The Myth Of A Maverick

Matt Stoller has scored an incredible interview with a staffer from John McCain's 2000 Presidential campaign. It might not surprise you, given the sludge that his campaign is currently running, that the style is virtually unchanged from those days, when he was this supposed straight-talking honorable maverick. John McCain hasn't changed a bit.

McCain 2000 staffer: Yes, in South Carolina he had the Quinn's running his campaign out of their office. McCain did very well with establishment Republicans in NH... they helped him get his big win there along with independents. The Quinn's (Rick and Richard) are notorious.

Matt Stoller: For what?

McCain 2000 staffer: Well, they are probably one of the few consultants in SC that everyone would want. But... They also publish the Southern Partisan magazine. Which is extremely racist.

McCain 2000 staffer: McCain had their support and they were our consultants there. A good get for a Republican in the primary.

Matt Stoller: Wow

McCain 2000 staffer: He also had the support of some state officials and legislators that were important. Not to mention Graham and Sanford who at the time were both US Reps. Now one is a Senator and the other is Governor

Matt Stoller: The general consensus among pundits is that McCain in 2000 was destroyed by George Bush's dirty tricks (masterminded by Karl Rove). These tricks included claims he fathered a black child and attacks on his record in Vietnam.

McCain 2000 staffer: Had the Quinn's won SC for McCain he would have been the nominee in 2000.

Matt Stoller: But that McCain himself ran an honorable campaign.

McCain 2000 staffer: Ha! Again, the story is more detailed than that. Rove ran a Rove campaign. So yes, they were dirty. But we were too. I remember the week after NH, we surged in SC polls from something like 10pts behind Bush to 10pts ahead. After a little slipping because Bush was letting surrogates go after McCain's military history, we went up with an ad that said Bush twisted the truth just like Clinton. The ad aired for one day. The press said McCain was going negative, the Bush people screamed bloody murder, and our campaign went into a tail spin. Had that ad not run, I'm convinced, and if you spoke to people from the SC campaign or Weaver or Davis and they were honest with you they would agree, that ad sank the campaign.

Matt Stoller: What were some of the rumors the campaign was pushing about Bush?

McCain 2000 staffer: I remember talking with reporters after events about Bush's DUI. I remember senior press staff doing that. I remember them talking about Laura Bush's horrible car accident, saying that she may have been drunk when it happened. On a funny side note, during a debate Bush held up this flyer we were handing out door to door and at events that said Bush would hurt seniors... it was a really nasty flyer aimed at scaring the elderly. So Bush holds it up and asks McCain about it. McCain looks at Bush and says it isn't from his campaign. Bush points out that it says McCain's campaign paid for it. McCain then says well we have stopped doing that. Keep in mind, McCain swore off negative TV ads after the Clinton one failed so badly. So I'm watching the debate and I'm like... is he crazy? We have people in the field handing that out TONIGHT. He blew up at the staff that night over the flyer. Vintage McCain. He doesn't mind getting deep in the mud when it works for him. But if he gets caught? Hell-to-pay. And then he plays the straight-talking martyr.

Matt Stoller: Was he responsible for the flyer, or was it some sort of rogue operation within the campaign? What kind of tone did he and his senior advisors set?

McCain 2000 staffer: Ultimately McCain signed off on everything. That's how he operated. Very military minded, chain of command so to speak. The tone? Well, I think a story illustrates that better. On the campaign we had this right of passage called being WOW'd. It stood for Wrath of Weaver. If you ever experienced his wrath you essentially made it to the in-team. McCain on the other hand, being on the receiving end of his temper was NEVER a good thing. It wasn't something you bragged about over drinks with co-workers like you did with Weaver. It could be brutal. It's sort of funny in retrospect. At the end of ads these days, candidates have to say 'I'm so and so, and I approve this message." McCain is the guy who made that law. To see the filth he's been approving is pretty sick, but not unexpected.

This would be a nice story to fax to David Broder and Chris Matthews and Joe Klein, these pundits who did somersaults any time McCain was in their general orbit for years, and who think that this dive into the muck is only of recent vintage. McCain has been saying and doing anything to get elected for a long, long time. The gasbags became so impressed by this military man and his presumed honor that they made up a story about him, created an image basically out of nothing, an image that until this year made him the most respected Republican politician in America. Now a few of them are seeing the error of their ways, but they're replacing it with another story - John McCain's changed. He had to go to the dark side in this election. He didn't even want to, it's those Rove protégés around him that are pushing this noble warrior into it.

