It's not news that much of the corporate Washington press corps feels a burning love for John McCain. But it's still enjoyable to see the lengths to which they'll go for their political cuddlebunny. Take Roger Simon, chief political columnist for the Politico. Simon isn't just willing to rewrite history on McCain's behalf; he's willing to rewrite history he himself wrote.
In 1999 Simon was working for US News & World Report, for whom he produced a long, mostly glowing piece about McCain's first campaign for president. Here Simon explains why the press was smitten with McCain:
At 63, one of the oldest candidates in the race, he is a bundle of energy, powering through as many as eight speeches a day. Except when he sleeps, he is virtually never silent...It may be a high-risk way to run, but his whole campaign is high risk. "I decided that the planets were aligned and I had a shot at it," he says. "Not a very good shot, but a shot. I'm not going to be driven by a fear of losing. I'm going to have fun and enjoy it because I'll never do this again."
Obviously McCain did run again, but at the beginning of 2007 even his prospects of getting the Republican nomination looked uncertain. And so Simon wrote a bizarre, moony article imagining how McCain could still become the 44th president: with another campaign "about authenticity." In the new piece Simon reused almost all his McCain quotes from 1999, including the above section. Simon did, however, make one small change. See if you can spot it:
[McCain] would run again because he had faced that terrible dread that kept many from ever running: the humiliation of defeat. "I'm not going to be driven by a fear of losing," McCain told his staff. "I'm going to have fun."
There are so many funny things about this that you have to make a list.
1. It's funny that McCain, in order to explain how he was able to be so damn honest, said something that turned out not to be true.
2. It's even funnier that, in order to explain why honest John McCain was running again, Simon quietly excised that McCain had said to Simon that he wouldn't.
3. It's funniest of all that, in the original 1999 article, Simon had reported that journalists loved McCain so much that at one point on the Straight Talk Express a reporter "begged McCain to shut up and protect himself." But apparently this isn't necessary; McCain can say anything, and reporters will retroactively have him un-say it. (It's also odd that this reporter goes unidentified. It's hard not to wonder whether this is because his name was Roger Simon. In any case, it's an interesting example of press corps omerta, in which they rigorously eliminate any information their audience could actually use.)
Still, don't think for a minute Simon isn't deeply concerned about the way reporters tend to suck up to the powerful. As he recently wrote:
It is not surprising that so many politicians have such a low opinion of the media; we make it so easy for them to do so.
And why was Simon so unhappy with his colleagues? For the most obvious reason imaginable: because the media has given Barack Obama a free
pass on Jeremiah Wright.
Cross-posted from Tiny Revolution
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Posted May 14, 2008 | 01:46 PM (EST)