McCain Channels His Inner Hillary
Frank Rich in the NY Times writes an interesting editorial. There’s much to disagree with of course, but some of his analysis ought to be revealing. It ought to reveal to us just how foolish it was to select a liberal Republican who represents the Washington establishment. Whether you like Huckabee or not, he would have been a young, somewhat accomplished executive, eloquent, Washington-outsider. He would have been much better suited to running against Obama who is an inexperienced, unaccomplished Washington outsider.
Noteworthy excerpts:
You’ve got to love a guy who said a few years ago that he regretted likening Mr. Limbaugh to “a circus clown” because of all the complaints from circus clowns insulted by the comparison. “I would like to extend my apologies to Bozo, Chuckles and Krusty,” Senator McCain told a rather startled Neil Cavuto of Fox News.
What’s more, Ann Coulter and Tom DeLay aren’t entirely wrong when they bluster that a vote for Mr. McCain amounts to a vote for Hillary Clinton (or, for that matter, Barack Obama). The Arizona senator’s otherwise conservative record is closer to the Democrats on immigration, campaign-finance reform, stem-cell research, global warming, oil drilling in Alaska, waterboarding, Gitmo and, until a recent flip-flop, the Bush tax cuts. In The New Republic, Jonathan Chait concluded that Mr. McCain’s Senate votes made him “the most effective advocate of the Democratic agenda in Washington” during the first Bush term.
And his analysis of the good news for Democrats (which happens to generally coincide with my previous assessment that McCain vs. Obama turns into a McCain slaughter in November):
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The good news for the Democrats so far is that whatever Mr. McCain’s sporadic overlap with liberals, he is emulating almost identically the suicidal Clinton campaign against Mr. Obama. He has mimicked Mrs. Clinton’s message and rhetorical style, her tone-deaf contempt for Mr. Obama’s cultural appeal, and her complete misreading of just how politically radioactive the war in Iraq remains despite its migration from the front page.
Like his prototype, Mr. McCain trumpets his long years of experience to an electorate that currently associates experience with Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. He further channels Mrs. Clinton by belittling Mr. Obama’s oratory as an “eloquent but empty call for change” — a tactic that calls attention to how flat and uninspiring his own speeches can be. (Again like Mrs. Clinton, Mr. McCain is at his best in small groups and town-hall meetings.)
He also likes to counter hope with gloom — as if he wants to put Armageddon, rather than a chicken, in every pot. But after seven years of doom, Americans are as hungry for optimism as they were for Reagan’s “Morning in America” after Carter’s malaise. As Rudy Giuliani learned the hard way, the political potency of 9/11 has gone the way of John Ashcroft and color-coded terror alerts.
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