I've never been too enthralled with Gail Collins' political columns for the New York Times. In the past she's often been too milquetoasty for me, and trying a bit too hard to be witty -- a MoDo-lite. But lately I've been enjoying her columns much more, perhaps because she suddenly seems to be taking a much sharper scalpel to John McCain's BS. Her column today, "The McCain of the Week," really rips McCain a new one on many fronts, most prominently on his ever-changing messages and feigned personas. But beyond that, the column adds to the growing body of evidence we're seeing lately that the media's longtime lovefest with John McCain has come to an end.
After McCain's disastrous comment in Jacksonville, Fla. on Monday about the fundamentals of the economy being strong, Collins notes that by the time he got to Orlando a few hours later his handlers had "reprogrammed" him into a populist. Reporting on a McCain Town Hall in Vienna, Ohio, on Tuesday, Collins takes McCain to task for this sudden transformation:
"We’re going to put an end to the abuses on Wall Street — enough is enough!" this new incarnation yelled, complaining angrily about greed and overpaid C.E.O.’s. Slowly, people begin to peel out of the crowd and drift away. Even in these troubled times, there are apparently a number of Republicans who think highly of corporate executives and captains of high finance.
Ha-ha. I can just see the confused looks on Republicans' faces in the crowd. They came to rail against all those bad liberal policies, and instead found a candidate railing against all those (mostly Republican) corporate executives and the nasty free market.
Nobody had warned them that he had just morphed into a new persona — a raging populist demanding more regulation of the nation’s financial system. And since McCain’s willingness to make speeches that have nothing to do with his actual beliefs is not matched by an ability to give them, he wound up sounding like Bob Dole impersonating Huey Long.
Perhaps we're seeing another effective meme here for us to use against McCain, in addition to his Liar, Liar Pants on Fire meme: the morphing McCain!
Really, if McCain is going to keep changing into new people, the campaign should send out notices. (Come to a rally for the next president of the United States. Today he’s a vegetarian!)...
The whole transformation was fascinating in a cheap-thrills kind of way. It’s not every day, outside of "Incredible Hulk" movies, that you see somebody make this kind of turnaround in the scope of a few hours.
Collins points out the obvious lunancy of McCain trying to position himself as a man who will bring change to Washington, when he's so tied at the hip to George W. Bush and his failed policies of the last eight years:
It is also disconcerting, of course, to hear the Republicans rail against Washington as if the Socialist Workers Party had been running things there for the last eight years. But really, what would you do if you were McCain? There aren’t a lot of options...
One passage in Collins' evisceration of McCain that rally stuck out for me was her observation about McCain's current loathing of the media. She points out dryly that if he doesn't want to use the media to help get across his message, he might want to come up with some other options than the ones he's currently using:
McCain used to like reporters, and now he treats them as if they were carrying the Ebola virus. Fair enough, although given the fact that he’s terrible at speeches, and the famous town halls have now become Republican-only lovefests, the campaign really should invent some new method of communication. (And remember, the man doesn’t text.)
That's certainly a less-than-subtle dig at McCain for his new avoid-the-media strategy. Political writers like Collins certainly have to be frustrated by this strategy, both personally and professionally, and we see that frustation seeping out all over the place lately.
McCain's constant transformation into a different candidate certainly doesn't seem to be a winner. It confuses and dispirits his base, and causes indies and others to serious question his integrity and honesty. And along with the "Liar" image that his quickly cemented around McCain, it creates a larger impression among voters that McCain simply cannot be trusted.
What voters need to realize is that when John McCain talks about "change," he's not talking about changing Washington. He's talking about changing himself -- on a daily basis.
McCain has always, genuinely, believed in dismantling government regulations, and there he was, vowing to create new "comprehensive regulations that will apply the rules and enforce them to the fullest." It makes you think that he’s trying to impersonate something he’s not. Or wasn’t. Or might not be. The image is getting fuzzy.