Zed

Paul welcome to the Lake.

Welcome, and thanks for writing the book. It’s a really vital contribution to this election season. If this doesn’t get addressed, we’re going to be at a real disadvantage.

Welcome gentlemen!

Sounds like an interesting book. I read somewhere the other day (sorry I can’t remember where, I’ll look….) that much of the press adulation for McCain comes from treating the press as an insider to the cynical “for-the-rubes” crap that he spouts in his public speeches and they just love being part of the “cool, in-crowd.” Have you seen evidence of this?

Unless someone starts pushing the media to apply some equivalent skepticism to McCain, the slog to November will be one long foot massages for St. John the Divine.

But he just has so much cred with the TradMed doncha know. They forgive him of his sins for he is the provider of the Sainted Barbecue. /s

Ok my theory (its not to original) is that the press feels that because they skipped Viet Nam that they owe McCain for getting shot down and tortured so he gets a free pass from them.
Now then what can we do about it besides laugh st the man crushes the media has for a war hero from a war they were too busy to fight.

Welcome, David and Paul.

John McCain supports torture of human beings by the United States of America.

Why isn’t the media talking about this?

John McCain:
Worse than Bush

McCain now wants Phil Gramm as Treasury Secretary but the press is going to ignore this because McCain is a vet.
Funny there are lots of stories about defective kevlar helmets that the press could pursue to protect today’s solders.
But McCain was on the Senate Armed Forces Committee then and ANY story about lax government oversight would make him look bad!

Congrats for launching Media Matters for America and the book. Are you familiar with the work of Neil Chenoweth? Have you thought of expanding Media Matters to examine the financial side of the media?

Now I’ve not read this book. But I am familiar with some of the work you’ve done.

You know, I just don’t hear enough from “you guys” that the corporate media is advancing the corporate agenda by aiding and abetting the corporate preferred candidates of the Republican Party.

Is that not your take? Isn’t summing up the narrative with a simple thesis essential to explaining to the public what is happening. You guys keep building your case with supporting data but, in my opinion, you should be leading with your conclusions.

John McCain supports torture of human beings by the United States of America.

Why isn’t the media talking about this?

What media? The media who produce TV shows like 24? Maybe they don’t have a problem with torture.

Thanks very much for appearing here.

I am more optimistic than some. I think the corporate media has wandered so far from reality, and that current reality is so explosive, that things will be blowing up in the corporate media’s face from now until election day. Examples are current financial panic and nascent recession, and tragic developments in Iraq.

I am not even bothered too much by the persuasive arguments others make that the media will not respond, or at least not respond in an honest good faith way. I figure we only have to get them to slip up enough times, and just a little real McCain will go a long way towards sinking him.

And so far it looks as if McCain will be handing out what amounts to live PR nukes that can be used against him immediately and repeatedly to great effect. He has shown a talent for issuing obvious lies in public, public temper tantrums, public nasty bullying of anyone lower on the sh*tpile, and public display his unreasonable self-righteousness and stubbornness on a regular basis.

But, there needs to be strategy for grassroots public pressure on the media. What do you think are the best approaches to getting the truth out about McCain?

Hi folks - sorry for the late arrival. Let me get to some of the questions.

McCain has passed the Commander and Chief test Hilary said but McCain has confused Shia and Sunni 3, 4? times this week. The Man does not even know who we are fighting but the Press and Hilary trust him to lead us?
What does McCain have to do to get the press to write a bad story about him?
This is the same biased coverage Bush got running against Al Gore as Al Franken pointed out in his book. I wonder what the ratio of proMcCain to anti McCain stories is?

Jane, thank you for bringing Free Ride to my attention. Welcome gentlemen! Thank you for spending time with us.

I am very concerned with the deletion of “conflict of interest” throughout our government. I remember when this was an unpardonable sin in politics but today it is passé. In your research for this book, can you address whatever happened to “conflict of interest”? Why is it so ignored? Is it still part of the Ethics Committee concerns? It is the foundation of many things, excepting McCain’s mental issues, at which McCain thumbs his nose.

McCain’s Senate Armed Forces Committee has oversight over war contracts so how come McCain never did anything about KBR giving our solders water that made them sick?

