Sunday Watch: In Which McCain Is Not Greeted as a Liberator

[originally published on CJR.org, the Web site of the Columbia Journalism Review]

Several of McCain’s utterances in his first interview with George Stephanopoulos since April deserve, as they say, to “make news”—to be emblazoned all week on front pages and reprised in TV clips—though, being substantial utterances, almost surely they will not.

Stephanopoulos led by noting that, on Friday, McCain said that Obama’s sixteen-month timetable for leaving Iraq was “a pretty good timetable.” McCain responded that by “timetable” he didn’t mean “timetable,” but rather something “dictated by conditions on the ground,” whatever exactly that might be. At this point in his campaign, he is trying to smudge differences with Obama on Iraq on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, in order to blur his earlier resemblance to a hundred-year-warmaker. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, he accuses Obama of surrender lust. On Sundays, he plays both sides.

An on-message McCain tried to characterize the surge decision as the decisive question of our time:

Senator Obama…says that the surge has not worked. He said it couldn't work. There's a fundamental difference between myself and Senator Obama….When the decision had to be made whether to adopt the strategy of the surge, he said it wouldn't work, it would increase sectarian violence. He said all those things that made it acceptable to the left of his party.

Three weeks ago in this space, I wondered when interviewers were going to remind the country of McCain’s early statements on the wisdom of the war. This week, it was a delight to see Stephanopoulos nudge McCain over into this subject, getting at what is arguably the most fundamental difference between the two candidates—the grown-up test of judgment, experience, and intellectual readiness, and of independence from the Bush worldview (one of whose architects, Randy Scheunemann, is McCain’s chief foreign policy maven). Stephanopoulos brought up

a fundamental difference about the original decision to go to war. [Obama] said it would inflame the Muslim world, it would become a recruitment tool for Al Qaida. You said, and you wrote, that it would lessen antipathy in the Muslim world and that we'd be greeted as liberators. Wasn't Senator Obama right about that?

McCain:

I don't believe so. We were greeted as liberators.

Possibly realizing he might be digging himself into a black hole, McCain quickly pivoted to reestablish himself as the far-sighted maverick:

We mishandled the war for nearly four years. We mishandled it in a way that was so harmful that I stood up against it. I said it wouldn't work. I said we had to have a new strategy, and I was criticized for being disloyal, disloyal to Republicans.

Stephanopoulos came back, accurately: “You also said many times that the strategy was the right strategy.”

“Many times” is quite right. Thanks to Greg Sargent, for example, for the following little item from March 18, 2003. Who’ll be the first to quote this on-air?

Bill O'Reilly: "All right, Senator, if you were president, what would you have done differently in the run-up to this war?"

McCain: "Nothing."

O'Reilly: "Nothing?"

McCain: "The president has handled this, in my view, skillfully."

But back to “This Week.” The original question of whether to go to war was, McCain said, “a job for the historians.” The “crucial”—the only “crucial”—question in his eyes was and is the surge. Despite interruptions, Stephanopoulos asked: “And you don't...accept that he was right and you were wrong...on the original decision?

McCain: “Of course not. Of course not. Of course not.” The historians had completed their job in record time.

A bracing precedent here—Stephanopoulous’s refusal to take for granted that, because McCain fancies himself the wise man, the ready man, the man who knows, the man we know, therefore this man who will say anything to be President knows enough about the limits of American power, and rectitude, and in other respects, understands the essentials of how the world works.


“This Week’s” round table was something else again. With the more blinded-than-blinding perception he has put on display for years, Sam Donaldson found the day’s McCain “appealing,” then rehashed some conventionally untrue wisdom about the senator from Arizona and the environment, declaring (as if it was the most obvious thing in the world) that McCain “is an environmentalist. That’s one thing you’ve got to credit John McCain for, if you agree with that, which I do.” Teflon ahoy!

In truth, McCain voted against the toughest CAFE mileage standards in 2002, 2003, and 2005, before he went to Detroit last fall and called for…higher standards (whereupon he could pat himself on the back for bucking the tide). Unnoted by Donaldson (or anyone else): McCain, unique in all the Senate and House, missed all fifteen votes last year that the League of Conservation Voters, no bunch of ravers, thought crucial—including votes where a “yes” vote from him would have passed the bills. His lifetime score, by the League’s criterion, is twenty-four.

