The conventional wisdom is that voters are still getting to know Barack Obama. John McCain is a known quantity, who’s been part of the political establishment for more than a quarter-century, but Obama is still fairly new to the political stage. There may be a discomfort/unfamiliarity factor for Obama to overcome.
The NYT’s Bob Herbert makes a very compelling case today that Americans may not know Obama’s rival as well as they think they do.
[W]hat we’ve learned over the years is that Mr. McCain is one of those guys who never has to pay much of a price for his missteps and foul-ups and bad behavior. Can you imagine the firestorm of outrage and criticism that would have descended on Senator Obama if he had made the kind of factual mistakes that John McCain has repeatedly made in this campaign?
(Or if Senator Obama had had the temerity to even remotely suggest that John McCain would consider being disloyal to his country for political reasons?)
We have a monumental double standard here. Mr. McCain has had trouble in his public comments distinguishing Sunnis from Shiites and had to be corrected in one stunningly embarrassing moment by his good friend Joe Lieberman. He has referred to a Iraq-Pakistan border when the two countries do not share a border.
He declared on CBS that Iraq was the first major conflict after 9/11, apparently forgetting — at least for the moment — about the war in Afghanistan. In that same interview, he credited the so-called surge of U.S. forces in Iraq with bringing about the Anbar Awakening, a movement in which thousands of Sunnis turned on insurgents. He was wrong. The awakening preceded the surge.
More important than these endless gaffes are matters that give us glimpses of the fundamental makeup of the man.
It’s one of the reasons I, over the last several months, started compiling lists of McCain’s policy reversals and areas of confusion. The perception is that McCain is a competent “maverick” who values consistency and knows a lot about foreign policy. The reality, if one bothers to take a look, is that the conventional wisdom about McCain is almost entirely backwards.
Or, as Herbert put it, “How much do voters really know about John McCain?”
Looking at the evidence, we see an ill-tempered curmudgeon who shifts with the political winds, is easily confused, and abandons principles whenever it suits his purposes.
Herbert emphasized the fact that McCain is just an angry man.
If the McCain gaffes seem endless, so do the tales about his angry, profanity-laced eruptions. Senator Thad Cochran, a Mississippi Republican, said of Mr. McCain: “The thought of his being president sends a cold chill down my spine.”
Senator Pete Domenici, a New Mexico Republican, told Newsweek in 2000: “I decided I didn’t want this guy anywhere near a trigger.” […]
My guess is that most voters don’t see John McCain as an angry candidate, despite several very public lapses. The mythical John McCain is an affable, straight-talking, moderately conservative war hero who is an expert on foreign policy.
Barack Obama is not the only candidate the voters need to know more about.
We talked the other day about the election turning into a referendum on Obama. Republicans no doubt hope so, because if it’s a referendum on McCain, the results probably wouldn’t be close.