KevinP mentioned the oped that Neal Gabler wrote in the Times last week, where he made the point that McCain shares with reporters a cynical, ironic view of the political process. It’s just one example of the fundamentally different stance McCain takes toward reporters. Most politicians treat them like adversaries - they are always afraid of saying something that will get them in trouble, so they’re very careful and guarded. This drives the reporters nuts. So they get into a vicious cycle where the reporter is just waiting for the candidate to screw up. McCain figured out that if he treated reporters like he enjoyed their company, never went off the record, and just sat and talked with them for hours on end. The result is that he built up so much good will that when he does say something appalling, they write it off - “Oh, that’s just McCain - he’s so unscripted!”

Paul, I enjoyed reading your book Being right is not enough.

I hope to have a chance to read your latest.

In response to QuakerGirl, one thing I can say is that reporters don’t see conflict of interest when it comes to McCain. He successfully convinced them that he’s the paragon of reform, unsullied by the corrupt ways of Washington. But if you go over to mccainsfreeride.com we put together a neat little chart of all the lobbyists working for McCain, including his campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, chief strategist, chief fundraiser, campaign co-chair…the list goes on and on. And many of these people have lobbied for corporations that have interests before the Commerce Committee, which McCain chaired for many years and still sits on. But the idea that John McCain or the people who work for him might have a conflict of interest just doesn’t register.

Thanks Paul,

Yeah that was the article, here’s the linky

Try this site:

www.mccainsfreeride.org

ThingsComeUndone points to the possibility that reporters who missed Vietnam feel guilty, and in response treat McCain with kid gloves. McCain’s Vietnam service is a key part of the reverence with which he’s treated. We quote a number of journalists who admit that this dynamic is at play. And one of the stories they tell is that McCain has so much integrity and modesty that he would never use his Vietnam history for his political advantage. The truth, though, is that at every key point of his career - from his first run for Congress, to his emergence as a national figure when he gave the keynote speech at the 1996 GOP convention, up to today - he has always made his POW experience the centerpiece of his story. He just unveiled his first general election ad, which is all about his being a POW.

Of course, he has every right to do that if he wants to. No one disputes that he suffered greatly and showed courage, and lots of politicians have used their war histories. But no reporter should try to convince us that McCain is in any way reluctant to talk about Vietnam, because he does it all the time.

Paul - Thanks for the site. I’m on it now. Just listed it above for others.

Paul, thanks for being here today!

I’ve got a couple questions:

1. Are there a few “journalists” that stand out above the rest for their whitewashing of McCain’s image, and if so, would you please name some names?

2. Conversely, who are the real journalists (if any) you admire that do not give McCain a free ride?

We’ve seen this replayed again and again. The story reporters tell about McCain is that he is uniquely principled, and obviously more so on this issue. Yet you’re right - despite his fabled conflict with the Bush administration on torture, the bill that was finally written pretty much allows the president to torture whenever he wants to, and Bush’s signing statement made clear that he feels he is a law unto himself when it comes to this. Yet McCain stood by and said nothing about it. Reporters could have portrayed that as an act of cowardice on his part, or a betrayal of the values he professed to uphold. But those kind of allegations just aren’t made about John McCain.

The president of the John McCain fan club would have to be Chris Matthews. The best word to describe his worship of McCain would probably be “embarrassing.” The other notable fans tend to be men of a certain age - David Broder, David Ignatius, and Joe Klein, to name a few. But if you reach farther back, the person who really began the McCain hagiography was Michael Lewis (of “Moneyball” and “Liars Poker” fame), who wrote a series of pieces for the New Republic about McCain in 1996.

As for those who give a more complete view? Pretty much any reporter from Arizona. They give a warts-and-all picture of him, which is why McCain has always had a very bitter relationship with his home-state press.

Didn’t Fred Thompson and Rudy Giuliani get some hard to explain great press for quite a while? True the NY Times threw Giuliani an anchor with their Judy Nathan tales but that was after he started tanking following Joe Biden’s “a noun, a verb and 9/11″ one liner.

The press found a way to make George W. Bush their darling during the 2000 general election campaign after he beat out McCain for the nomination.

The difference between an ordinary politician and McCain is that others get good press at some times, and bad press at others. McCain has enjoyed a 12-year run of good press.

The result is that he built up so much good will that when he does say something appalling, they write it off - “Oh, that’s just McCain - he’s so unscripted!”

