McCain's Retreat

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, in the oped Running From Reality, examines John McCain's retreat from reality as he recasts himself as the maverick reformer and outsider, despite supporting the Bush Administration 90% of the time:

If there was one pre-eminent characteristic of the Republican convention this week, it was the quality of deception. Words completely lost their meaning. Reality was turned upside down.

From the faux populist gibberish mouthed by speaker after speaker, you would never have known that the Republicans have been in power over the past several years and used that titanic power to lead the country to its present sorry state.

In his acceptance speech on Thursday night, Senator John McCain did his best Sam Cooke imitation (“A Change is Gonna Come”) and vowed to put the country “back on the road to prosperity and peace.”

Mr. McCain spoke at the end of a day in which stock market indexes plunged. The next morning the Labor Department gave us the grim news that another 84,000 jobs had been lost in August, and that the official unemployment rate had climbed to 6.1 percent — the highest in five years.

Playing the Race Card

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, on the McCain campaign's charges of Obama playing the race card, writes, "it’s frustrating to watch John McCain calling out Barack Obama on race. Senator Obama has spoken more honestly and thoughtfully about race than any other politician in many years. Senator McCain is the head of a party that has viciously exploited race for political gain for decades." Indeed, the Republican Party has come to power by its cynical use of race since the days of Richard Milhous Nixon's Southern Strategy. Apparently old habits are difficult to abandon.

McCain: The Man and the Myth

New York Times columnist Bob Herbert raises an interesting question: Who is the real John McCain? Contrary to the conventional wisdom which says that mainstream media has given Barack Obama a free ride, a strong case can be made that McCain is the recipient of media favoritism, having glossed over McCain the man in favor of McCain the myth. Just this week, McCain accused Obama of putting personal ambition ahead of the national security interests of the United States and, in what can only be described as risible absurdity, blamed Barack Obama for Americans having to pay more than $4 a gallon for gasoline. Not exactly behavior one would associate with McCain the mythical figure.