THE JURY MAY BE OUT, BUT THE EVIDENCE IS IN...

The initial blog entry on HCO made the argument that the real John McCain had lost himself, gone adrift, sold his soul for this election. Since then, echoes on this theme have sounded from all quarters, left and right. For example:

1. In the New Yorker: The Talk of the Town by Hendrik Hertzberg: "Going beyond the Palin", accessed today at http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/27159596:

...Early in the general-election campaign, Obama was accused, for example, of favoring “painful tax increases on working American families,” when in fact his tax hike would apply only to family incomes of more than a quarter million dollars a year...Obama was also portrayed as a libertine who demanded that kindergartners be exposed to explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse (when in fact he proposed only to teach them to recognize inappropriate advances) and as a sexist boor who called the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee a pig (when in fact he used a common simile that his opponent had a habit of using himself).

...[A recent negative campaign ad says:] "Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are [Obama’s voice] 'just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.' How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops, increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals. Too risky for America." Here is what Obama actually said, fourteen months ago: “We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.” He was calling for reinforcements, not casting aspersions....

...Enter Bill Ayers, the former Weatherman, now a college professor....Palin again, a few days ago: “Our opponent is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.” At the end of the nineteen-sixties, when Bill Ayers was a leader of the New Left’s most destructive, self-destructive, and delusional splinter, Barack Obama was a small boy living with his mother in Indonesia. The fact that thirty years later Obama and Ayers sat on a couple of the same nonprofit boards tells us no more about Obama’s politics and character than does the fact that another member of one of those boards was Arnold R. Weber, the former president of the Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago and a donor of fifteen hundred dollars to the McCain campaign. ...

The Obama campaign has been spending money on negativity, too, of course...But there is no equivalence between the two campaigns. If there were, Obama’s ads would be “raising questions” about the other ticket’s “associations.” For example, Todd Palin was a registered member of the Alaskan Independence Party—to which his wife, as governor, has sent friendly greetings—between 1995 and 2002. Four years before Todd joined, the A.I.P.’s founder, Joe Vogler, declared, “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” and added, referring to the Stars and Stripes, “I won’t be buried under their damned flag!” (Sure enough, in 1995, Vogler, after being murdered in connection with an informal transaction involving plastic explosives, was buried in Canada.)...Ditto the fact that during the early nineteen-eighties John McCain sat on the advisory board of General John Singlaub’s U.S. Council for World Freedom—the American outpost of the World Anti-Communist League, a sort of clearing house for former Nazi collaborators, Central American death-squad leaders, and assorted international thugs. And, unlike Obama’s alleged palship with Ayers, these things are true.

...[The McCain campaign] has been late in having second thoughts. This became frighteningly obvious in recent days, as the rallies McCain and Palin have held around the country turned into bloodcurdling hate-fests. The shouts of supporters in response to the candidates’ attacks on Obama—“Traitor!” “Terrorist!” “Kill him!”—were uttered without rebuke.

...If McCain loses, or even if he wins, his campaign will be remembered as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, in which a hero is ruined through some terrible choice of his own....

2. On FoxNews.com, "A Buckley for Obama," by Bonney Kapp, 10.12.08, accessed at http://embeds.blogs.foxnews.com/2008/10/12/a-buckley-for-obama:

...Buckley writes he’s known John McCain since 1982 - written speeches for the guy. He once thought, “God, this guy should be president someday.” He continues, “But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed.”

Buckley argues the campaign has changed the man he used to think was authentic. “A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence....

3. New York Times, 10.11.08, "Concern in G.O.P. After Rough Week for McCain," by Adam Nagourney and Elisabeth Bumiller, accessed at http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/12/us/politics/12strategy.html?bl&ex=1223956800&en=9129ef63b50f6f1c&ei=5087%0A:

...Tommy Thompson, a Republican who is a former governor of Wisconsin...[was asked] if he was happy with Mr. McCain’s campaign, [and] Mr. Thompson replied, “No,” and he added, “I don’t know who is.”

4. The Associated Press, 10.12.08, "GOP frets about McCain's strategy, prospects," by Liz Sidoti, accessed at http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5gLBaEUjMtevno3eCncjjLYuozYVgD93P69GG0

...On Friday, McCain called for the temporary suspension of the requirement that older investors liquidate their retirement accounts — and defended Obama as "a decent, family man" the public shouldn't fear. That day, McCain's campaign also came out with its hardest-hitting ad yet."

...[McCain] has an opportunity to step up and be a forceful leader during these challenging times," said Ron Kaufman, a veteran [Republican] party operative who also worked for [Mitt] Romney. "McCain got the nomination because that's what his brand is, but somehow it's gotten muddled."...

...There's been backlash to the negativity [in McCain's campaign]. "He is not the McCain I endorsed," former Michigan Gov. William Milliken told The Grand Rapids Press, calling the tenor disappointing. "He ought to be talking about the issues."

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There is no joy in citing these pieces. What they illuminate is the tragedy the New Yorker talks about...

Once upon a time, there was a man who by all measures was good, honest, and sincere, and who had given long and commendable service to his country. He was, in fact, a hero to many. In 2000, he tried to become President but lost. He never got over it, because he believed the job was rightfully his. This haunted him constantly, and the pain was made even worse because the man who had defeated him and become President did a terrible job and hurt the country very badly. Eight years later, he decided to try again--and this time, he was determined to do everything possible to win.

He surrounded himself with expert advisors, many of whom had helped the current President win in 2000. They told him: "We know how to win! If you do exactly as we say, you'll win this time."

But the expert advisors knew only the same wisdom they had given the bad President, and blinded and crazed by their arrogance and pride, failed to realize that the world had changed drastically in eight years. So the good, honest, and sincere man, at his oracles' urging, said things that had indeed worked for the bad President, but weren't true to himself. Saying these things tormented the hero, but he was unwaveringly determined to win. In fact, he said and did everything his sages told him to, even things that contradicted each other and confused and angered the people.

Before long, the hero's true self got lost. So lost that even when he tried to find himself again, the people did not believe him: in his contradictons and obfuscations, the people lost sight of the hero and saw only that he was acting almost the same as the bad President.

And in the end, he lost the election...again.

But he didn't lose because he was a bad man. He lost because of his fatal flaw: wanting to win at any cost. And in the end, the cost to him was everything: his hard-earned reputation, himself.

FINE