Well, he’s gonna need it.

McCain’s such a hot head, he’ll explode sooner or later.

He almost lost it on the plane with Bumiller when lying about playing footsie with Kerry in 2004. This was with his knowledge cameras were rolling.

He has flip flopped on so many issues it’s inevitable — even with barbecue sauce on their fingers — the press will dare ask him about some blatant contradiction, and then ‘Blam’, you’ll think Mt. St. Helens went active again!

(There was a Sen. Craig joke in there somewhere around ‘footsie’, but given we have distinguished guests here that we’ll want to come back someday, I let it pass.)

Welcome David and Paul … we sure need your help on this!

Thanks for being here, gentlemen. McCain mentioned a couple of weeks ago that he would be releasing his medical records within one month. Do you believe that he will, and how important is it for voters to know his medical condition?

I agree, Paul. I view it as a colossal flipflop, which is a story the media often likes to write–about other candidates. The flipflop was also a very unprincipled one, givin that he had previously used his POW cred to give lip service to opposing torture. Yet it is my impression the average citizen still remembers his original opposition and does not realize he now condones Bush’s torture policy. What would it take to get past the media’s silence on this issue?

After the Bumiller incident, Ana Marie Cox said something to the effect that the problem was that Bumiller had just gotten to the McCain beat, whereas those who had been on the trail with him for a while would never be so mean as to challenge him. And he showed a mild testiness with her, but the truth is - and again, this is something of which there has been much written in Arizona but not much in the national media - that McCain has a positively volcanic temper. DC and Arizona are both littered with people who have been the targets of his ire - insults, swearing, threats, etc.

Wasn’t it Thad Cochoran of MS who said McCain was too hot-headed? How do we get the Rs to come out on how McCain has attacked them? I believe Cornyn and Domenici have also been attacked by him. Or are all the ones he’s attacked considered too much of the Lunatic fringe that no one gives them any credibility? Has he attacked Hagel? And surely Mitch McConnell can be brought around to do some attacking.

So, how do we get the MSM to wake up and do their job?

Paul what is YOUR theory about why the press just won’t dig into McCain?

I know you have established they fact that they give him a pass, but how did he work this transformation?

Cause I can think of few Dems who love to tap into that secret.

If memory serves, he released his records in 2000, and there wasn’t much there to be all that concerned about. It does, however, bring up the age issue. He’ll be 72 by the time he takes office, which would be older than any other first term president. Bob Dole was 73 when he ran, and his age was not only a big issue, but the only thing the late-night comics made jokes about (which is actually an important means of establishing the campaign’s dominant frames). Some people are already making the jokes, of course: See here.

Thanks for joining us today at FDL. Do you think McCain’s eventual Democratic opponent ought to push for lots and lots of debates? Seems to me this format disadvantages McCain by allowing an unfiltered view of his ignorance, stupidity, and temper.

Lots of debates would also vividly demonstrate just how much OLDER McCain is than his Dem opponent….

I keep wondering why McCain’s rather non-stellar military record gets no traction and is always trumped by his POW experience … this is a guy who wrecked a lot of planes but that never gets mentioned, etc … and it seems to tie in to his hotheadedness, etc … with his history of heavy drinking I feel like we’re getting Bush redux on that as well.

It’s always been a mystery to me that more politicians don’t make more of an effort. We talk about three major factors in the book, and explore the impact and manifestations of each: his Vietnam history, campaign finance reform, and the personal relationships he has built with reporters. The last is the most important. In the book we quote Andrew Ferguson (a conservative, by the way), who wrote, “I never saw Heifetz play the violin, or Hogan hit a five iron, or Pavlova do a pirouette. But I’ve seen John McCain work a reporter. And I knew I was seeing a master at the peak of his form.”

I can’t really remember President Clinton, Vice-President Gore, Sen. Clinton or Sen. Edwards getting “good press at some times” but I do remember their getting “bad press at others.”

I think there is a corporate media angle to this. Sen. McCain may be the most preferred by the press candidate but there’s something else going on.

Do you believe if you make an effective enough case the press can be persuaded to conduct itself more objectively?

Paul, is there any chance we can bring some of that critical Arizona reporting into the national conversation? How can that be done?