Wrong. All wrong. McCain lives for knifing his political enemies. He just wants deniability for it, which so many in the media are willing to give him thanks to this carefully cultivated image. The great axiom of modern politics is that if someone on television is telling you how honorable a politician is, well, just turn the sound off, because it's nothing but inauthentic flattery. Cocktail parties don't have this much gladhanding at them.

Life Support

We're seeing the beginning of the end of the political career of John McCain. The resumes are being shopped and the fingers are being pointed. Maybe it's because we haven't had a real blowout election in the digital age, but this post-mortem, coming 12 days early, is the earliest I've ever seen it. The New York Times Magazine article is particularly brutal, showing practically every wart of this flailing campaign. I think this paragraph, which is kind of a throwaway, said it all.

The campaign was in the throes of an identity crisis by June 24, when a number of senior strategists gathered at 9:30 a.m. in a conference room of McCain’s campaign headquarters in Arlington. As one participant said later, the meeting was convened “because we still couldn’t answer the question, ‘Why elect John McCain?’ ” Considering that the election was less than five months away, this was not a good sign.

On October 23, they still can't answer it. They bounced from one idea to the next and never settled on anything. It was a cynical, superficial campaign designed to win hours of the news cycle instead of a campaign. And this is an incredible passage:

Then for a half-hour or so, the group reviewed names that had been bandied about in the past: Gov. Tim Pawlenty (of Minnesota) and Gov. Charlie Crist (of Florida); the former governors Tom Ridge (Pennsylvania) and Mitt Romney (Massachusetts); Senator Joe Lieberman (Connecticut); and Mayor Michael Bloomberg (New York). From a branding standpoint, they wondered, what message would each of these candidates send about John McCain? McInturff’s polling data suggested that none of these candidates brought significantly more to the ticket than any other.

“What about Sarah Palin?” Schmidt asked.

What [Davis] liked was how she stuck to her pet issues — energy independence and ethics reform — and thereby refused to let Rose manage the interview. This was the case throughout all of the Palin footage. Consistency. Confidence. And . . . well, look at her. A friend had said to Davis: “The way you pick a vice president is, you get a frame of Time magazine, and you put the pictures of the people in that frame. You look at who fits that frame best — that’s your V. P.”

And this is now his single biggest liability in the campaign.

But more than anything, this part gets to the heart of who John McCain is as a man, why he would be led by the nose and stoop to the basest tactics just to get elected.

The flipside to John McCain’s metanarrative of personal valor has always been palpable self-righteousness. In this campaign, his sense of integrity has been doubly offended. First, an adviser said, “He just really thinks the media is completely in the tank for Obama and doesn’t feel like he’s getting a fair shake at all.” And second, another said, “I don’t think John likes people who try to do jobs they’re not qualified for” — referring, in this case, to Barack Obama.

And this informs the latest gimmick.

John McCain's election night watch party might be missing John McCain. Instead of appearing before a throng of supporters at the Biltmore Hotel in Phoenix on the evening of Nov. 4, the Republican presidential nominee plans to deliver postelection remarks to a small group of reporters and guests on the hotel's lawn.

Aides said Thursday that the arrangement was due to space limitations and that McCain might drop by the election watch party at some other point.

He's so self-righteous that he doesn't want to face anyone when he loses. He can't imagine that America wouldn't think him worthy of the honor, and so he'd rather wrap himself inside the bubble. This is cowardly.

I predict he resigns from the Senate before the 111th Congress even starts.

Magnificent Bastard

Here's John McCain saying "BOORRRR-INGGGG" with his eyes over the deaths of Colombian labor leaders:



And here's him making air quotes to deride something so frivolous and mockable as women's health.



The reason John McCain is losing this race has something to do with the fundamentals, but also because he's simply an arrogant asshole. This is why independents are laughing in his face. He's inauthentic, hollow, callous, and believes he should have the Presidency handed to him by divine right. His delusions of grandeur aren't playing well.

