McCain has sneered at Obama's surge toward assured victory with the tired cliche "he's measuring the drapes for the Oval Office." [Note to McCain's staff: that's not a good line for him to use. It was Poppy Bush's line, and remember, you're running away from the Bush name; and Poppy said it about Bill Clinton. Who won, by the way, and did change the drapes in the Oval Office.]
The counterpart to that line might be that John McCain should be measuring his post-defeat legacy. What's it going to be like, going back to the Senate? Even pal HolyJoe Liebermann hasn't been too much in evidence lately. Post-defeat McCain legacy is not going to be pretty. He led his party to defeat in a way that further damaged its moral and idealogical bankruptcy.
By the negative campaign he has run, he has destroyed his once vaunted reputation as a decent man of integrity, who promised to run a civil campaign. Trying to put the blame for the negative campaign on Obama's refusing to meet him in weekly town hall events is simply a silly excuse. Adult people know that.
By the confused, incoherent campaign he has run, with constant lurches and reversals and lack of a persistent theme, he has destroyed any reputation for clear thinking and leadership. If you can't choose your staff and then supervise them to do a better job than this, what kind of administration would you run? Are you listening, Hillary?
By fanning the flames of partisanship, and even going over the line to demonize his opponent and, yes, to stir up violent crowd emotions, he has destroyed any reputation he had for bipartisanship. Just saying that all's fair in the heat of a political campaign, won't do, Senator. You went too far.
By making repeated gaffes and revealing a poor understanding of the Middle East, Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan, he lost the reputation he once had as strong on national defense and the credentials to be commander in chief.
And now today, Matthew Dowd, chief strategist for George Bush's reelection campaign, has eviscerated him for choosing Sarah Palin. Speaking at a Time-Warner Summit panel, Dowd said "[McCain] knows, in his gut, that he put somebody unqualified on the ballot. He knows that in his gut, and when this race is over that is something he will have to live with... He put somebody unqualified on that ballot and he put the country at risk, he knows that."
So, there goes his mantra of "putting country first."
Maybe after the furor of this campaign has died down, I might feel a little sorry for John McCain, as I often do when a man's long career ends ignominously and thus obliterates a better legacy. But I'm not sure I will get to that point. One of the things that we've learned in this campaign is that the "old John McCain" that everyone keeps wishing would come back, wasn't the man that we thought he was anyway.
Ralph
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As you point out, "'old John McCain' that everyone keeps wishing would come back, wasn't the man that we thought he was anyway." But it feels even bigger than that to me. The "old Republican Party," the one that elected Eisenhower may be equally mythic. Certainly, since Nixon, the campaigns have gone like this one. Pappa Bush may be a slight exception in that he fired Rove, but there was still "stuff" with the religious right.
But the rest of them have been this way. The difference with McCain is that Bush and Cheney so overused the dirty tricks motif that McCain's version was transparent to all. What I hope is that the era of Republican nastiness will begin to die on November 4th, and be buried by some nice convictions in the future. I expect "the old John McCain was as much an illusion as the Rolling Stones article made him out to be.
Our problems, these days, require that we elevate the dialog to meet them. I hope Obama appoints every decent, non-ideologue in the Republican Party to his Administration. There are a few bright lights in this otherwise dull cast of characters...
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