The Surrender Post

Senator John McCain, as I write this, is preparing to name Governor Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate. This is an out of the box, unconventional choice that will no doubt stir quite a bit of controversy. The Blog To Be Named Later returns to clarify the issue. It’s very simple: John McCain, the old warrior, has surrendered his principles once again for the sake of ambition.

What does that mean? If John McCain were running for president thirty years ago (he’s old enough to have done that) he would have been free to pick a running mate that met his own personal standard of “ready to be president.” But this is a very different Republican Party, and a different political environment.

If John McCain were a younger man, if this weren’t his last chance after watching a moron take the nomination away from him eight years ago, he would be less susceptible to making a crass political choice. But he’s not young; today is his 72nd birthday.

This choice will be presented of evidence of McCain’s maverick nature, that he would think outside the box and choose a woman. Don’t be fooled. This is a pick of desperation, and in many ways, a pick of surrender.

McCain is surrendering to the reality that his age stands in stark contrast to that of his opponent. That’s a reasonable political calculation, to pick a young, dynamic running mate. The problem is, John McCain has spent months attacking Barack Obama for youth and inexperience, and he has today chosen for vice president someone even younger and with less experience. There are two great problems with this. First, it exposes McCain to charges of hypocrisy. More importantly, it exposes the United States of America to the possibility that it could have a manifestly unqualified president in a dangerous time in this country’s history.

To be fair, Obama’s resume is not significantly more impressive than Palin’s. Yes, I prefer four years in the Senate to two years in an igloo. Yes, I prefer someone who has gone through the fire of a long presidential campaign and has the demonstrated ability to inspire and lead. Yes, I think Obama’s choice of Joe Biden compares very favorably to McCain’s pick. But an Obama supporter cannot fairly complain about Palin’s inexperience, and must instead accept her meager resume and say, okay, fine, now we can stop talking about readiness to be president.

Instead, I choose to focus on McCain’s greatest surrender, and that is to the far right wing of the Republican Party. Sarah Palin is a genuine conservative, and that makes her more acceptable to the “values” Republicans. For all McCain’s tough talk, the Republicans aren’t fundamentally about foreign policy and national security. If they were, John McCain would have selected Tom Ridge, the former governor of a major state and later the first Director of Homeland Security. Or Senator Joe Lieberman, a longtime Senate veteran and the Chairman of the Homeland Security Committee. By most accounts, McCain wanted to pick Lieberman. They are close friends, they agree on the war, Lieberman has been an effective campaign sidekick and advocate for McCain. If McCain were really a maverick, he would have taken the former Democrat turned Independent Senator from Connecticut.

Why didn't he? Lieberman and Ridge support abortion rights, and McCain is not willing to offend the conservatives who have always viewed McCain with suspicion. This is but the latest in an increasingly long series of examples of McCain’s desperation.

After he was defeated in 2000, unjustly and unfairly, through rumor and innuendo, and had to watch George W. Bush claim the nomination that he deserved, John McCain realized that if he were to keep his flickering presidential hopes alive, he was going to have to do some pretty unpleasant things. Like Andy Dufresne in The Shawshank Redemption, he was going to have to crawl through shit to get where he wanted to go.









So he endorsed Bush for re-election, campaigned with him, hugged the bastard, and sold his soul. He could have made a principled decision to oppose an incompetent Commander in Chief, but instead he chose to embrace him.

During Bush’s second term, McCain watched as the occupation of Iraq was bungled and his own recommendations ignored. But he remained silent. Well, that’s not true. He actually remained vocal in his support of George W. Bush. As the 2008 election approached, McCain reached out to the evangelicals who scorned him in 2000. He mended fences with Jerry Falwell. He changed his position on tax cuts for the wealthy. He changed his position on abortion. He changed his position on ethanol. He solicited donations from corrupt businessmen that he had once accused of spending “dirty money” to defeat him. Strikingly, this heroic former prisoner of war, who spent five years in the Hanoi Hilton, buckled to pressure from the Bush White House and gave up his opposition to torture.

And now, he has sacrificed his principles once again. This choice was made for crass political considerations. Don’t offend the right. Try to appeal to the female voter. Pick somebody young to offset his own advanced age.

In 2000, I watched John McCain’s campaign for president in admiration. As a supporter of Al Gore, I began to worry as McCain scored upset after upset against his better financed opponent. I worried because I viewed McCain as a very strong opponent in the general election. And I worried that if McCain won the nomination, I would face a very difficult personal decision between Gore and McCain, because I thought either one of them would have made a great president. The American people spared me that choice by passing on both men in favor of a trained monkey. Back then, it would have been hard not to vote for John McCain.

