by hilzoy
That's what David Brooks says, at any rate:
"McCain and his advisers have been compelled to adjust to the hostile environment around them. They have been compelled, at least in their telling, to abandon the campaign they had hoped to run. Now they are running a much more conventional race, the kind McCain himself used to ridicule.The man who lampooned the Message of the Week is now relentlessly on message (as observers of his fine performance at Saddleback Church can attest). The man who hopes to inspire a new generation of Americans now attacks Obama daily. It is the only way he can get the networks to pay attention.
Some old McCain hands are dismayed. John Weaver, the former staff member who helped run the old McCain operation, argues that this campaign does not do justice to the man. The current advisers say they have no choice. They didn’t choose the circumstances of this race. Their job is to cope with them."
Compelled? No choice? I don't think so. For one thing, there are lots of ways in which McCain could campaign without lying or impugning his opponent's patriotism. Some of them might even win. If McCain's advisors can't think of a single one of them, that shows only their limited imaginations.
But let's pretend, just for the sake of argument, that they are right to say that the only way to win, this year, is by taking the low road. Would that mean that they have to take it? Of course not. That means you have a choice between honor and ambition; between running a decent campaign and a sordid one; between being a candidate the country can be proud of and being a candidate who contributes to the degradation and trivialization of political discourse.
You would have no choice only if you assumed that your own ambitions were more important than your honor.
All the while McCain's advisors were mumbling something about being thrown in some sort of patch.
Posted by: Ugh | August 19, 2008 at 02:01 PM
Brooks. bah. what a transparent GOP shill. times like these i wish the NYT had comments.
Posted by: cleek | August 19, 2008 at 02:08 PM
Hilzoy, I'm reminded of that great Bernard Williams line somewhere that goes more or less like "He will tell you that you have no choice, and, like most people who say that, he will be lying."
Posted by: FL | August 19, 2008 at 02:23 PM
Hilzoy, is there something we should know ?
Posted by: cleek | August 19, 2008 at 02:24 PM
cleek: yeah, was just going to post on it. Short version: cross-posting here and there, so I'll still be around.
Posted by: hilzoy | August 19, 2008 at 02:26 PM
Back a whle ago, when the McCain campaign got away with saying that John McCain did not speak for the McCain campaign, I knew there would never be accountability. McCain takes IOKIYAR to a whole new level.
Posted by: Warren Terra | August 19, 2008 at 02:26 PM
Right, because being forced to have a disrespectful campaign foist upon you is a fabulous way to demonstrate serving a cause greater than your own self-interest.
Posted by: Susan Kitchens | August 19, 2008 at 02:28 PM
And, oh, yeah, What Cleek posted. I mean, it's great if Hilzoy can get an actual paycheck for the wonderful blogging she does, but she's also the beating heart of the ObWi community, aand on the assumption this means the end of her contributions to ObWi there will be a real loss involved.
It really would be nice if these sorts of announcements could be coordinated so we don't get the shock secondhand ...
Posted by: Warren Terra | August 19, 2008 at 02:29 PM
I had the same reaction when I read Brooks' column.
Posted by: Bernard Yomtov | August 19, 2008 at 02:30 PM
McCain would rather lose his maverick reputation than lose an election.
Posted by: cleek | August 19, 2008 at 02:30 PM
warren: paycheck? what paycheck? ;)
Also: not leaving.
Posted by: hilzoy | August 19, 2008 at 02:41 PM
Fortunately with our current media he doesn't have to lose his maverick reputation, cleek, so that makes the decision easier.
Posted by: KCinDC | August 19, 2008 at 02:41 PM
Shorter Brooks: McCain is acting like a Bush Republican instead of the maverick he said he would be, and it's Obama's fault.
Posted by: Seth Gordon | August 19, 2008 at 02:42 PM
Fortunately with our current media he doesn't have to lose his maverick reputation, cleek, so that makes the decision easier.
As I've previously explained:
Under the Unitary Maverick Theory, one part of the Maverick branch, having made a decision that it will vote for a certain bill, cannot be contradicted by another part of the same branch stating that it will not vote for the same bill. This is because, under the theory, the Maverick exists in a Schrödinger's cat-like state, where it can take both sides of a position at any time until it is measured by some outside force, such as the press, at which point its current position is revealed.
