The Downside of Experience
Of the three remaining presidential hopefuls, Barack Obama is generally considered to be the least experienced. In at least one way that is empirically true; he is fourteen years younger than Hillary Clinton and a whopping twenty-five years younger than John McCain. In terms of legislative experience he and Clinton can each make a case for “most experienced”, she’s been in the Senate longer, but he was in the Illinois Legislature before she was in the Senate so his total time as a legislator exceeds hers. Their combined years as legislators don’t even come close to equaling those of McCain though, and that’s probably a good thing for them and a bad thing for him.
John McCain was first elected to the House in 1982 and four year later he got himself into the Senate, where he has been ever since. In 1982 Hillary Clinton was the wife of an obscure Arkansas governor who had just gotten back into office after a two year exile and Barack Obama was a senior in college. In other words, McCain has been in Congress for pretty much the entirety of Barack Obama’s adult life.
During that time, McCain, like all legislators, has cast a lot of votes and has had a lot of people (constituents, donors, lobbyists, etc) vying for his attention and his consideration. Anyone, sinner or saint, who comes into contact with that many people is going to have significant number of untold or rarely remembered stories floating around. The - ahem - bombshell article in the New York Times on Thursday is a perfect example of that.
The piece has been criticized for basically being a rehash of previously known material used to pad an allegation of marital infidelity that relies only on anonymous quotes. That may be true, but whether or not the attention grabbing sexual component has any merit or not the rather mundane headline, “For McCain, Self-Confidence on Ethics Poses Its Own Risk” quickly became a self fulfilling prophecy. McCain’s rebuttal to the Times piece contained statements so provably false that it took less than forty-eight hours for a definitive contradiction to come out.
Writing in Newsweek (via TPM) on Friday, Michael Isikoff points out that back in 2002 McCain admitted, under oath, to writing a letter to the FCC on behalf of Paxson Communications in 1999; an action he specifically denied this week in his response to the story in the Times. Yesterday came the full write-up of the story in the Washington Post, complete with quotes from Mr. Paxson himself contradicting McCain. The eighth paragraph contains this shame free quote from McCain super-lawyer Robert Bennett, “We understood that he [McCain] did not speak directly with him [Paxson]. Now it appears he did speak to him. What is the difference?”
“What is the difference?” indeed. In the grand scheme of things it’s a pretty harmless lie and I, for one, wouldn’t want to live in a country where politicians running for office couldn’t lie to the press and the public. But it illustrates a bigger problem for McCain and his supporters, one that will continue all the way through November. McCain honestly sees himself as an incorruptible crusader for truth, justice and the American way. In reality he’s just a Senator who isn’t in lockstep with his party and likes to see himself on television. Whenever that inconvenient truth is raised he seems genuinely offended and Heaven forefend that anyone might think him capable of such low behavior; as a result the political bullshit he puts out is of lower quality than we have a right to expect from the nominee of a major party.
His vaunted crossover appeal is based on the notion that he’s some kind of extraordinary Senator, a (forgive me) maverick. The truth is that even if McCain is less sullied by the ugly side of politics than your run of the mill multi-term Senator, he is no white knight. Yet one of the foundations of his campaign is the idea of his incorruptibility and honesty. For a man who’s been in Congress for a quarter of a century that might not be a good strategy.
