Tristero on Hullabaloo hits on some of the same themes I touched on yesterday in regard to the John McCain story in Thursday’s New York Times. the issue is not about an alleged affair — one that the story only touches on unconvincincingly — but about judgment and the people with whom McCain has been willing to associate.
From Hullabaloo:
McCain admits his judgment is frequently awful. Even when he knows better, he can’t help himself sometimes- he’s easily, and dangerously, swayed by strong personalities and by his need for friendships with such people. But think about what that means. Even if you cut him slack on a personal level – something along the level of, “well, at least he has the courage to admit he’s wrong and the insight to know why” – this is not the kind of personality you want negotiating with Vladimir Putin, to pick just one example.
Sure. Everyone makes mistakes. And even though McCain makes spectacular mistakes, that in and of itself isn’t the real crux of the problem. Rather it’s this: By his own admission, McCain can’t learn from his mistakes. He knows himself that his personality is too rigid. That is the critical difference between John McCain and a truly qualified candidate for President of the United States. And no amount of straight-shooting hype will change that.
And Matthew Yglesias hits on another interesting point — remarking on an interesting Newsweek piece on a discrepancy between past McCain statements and his most recent comments in response to the Times story — about the press; relationship to the candidate:
At this point, it’s worth observing something about the general McCain-press dynamic. One thing reporters like about McCain is that he offers shoot-from-the-hip statements on topics that come up in discussions. Reporters like this for good reason — the carefully worded, artfully hedged statements in which the vast majority of politicians speak nowadays is really annoying. That said, politicians don’t talk like that because they’re all douchebags, they talk like that because that’s how you have to talk. If you make the slightest slip-up or misstatement, the press will pounce all over you.
Unless, that is, you’re John McCain. If you’re John McCain you can make an obviously false statement like claiming you’ve “never done favors for special interests or lobbyists” or saying that “no representative of Paxson or Alcalde & Fay personally asked Senator McCain to send a letter to the FCC” when you yourself said in the past that you’d been contacted by Paxson and the press just lets it slide. Why? Because they like him. But they like him because he’s spontaneous. But he’s spontaneous because they let him get away with this stuff. And they let him get away with it because they like him. It’s what makes him such a formidable political figure — he can run around doing things no other politicians could get away with and actually
attract praise for it.Unless, of course, it all comes crashing down. If reporters start judging McCain by their usual rules, then he’ll have to turn himself into just another carefully-hedging pol. But one who’s a million years old, one who thinks the problem with the Bush foreign policy is that we haven’t started enough wars, and one who doesn’t even care about the economic challenges facing the country.
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Hank Kalet 