He's also a liar, and so are his friends:

Verizon spokesman Jeffrey Nelson attacked The Post's story as "wrong," saying, "Verizon received a request from Mrs. McCain, but declined. Subsequent to that, the Secret Service made a legitimate request for a temporary tower for its work and Verizon complied as is required by our contract with the agency."

However, interviews and public records filed in the development services offices of Yavapai County, Ariz., reveal a different timeline. Getting cell coverage was the culmination of an effort begun in early 2007 by Cindy McCain, when her staff first requested coverage through Verizon's Web site, according to the McCain campaign. After discussing the matter with the company, Mrs. McCain offered land for a permanent cell tower. She gave Verizon authorization to act on her behalf to seek permits from the county. Verizon hired contractors to draw up the plans and Cindy McCain signed a contract in May.

After a regulatory hurdle delayed installation of the permanent tower, Verizon received e-mails from the Secret Service asking about coverage in the area and asking for the process to be rushed. Verizon's contractor then petitioned for a cell site on wheels. It was installed in June.

Erratic. Dishonest. Dishonorable. Dismissive.

John McCain 2008.

The Kristol Prefigure

Bill Kristol is an insufferable fool and wrong about everything, but over and over in this campaign he has flown trial balloons in this column that have inevitably been picked up by John McCain. So if you want to see what's going to happen at the final debate on Wednesday, consider his column today a blueprint.

Of course, the idea that McCain can junk everything with three weeks to go and start over, while people are voting early, and expect the electorate to react favorably, is... well, it's a Bill Kristol idea, so I don't have to tell you how stupid it is. But as much as anything, it's an honor restoration strategy, not really a strategy for winning. They actually started this over the weekend, when Rick Davis responded to John Lewis' comparison between McCain rallies and the ugly race-baiting of George Wallace by saying, oh yeah, well John McCain was a POW. Which suggests a return to the wounded warrior status, the "how dare they attack me" backlash strategy.

Not that McCain isn't OK with a little comparison of Obama to a terrorist. I mean, he's only human.

...And sure enough, here comes the McCain reboot. Bill Kristol is a genius! In the same way that the guy holding the puppet strings knows exactly where the marionette is going to go!

Immolation

There's a story out today that the Presidential campaign has somehow "shifted back" to the economy because John McCain didn't run out last night and tell Barack Obama to his face that he was a Muslim terrorist. And the Politico got these very nice little quotes from McCain staffers that "proved" this.

After days of attempts to persuade voters that Obama’s ties to ‘60s radical Bill Ayers are a crucial character issue, McCain didn’t mention Ayers’ name during the 90 minutes of Tuesday’s forum. His top aides suggested afterward that, going forward, the candidate wouldn’t focus on the former domestic terrorist nor invoke the name of Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Nicolle Wallace, a top McCain adviser, hinted McCain would not bring it up. “If asked about it, of course [he’ll talk about Ayers],” she said.

McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt all but said the controversial pastor remained off-limits.

“What Sen. McCain has said is that it’s not an issue he intends to talk about in the race,” said the aide, though he did note that Obama himself had called Wright 'fair game.'

But Schmidt did say without prompting: “You’ve not seen Sen. McCain advertise on [Wright]."

Apparently, the institutional memory of the Washington press corps has been erased. These things aren't meant to be frontal assaults - George H.W. Bush only brought up Willie Horton in a debate in 1988 after Dukakis approached the subject first. These things happen in the background, over email, through whisper campaigns, and once they're in the ether they don't need to be hyped again and again. It's "out there."

But McCain's campaign isn't as deft as those in the past, for a particular reason which I'll get to in a moment. As for the idea that the McCain campaign's given up on the character attacks, um, no:

ARLINGTON, VA -- Today, John M. Murtagh made the following statement on Barack Obama's relationship with William Ayers:

"When I was 9 years-old the Weather Underground, the terrorist group founded by Barack Obama's friend William Ayers, firebombed my house. Barack Obama has dismissed concerns about his relationship with Ayers by noting that he was only a child when Ayers was planting bombs at the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. But Ayers has never apologized for his crimes, he has reveled in them, expressing regret only for the fact that he didn't do more [...]

