The first thing I'd like to highlight is a series of--unsurprisingly--well-written and interesting articles from The New Yorker. The first one, an examination of Senator McCain's campaign actually made me feel for the man, something that, after this increasingly dirty campaign, I thought I wouldn't ever need do again. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't support the man, but it was only a few years ago that I truly believed--as did many others--that John McCain was an honorable politician. I held him up as the Republican version of Sens. Paul Wellstone and Russ Feingold. That is, I believed him to be someone who treated politics with honor and wasn't afraid to speak his mind.
That image, of course, was torn asunder after his erratic and politically Pentecostal campaign.
I had a chat with my friend Lucas, and he told me (I'm paraphrasing, of course) if you work on a camapign, no matter what you do or what kind of person you are, you're always going hate the other side. I believe that. Elections are warping things. You spend months fighting against someone else for the both the shape of a country and your own personal identity and ambitions.
It is, of course, hard for me to think now of John McCain as anything else besides some kind of dishonorable and manipulative (in the pejorative sense) politician. But this New Yorker article helped me see that (1) John McCain is a real person and (2) he might have actually have gone into this election with good intentions.
David Grann writes on the ill-fated run in 2000 and the Bush camp's despicable smear attacks:
Within days, sordid attacks began to appear: flyers on car windows claiming that McCain, who had adopted an orphan from Bangladesh, actually had fathered a black child; recorded phone messages, or robo-calls, spreading rumors that McCain’s wife, Cindy, who had once been addicted to prescription painkillers, was a junkie; and lies, propagated by an obscure group of Vietnam veterans, suggesting that McCain had become a traitor while serving in Vietnam.
McCain’s response was decisive: he pulled from television his negative advertisements, and announced to supporters, “If we don’t prevail, my friends, we know that we have taken the honorable way.” On the evening of the primary, McCain and his family watched the returns in a hotel suite in Charleston. As the polls came in, showing that he had lost by more than ten points, Cindy wept. “How could they believe all that about you?” she said of the public.
McCain, after embracing his wife and children, headed down to a ballroom to deliver his concession speech. “I will not take the low road to the highest office in this land,” he said. “I want the Presidency in the best way—not the worst way. The American people deserve to be treated with respect by those who seek to lead the nation. And I promise you: you will have my respect until my last day on earth. The greatest blessing of my life was to have been born an American, and I will never . . . dishonor the nation I love or myself by letting ambition overcome principle. Never. Never. Never.”
Of course, it wasn't long that the roles were reversed, and McCain was the one engaging in these despicable and scurrilous attacks. Grann continues:
According to one of McCain’s longtime friends, the endorsement of Obama by General Colin Powell was “especially painful,” as there was no one whom McCain “admired more.” Equally devastating were criticisms made by John Lewis, the civil-rights leader and Democratic congressman from Georgia, whom McCain had idolized. In the 2004 book “Why Courage Matters,” which McCain wrote with his aide Mark Salter, a chapter was devoted to Lewis’s march against racism in Selma, Alabama, during which he was beaten nearly to death. Because of the actions of Lewis and his colleagues, McCain wrote, many Americans were “ashamed that they had not loved their country as much as the marchers; that they had not the courage to march into the force of such injustice.” McCain also praised Lewis for decrying incendiary black leaders, such as Louis Farrakhan, as “bigots.” McCain concluded, “I’ve seen courage in action on many occasions. I can’t say I’ve seen anyone possess more of it, and use it for any better purpose and to any greater effect, than John Lewis.” A month before the election, Lewis released a blistering statement accusing McCain and Palin of “sowing the seeds of hatred and division.” Though McCain publicly called the accusations “shocking and beyond the pale,” a campaign aide told me that when McCain first heard Lewis’s remarks he sat in silence inside the campaign’s official bus.
The image of John McCain, after hearing someone whom he respects saying straight up that his campaign was "sowing the seeds of hatred and division" on a bus in silence, clearly thinking over his campaign is almost heartbreaking. Especially in light of the fact that McCain actually has awknoledged in the past when he engages in cynical campaigns:
After the South Carolina primary, he delivered a speech on the one aspect of his campaign that he saw as a cynical tactic: his defense of the Confederate flag as a local “symbol of heritage.” He said, “I feared that if I answered honestly I could not win the South Carolina primary. So I chose to compromise my principles. I broke my promise to always tell the truth. . . . I do not intend for this apology to help me evade criticism for my failure. I will be criticized by all sides for my late act of contrition. I accept it, all of it. I deserve it. Honesty is easy after the fact, when my own interests are no longer involved. I don’t seek absolution. Like anyone else, I can only try to resist future temptations to abandon principle for expediency, and hope that in the end my character is judged from the totality of my life, and not by its flaws alone.”
Intrigued? Go, read.
The next New Yorker article I found pretty amazing was this one on Obama's race. I would quote it or say something intelligent about it, but it's a lot to chew on, and I'm still digesting it myself.
Go, read.
The last New Yorker article I'd send you to is this one on Obama's campaign strategy. It's interesting to see just how the "No Drama Obama" campaign was run. No quotes here either.
Just go, read.
I'd also like to point you in the direction of this article in The New York Times on the Republican Party in the south. I know this has been bantied around a lot lately, but I think there's some truth to it. The Republican Party has sequestered themselves to an old and waning political coalition (white, middle-class men) who primarily live in one waning geographic area (The South). With Obama's gains in the Mountain West and the slow purpling of high-tech and high-education areas of some southern states (Northern Virginia, the Reaserch Triangle in the South Carolia, I think), you're going to see an increasing reliance of the GOP on certain areas of the deep south and Appalacia. Take a look at this map from The Times. It's pretty striking.
It's important to note that the main reason for the red shift in Arizona is probably McCain's presence on the ticket, not an actual conservative shift in the state. If anything, McCain, a senate figure for 800 years, should have done better in his home state.
Go, read.
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