In an op-ed in this morning's Washington Post, columnist George Will took John McCain to task once again, criticizing his decisions, labelling him "careless," and, in the unkindest cut of all, denigrating McCain's key issue: campaign finance reform.
It all begins with a lede that neatly stitches McCain and Bush together:
From the invasion of Iraq to the selection of Sarah Palin, carelessness has characterized recent episodes of faux conservatism. Tuesday's probable repudiation of the Republican Party will punish characteristics displayed in the campaign's closing days.
Will's harshest seeming terms, and the bulk of his attention, seems to go to Palin. This is not surprising -- he's been one of the godfathers of the anti-Palin, scent-of-common-sense conservative fringe for some time now. And, really, one would hope that Palin's inability to nail down the precise duties of the Vice Presidency would set Will's teeth on edge. Still, it's refreshing to see Will put it in these terms: "Perhaps Palin's confusion about the office for which she is auditioning comes from listening to its current occupant. Dick Cheney, the foremost practitioner of this administration's constitutional carelessness in aggrandizing executive power, regularly attends the Senate Republicans' Tuesday luncheons."
Will calls out McCain for his "history of reducing controversies to cartoons," and then, with a flourish, all but throws McCain's legacy under the bus:
McCain revived a familiar villain -- "huge amounts" of political money -- when Barack Obama announced that he had received contributions of $150 million in September. "The dam is broken," said McCain, whose constitutional carelessness involves wanting to multiply impediments to people who want to participate in politics by contributing to candidates -- people such as the 632,000 first-time givers to Obama in September.
Why is it virtuous to erect a dam of laws to impede the flow of contributions by which citizens exercise their First Amendment right to political expression? "We're now going to see," McCain warned, "huge amounts of money coming into political campaigns, and we know history tells us that always leads to scandal." The supposedly inevitable scandal, which supposedly justifies preemptive government restrictions on Americans' freedom to fund the dissemination of political ideas they favor, presumably is that Obama will be pressured to give favors to his September givers. The contributions by the new givers that month averaged $86.
One excellent result of this election cycle is that public financing of presidential campaigns now seems sillier than ever.
Naturally, I'd hesitate to call this op-ed an endorsement. But there's no doubt that all of the cited virtues tend to accrue to one candidate in particular. And, I suspect that Will is not being "careless."