From the ArcaMax Publishing, Politics Newsletter:
http://www.arcamax.com/news/politics/s-367778-837677
In politics, we're having a Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr kind of year.
It was Karr, a French writer, who coined the phrase plus ca change,
plus c'est la meme chose which means, as Barack Obama has shown,
that the more things change, the more they stay the same. N'est ce
pas?
Oui. And the same principle holds for John McCain. Like Obama,
he was going to give us change, and in a sense, he has. He has
abandoned his maverick persona of old and moved to assure the GOP that
on most matters, he is devoutly orthodox. This is change, all right,
but for most voters, who hanker for something other than what they've
had for the last eight years, this is not much change at all.
We shall return to McCain in a moment. First, Obama. The Democratic
nominee reversed himself on the public funding of presidential
campaigns and decided that he would, after all, raise the money
himself. The reason for this reversal is that Obama is going to raise
much more money on his own than the $84 million the government is
prepared to give him. This is the kind of math even I can understand
and I forgive Obama for valuing victory over consistency.
But what is far less forgivable is the socialist realism language he
used to rationalize his decision. He couched his selfishness as the
essence of civic duty. He explained that he had to adapt to an
exigency that was there all along but somehow he had never foreseen
when he pledged to accept public financing: to respond to those slimy
campaign committees of the type that Swift-boated poor John Kerry.
"This is our moment, and our country is depending on us," he said. "So
join me, and declare your independence from this broken system and
let's build the first general election campaign that's truly funded by
the American people" -- those people being, as it happened, his very
own contributors.
In some recent magazine articles, I and certain of my colleagues have
been accused of being soft on McCain, forgiving him his flips, his
flops and his mostly conservative ideology. I do not plead guilty to
this charge because over the years, the man's imperfections have not
escaped my keen eye. But, for the record, let's recapitulate: McCain
has either reversed himself or significantly amended his positions on
immigration, tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign spending (as it
applies to use of his wife's corporate airplane) and, most recently,
offshore drilling. In the more distant past, he has denounced then
embraced certain ministers of medieval views and changed his mind
about the Confederate flag which flies in South Carolina only, I
suspect, to provide Republican candidates with a chance to chose
tradition over common decency. There, I've said it all.
But here is the difference between McCain and Obama -- and Obama had
better pay attention. McCain is a known commodity. It's not just that
he's been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to
his Republican base. It's also -- and more importantly -- that we know
his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is
only so far he will go and then his pride or his sense of honor takes
over. This -- not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the
Straight Talk Express -- is what commends him to so many journalists.
Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in
some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don't know what they are.
Nothing so far in his life approaches McCain's decision to refuse
repatriation as a POW so as to deny his jailors a propaganda coup. In
fact, there is scant evidence the Illinois senator takes positions
that challenge his base or otherwise threaten him politically. That's
why his reversal on campaign financing and transparently false
justification of it matters more than similar acts by McCain.
A presidential race is only incidentally about issues. It's really
about likability and character. Obama is, to paraphrase what he said
about Hillary Clinton, more than " likable enough" -- in fact, so much
so, that he is the most charismatic presidential candidate I've seen
since Robert F. Kennedy. But the character question hangs -- not
because of any evidence to the contrary and not in any moral sense,
either -- but because he is still young and lacks the job references
McCain picked up in a Vietnamese prison. McCain has a bottom line.
Obama just moved his.
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Richard Cohen's e-mail address is cohenr@washpost.com