"Barack Obama may have been a child when William Ayers was plotting attacks against U.S. targets -- but I was one of those targets. Barack Obama's friend tried to kill my family."

John McCain has a problem. He isn't trusted by the base and so he must appeal to their darkest instincts, but every time he does so he turns off independents. Indeed, during the debate, every time he launched an attack, such as they were, the dials plummeted. But without his base he's sunk and he has no ground game, so attack he must. That's why Sarah Palin is taking the Agnew role and whipping crowds into a frenzy (and Joe Biden is right to call her on it), but McCain is backing away and hedging. That's why his campaign is taking tentative steps in the water with the Ayers and Rezko and Wright stuff but never full steps. They know they must take the campaign into the gutter, but every time they do they destroy this carefully cultivated "honorable" brand, which was never true in reality, but also the only way he could ever win in a down Republican year.

The further problem is that the tentative steps are ugly enough to provoke anger and distaste. And of course, these are ill-suited times for the Republican playbook of smear and fear. Heck, even the racists are undecided.

An Obama supporter, who canvassed for the candidate in the working-class, white Philadelphia neighborhood of Fishtown recently, sends over an account that, in various forms, I've heard a lot in recent weeks.

"What's crazy is this," he writes. "I was blown away by the outright racism, but these folks are f***ing undecided. They would call him a n----r and mention how they don't know what to do because of the economy."

I'm from Philly and I know Fishtown, and that rings very, very true.

The end result is that you get this lurching, haphazard, erratic campaign. Last night we saw the "compassionate conservative" asking for the government to buy out struggling mortgages (an idea that is far less than meets the eye - he would buy homes at full face value instead of what they're actually worth - a huge payoff to the banks). In the same breath, by the way, he calls for a spending freeze on all but the most vital programs. And by this morning, there are Ayers attacks and new ads calling Obama "secretive". There's no rhyme or reason to any of it because of the enormous self-generated bind, having to please the wingnuts and simultaneously cut them off, having to strike a populist tone and simultaneously please his corporate paymasters and lobbyist staff, having to play to win while every attack hurts his own image.

McCain is running a self-negating campaign.

Dishonorable Revisionism

So I watched the Obama campaign's Keating documentary, and it's a fairly good recitation of the scandal, and the connection to the financial crisis of the present.



What's more, the research section of the "Keating Economics" site includes a wealth of information and documents, including personal letters from McCain to White House colleagues and federal regulators asking for them to back off Charles Keating. This letter to then-WH Chief of Staff James Baker in 1985 is particularly striking, if only for the line "I believe it to be unwise, and I think it flys (sic) in the face of our recent efforts to remove the hand of government from the affairs of private enterprise." That sentence alone explains much of the current crisis.

Now, what's been very interesting is the McCain campaign's reaction to this. Rewriting 20 years of history, they have trotted out surrogates, including McCain's lawyer in the case John Dowd, to claim that the entire affair was a classic political smear job on the Arizona Senator. This makes no sense, considering that McCain's very cultivated media image was entirely launched on his admission of guilt in the Keating case. As usual, Billmon puts it best.

But I was around, and following congressional politics rather closely (by which I mean professionally) when McCain first popped up on the political radar screen in 1986 during the so-called Keating Five scandal. In exchange for various regulatory favors, Keating, a wealthy and politically, um, generous, S&L executive, turned himself into the special friend of a bipartisan group of sleazebag Senators, with five in particular, including McCain, reaping most of the benefits. By modern standards (i.e. Jack Abramoff’s and Ted Steven’s standards) it was actually pretty tame stuff, but it was considered a big deal at the time.)

In a sense, the scandal marked the birth of the McCain "brand," because unlike the other four of the Five, he stood up in the Senate and more or less admitted he was guilty (not nearly as guilty as the others, he hastened to point out – but still, he felt bad about what he had done.) This went over really big with the media ("Senator admits guilt" outranking even man bites dog on the news-o-meter.)