No doubt the McCain team will be sensitive to the perception that he’s dodging debates because of his age, so they’ll probably agree to three, or at least two. But we haven’t seen McCain in a one-on-one for an hour and a half, so we don’t know for sure how he’ll do. You are right, though, that he tends to repeat some pretty simplistic things on policy. Not that that ever proved fatal in the past - see Bush, George W.

How can we turn that into a teachable tecnique?

Paul - Your research has put you on the inside and closer to the beast. Can you give us some suggestions on how to deall with the following:

I hear other Democrats say of the mythical being: Well, you can’t touch McCain’s hero standing and the guy is a maverick. They follow by saying they wouldn’t vote for him but acknowledge his courage and strength. Even people who are critical pick up the PR snip and repeat it. Media means a lot and language means a lot.

It is more difficult for those with a conscience and have trouble being Rovesque to match these guys. They play mean and dirty. There must be a way to deal with the lies and expose the truth without becoming like them. Do you have any ideas?

As for those who give a more complete view? Pretty much any reporter from Arizona. They give a warts-and-all picture of him, which is why McCain has always had a very bitter relationship with his home-state press.

This, along with his aforementioned bad temper, will be what dooms him.

Just like it did St. Rudy of 9/11.

Reporters have long memories, and will be just looking for the chance to stick it to him.

That’s the $64,000 question. Our book alone may not be enough to convince the entire Washington press corps to do some introspection on the way they’ve been covering McCain. But we hope we can start a conversation - one that will be enhanced in the blogosphere - that will ultimately push the issue to the point where they can’t ignore it. And while some of my friends might not agree, I do believe that reporters want to do a good job. So our hope is that they can be persuaded to take a step back and ask whether their coverage of McCain has been what it should be, or whether they’re just repeating that he’s a principled maverick delivering straight talk, over and over and over…

The more exposure McCain gets, truly unscripted, the more he will self-reveal. The more debates the merrier.

We need someone to bait McCain in public who won’t back down but will play it clean. When confronted it seems McCain tries to scare people into doing what he wants by yelling and swearing, now if Hilary were the nominee she would be the perfect person to set him off in a debate.
But what are his triggers losing an argument? Feeling the crowds attention turn away from him, not getting his way, Defiance? Hilary may be portrayed as a nag but I’m betting if we can get McCain to explode that he will remind many women of their exhusbands.

What do you suppose the media would do with Barack Obama if Michelle had been strung out on prescription meds and actually stealing them to feed her habit from a nonprofit charity?

Sell your Soul to Satan like Bush did to get the coverage he did in his race against Al Gore.

I think one can acknowledge that he was a hero in Vietnam, and still point out that it was 40 years ago, and he also has to be judged by what he’s done since. If character is important, then it should be about the entirety of a person’s character, not just the noblest thing they ever did. But that’s how it is for McCain, while other politicians get judged by the dumbest or least noble thing they ever did.

IOKIYAR

David and Paul, I just got home from work and am glad to see y’all are still here. I haven’t read through all the comments yet (how rude!) but I wanted to ask if in your research you identified a place where McCain is vulnerable, other than his notorious temper, where we might successfully change some minds about him.

Is there any evidence his political aspirations were primarily fueled by his wife and inlaws?

It seems he was kinda adrift until The Trophy Wife showed up.

Even when there is coverage of McCain’s campaign finance lawbreaking, the FEC complaints are dismissed by TradMed as projects of Howard Dean and the liberal bloggers. Seems to me, we need a breakthrough (”macaca”) moment. The interview with Bumiller came close, but then Ana Marie Cox made it a joke on Elizabeth as much as anything else. She was just a newbie, she’ll learn how to treat the demi-god soon….

I am surprised at the lack of exposure Arizona reporters get. Usually, a campaigner’s homestate press has the advantange in covering a presidential bid, but with McCain they seem completely shut out. Will there be any way to provide Arizona press a platform to illustrate what they know about their Senator?

And, also on McCain, what do you think about Janet Napolitano (Arizona’s governor) as a running mate for the Democratic nominee? Would that put Arizona and the rest of the non-coastal west in play in a way that makes McCain stay closer to home this fall?

Thanks again for writing this book — I am off to order it now.

There were many, many young men who were quietly heroic in the face of horrific circumstances during service in Vietnam. Many of whom went on to lead distinguished, productive lives. None of whom get a pass to become President.

