The Making (and Remaking) of McCain

Have thirty minutes to gain some real insight into the nature of John McCain's campaign, and wondering where to spend it? Easy; read Robert Draper's 8,000 word "The Making (and Remaking) of McCain", which will appear in The New York Times Magazine this coming Sunday. A sample:

A senior adviser to McCain said: "The town halls, the ethics bill, immigration reform -- all are examples. I think McCain finds it galling that Obama gets credit for his impressive talk about bipartisanship without ever having to bear the risk that is a part of that. It is so much harder to walk the walk in the Senate than to talk the talk." By extension, then, if the McCain campaign's conduct would appear to be at odds with the man's "true character," it is only because the combination of a dishonorable opponent and a biased media has forced his hand. Or so goes the rationale for what by this month was an increasingly ugly campaign.

The worry among his aides had long been that McCain would let his indignation show. Going into the debates, an adviser expressed that very concern to me: "If he keeps the debates on substance, he's very good. If it moves to the personal, then I think it's a disaster." Accordingly, Salter advised McCain before the first debate to maintain, one person privy to the sessions put it, "a very generous patience with Obama -- in terms of, 'I'm sure if he understood. . . .' "

"The object wasn't to appear condescending at all -- really, the opposite," an adviser said of Salter's tactic, which judging by the postdebate polls seemed to backfire. "You put a bullet in a gun, figuring it'll get shot once. We had no idea it would be shot 10 times."

Sure it backfired! McCain didn't say "'I'm sure if he understood...," he said "What Sen. Obama just doesn't understand is..." This is considerably nastier, and he said it over and over again. And when Senator Obama actually was gracious ("Senator McCain is right"), the McCain campaign made an ill-received, sarcastic ad about it.

If you were ever looking for a textbook example of an echo chamber, this is it. A campaign essentially driven by a candidate's personal animosity toward his opponent, which he simply assumed entitled him to be negative and condescending, no matter how uncalled for and overblown this would seem to the world. McCain aides specifically point to an incident (from February 2006!) wherein McCain felt Obama went back on his word to attend a bipartisan meeting on ethics reform, and had Salter write a nasty letter in response.

Perhaps this was a legitimate grievance. But how many Americans have the slightest notion about this uber-insider baseball stuff from 32 months ago? That's how the whole article reads; three close advisers basically spent the last year convincing each other to believe their own spin, and apparently failed to notice that: a) no one else did; and b) they were contradicting themselves every few weeks.