Now, if you go back and look, you’ll see that if Keating didn’t comp McCain as generously and vigorously as he did the other four, it was probably because McCain was a very junior senator at the time, with relatively little influence to peddle. But it wasn’t because Honest John was shy about accepting the favors that were offered him. If John McCain had a problem with the way lobbying (i.e. legalized prostitution) was being done in Washington, you definitely won’t find it in the record of the Keating investigation. McCain’s fit of Puritan self-righteousness (or political calculation, depending on your view) came after the fact, once he’d already been caught. And yet, from that single Senate speech sprang the shoot that eventually grew into the sturdy tree of John McCain’s media image.

You have to admit it was a neat trick: Happily accepting the naughty goodies while they were being handed out, but then winning brownie points for admitting he took them – after the world had already found out he took them. But that’s precisely what McCain did. He’s never looked back since.

Until today, when he flip-flopped on his own contrition, and basically used the time-honored political trick in describing an investigation against him as a "witch hunt."

This is the usual move for McCain. He admits his own failures only when it's politically convenient. In the moment he's as dishonest and dishonorable as the rest, probably more. But at the proper moment, he returns to the lecturn and somberly recounts his moral failings, weeping at the altar of honor for all to see, and the media responds in Pavlovian fashion with a handkerchief for their fallen warrior and a flurry of encomiums to his great character. Whether that will happen this time around is unclear. But McCain reverting back to the "I did nothing wrong" side of the Keating Five scandal should make it pretty obvious that to him, "honor" is a coat that is worn only in winter, only when necessary.

Dishonorable

This ad was several weeks in the making.



It's kind of a combination attack. There's a pretty long history of the "he'll say anything to get elected" political ad. This one directly charges a loss of honor and a lack of integrity. For any other politician that might not be important, but John McCain is basically running on his honor, so this becomes a character-based attack in addition to the typical "stop lying about my record" fare. This is kind of tricky to pull off. Let's not forget that John McCain was the most popular politician in America prior to this election cycle. He was able to hide in the weeds while progressives really savagely pinned narratives on Mitt Romney, Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson, with a great deal of success. While policy differences and ties to President Bush were the battleground for much of the general election, nothing was done to depress McCain's favorables. So the media, and much of the electorate, I gather, made excuses for the dishonest and dishonorable campaign he was running.

But it became too much. Steve Schmidt and the boys laid it on too thick. And they engendered a backlash. With Obama taking the lead on this, it will become one of the defining narratives of this campaign, especially if it gets used in the first debate (there has to be a canned line written to attack McCain's honor).

I think this is going to play.

Meme Watch

Let it be known that this was the week that the press caught up to everyone closely following the Presidential campaign and finally started reporting on John McCain's troubling pattern of consistent lies. It has now become a staple of campaign coverage, and the McCain campaign is on the record as calling it a deliberate strategy.

To top it off, McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said this to the Politico about the increased media scrutiny of the campaign's factual claims: "We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

What they're saying is that they don't care about the truth. They have contempt for the electorate and are cynical enough to believe that their voters will ignore reality while they create it themselves.

If you doubted that McCain offered a third Bush term, read that previous sentence again.

By the way, the lies keep on coming, about all things great and small. Turns out Sarah Palin has never been to Iraq, and her team admitted that she was only in Ireland on a refueling stop. The crowd size at recent McCain-Palin events has been inflated. It was revealed that Palin is still actively pursuing a "Bridge to Nowhere" project with federal money, all the while repeating the stock line in her stump speech that she said "thanks but no thanks" to it (even after Charlie Gibson called her out on this on national television). More fact-checks show recent ads and statements to be full of lies. They even lie in multiple languages:

The campaign Friday launched a 30-second Spanish-language television ad charging that Democrat Barack Obama and his Senate colleagues torpedoed meaningful changes in immigration laws.

"The press reports that their efforts were 'poison pills' that made immigration reform fail," the ad charges. "The result: No guest worker program. No path to citizenship. No secure borders. No reform. Is that being on our side? Obama and his congressional allies ready to block immigration reform, but not ready to lead."

What that's wrong: Media accounts cited two votes as effectively killing immigration reform last year — and Obama was on the same side as McCain in both.