We don’t have some “here’s how you beat McCain” silver bullet, because that isn’t really what our book is about. The problem is really larger than McCain himself. To a great degree, he’s just doing what every politician does - get the best press coverage he can. He’s just better at it than the rest of them. The question, though, is why reporters who are supposed to be so cynical and jaded are so easily manipulated by him.

I have not read the book, but I do read MM regularly.

I would say that despite the roll over press, many people can read right through and see what a fake McCain is. To me he appears senile or dumb or both.

I am not comfortable with his temper and his experience with the Keating 5 and lying and flip flopping as the press likes to call it.

I don’t care for much of the reporting in this country. I’m OK with DemocracyNow and LinkTV.

I’d be surprised if they can polish up McCain. He may be a place holder for a VP. The idea being he gets a year of glory and then retires.

They can only win by stealing this one. People want out of Iraw and no Iran.

The question, though, is why reporters who are supposed to be so cynical and jaded are so easily manipulated by him.

Because they really aren’t all that jaded and cynical but are stuck in High School wanting to be invited to be with the kewl kidz?

“The question, though, is why reporters who are supposed to be so cynical and jaded are so easily manipulated by him.”
_______

They’re all leery of being nuclearly, permanently “Shustered”?

Sure if the questions are not known in advance, if the candidates can ask each other questions if we get good moderators and no topic is off the table. I want the League of Womn voters running debates again!
McCain needs debates to prove he is not to old.He needs debates to convince the GOP moneymen to give him cash. He needs debates because Hilary and Obama are both getting more votes in the primaries than he is getting.
So we use that as leverage to get the kind of debates that we want!
We must be prepared to say No!

He’s no hero to me, dropping bombs.

I don’t like to see anyone tortured, even murderers. But he is no hero.

I am surprised at the lack of exposure Arizona reporters get.

Teddy - You are loaded with great ideas today. I think you are on to something here. Why can’t we feature Arizona reporters on FDL for insight into the real McCain.

Jane - Can we do this?

The Arizona reporters ought to be given a platform, but it hasn’t happened yet. You might have noticed that some Chicago reporters, like Jim Warren of the Chicago Tribune and Lynn Sweet of the Chicago Sun-Times, have become staples on cable television because they know a lot about Barack Obama. Yet the Arizona reporters haven’t been given the same privilege. There may be a little elitism here - if you write for the Tribune, you’re considered part of the big boys club, but if you write for the Arizona Republic, not so much.

Go here.

KRISTOF (2/27/00): Mr. McCain let the scope of his ambitions slip out again in fall 1970, when he was in Vietnam and four of the prisoners of war were put together in a cell. They spent a couple of weeks talking nonstop, and the conversation soon touched on their dreams…

“We asked John what he wanted to be—chief of naval operations?” recalled Richard A. Stratton, one of those present. “He said, no, the best job in the Navy is commander in chief of the Pacific forces, because then you’re chief warrior. But he said that what he really wanted to be was president.

“With him, it’s no flash in the pan, no sudden dream,” Mr. Stratton said. “He’s been thinking of this for a long time.”

He gets kid glove treatment because he was a POW. So he’s got military bona fides and they won’t touch him because of that.

He has nothing else going for him except he excels at corruption.

Hmm Nancy Reagen repeat a stage mother presidency.

We don’t elect the most qualified in this country, as much as the most marketable. Tortured war hero works for MadAv.

he question, though, is why reporters who are supposed to be so cynical and jaded are so easily manipulated by him.

Paul - I bet many are not but their editors are. Perhaps we should be looking for editors with a backbone.

Seconded!

It actually isn’t too surprising for him to have that sense of destiny about himself, given that he came from naval royalty - both his father and his grandfather were admirals. His father was commander in chief of naval forces in the Pacific during Vietnam.

David and Paul, welcome. Thanks for your work and your integrity. As a psychiatrist, I’ve been astonished and appalled by MSM’s apparent complicity in concealing McCain’s obvious and severe emotional instability and cognitive dysfunction from American voters. As Mark Benjamin described a few weeks ago in Salon, even McCain’s brothers-in-arms in senior military ranks have taken the extraordinary step of publicly stating they find the senior Senator form Arizona unfit for command.

