Proving that Time Magazine never understood a single thing about John McCain, Time writer, Karen Tumulty, is all worried about the "cost" of McCain's purported run for the 2008 GOP nomination for the presidency.
The head and sub-head lines alone are so filled with misconstructions, assumptions and laments that one doesn't have to read the rest of the story to know how far off they are in analysis.
Why It's Dangerous For the Maverick To Be the...Front RunnerJohn McCain was a straight-talking upstart in the 2000 presidential election. Now he's poised to be the G.O.P. favorite for 2008, but at what cost?
First of all, the "maverick" label is one the press created and drove McCain ever more toward with their fawning attention. This assumption of "front runner" now is also a figment of their imagination.
Then, they belie their supposed objectivity and reveal how much they loved the claimed maverick status of their hero, McCain, by claiming there now is a "cost" to be incurred with his attempt to get the '08 nomination. Tumulty's article reveals her bad feelings that he will have to try harder this time to court the base as opposed to imagining that the independent and moderate vote will catapult him past all comers in a GOP primary -- a woefully mistaken belief from the 2000 run that the press seems to have encouraged for McCain, an encouragement that doomed his candidacy.
They inflate his appeal from the 2000 campaign to a ridiculous extent with their "upstart" claims, too. McCain never had much of a chance amongst the base in 2000 with his entire campaign being a creation of the media. The last time the media tried to create a Republican candidate out of whole cloth it was Wendell Wilkie who faced Franklin Roosevelt in 1940.
Wilkie lost, too, just like McCain.
Now, Time is lambasting McCain's new slogan as one that doesn't "have quite the ring" of his earlier one. They also seem sad that a candidate running to get a Republican nomination will have to seem more like a Republican.
As a rallying cry. "Common sense conservatism" doesn't have quite the ring of "Straight Talk Express." But the new slogan on the website of John McCain's presidential exploratory committee--a slogan he manages to repeat at least three times in every speech he gives these days--tells you all you need to know about how different this presidential campaign will be from his last one. McCain '08 will be a bigger, more conventional operation--a tank, not a slingshot. The prevailing wisdom about McCain used to be that his bipartisan appeal would make him a sure bet in a presidential race--if only he could get past the Republican primary. But as more and more of the party establishment climb aboard a campaign that McCain has not yet even formally launched, it's starting to look as if the opposite may be true. By trying to become the perfect candidate for the primaries, McCain could be creating difficulties for himself in a general election.
I wonder if they ever lamented that a Democrat had to seem like a Democrat to get the nomination of the Democratic Party?
The article goes on and on about his "bad" views -- you know the ones, those conservative ones -- even quoting him as saying he is "more conservative than many of his fans believe him to be". No, he is more conservative than the media wanted him to be. If one looks at McCain's voting record, there could be little doubt that he stacks up as a pretty conservative Senator. It has always been such but the media turned away from this truth in favor of playing up his anti-Bush stances.
But, now without Bush around for the 2008 run, they are at long last setting out to bash McCain over HIS conservatism... yes, after they spent 8 years building him up as a "maverick". McCain will now see the fawning media turn hostile when they FINALLY start discussing his voting record, for sure.
But Time's report does help us see the hypocrisy in McCain's media stance and his voting record. His claims of "maverick" are at odds with many of his actual votes. Making his "straight talk" perfectly muddy, indistinct and filled with dissembling.
Still, McCain has no better chance of getting the 2008 nomination than he did the 2000 one. Even though his voting record is pretty good for the most part, he has spent the last 7 years hampering the Republican efforts in Congress, harming our national security, worsening our campaign finance laws, proving he hasn't a clue what the US Constitution means, putting the breaks on our judicial nominations and generally playing to the leftist media to get their slobbering approval. All things that will make him damaged goods to a Republican voter.
McCain will probably do worse than he did in 2000 because of his road blocking of the GOP agenda over the last 7 years, I'd bet.
Most amusingly, this article tied the supposed "racist" ad against Representative Bob Ford of Tennessee to McCain because McCain hired Terry Nelson as his campaign manager. "Nelson oversaw the Republican National Committee's independent expenditure operation, which produced the most notorious ad of the 2006 campaign. In it, a bare-shouldered white actress claimed that she had met the black Senate candidate Harold Ford at a Playboy party", Time informs us.
So, perhaps McCain might begin to see his beloved leftist media turn against him now that he is no longer a thorn in Bush's side. The Times, for their part, is ready to treat him as just another evil Republican. Watch for this to begin happening more.
Like Victor Frankenstein, the MSM stand ready to destroy their own creation.
