presidential election – Page 34

More on McCain

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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The Blog of South Brunswick

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McCain, the Times and the issue of ethics

The response to the John McCain story in today’s New York Times on the right has been one of shock, of high moral outrage that unnamed sources would be used to sully the reputation of a war hero, to insinuate that he’d had an affair.

Forget for a minute the whispering campaigns regularly waged by what Hillary Clinton has rightly called the “vast right-wing conspiracy,” innuendo that not only has targeted the Clintons, John Kerry, Al Gore and most of the Democratic Party, but John McCain himself.

Forget the expected attack on the Times as a bastion of liberal bias.

What is important about the response is its focus on the sex scandal angle and the way in which it sidetracks the real debate. The Times, in focusing on what unnamed sources say was more than a friendly relationship with a female lobbyist, has taken the focus off the real issues in the story — a somewhat muddled presentation that rehashes a lot of what we already knew about McCain.

The basic question the Times story raises is legitimate and must be addressed: Has John McCain, who has staked his reputation on being a clean-government reformer, engaged in the kind of influence peddling he has regularly decried?

The story offers an interesting and believable narrative in this regard, but leaves this issue up in the air, with questions raised about the nonprofit he had formed and his connections to a variety of lobbyists with business before his Senate committee.

These are issues that need to be explored. McCain attempted to answer them during his press conference today — defending his honor and credibility, but also taking a cheap shot at the Times designed to play to the GOP base.

Should his responses be taken at face value? No more than the comments from unnamed sources in the Times story.

My opinion on unnamed sources remains the same: that they should only be used sparingly in special circumstances to get information of vital importance that can be gotten in no other way or to protect the safety or privacy of sources — a whistleblower, for instance, or someone getting help from the local food pantry. I’m not sure that the use of unnamed sources here rises to this standard, though I will say they were not used frivilously.

So, what should we take from this? There remain a lot of questions that need to be asked about a candidate who has made honor, integrity and straight talk his calling cards, but has shown a disturbing willingness to pander, pander and pander again.

Let’s hope the media continues to probe deeply into McCain’s background, to press him on his flip-flops and conflicts, real or apparent, and that the eventual Democratic nominee also is held to this standard.

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Quote of the day: on accountability

Juan Cole offers this (from yesterday’s post on his Informed Comment blog):

And I think there is good reason to ask whether McCain helped create al-Qaeda and the mess in Pakistan to begin with. It is time for someone to start holding the Cold Warriors who deployed a militant Muslim covert army against their leftist enemies accountable for the blow-back they created.

It has not been fashionable in the Post-9/11 era to raise this kind of question — to do so is to court criticism as an America-hater — but shouldn’t the people who created the conditions that led to the spread militant Islam be held to account?

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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Healthy debate

An interesting piece on the somewhat minor distinctions between the Clinton and Obama healthcare plans in Salon. As I’ve written before, the mandates included in the Clinton plan make it more comprehensive, though as Paul Krugman points out, it is likely that Obama will have to add the mandates at a later date. This, and Clinton’s repeated response that much of her plan would have to be hashed out in Congress, make them almost indistinguishable.

In any case, both are leaps and bounds better than the plan that John McCain is pushing.

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Military matters

I won’t argue with Blue Texan’s point about John McCain’s hypocrisy, but I have to wonder whether progressives should be making the argument in this way — even if it is meant as tongue in cheek:

St. McCain is such a global test surrendermonkey Chamberlain appeaser.

There is the danger that someone might take you seriously and think the writer advocates cowboy diplimacy.

This approach, by Matthew Yglesias, addresses the central issue here, which is the notion of priorities and focus:

there’s more to life than being a prisoner of DC conventional wisdom — “McCain, like Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney may have years of Washington experience” but they’ve all made “flawed judgments and as a consequence we’re less safe.” In a crucial point, Rice observed (emphasis added) that a McCain administration would be “very much a continuation and intensification of the failed Bush policy, remaining in Iraq indefinitely not investing adequately in Afghanistan.” According to Rice we need to “show that we have learned from our mistakes in Iraq and elsewhere and are prepared to cooperate and collaborate on the challenges we face,” namely al-Qaeda, nuclear proliferation, and climate change.

I know Steve Clemons has expressed some concerns that Team Obama may have a problematic unwillingness to set priorities in foreign policy, but I thought Rice was admirably clear here. The question of cooperation and the question of priorities goes hand-in-hand. When you’re willing to define what it is you think is really important, then the stage has been set for other countries to work with you. The kind of deterioration in America’s ability to cooperate with other countries that we’ve seen over the past seven years stems not just from “cowboy diplomacy” but from Bush’s grandiosity and lack of focus.

South Brunswick Post, The Cranbury Press
The Blog of South Brunswick

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