OLD Mr. Straight Talk has become so shaky a speaker that when he does talk
straight, it’s startling. On
Wednesday night, John McCain mustered exactly one such moment of clarity:
“Senator Obama, I am not President Bush. If you wanted to run against President
Bush, you should have run four years ago.”
Thanks largely to this line, McCain’s remaining base in the political press
graded
his last debate performance his best. The public, not so much. As with the
previous debates, every poll found Barack Obama the winner, this time by as much as two-to-one ratios. Obama even
swept the focus
group convened by the G.O.P. pollster Frank Luntz in the once-impregnable
McCain bunker of Fox News.
Perhaps voters were unimpressed by McCain’s big moment because they can
figure out the obvious rejoinder: Why didn’t McCain run against President Bush four years ago — as he had four years before that?
Instead McCain campaigned for Bush’s re-election, cheered for Bush policies he
once opposed and helped lower himself and America into the pit where we find
ourselves today.
The day after the debate, McCain put up a new ad trying yet again
to shake the president. “The last eight years haven’t worked very well, have
they?” he asks, as if he were an innocent bystander the entire time. But no
matter what McCain says or does, he still can’t quit the guy. Heading from a
Midtown hotel to a fund-raiser the night before facing Obama onstage on Long
Island last week, the McCain motorcade lined
up right next to the New York red-carpet premiere of Oliver Stone’s “W.” A
black cat would have been a better omen.
The election isn’t over, but there remain only three discernible, if highly
unlikely, paths to a McCain victory. A theoretically mammoth wave of racism,
incessantly anticipated by the press, could materialize in voting booths on Nov.
4. Or newly registered young and black voters could fail to show up. Or McCain
could at long last make good on his most persistent promise: follow Osama bin
Laden to the gates of hell and, once there, strangle him with his own bare hands
on “Hannity & Colmes.”
Even Republicans are rapidly bailing on a McCain resuscitation. It’s a
metaphor for the party’s collapse that on the day of the final debate both Nancy Reagan and Dick Cheney checked into hospitals. Conservatives have already moved past denial to anger on
the Kubler-Ross scale of grief. They are not waiting for votes to be counted
before carrying out their first round of Stalinist purges. William F. Buckley’s
son Christopher was banished
from National Review for endorsing Obama. Next thing you know, there will be
a fatwa on that McCain-bashing lefty, George Will.
As the G.O.P.’s long night of the long knives begins, myths are already
setting in among the right’s storm troops and the punditocracy alike as to what
went wrong. And chief among them are the twin curses of Bush and the “headwinds”
of the economy. No Republican can win if the party’s incumbent president is less
popular than dirt, we keep being told, or if a looming Great Depression 2 is
Issue No. 1.
This is an excuse, not an explanation. It absolves McCain of much of the
blame and denies Obama much of the credit for their campaigns. It arouses pity
for McCain when he deserves none. It rewrites history.
Bush’s impact on the next Republican presidential candidate did not have to
be so devastating. McCain isn’t, as he and his defenders keep protesting, a
passive martyr to a catastrophic administration. He could have made separating
himself from Bush the brave, central and even conservative focus of his
campaign. Far from doing that, he embraced the Bush ethos — if not the
incredible shrinking man himself — more tightly than ever. The candidate who
believes in “country first” decided to put himself first and sell out his
principles. That ignoble decision is what accounts for both the McCain
campaign’s failures and its sleaze. It’s a decision McCain made on his own and
for which he has yet to assume responsibility.
Though it seems a distant memory now, McCain was a maverick once. He did defy
Bush on serious matters including torture, climate change and the over-the-top
tax cuts that bankrupted a government at war and led to the largest income
inequality in America since the 1930s. But it isn’t just his flip-flopping
on some of these and other issues that turned him into a Bush acolyte. The full
measure of McCain’s betrayal of his own integrity cannot even be found in that
Senate voting record — 90 percent in lockstep with the president — that Obama keeps throwing in his
face.
