[I'll give it to you straight-I'm not going to talk about "straight talk" in this review. I can't possibly deal with everything they cover! So enjoy your 1000 words, above.]
A Three-Fold Foundation
Brock and Waldman argue that the media's affection for McCain has a three-fold foundation: Vietnam, campaign finance reform, and his style in dealing with them. Although these seem like three distinct, even heterogeneous matters, in fact they function together as one, creating an image of McCain as the antithesis of everything the press dislikes, even despises in other politicians:
They view politicians as craven; McCain's undeniable courage in Vietnam casts him as the bravest of politicians, whether such bravery is in evidence at a particular moment or not. They view politicians as shameless supplicants to their contributors; McCain's advocacy of campaign finance reform makes him in their eyes the premier "reformer" in American politics (despite the weaknesses of the legislation he advocates and his spotty record on reform). They view politicians as cynically manipulative, fundamentally artificial, and endlessly hostile when it comes to dealing with journalist; McCain's attentive courting makes him "genuine" and authentic in a way that no other politician can seem to achieve.
The authors aptly invoke the image of a "concave mirror" that "takes all they dislike about politicians and inverts it to construct the figure of John McCain. This becomes particularly clear at various points, none moreso than somewhat late in the book, when they describe the rationalization of McCain's pronounced pandering to Jerry Fallwell and other hard right figures while re- and pre-positioning himself for the 2008 election. While it became far too pronounced to be ignored, the press displayed considerable ingenuity in rationalizing it-or at least one might think so before reading the earlier chapters of Free Ride. Yet, by the time the story gets that far, it's clear how such rationalizations (and the assumptions underlying them) have become so deeply internalized that far from being ingenious, they are, indeed, much more like the routine and habitual actions of the aforementioned "obedient service animals."
Thus, moves that would lead the press to denounce any other politician for shameless, spineless kowtowing were lamented as cruel necessity, which journalists openly imagined must be causing McCain considerable distress. His definitive turn to the right was taken as a necessary-even shrewd!-concession to political reality, while the media remained utterly oblivious to its own role in creating the earlier image of McCain as significantly more moderate than he actually was-an image that was also politically necessary, albeit for different reasons.
John "POW" McCain
McCain's POW experience is construed as defining his very identity, the first, last and only word that need be said about his "character." The authors note:
Other politicians find features of their biographies mentioned when they are relevant to the story at hand.... But McCain's POW experience is different. Journalists do not hesitate to mention it even when it has absolutely nothing to do with the story; instead, it is often tossed into stories by reporters almost in an offhand way, as though it were necessary to constantly remind readers of his trials.... There have been literally hundreds of articles that include a line on the order of "McCain, who spent five and a half years as a prisoner of war...," as though that were his middle name.
John "POW" McCain. Yeah, that's the ticket!
The fact that the press constantly reminds us of McCain's POW past is augmented by two significant facts-first, that it frequently repeats McCains claim that he doesn't like to talk about, and second, that this is deeply disingenuous. Not only does McCain not need to talk about it much, since it's far more effective to have the press do it for him, but McCain in fact does lie to talk about it, or at least selective invoke it when it serves his purposes.
When he first ran for Congress as a double carpetbagger (first moving to Arizona, then moving again to get inside the unexpected target district), for example, the authors note:
The key moment of his first congressional race came in a debate when McCain responded to an accusation of carpetbagging by saying, "As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived longest in my life was Hanoi."
The authors also note the key role that the POW experience played in his 2000 campaign, including his 1999 memoir of his wartime experience, Faith of My Fathers.
Mr. Clean
Why was campaign finance reform so important? (Aside from erasing all memory of the Keating Five Scandal, that is!)
The answer is that the issue of campaign finance reform, and the McCain Feingold bill in particular, became a vessel into which the press could p[our all of its disgust with the practice of politics. The details of the bill, and whether it would truly be effective in curbing the influence of special interest, ended up being almost beside the point. The issue gave the press the opportunity to write about all the terrible things it sees on Capitol Hill: the blatant buying of influence, the shameful groveling for campaign contributions, the symbiotic relationship between those who hold power and those who want the powerful to bestow gifts upon them.
As campaign finance reform's champion, McCain became a symbol of what could be right in politics, the "independent" free of influence by moneyed elites, the "reformer" out to clean up the system, a man motivated by conviction and nothing else, as pure as the driven snow.
The authors note numerous problems with this. To begin with, McCain Feingold actually didn't get rid of the influence of money-that influence just got redirected through 527s. Nor has McCain made any follow-up effort for more comprehensive reform-he does not, for example, support public financing of federal elections, despite the promising state-level record of clean money campaigns in Maine and elsewhere.
What's more, were it not for the unexpected emergence of 527s, the overall impact of McCain Feingold would have been significantly more damaging to the Democratic Party, which was more dependent on soft money, especially from unions. Indeed, the authors cite an article in the Atlantic Monthly in which Republican election lawyers refer to it as "the Democratic Party suicide bill." And, adding insult to injury-no make that "adding injury to injury"- McCain accepted an amendment that doubled the individual donor hard money limit from $1,000 to $2,000-a move that clearly favored Republicans.
None of that really mattered, of course, since none of that touched on the real reasons the press cared about the story:
In sum, McCain's great triumph of maverick rebellion and bipartisanship: 1) damaged the Democratic Party by eliminating the on fund-raising area, soft money, in which they had an advantage over Republicans; 2) allowed wealthy donors, most of whom are Republicans, to give more money to Republican candidates; and 3) allowed the total amount of special interest money pouring into political campaigns to increase, not decrease.
