Just think that a couple weeks ago the entire campaign was engulfed by scrutiny of Obama’s suggestion that he might be “refining” his plan for a 16 month timetable for withdrawal — a twitter, if that, on the seismograph of campaign course corrections. Now consider that over the span of a few weeks Sen. McCain has gone from predicting a decades long presence of American troops in Iraq and attacking any discussion of timetables for withdrawal to endorsing Maliki’s push for a 16 month timetable and tying himself in knots trying to explain why what Maliki’s endorsing is any different from Obama’s.
When confronted with Maliki’s own words saying that he supports what Obama supports, McCain now falls back on that last redoubt of philanderers, asking the American people, “Who you gonna believe? Me or your lyin’ eyes?”
For all the seismic shifts that have taken place over the last two weeks, we need to recognize that McCain has now abandoned virtually everything he’s been campaigning on for the last year. There’s really no more eloquent confirmation of that reality than the fact that McCain now appears determined to base his campaign on charges that Obama is unpatriotic and despises American soldiers.
There’s also the media perplexing trend of McCain saying one thing and his advisors then saying he didn’t mean that, then the McCain “campaign” (in all of it’s anonymity) saying the advisor doesn’t speak for him, then McCain (looky here, 2nd bite) then confirms or denies or “re-clarifies” changing his position further, the advisor is then demoted and/or “released” only to be relabeled as a trusted informal advisor who then confirms the “clarified” position thus proving everyone has always been on the same page. Now when I said perplexing I meant that by pointing out that the quandary for the media is – now that all this has happened – whether to frame the events in terms of McCains “Maverickyness”, or, his “Straight Shooterificness”.
