The headline doesn’t exactly fit, but I really like Me First and the Gimme Gimmes a band that does some cool punk covers of non-punk songs. “Me First” is John McCain’s motivating force according to the case laid out by Frank Rich. I don’t know about the “Gimme Gimme” part – I’m sure I could strain the metaphor and come up with something, but I’m not going to bother.
Rich points out that McCain’s sudden interest in the economy came as his poll numbers were tanking. Prior to that, the economy was fine, according to him. So, he came up with the gimmick of claiming that his campaign had been “suspended” when he didn’t stop campaigning. Then, he parachuted into Washington in an effort to make the economic crisis about him; nevermind how it might affect the success of the efforts.
Rich notes that Palin had just recorded a disastrous interview with Katie Couric. He suggests that McCain’s decision to “suspend” his campaign at least as far as canceling on Letterman was an effort to get to Couric and upstage the Palin disaster. This backfired as Letterman discovered that McCain hadn’t suspended his campaign but was, in fact, going to do the Couric interview which, in turn, led to Letterman playing the feed from the Couric interview on his own show as he explained that McCain had falsely claimed to be “getting on a plane” to Washington to deal with the crisis.
It’s not hard to guess why McCain had blown off Letterman for Couric at the last minute. The McCain campaign’s high anxiety about the disastrous Couric-Palin sit-down was skyrocketing as advance excerpts flooded the Internet. By offering his own interview to Couric for the same night, McCain hoped (in vain) to dilute Palin’s primacy on the “CBS Evening News.â€
Letterman’s most mordant laughs on Wednesday came when he riffed about McCain’s campaign “suspensionâ€: “Do you suspend your campaign? No, because that makes me think maybe there will be other things down the road, like if he’s in the White House, he might just suspend being president. I mean, we’ve got a guy like that now!â€
Rich also notes that McCain’s stunt came as his campaign manager’s intimate ties to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were coming to a head — not the kind of lobbying association his campaign wanted in the wake of those institutions’ collapse.
So, when you hear McCain’s “country first” slogan; know that he really means “me first.”
Why is it the more I see and hear of McCain, the less I like of him? Frank Rich caught a lot of what has been bothering me and a lot more that I missed. It actually seems a shame but maybe this has been McCain all along? Did the conservative Republicans know something we did not?
Actually, I suspect they did. When McCain is shitty to Democrats, you can kind of chalk it up to cross-party rivalry and not read too much into it. When McCain is shitty to Republicans, perhaps they looked further and saw not a “principled maverick,” since he doesn’t really seem to have a consistent set of principles. Instead, they saw a guy who was looking to move himself ahead (more than whatever arbitrary line is acceptable in D.C.)
That may be the best explanation I have heard anywhere explaining McCain.
McCain has mentioned several times over the last weeks(and again in the debate) that if Obama had agreed to travel with him and present themselves together in townhall meetings there would be none of this ‘ugliness’ in the campain,so McCain is admitting,and excusing himself, that he is deliberately disdainful of Obama.
A psych major could explain the emotional dynamics here.
That argument is just weird: “If he’d done what I wanted, I wouldn’t be taking these unrelated actions.”