Of course, even when McCain “released” his medical records in 2000, IIRC he did so to one media outlet and a single physician. Since 2000 McCain’s undergone yet another round of treatment for malignant melanoma: treatment for recurrent melanoma of the head and neck may involve radiotherapy and or/chemotherapy, both of which can cause permanent decrease in brain function. Such decreases may be manifest as either emotional lability, cognitive impairment, or both.

Yet McCain’s campaign has not released his records (or neuropsych assessments) for the 2008 campaign - and Paul, in your helpful reply above, you’ve helped me to understand the press with McCain have apparently normalized his emotional lability and impaired impulse control:

After the Bumiller incident, Ana Marie Cox said something to the effect that the problem was that Bumiller had just gotten to the McCain beat, whereas those who had been on the trail with him for a while would never be so mean as to challenge him….. but the truth is - and again, this is something of which there has been much written in Arizona but not much in the national media - that McCain has a positively volcanic temper.

I confess I’ve not yet had the opportunity to read you book,though I look forward to doing so. Based either on what you’ve written or what you’ve observed, can you help the rest of us understand how the MSM has come to normalize a candidate with brain dysfunction so severe they must adjust their own behavior to compensate for the Senator’s symptoms? Are the “boys” (and “girls”) on the airbus also so impaired that McCain’s dysinhibition feels normative? Are they suffering the MSM’s version of the Stockholm syndrome? Are they just so achingly insecure they’ll put with any abuse for acceptance by the powerful and erratic? Or is it something else altogether?

My reason for asking is to try and better understand the media vacuum flask around this deeply impaired candidate - in order to shatter it.

Uh, your link is busted there CMike…

Here’s a topic to throw out: Have you ever found yourself suspecting that McCain is secretly a liberal? Because one of the odd things about him is that despite his rock-solid conservative record (and his own protestations), both some conservatives and some liberals think that deep down, he’s not what he appears, and will reveal himself to be so once he takes office.

I thought that the Lieberman-as-Nancy-Reagan moment in Jordan when McCain got “confused” would sink him. But, as with the lobbyists doing business on McCain’s bus, we are told by Very Serious People that everyone knows McCain is invulnerable on the issue at hand (expert in foreign policy or untouchably incorruptible) so: don’t believe your lying eyes.

Of course, CNN helped by initially editing out Lieberman’s “We’re doing everything we can” moment.

That would not surprise me, to an extent. And to the extent that the label has any solid meaning.

I enjoyed David’s book Blinded by the Right and Paul, I think you are terrific writer, so I’ll be buying a copy of your book.

My dad was a journalist, was an editor at National Journal in the early ’70’s, and covered the White House. Relationships between politicians and journalists were very different then. Cordial relationships were the norm, at least on the surface. There was gossip about the politicians but a bright line dividing the gossip and what was reported.

Do you think Bumiller will fall into line on the Express Bus to hell? Ana Marie apparently has.

They do seem to circle the wagons when McCain does something potentially problematic. In the case of the imaginary Iran-Al Qaeda link, they said he “misspoke,” and someone (Andrea Mitchell, perhaps?) said it was because he just hadn’t had enough coffee. The more worrisome possibility is that he really believes it - in other words, he has a Bush-type simplistic view of foreign affairs, in which all “bad guys” are pretty much alike, and if Al Qaeda is bad, and Iran is bad, then of course they’re in cahoots. But that can’t possibly be, because we’re always told how much experience and knowledge about he has about foreign policy and national security.

Oliver Wendell Holmes acidly observed of FDR that “he had a first class temperament, but a second class intellect.”

Excepting his hot temper, would Holmes’ quip fit McCain?

McCain now wants Phil Gramm as Treasury Secretary but the press is going to ignore this because McCain is a vet.

Ironically, Krugman has addressed McCain and the Gramm issue on his NYT blog today:

Seriously, the Gramm connection tells you all you need to know about where a McCain administration would stand on financial issues: squarely against any significant reform.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/

Krugman is the exception, not the rule, tho…! ;-)

I believe Chuck Todd admitted on MSNBC that if it had been Obama or Clinton making those statements, the TradMed would have been all over it but that McCain has the “reservoir of good will and built up credibility” so “nothing to see here, move along.”

That actually raises the interesting question of whether the public was better served when reporters got to see more of politicians in unscripted settings, but had all kinds of gentlemen’s agreements about what they wouldn’t cover; compared to today, when most politicians won’t be open with reporters, and the relationships at least appear more adversarial.

