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John McCain the Media Maverick
June 12th, 2008
I heard commentary this week that makes a good argument that McCain didn’t become a campaign finance reformer out of any principle; but simply to try and rehabilitate his reputation after his participation in the Keating 5 scandal; where he used his position as a Senator to lean on the banking regulators on behalf of a lobbyist contributor.
This hypothesis is buttressed by two things: John McCains own expressed feeling that the Keating 5 scandal was the worst thing that ever happened to him, even over the 5 years he spent in the Hanoi Hilton. The second thing is the fact that McCain’s current campaign is both littered with lobbyist and he is violating the very campaign finance reform that he passed and that bears his name.
You can also read: McCain Campaign Staffed By Telecom Immunity Lobbyists
The Press Corps’ Unshakeable Crush on McCain
Some straight talk about the media’s favorite ‘maverick’
By Peter Hart
If you pay even passing attention to national politics, you know that presumptive GOP presidential candidate John McCain is a maverick who bucks his own party’s line and never wavers in his political beliefs. At least, that’s what the corporate media say-reality tells a very different story.
A candidate could only get away with such an elaborate and long-running con with the media as willing accomplices. “The press loves McCain,” explained NBC host Chris Matthews (9/10/06). “We’re his base.”
For much of the press, the early stages of the 2008 presidential campaign were a chance to fall in love all over again. “Those of us on the Straight Talk Express eight years ago got a breathtaking journalistic opportunity: to be inside the lively mind and heart of a leading contender for president,” Newsweek’s Howard Fineman recalled (3/3/08). “McCain was as joyously combative as Popeye and as earnestly confessional as Oprah.”
Fineman was actually restrained when compared to some of the coverage from eight years prior. “I know it shouldn’t be happening, but it is,” wrote Charles Lane in the New Republic (10/18/99). “I’m falling for John McCain.” Lane’s confession was in turn surpassed in awkwardness by another writer in the same magazine: Michael Lewis (9/30/96) declared that his feelings for McCain were like “the war that must occur inside a 14-year-old boy who discovers he is more sexually attracted to boys than to girls.”
The maverick is born
The origin of the McCain the Maverick storyline is hard to pin down, but it gained a serious boost after CBS’s 60 Minutes delivered a mostly fawning segment headlined “The Maverick From Arizona” (10/12/97) that celebrated his quest to reform the campaign finance system. CBS interviewed several of McCain’s harshest home-state critics, but that tape was left on the cutting room floor (New Republic, 5/24/99). And CBS’s allegedly tough-as-nails correspondent Mike Wallace was clearly enamored with McCain, going so far as to say that he was considering joining his campaign: “I’m thinking I may quit my job if he gets the nomination,” Wallace declared (Washington Post, 6/8/98).
It’s hard to overstate how vital this “maverick” meme is to media coverage of McCain.
“McCain is nothing if not a maverick,” declared U.S. News & World Report (4/7/08), while CBS host Bob Schieffer (7/15/07) called him the “most famous maverick of the last half of the 20th century.”
“McCain is nothing if not a maverick,” declared U.S. News & World Report (4/7/08), while CBS host Bob Schieffer (7/15/07) called him the “most famous maverick of the last half of the 20th century.”…
The real record
McCain, of course, is actually quite conservative, with a 9 percent lifetime rating from Americans for Democratic Action, a liberal group that rates lawmakers’ voting records. But what’s most fascinating—and rarely discussed in the press—is not just that McCain is so conservative, but that, for a brief time, McCain’s voting record did line up with the media myth—before McCain reverted back to form.
New Republic writer Jonathan Chait produced one of the most detailed accounts of McCain’s ideological meanderings
in the magazine’s February 27, 2008 issue. Chait, who was once an admirer, argued that the media storyline “gets McCain almost totally backward. He has diverged wildly and repeatedly from conservative orthodoxy, but he has also reinvented himself so completely that it has become nearly impossible to figure out what he really believes.”
Chait went on to argue that “McCain’s ideological transformation is unusual for two reasons: First, he has moved across the political spectrum not once—like Al Smith or Mitt Romney—but twice. And, second, he refuses to acknowledge his change.”
Chait pointed out that in Bush’s first term, McCain performed almost exactly like the media’s version of himself—voting against the Bush tax cuts, co-sponsoring a patients’ bill of rights and taking on his party over emissions standards and climate change. By Bush’s second term, however, McCain was more of a team player, sticking with the party on an estate-tax repeal and aligning with Bush’s position on immigration “reform.”
In other words, McCain wasn’t much of a maverick when the media affixed that label to him. He became one very briefly, and then returned more or less back to where he started.
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Yobachi Boswell is creator and publisher of BlackPerspecitve.net. I’m a writer, activist and political watcher based in Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve also been know to do some spoken word and MCing in my day.
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McCain is a piece of work for sure.
On MSNBC there was a discussion this evening on how his press reps have tried to tell the media how to describe his political platform. Some press people go with it and others are beginning to feel that he is trying to intimidate them.
One thing for sure, this is not the individual who should be leading the nation.
McCain is an idiot who shouldn’t be leading anything. He has no plans for not a one issue, no vision, and no ideal of what’s up from what’s down.
It’s amazing how easy it is for the media to create a distorted reality. McSame has shown his true colors in this run for the White House. He’s saying whatever he thinks he needs to say to get elected. This Clinton Strategy (and stealing Obama’s website themes) is very telling.
It’s pathetic. He’s another Bob Dole. New new ideals, no vision, just elect me becaue I’m really old and I’ve been around a long time.
The only thing maverick about him now, is the level of flip flopping he engages in.