Today Senator Obama will be in Española, New Mexico to continue his call for real change in our economy and real accountability for those who have created the current financial crisis -- including John McCain and George Bush whose cozy relationships with corporate America and hands off attitude towards wild Wall Street speculation have put the nation on the brink of financial disaster. He'll pick up where he left off last night:
"You are interviewing the greatest free trader you will ever interview, and the greatest deregulator you will ever interview," McCain told the Wall Street Journal last year. Of course you wouldn't know that listening to John McCain today...
Last week when the McCain campaign was called out for their barrage of lies, they responded with a now-famous snipe. But the full quote was even more revealing:
Politico: "'We recognize it's not going to be 2000 again,' McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said, alluding to the media's swooning coverage of McCain's ill-fated crusade against then-Gov. George W. Bush and the GOP establishment. 'But he lost then. We're running a campaign to win. And we're not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.'"
Well today Elizabeth Drew, who wrote a glowing book on McCain in 2002, takes that statement to its logical conclusion and reevaluates everything she thought she knew about McCain:
Elizabeth Drew, op-ed: "While McCain's movement to the center was widely popular (if not on the right) - and he even flirted with becoming a Democrat - there's now strong reason to question whether it was anything but a temporary, expedient tactic. (In his 2002 memoir, 'Worth the Fighting For,' he wrote, revealingly, 'I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. . . . In truth, I'd had the ambition for a long time.') When he decided to run for president in 2008, he felt he couldn't win without the support of the right, so he adapted. In retrospect, other once-hailed McCain efforts -- his cultivation of the press ('my base') and even his fight for campaign finance reform (launched in the wake of his embarrassment over the Keating Five scandal) now seem to have been simply maneuvers. The 'Straight Talk Express' - a brilliant p.r. stroke in 2000 -- has now been shut down."
But what McCain might not have realized is how much his complete abandonment of the truth would shape perceptions of him going forward. Whereas previously the press might have given McCain a pass when he made his full body triple flip flop with a twist on regulating our financial systems, or the fact that he was saying "the fundamentals of the economy are strong" when not even the White House would agree with him, this time the reaction was swift and brutal. ABC News' fact check was particularly piercing...
McCain campaign manager Rick Davis recently said "This election is not about issues," as they preposterously tried to claim some sort of "change" mantle. Now we're seeing why Rick Davis would wish that were true -- as soon as an "issue" comes up John McCain's claim to change evaporates.