'Having Failed to Beat Them, He's Now Joined Them'

McCain picks up some Democrat Change

by Lisa Van Dusen

If you search the Wikipedia page on John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, the word "change" doesn't appear a single time (as of Sept. 9 ... by the time you read this, that may have been, um, changed).

Back then, after eight years of Bill Clinton, McCain ran as his maverick self against (wink, wink) K Street lobbyists and special interests, but it was a campaign based on personality and unfettered media availability, not on the classic change message of "throw the bums out."

If McCain wasn't demanding change after eight years of Democratic rule in Washington, why is he suddenly running, after eight years of Republican rule in Washington, on change? If he thinks the Republicans are the bums who need to be thrown out, shouldn't he be running as a Democrat?

Welcome to the Through the Looking-Glass politics of the same GOP tactics that pulled out every stop to get the man who would become the least popular, most disastrous president in memory into the White House not once but twice.

It's a world in which Christians are really closet Muslims, family values are subject to situational redefinition, your opponent's theme can be swiped like a licence plate and the bums are always the other guys, even when they're really you.

McCain didn't always operate this way, but the transition has been so remarkably smooth, you'd think he'd been bitten by a radioactive spider that imbued him with super powers of integrity amnesia, principle subsuming and, especially, theme-swiping.

FAMILIAR PLAYBOOK

Ironically, it's the same Rovian playbook that so famously slimed McCain off the map in the notorious 2000 South Carolina primary that's been pulled out of the bottom drawer for the brutal final stretch of this campaign.

McCain has been in Washington for more than a quarter-century, with more than three-quarters of that time served as a member of the party running the country. He's now saying he's the McChanger -- not so much with a straight face, but with that cat-that-ate-the-canary grin -- because Sarah Palin, like Barack Obama, looks and acts like nobody else who has ever been on a national ticket.

In Palin's case, the reasons for that have less to do with an unprecedented historic breakthrough than with a historically unprecedented low bar and for some of the people she scares, that's why she scares them. The choice also betrays a weirdly 1960s, Mad Men cynicism among that GOP brain trust: "We'll match 'em gimmick for gimmick ... they have a black guy, we'll get a woman!" Sarah Palin's not a threat to the old boys' network, she's an instrument of it.

But to the same illusionists who brought you the 2000 recounts victory, the phantom WMDs and "We do not torture," the only measure of truth is how many people you can convince that what they're seeing is real until you've got what you want. Then you shrug, step gingerly over the wreckage and move on.

For the man who wrote Character is Destiny, questions like why he went from wanting Joe Lieberman (a pro-choice, pro-gay rights rogue Democrat who got an "F" on his NRA report card) to picking Palin (a rifle-wielding, pray-out-the-gay, pro-life-in-cases-of-rape-and-incest conservative's conservative) within a matter of days may weigh more heavily after November.

Maybe that's what he means when he says he's now the candidate of change; that those days of watching the other guys have all the fun are gone and that having failed to beat them, he's now joined them.