, this surreal moment - like the entire surrealism of the past ten days - is not really about Sarah Palin or Barack Obama or pigs or fish or lipstick. It's about John McCain. The one thing I always thought I knew about him is that he is a decent and honest person. When he knows, as every sane person must, that Obama did not in any conceivable sense mean that Sarah Palin is a pig, what did he do? Did he come out and say so and end this charade? Or did he acquiesce in and thereby enable the mindless Rovianism that is now the core feature of his campaign?

So far, he has let us all down. My guess is he will continue to do so. And that decision, for my part, ends whatever respect I once had for him [...] In the end, his final concern is not national security. No one who cares about national security would pick as vice-president someone who knows nothing about it as his replacement. No one who cares about this country's safety would gamble the security of the world on a total unknown because she polled well with the Christianist base [...] McCain has demonstrated in the last two months that he does not have the character to be president of the United States. And that is why it is more important than ever to ensure that Barack Obama is the next president. The alternative is now unthinkable. And McCain - no one else - has proved it.

Joe Klein (yes, it's surreal for me to quote Klein and Sullivan in the same post, but after eight years of browbeating the media, we ended up converting two of them)

He is responsible for one of the sleaziest ads I've ever seen in presidential politics, so sleazy that I won't abet its spread by linking to it, but here's the McClatchy fact check.

I just can't wait for the moment when John McCain--contrite and suddenly honorable again in victory or defeat--talks about how things got a little out of control in the passion of the moment. Talk about putting lipstick on a pig.

Josh Marshall:

It's easy to get twisted up in your head about strategy and message and optics. But what is already apparent is that John McCain is running the sleaziest, most dishonest and race-baiting campaign of our lifetimes. So let's stopped being shocked and awed by every new example of it. It is undignified. What can we do? We've got a dangerously reckless contender for the presidency and a vice presidential candidate who distinguished her self by abuse of office even on the comparatively small political stage of Alaska. They've both embraced a level of dishonesty that disqualifies them for high office. Democrats owe it to the country to make clear who these people are. No apologies or excuses. If Democrats can say at the end of this campaign that they made clear exactly how and why these two are unfit for high office they can be satisfied they served their country.

Heck, even Chris frickin' Matthews gets this. These are dangerous times, this should be a watershed election, and we're talking about lipstick.

(What Chris Matthews could do for his country, actually, is not talk about it at all.)

I mean, this is where we're at. John McCain long ago jettisoned whatever sense of honor he had and determined that the only way to win the Presidency is to shamelessly lie about his opponents. He did it in the primary and he's doing it in the general election, lying with total impunity, leaving the punditocracy wondering whether the truth matters at all anymore. The pattern is clear. McCain lies about his opponent's policies, lies about his own ticket's strengths, and when called on it, uses his running mate as a human shield to deflect criticism. When called on the lie, his campaign doubles down on it, repeating it over and over again, because they know that the media will "teach the controversy," as it were, instead of demanding truth.

It is high time to stop being surprised by this. John McCain is clearly the most dishonorable character to run for the Presidency in decades. The residual "honor," now shown to be a fraud, explains the lackadaisical effort on the part of the media to call this what it is (that, and the fact that conservatives have a long-running outrage machine that constantly works the refs, and the media plays along like happy lapdogs).

In a country with a responsible news media, the presidential frontrunner beginning a speech by excoriating American journalism as an institution would prompt deep reflection on the problems in news coverage by every newspaper in the country. Every op-ed columnist and editorial page would endorse more substantive coverage, and newsrooms would switch gears and start reporting Obama and McCain's records and policy proposals on everything from nuclear terrorism to urban policy. This kind of crap would be relegated to paragraph-length articles, if retained at all. When Sarah Palin claimed she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere, the AP headline would be "Palin Repeats Lie about Infamous Bridge".

Obviously, this isn't a country with a responsible news media, and so none of that's going to happen. The Times and the Post will repeat the McCain camp's petty lies and slams without an ounce of critical analysis, not because they believe the spin, but because there's a massive conservative infrastructure devoting to working the refs and getting the coverage the right wants. Try as David Brock and John Podesta may, Media Matters and Think Progress just don't have the same level of influence. I absolutely guarantee that if the Ron Fournier situation were reversed - if the AP Washington Bureau were run by a shameless Democratic hack instead of a GOP hack like Fournier - there'd be hell to pay. Howls of "liberal media bias" would be echoing across every talk radio station, the major conservative blogs, Fox News, and into the mailboxes, real and virtual, of every Republican voter. The bureau chief would be gone or tamed within a week or two. As it currently stands, Fournier still has his job, and he's still doing it as badly as you'd expect. Liberals just aren't as good at ref intimidation.

I don't want to raise any expectation that this will change for this election; it's an ongoing project. The only way Obama can get back on the offense is through paid media and a debate line like the one I suggested above. Nothing else will do. Tonight's appearance on Letterman sounds amusing, but it's too much candidate-as-pundit assessing the political landscape.

"Look this is ... sort of silly season in politics -- not that there's a non-silly season in politics," Obama says. "But it gets sillier, and it's a common expression, at least in Illinois, I don't know about New York City, I don't know where you guys put lipstick on here."

To audience laughter, Obama says, "In Illinois, the expression connotes the idea that if you have a bad idea -- in this case, I was talking about John McCain's economic plans -- that just calling them change, calling it something different doesn't make it better. Hence, lipstick on a pig is still a pig."

"Keep in mind, technically had I meant it this way--[Palin] would be the lipstick! ... The failed policies of John McCain would be the pig," Obama says.

We need candidate-as-candidate, exclaiming that his opponent has lost whatever was left of his honor. Now, Obama's press releases have used this line with increasing frequency. And nothing would rankle McCain more than telling him he has no honor. If he waits until the debate it'd be a hell of a windup, and if he does drop the H word I'd expect a massive hissy fit, but he ought to do it. John McCain is unfit to serve.

UPDATE: Memo to Joe Biden - stop telling people how saddened you are by McCain's tactics, stop telling people you will fight back, and go ahead and do it. Don't be afraid to get your hands dirty, for God's sake. Think about what's at stake.