Yet these facts have done nothing to diminish John McCain's place as the avatar of political reform. Whenever a reform of any sort is propose, reporters rush to find out what John McCain thinks, and news stories about government waste and port are inevitable peppered with the obligatory condemnatory McCain quote, so generic as to make one wonder whether the reporter even bothered to speak to the senator.
Daddy Cool
The explanation of McCain's wooing of the press is the most subtle of the three foundations, on the one hand because of its roots in the development of modern campaign coverage, and on the other because of McCain's subtlety compared to other politicians. The authors cite three books as shaping the media's conception of how to cover presidential campaigns: The Making of the President 1960, by Theodore White, The Presidential Character by James David Barber, and The Selling of the President by Joe McGinniss. "While White's book taught journalists how they should report a campaign, White's book taught journalists how they should report a campaign, Barber and McGinniss taught them what perspective they should take."
A dominant result of this combination is that it has driven politicians into a defensive, risk-avoidance mode, and the more politicians go into this mode, the more journalists seek to break through their defenses, creating a vicious cycle. McCain breaks out of this vicious cycle by giving reporters exactly what they want-all the access they could ask for, blunt, quotable quotes, and the appearance of genuine camaraderie. And the press just eats it up.
The authors explain it with reference to a quote they use at the beginning of Chapter One. It's a telling passage from the 1992 movie Singles:
Steve: My friend and I have this argument, and here it is. He says when you're at a place like this, you can't just be yourself, you need an act. So anyway, I saw you standing there, so I thought, A, I could just leave you alone,; B, I could come up with an act; or C, I could just be myself. I chose C. What do you think?
Linda: I think that A, you have an act, and that B, not having an act is your act.
In contrast, they note:
Like the character in Singles we quoted at the beginning of this chapter, McCain has an act, and not having an act is his act. But unlike the savvy woman in the film who sees through it, reporters have fallen for it hard.
Naturally, this no-act act pays endless dividends, as it allows almost total freedom of action. It's why, for example, McCain can get away with virtually anything-racist comments, vicious jokes, whatever. All he has to do is say, "Ooops! Sorry!" and, having apologized, it's now bad form to keep harping on it. Although it happened too recently for the book to cover, the way in which McCain evaded any real flak for his long-courted Hagee endorsement was a classic example of this. Because he has no act, and his character has already been established, sealed away behind the POW door, when he does something atrocious, and then apologizes "guilelessly" how can they not forgive him? And how can they not turn on anyone else who doesn't forgive him?
The Self-Branding "Maverick"
It's remarkable that the "maverick" label virtually came out of nowhere. There was nothing particularly maverick-like that anyone observed about McCain in his two House terms. He likes to point to a 1983 vote against deploying Marines to Lebanon, but he was just one of 27 House Republicans who voted against, while more than enough Democrats voted in favor, so it was nowhere near a close vote. The earliest association between McCain and the "maverick" label appears to be a 1989 quote from the head of the American Conservative Union, saying, "He's a good conservative, but somewhat of a maverick," but the article it appears in offers no explanation of why.
It took another half decade for the label to emerge, though the basis in fact is difficult to sustain. He did vote for a Democratic campaign finance reform bill in 1992-but a Bush veto made the vote meaningless. The next year, with a Clinton signature assured, the Clinton Administration "was told by McCain and his fellow 'renegades' that they would support a Republican filibuster of the legislation." Some maverick!
He did introduce a failed bill to give the FDA some regulatory powers over tobacco, and the authors mention a few other signs of failure to march lockstep-but, as they later stress-none of these "maverick" positions were particularly unpopular with the people or the press. They were more indicative of serving two masters than serving none.
Still, the "maverick" label did not begin to explode until the run-up to the 2000 presidential campaign. After citing a number of stories that featured this attribution, the authors note:
What's noteworthy about these stories is that they referred to McCain as a maverick without providing a single example or citation to explain exactly what made him so-not even bothering to mention campaign finance reform or tobacco. McCain's maverick standing was simply noted, with the assumption that readers would know what the commentator was talking about.
Throughout 1999, CNN would air 37 stories that featured McCain as a maverick-far ahead of Fox's nine, in second place. And as cable went, so went the media.
The Mythical Moderate
If the "maverick" brand can be hard to get a handle on-who's to say what it means, ultimately?-the same cannot be said about another McCain moniker, "the moderate." There are all sorts of people out there who judge where politicians stand, and none of them shows John McCain to be a moderate, unlike fellow Republican Senators Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Lincoln Chafee. They have some neat little charts in the book to make all this obvious, even to a two-year old. But due to circumstances beyond my control, you're just going to have to buy the book to see them!
And-woooops! What do you know? They even have party unity scores from Congressional Quarterly, so I'll have to take back what I said about getting a handle on the "maverick" brand!
By now, not being a corporate media journalist, two things should be obvious: (1) McCain is not a moderate, and (2) the corporate media will never realize this, at least not by being shown reality-based evidence, like the charts above.
So what to do? The book has no easy answers. But it has a penetrating analysis-which I've only partly captured the highlights of. And that analysis is as valuable for pointing out blind alleys as it is for indicating promising directions, if not moreso. By raising the analysis of McCain's interactions with the media to a higher plane than ever before, Free Ride provides a kind of boot camp for strategic thinking about the campaign ahead.
And it couldn't have come at a better time. |