Not anymore.

The Media Post

The contest for the American presidency is almost never about what it should be about. What it should be about, of course, is open to debate. Some say it should be about a particular issue. Which candidate can best revive the American economy? Who can solve the Iraq dilemma? What about global warming, health care, education, immigration, human rights?

If a campaign for the presidency were about only one of these issues, it would be a campaign too narrowly defined, but at least it would be one of substance. However, this campaign is turning out to be a Seinfeld campaign: it’s an election about nothing. And it’s the media’s fault.

The 2008 election is vastly different from, say, the 1908 election, and the differences are fueled mainly by the existence of a 24 hour a day, 7 day a week news cycle. Reporters covering the Taft-Bryan race a hundred years ago couldn’t afford to waste their limited copy space writing about silly, inconsequential things. Now those sorts of minutiae help television networks fill up hours of airtime. If you watch CNN, or Fox News, or MSNBC, you might be too appalled by the lack of objectivity to notice that what these folks are really doing is stalling, waiting for something else to happen.

Another change in politics in the last century is the complete absence of privacy. The news media reports on subjects that were considered taboo in Theodore Roosevelt’s time. This has an enormous effect on the country. First, it thins the talent pool. There are a lot of good people who would never consider running for office now. They might have first class ability, or good ideas about how to tackle an issue, or an ability to inspire and persuade. But these people, as most people do, have something in their lives that they don’t want splashed across the front page of the New York Times. I’m not condoning immoral or illegal behavior. I am, in fact, rather disgusted with John Edwards. It’s not so much the extramarital affair as the hypocrisy it represents. However, human imperfection is a fact of life. If we were to exclude presidential candidates for things like this, our history would be vastly different and probably for the worse.

If the media reported on the candidates personal lives in 1960 they way they do now, obviously John F. Kennedy would never have become president. Good, some would argue. I cannot agree. When I think of Richard Nixon, faithful husband, taking Kennedy’s place during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it gives me a chill.













By Nixon’s own admission, he would have invaded Cuba, likely triggering a nuclear war. I’m sorry, I’ll take the other guy, the one with the cool head and the hot girlfriend on the side.

In my opinion, the biggest problem with media coverage of this election isn’t the focus on silly stuff, although there is plenty of lapel pin foolishness to go around. It’s not even the lack of privacy, although I’m fairly sure the Edwards family would disagree. No, the biggest problem is that the coverage never ends. Take a break! Obama’s on vacation in Hawaii, McCain has spent some time at the ranch in Arizona, why can’t the media shut it down for a while? I remember a time, not so long ago, that if you watched a channel long enough, eventually they’d play the national anthem while showing footage of a fighter plane flying over mountains, and then the channel would go off the air.

There’s been a lot of discussion about media bias in favor of Barack Obama. And it’s probably true, at least to a certain degree. The reality is that media will cover anyone who’s a good story. The fifty people outside Lindsay Lohan’s house aren’t biased towards her, they just know that a picture of her getting out of a car is worth money. Especially if she forgets her underwear. It’s more or less the same with politicians. The media loved Bill Clinton, but did they go easy on him when the Lewinsky story broke? Of course not, they pounded him nonstop for a year. It’s the same with Obama. For most of 2007, all the stories were about Hillary and how she was inevitable. Then Obama caught on, and the media shifted to him, building him up. Then they tore him down a bit, breathlessly reporting that someone he knows said some things. Wow, thanks for the breaking news. Then they built him back up. And the cycle continues...

Still, there’s no denying that a majority of the media attention Obama receives is favorable. And that leads me to my final point. If the media is so in love with Obama, they should stop hurting him. How are they doing that? By covering him so relentlessly, by dwelling on every story and non-story that has the faintest hint of association with Obama that they’re making the American people sick of looking at him.

One of the stupid things that decided the 2000 election was the evening news test. That is, which of the two candidates could the American people stand to see and hear on the evening news for the next four years? Gore gave this one away by being pompous and condescending. Bush won it with unintentional comedy. And now, eight years later, the media is deciding this one for John McCain by overexposing Barack Obama. I’m for Obama and I’m tired of looking at him. So please, dear news media, find something else to talk about, just for a little while. And if you can’t think of anything, let’s see the fighter planes, let’s hear the national anthem, and let’s have a rest before the fall campaign is upon us.