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And If His Contrition about Keating Is Fake, then So Is His Sincerity about Reform

/in /by

Aravosis listens to tedious McCain conference calls so you don’t have to.

Then McCain’s lawyer dropped the real bomb.

The Keating Five Investigation was "a political smear job on John [McCain]." WTF? He called Howell Heflin, who led the hearings, a "stooge" of the Democratic machine out to get poor, innocent John McCain.

This opens up the entire question of McCain’s supposed contrition. If McCain thinks he did nothing wrong, and that it was wrong for the Senate to scold him for his actions during the Keating Five Scandal, then he isn’t contrite at all, he isn’t sorry at all. He’s learned nothing. You can’t turn a new leaf when you don’t think you did anything wrong. [my emphasis]

I’d go further. As the NRO helpfully reminds us this morning (inconveniently for them, they didn’t get the memo about this latest McCain flip-flop until it was too late), McCain’s entire claim to be since about his mavericky reformer personality stems from his contrition about his mistakes with Keating.

 …his involvement in the scandal is what drove McCain to become such a relentless pain-in-the-tuchus about campaign finance reform, and arguably blind to First Amendment objections. Put aside the fact that McCain sees that his association with Keating was a mistake,…

I guess that whole maverick reform business was just a temporary, politically convenient stunt, then, if the underlying contrition was just an act. 

Debate Prep

/in /by

Let’s review the events of the last week or so for the McCain team. On Thursday, McCain precipitously withdrew from MI–the MI GOP seemed to have no warning, and his offices were already packing up and closing on Saturday. McCain then spent the weekend sequestered with his advisors in Sedona (though he did take a break on Saturday for a Happy Meal). He’s got an event in NM today (a state where Obama leads polling by greater margins than he does in MI), but the weekend retreat was notable for the way it served not just as time to retool the campaign (and, desperately, to try to count to 270) but also to prep for the debate on Tuesday. Indeed, the campaign seems to be tying their new campaign roll-out to Tuesday’s debate.

Asked at a Colorado town hall, "When are you going to take the gloves off?" the candidate grinned and replied, "How about Tuesday night?"

[snip]

A senior aide said the campaign will wait until after Tuesday’s debate to decide how and when to release new commercials, adding that McCain and his surrogates will continue to cast Obama as a big spender, a high taxer and someone who talks about working across the aisle but doesn’t deliver.

Now, that’s not entirely true–that the campaign would wait until Tuesday to roll out its new recycled smears. Sarah Palin’s been accusing Obama of palling around with terrorists since Saturday.

But it does set up a remarkable dynamic for tomorrow’s debate. After losing two debates in a row, the McCain team seems to believe it can use the next debate as an opportunity relaunch its entire campaign.

Obviously, this is the debate format McCain prefers.

Second presidential debate: all topics in town meeting format, moderated by Tom Brokaw
Tuesday, October 7, Belmont University, Nashville, TN

-Two-minute answers, followed by one-minute discussion for each question.

Or should I say preferred. McCain won New Hampshire by doing about a million town halls; and he used them a lot early in the summer. But around mid-summer (when Steve Schmidt took over the campaign, I think), McCain started vetting the attendees of these town halls. And as the WSJ points out, he has really cut back the number of town halls he is doing. In other words, McCain used to like the unscripted format of town halls, but has grown sour on them.

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