The Bushian ethos that McCain embraced, as codified by Karl Rove, is larger
than any particular vote or policy. Indeed, by definition that ethos is opposed
to the entire idea of policy. The whole point of the Bush-Rove way of doing
business is that principles, coherent governance and even ideology must always
be sacrificed for political expediency, no matter the cost to the public good.
Like McCain now, Bush campaigned in 2000 as a practical problem-solver who
could “work across the partisan divide,” as he put it in his first debate with Al
Gore. He had no strong views on any domestic or foreign issue, except taxes
and education. Only after he entered the White House did we learn his sole
passion: getting and keeping power. That imperative, not the country, would
always come first.
One journalist who detected this modus operandi early was Ron Suskind, who,
writing for Esquire in
January 2003, induced John DiIulio, the disillusioned chief of the White
House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, to tell all. “There is no
precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete
lack of a policy apparatus,” DiIulio said. “What you’ve got is everything — and
I mean everything — being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the
Mayberry Machiavellis.”
If politics strongarm everything, you end up with the rampant cronyism,
nonexistent long-term planning and abrupt, partisan policy improvisations that
fed the calamities of Iraq, Katrina and the economic meltdown. Incredibly,
McCain has nakedly endorsed the Bush-Rove brand of governance in his own
campaign by assembling his personal
set of lobbyist cronies and Rove operatives to run it. They have not only entangled him in a welter of conflicts
of interest, but they’ve furthered cynical political stunts like the
elevation of Sarah Palin. At least Bush and Rove didn’t try to put an
unqualified hack like, say, Alberto Gonzales half a heartbeat away from the
presidency.
As if the Palin pick weren’t damning enough, McCain and his team responded to
the financial panic by offering their own panicky simulation of the Bush style
of crisis management in real time. Fire the S.E.C. chairman and replace
him with Andrew Cuomo! Convene a 9/11
commission to save Wall Street! Don’t bail out A.I.G.! Do
bail
out A.I.G.! Reacting to polls and the short-term dictates of 24-hour news
cycles, McCain offered as many economic-policy reboots in a month as Bush offered “Plans for Victory” during the first three years of the Iraq
war.
Now McCain is trying to distract us from his humiliating managerial
ineptitude by cranking up the politics of fear — another trademark Bush-Rove
strategy. But the McCain camp’s quixotic effort to turn an “old washed-up
terrorist” into a wedge issue as divisive as same-sex marriage is too little,
too late and too tone-deaf at a time when Americans are suffering too much to
indulge in 1960s culture wars. Voters want policies that might actually work
rather than another pandering, cynical leader who operates mainly on the basis
of his “gut” and political self-interest.
The former Bush speechwriter David Frum has facetiously
written that McCain could be rescued by “a 5,000-point rise in the Dow and a
20 percent jump in home prices.” But the economy, stupid, can’t be blamed for
McCain’s own failures, any more than Bush can be. Even before the housing bubble
burst and Wall Street tumbled, voters could see that the seething, impulsive
nominee isn’t temperamentally fit to be president.
That’s where the debates have come in. There may have been none of those
knockout blows the press craves, but the accretional effect has been to teach
the public that McCain isn’t steady enough to run the country even if the
economy were sound, and that Obama just might be.
In Debate No. 1, you could put the volume on mute and see what has proved to
be the lasting impressions of both candidates start to firm up. In Debate No. 2,
McCain set the concrete: he re-enacted the troubling psychological cartography
of his campaign “suspension” by wandering around the stage like a half-dotty
uncle vainly trying to flee his caregiver. After the sneering and eye-rolling of
McCain’s “best” debate on Wednesday, CNN’s poll found the ever-serene Obama swamping
him on “likeability,” 70 to 22 percent.
At least McCain had half a point on Wednesday night when he said, “I am not
President Bush.” What he has offered his country this year is an older,
crankier, more unsteady version of Bush. Tragically, he can no sooner escape our
despised president than he can escape himself.