silver-spoon.thumbnail.JPGThe ongoing saga of Johnny "Seven Tables" McCain continues and somehow we are getting treated to a media obsessed with the foibles of Obama’s vacation preferences and his apparent "elitism" because he went to Harvard and excelled, as opposed to McCain being a "Boat School" legacy who spent most of his academic career being a bottom feeding midshipman.

His lobbyist contingent is starting to kick it into overdrive, because the payoff for them is virtually inestimable if he were to somehow be elected to sit in the Oval Office with one hand on the nuclear trigger and the other on the Official White House Risk Board left over from the day of Glorious Beloved Leader. Let’s face it, if the anti-regulation fervor of the current maladministration is allowed to continue, our best bet as a country will be to start truck gardens built in foreclosed developments and watch "The Grapes of Wrath" to know that we don’t have much further to go economically. From last January:

Washington lobbyists and members of Congress gathered at a popular Capitol Hill bar and restaurant last night to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain, whose staff refused to disclose exactly how much was raised or by whom.

So let’s see, we let the lobbyists have ultra-high-level access to the White House, and they will act honorably. Right.

McCain’s other problem, and it’s sort of becoming self-inflicted, is his over-use of the whole POW status thing. Wes Clark rightly pointed out that being shot down does not confer executive-level decision-making abilities on an otherwise hapless aviator who managed to get in the way of a SAM missile while just doing his job. His actions while locked up were perfectly honorable in keeping with the code of conduct that was essentially the written/unwritten law governing the behavior of POWs, and he did well, but so did hundreds of others who were incarcerated with him in Hanoi. Does that necessarily make him Presidential? No, not by any stretch of the imagination.

McCain also fills a need for macho toughness that the chickenhawks,mid-life republicans and media elites who avoided the military like the plague thirty or so years ago so espouse in their quest to be mas macho. They like St. John because he did what the refused to do, went off to war honorably, and by supporting him, they get to live their "Top Gun" fantasies vicariously through him. So they slap a "McCain 08" sticker on their Hummers as they head out to play paintball. A bit sick and twisted, but I think more than just a bit true.

Clearly McCain’s campaign is being run by the surrogates and sycophants who see another chance to extend their reach into the executive branch of the Republic by helping him to be elected. Let’s face it, a man who is in his physical condition and can only make one campaign event a day is hardly dynamic enough to be sitting in the Oval Office daily in what has been described as one of the most stressful jobs on the planet Earth. So that opens the door to a legitimate question: who would be running a McCain Adminstration of that unfortunate event were ever to befall us? Cindy Lou? Phil Gramm? Karl Rove (again)? Charlie Black? All of the above using a wise-cracking Johnny Seven Tables as their front-man?

Will the media stay in the tank for St John? Magic 8-ball says "yes", although there have been some cracks in the facade of late… the more that he’s displayed in public as a hapless old man, the better for a dynamic and accountable Obama-Biden ticket. If there is one thing that I think that Joe Biden brings with his twenty-plus insider years is a good knowledge of where the insider skeletons are buried inside the Beltway, and which ones bear the mark of St John McCain. I don’t think that knowledge will be released reluctantly, and Joe Biden might just be the man to challenge McCain on a level that Obama could not (or would not) on the road to the White House.

I do so hope that all those lobbyists have their resumes ready to go after November. Undoubtedly, they do.

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