George Will, no slouch with metaphorical references, labeled Obama’s Berlin speech “no metaphor left behind.” This was a widespread opinion among pundits last week, who seemed disappointed—some cynically, some not—that Obama had not raised Lazarus from his grave before two hundred thousand German onlookers. Will neglected Obama’s quite nonmetaphorical call for reducing nuclear arsenals and his urging Germany to provide more troops in Afghanistan. But who cares?

Donaldson later tasked Obama with overreaching because Nicolas Sarkozy shared the spotlight with him, a mere senator, in Paris. Imagine! Obama isn’t even president yet! Did anyone raise such a complaint when McCain was zooming through Latin America? Isn’t it plain that the “presumption” trope directed at Obama is perilously close to “uppity”?

The rest of the roundtable scuttlebutt about the reception of Obama’s speech in Europe was a quarter-inch thickness of froth. Can the roundtable do some homework for a change?

Comments

[Easttexas82]

Who else is through listening to MSM and the "pundits?" What the crap is a pundit anyway? I can find my own news and can make up my own mind.

[research]

KO, Stewart and Colbert.

That's it. The rest is obedient corporatist propaganda.

It will rot your soul.

[katmeyster]

Would you expect less from the complicit media? Who made sure we watched the planes fly into the Towers over and over. Who exploited shock and awe like it was a video game. Who completely forgot about all those interviews with weapons inspectors who found no evidence of WMD. Who made George Bush some kind of hero just because he showed up? It was disgusting.

It all makes sense if you understand that just a few megaconglomerates own most media outlets and satisfying the bottom line and shareholders are their only concerns. Democracy is doomed without a free media -- hoorah for the Internet and any actual journalists left.

[InfosolutionWiz]

LOOK AT HOW THE MEDIA GIVE "FLIPPER" JOHN a FREE PASS ON EVERYTHING WEEK AFTER WEEK!!!

WHY IS THIS SO??

THE AIM IS TO Create doubts in people's minds, and make sure the status quo lives on. The powerful and the wealthy like the way things are, so make sure the MSM "reports" the correct way, and the pollsters "poll" the correct way. Very simple really.

*********FLIPPER JOHN McCain doesn't care about the Troops

CLICK>> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBTOPyiCXQY

[Davwbaird]

Why start now? They need to be taken off the air and out of the news business.

[mamacat]

How in the world is anyone supposed to take McCain seriously until he admits that he was wrong to vote for the Iraq war, and that both we and they would be better off if Bush had never lied us into this war? He just doesn't get it, and he never will. His answer to every foreign relations problem is "bomb, bomb, bomb,.....".

He doesn't understand the Iraq war.
He doesn't understand the economy.
He doesn't understand environmental issues.
He would rather run a dirty campaign than a campaign about the issues.

I repeat, why in the world would any sane person vote for this loser?

[egal]

The kind of people who DO take McCain seriously (mainly because they haven't listened to a word that's come out of his mouth) also:

don't understand the Iraq war (they think it's patriotic and security-improving and the best thing that's happened to our international appeal since the Red Scare [it's about equal, really]);
don't understand the economy (they think giving tax xuts to the rich and sending jobs overseas helps them more that that darn Democrat planning to lower their taxes);
don't understand environmental issues (they think that manmade global warning is a crock of horse manure and we should pollute as much as we want because WE won't live to see the consequences);
prefer a nasty, immature, name-calling, false but zippy soundbyte to things that matter.

The problem is that the people voting for him effectively are NOT sane, given that they've chosen to enmire themselves in bigotry, ignorance, spoon-fed opinions, and the hate and bitterness that gets them through the day by imagining all those other people falling for real change.

[research]

Or the polls that show McBush close to Obama are lies paid for by the MSM to make stealing the election look believable.

[schatsie]

The media has not changed, they are supporting McCain in the same way they supported Bush....

[EdinNJ]

No, the roundtable, and the media in general, cannot do their homework. To do so would ensure a noncompetitive race, since it would reveal McCain to be the most confused, shallow, ill-informed candidate in their lifetimes.

The networks, cable stations, and print media cannot have that. Their bottom line depends on a horse race in order to keep interest and sell ad time. It's just that simple.

The only alternative, as may be likely, is that Obama pulls so far ahead, that the full on coronation begins, since creating a new "Camelot" would bring in viewers. Of course that would leave Fox, the WSJ and the media elite on the wrong side, but you reap what you sow after 7 years of carrying this administration's water.