The Obama campaign is absolutely making this an issue. Here's a piece of their memo to reporters:

Here are the facts. Governor Palin supported the Bridge to Nowhere, requested hundreds of millions of dollars in earmarks, never visited Iraq, increased spending as governor, increased taxes as governor, and was about as successful selling that luxury jet on eBay as the McCain campaign has been selling her reputation as a reformer. Oh yeah, and the gas pipeline she touts won’t be usable for at least a decade, if it’s completed at all.

While the media is slowly starting to call the McCain campaign on their dishonest tactics, McCain’s staff boasts that they don’t care.

They also said yesterday that McCain is running a campaign not worthy of the office he is seeking. And they're right. If McCain were still in the Navy he would be tossed out for this kind of conduct.

Honor has suddenly taken center stage in this Presidential campaign. And McCain's is gone.

...in a way, McCain's entire focus on earmark spending as the biggest problem in the federal budget is a lie all its own. Earmark spending is miniscule. The military budget is far more central to government waste, but of course McCain procures a lot of that for his contractor buddies in Arizona, so that's sacrosanct.

They Found A Nut

It seems that on the message side, the Obama campaign has been searching for a line of attack against McCain all week. They're hinting at the "he's old" thing. They're having Biden release tax returns to try and make it look like McCain and Palin have something to hide. They're using the line McCain said last night that he's divorced from America's day-to-day challenges to paint a picture of him as out of touch.

Some of these are effective, some maybe not. They could always do more - the Palin charging victims for their own rape kits story needs to be its own ad. I mean, holy crap.

When Sarah Palin was mayor of Wasilla, the city billed sexual assault victims and their insurance companies for the cost of rape kits and forensic examinations.

Palin had been in office for four years when the practice of charging rape victims got the attention of state lawmakers in 2000, who passed a bill to stop the practice.

There's new evidence on this, too. She knew about it directly. That should really hurt her with women and moderates.

But for my money, this is the line that they can run with from now to the end of the election.

Today on "The View," John McCain defended his campaign's latest ad campaign, which has been debunked repeatedly as both false and sleazy. In running the sleaziest campaign since South Carolina in 2000 and standing by completely debunked lies on national television, it's clear that John McCain would rather lose his integrity than lose an election.

This is about honor. John McCain has none. And they have used the line now in multiple statements, and the media is picking up on it. While there is an absolute bias toward anything out of the "assertive" McCain campaign's mouth, traditional media does respond to a fight. They'll be happy to capture that on camera. And that's what they're getting from the Obama campaign today.

Keep this on honor and the lies and pretty soon nothing McCain says will be credible. Everything should be answered with "this is the guy who's been lying the whole campaign, who would you believe?"

...from Obama himself at a campaign event today:

"Just ask the Machinists in Pennsylvania who build Harley-Davidsons," Obama said of McCain's record. "Because John McCain didn’t just oppose the requirement that the government buy American-made motorcycles, he called Buy American provisions 'disgraceful.' Just ask the workers across this country who have seen their jobs outsourced. The very companies that shipped their jobs overseas have been rewarded with billions of dollars in tax breaks that John McCain supports and plans to continue.

"So when American workers hear John McCain talking about putting 'Country First,'" Obama said, "it’s fair to ask – which country?"

This will drive McCain nuts. Keep saying it.

The Anti-Truth Campaign

The first line of this AP story says it all.

Republican presidential candidate John McCain said Friday running mate Sarah Palin has never asked for money for lawmakers' pet projects as Alaska governor when in fact she has sought nearly $200 million in earmarks this year.

They are running a campaign based on lies. Lies about their opponent's record. Lies about their own record. Lies on all things great and small.

And the Obama campaign responds by saying, b-but I'll offer real change! And anyway, McCain is old and out of touch!





The first ad is useless (does talking to the camera directly really work anymore?), the second ad would have been good three months ago but we're in a different phase of the campaign. Sen. McCain is lying about the record, lying about everything, actually, and the only antidote is to call this what it is. And then hit back with the truth, which is actually more shocking than the lies in this case.

Planned Parenthood does it:



And Defenders of Wildlife pivots.



I mean sheesh, if you wanted to go the "out of touch" route, how about the fact that just yesterday McCain called himself "divorced from everyday challenges"?

Ari Berman shows how it's done, you call these hacks liars, you call them dishonorable, you do it again and again.



I'm slightly fed up this morning.

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.