However, in addition to behaving like Schrödinger's cat, the Maverick has certain, black hole like qualities, in that once a position is revealed, it is immediately sucked back into the Maverick, which then returns to the Schrödinger state until it is measured again, at which point the opposite position may emerge. And so on.
Perhaps the most amazing part of the Unitary Maverick Theory is that the people taking the measurements fail to notice the different readings on their instruments with respect to the same position from the Maverick.
Posted by: Ugh | August 19, 2008 at 02:47 PM
Davis Brooks' unhealthily co-dependent relationship with McCain makes him incapable any mature assessment of the Senator's behavior. "John McCain isn't a bad man," Brooks tells himself at night, "we just make him lose his temper now and then."
Posted by: Populuxe | August 19, 2008 at 02:48 PM
if only we could harness the power of the Maverick... perhaps we could use it to eliminate our dependency on fossil fuels.
Posted by: cleek | August 19, 2008 at 02:50 PM
OT - thank god we invaded Iraq and got rid of all the torture chambers.
Posted by: Ugh | August 19, 2008 at 02:56 PM
I don't think you're being entirely fair when you present McCain's choice as being between "honor" and "ambition". Surely a more likely scenario is that he sees his own policies as vital for the future of the country and his opponent's policies as likely to be disastrous if implemented. It's easy to see how someone in that position would be persuaded that a sleazy campaign is essential for the good of the country.
This doesn't of course add up to "no choice", and we can dissect the varieties of self-deception and self-regard that might lead McCain down that route. But I suspect that he is unlikely to be presenting it to himself as a choice between honor and ambition: he is rather (on this view) sacrificing a superficial honor for a higher good. When Obama backtracked on FISA, do you think he saw it as abandoning his honor and his ideals for ambition, or do you rather think that he (however misguidedly) saw it as an essential move in the higher cause of freeing the country from Republican conservatism?
I know that journalists like Brooks give McCain an unacceptably easy ride on all sorts of things, and I'm grateful to bloggers like yourself for exposing him, but one can go too far in the opposite direction. I suspect that few people are as blatantly cynical in their ambitions as you imply McCain to be here.
Posted by: David | August 19, 2008 at 04:24 PM
Congratulations on the new gig, Hilzoy!
Posted by: Prodigal | August 19, 2008 at 05:23 PM
It's not like he's running for Commander in Chief or anything.
Posted by: croatoan | August 19, 2008 at 06:08 PM
Surely a more likely scenario is that he sees his own policies as vital for the future of the country and his opponent's policies as likely to be disastrous if implemented.
Do you really think McCain comes off looking any better under this scenario? He’d have to be some combination of staggeringly arrogant and hopelessly deluded to think he knows so much better than the rest of us that he can’t even have an honest policy debate lest we vote for the man whose policies we naively think we prefer. And that’s leaving aside the fact that his policies aren’t noticeably different from Bush/Cheney’s, which have already failed abjectly at everything except enriching Halliburton.
Posted by: Stephen Stralka | August 19, 2008 at 06:09 PM
Senator McCain's advertising himself as "the original maverick" is palpably dishonest. Where does he think the label originated?
The use of "maverick" as a political label pays homage to former Texas congressman and San Antonio Mayor Maury Maverick, who entered the House of Representatives shortly before John Sidney McCain III was conceived. (Rep. Maverick also coined the term, gobbledygook.)
see, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/02/29/AR2008022903461.html
I wonder why David Brooks and his ilk have not called McCain on the sheer audacity of this blatant falsehood.
Posted by: John in Nashville | August 19, 2008 at 06:14 PM
My proposal for a new ad:
1.Picture of the Son of Cain
2.Text: This is a Maverick
3.Picture morphs into a bovine (still recognizable as tSoC)
2.Text: Is this (really) a Maverick ?
3.Bovine turns and shows a brand mark on its behind, the GOP elephant and a large W.
4.Text: NO! This "Maverick" is fully owned by the Grand Old Party of Bush and Rove.
5.NO MORE YEARS!
---
6.I am [insert name] and I do not approve this candidate.
Posted by: Hartmut | August 20, 2008 at 04:47 AM
Surely a more likely scenario is that he sees his own policies as vital for the future of the country and his opponent's policies as likely to be disastrous if implemented.
elitist
Posted by: cleek | August 20, 2008 at 08:08 AM