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Sep

16

Richard Cohen, once in the tank for McCain, now says he’s a tragedy & a farce


I do not read Richard Cohen often – I really don’t know too much about him.  But someone tweeted a link to his column today, The Ugly New McCain, in the Washington Post and it is intense.  I can just imagine how it must have felt to write it, because it oozes the upsetment of betrayal.

Then:

I am one of the journalists accused over the years of being in the tank for McCain. Guilty. Those doing the accusing usually attributed my feelings to McCain being accessible. This is the journalist-as-puppy school of thought: Give us a treat, and we will leap into a politician’s lap.

Not so. What impressed me most about McCain was the effect he had on his audiences, particularly young people. When he talked about service to a cause greater than oneself, he struck a chord. He expressed his message in words, but he packaged it in the McCain story — that man, beaten to a pulp, who chose honor over freedom. This had nothing to do with access. It had to do with integrity.

Now:

McCain has soiled all that. His opportunistic and irresponsible choice of Sarah Palin as his political heir — the person in whose hands he would leave the country — is a form of personal treason, a betrayal of all he once stood for. Palin, no matter what her other attributes, is shockingly unprepared to become president. McCain knows that. He means to win, which is all right; he means to win at all costs, which is not.

At a forum last week at Columbia University, McCain said, “But right now we have to restore trust and confidence in government.” This was always the promise of John McCain, the single best reason to vote for him. America has been cheated on too many times — the lies of Vietnam and Watergate and Iraq. So many lies. Who believes that in Afghanistan last month, only five civilians were killed by the American military in an airstrike, instead of the approximately 90 claimed by the Afghan government? Not me. I first gave up on the military during Vietnam and then again when it covered up the death of Pat Tillman, the Army Ranger and former NFL player who was killed in 2004 by friendly fire.

McCain was going to fix all that. He was going to look the American people in the eyes and say, not me. I will not lie to you. I am John McCain, son and grandson of admirals. I tell the truth.

But Joy Behar knew better. And so McCain lied about his lying and maybe thinks that if he wins the election, he can — as he did in South Carolina [where he apologized for lying about his feelings on the Confederate flag] — renounce who he was and what he did and resume his old persona. It won’t work. Karl Marx got one thing right — what he said about history repeating itself. Once is tragedy, a second time is farce. John McCain is both.

The term cognitive dissonance has been thrown around a fair amount during this election season but I’d like to hear from people like Cohen, who felt as he did about McCain in 2000 and hear how they are coping with the persona being presented now.  Maybe that’s a dumb question and people will just continue to support him – or maybe more people will tell the emperor that he has no clothes.

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By Jill Miller Zimon at 9:48 am September 16th, 2008 in Campaigning, Government, John McCain, Politics, Sarah Palin, WH2008, leadership 

Comments

One Response to “Richard Cohen, once in the tank for McCain, now says he’s a tragedy & a farce”

  1. 1 Carole Cohen on September 17th, 2008 12:01 am

    Yeah, when it got ‘tweeted’ and I read it I cried. It is so baffling to me. I remember blogging about McCain and his alignment against a free Internet about a year and a half ago. I was disappointed then but had no idea how deep that feeling would get a year and a half later.

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