Survivors endure by confounding expectations, as Hillary Clinton did once again and as Michelle Obama did for the first time. McCain certainly did that when he almost single-handedly revived his sputtering campaign earlier this year. Still, McCain’s hold on the nation’s imagination is rooted in the five torturous years he spent in a North Vietnamese prison camp. In marked contrast with the restrained way in which— up until recently— he has used this personal history, McCain seems willing to dilute the magic of past pain and extol his sacrifice to combat run-of-the-mill political attacks.
McCain styles himself as a regular Joe. But there is nothing routine about a candidate’s wife owning seven, or more, houses and condos. It is routine to be whacked — or at least joshed — for it.
McCain, however, has lived in a bubble of his own construction for so long that, with the active complicity of so much of the press, he appears to believe in his own legend.
What sort of maverick cuts the cloth of yesterday’s fashion so quickly to conform to his party’s style of today? McCain, once the reasoned champion of immigration compromise, is now one with Lou Dobbs’s massive-deportation logic. McCain, who once rightly criticized Bush’s tax cuts as leading to a new style of fiscal irresponsibility, today champions supply-side idiocy. And McCain, who once felt the wrath of right-wing Evangelical fury, today prostrates himself before the pulpit of the born-again vote.
To date, McCain has received a pass for his duplicity. Maybe he has learned from Bush that if you tell a lie often enough, people will believe you.
The task facing Obama in the campaign ahead is to penetrate the rhino-like hide that the national media enablers have helped McCain sheath himself in, to expose McCain for being the choice-opposing, militarist enemy of civil liberties that he is.
If Obama can not do so, then all of the hope in the world can not save him— or, for at least four more years, the United States.