I say “appear,” because in some ways they are and in some ways they aren’t. Reporters act as though they hate spin, but what they really hate is bad spin, and photo ops poorly executed. You land on an aircraft carrier, and they’ll be falling all over themselves to say how great you look in your costume.

“The more worrisome possibility is that he really believes it - in other words, he has a Bush-type simplistic view of foreign affairs, in which all “bad guys” are pretty much alike, and if Al Qaeda is bad, and Iran is bad, then of course they’re in cahoots.”
_______

That’s what Froomkin observed the other day about Bu’ush, i.e., that there’s this homogenized, unified cadre of Bad Guys out to prevent the vast majority of homogenized, unified peace-loving, democracy-pining Good Guys. We, of course, are always on the side of the Good.

Some Very Serious Person tried to make the case recently that McCain’s the most likely candidate to end the Iraq war soonest. And conservatives are pushing him to be clearer about his opposition to the Family Marriage Amendment to the Constitution, in order for them to believe his anti-gay bona fides.

I find this all to be the result of lazy and corrupted reporters’ projection of their own views onto the candidate. “He can’t really be anti-choice and anti-gay, he’s such a great guy and gives us such tremendous access.” Access has become the token that represents reasonableness and rationality, aka liberalism, to the media mavens covering McCain. By giving them access, he upsets all their understanding of politicians, and conservative power-hungry ones especially. By sharing their irony about the crazy process, McCain must secretly also share their views.

The media certainly doesn’t highlight McCain’s oft-stated preference for judges just like Alito and Scalia — because those views run counter to the image the media has created for themselves (and for us).

Brit Hume called it a “senior moment”.

When McCain is asked about his oft-stated ignorance on economic matters, he says that it’s OK, because he’ll listen to people like Phil Gramm and Jack Kemp. Why anyone is supposed to find that reassuring, I don’t really know.

Agreed. There’s nothing wrong with having an ambition to become president. I can not embed the link to the November 29, 2007 Daily Howler. Somerby makes the point that Al Gore was criticized by the press for having such an ambition. However neither George W. Bush nor John McCain have been criticized by the press for having such goals for themselves when they were younger.

I think the press portrays McCain as secretly liberal. They say he’s anti-torture. They say he’s a “at odds” with his party. But basically they never call him on his actions.

I wonder if the only way this will change or get noticed by enough voters to matter, is if Obama confronts it directly? Obama could call out McCain’s contradictions, and also note that the press is failing to do so.

McCain did not misspeak he has been on the Senate Armed Forces Committee for awhile. He has been reading intel reports months before we get the unclassified versions.
If he misspoke then he does not have what it takes to be Commander and Chief.
If he is confused, senile who cares he misspoke 3, or 4 times this week so unless Andrea Mitchel is going to get McCain a cup of coffee at 3 a.m when the White House phone rings we need somebody else as President.

The notion of official source reporting is another word for propaganda.

I don’t trust any of the networks or big newspaper reporters.

The TV bobbleheads are too rich to want anyone but a republican running the show. Conflict of interest right off the bat.

The press is giving this man a pass on everything.

For the sake of argument, let’s say the wheels really come off this latest upheaval in Iraq big-time within a couple of weeks (sure looks like it could happen). Does McCain simply get to spin without rebuttal it as justification of how right he is on Iraq policy, or would it raise serious questions from which he could not hide?

Exactly. Scary enough that he admits not knowing much about economics, but that he admits being advised by certifiable lunatics is terrifying.

You’re exactly right - people are constantly projecting their own views on to McCain, on any number of issues. While I don’t have specific evidence to back this up, I’d wager it’s particularly true among the reporters who are themselves more liberal - “He’s such a cool guy, I’m sure he doesn’t really agree with those crazy wingnuts.” So when he goes to pander to John Hagee, or accepts the support of Rod Parsley, the response from reporters isn’t, “What a panderer!” Instead, it’s “This is really an awful process, when even someone as glorious as John McCain has no choice but to pander.”

Seriously, the Gramm connection tells you all you need to know about where a McCain administration would stand on financial issues:

Good quote Gramm running the economy tells me all I need to know the Stock Market is going to have a Greenspan Bubble on Roids and explode.