Biden, stealing a line from Sen. Bob Casey, said "You can't call yourself a maverick when all you've been is a sidekick."
I, like many people, have never known the Maverick McCain, the one that Palin likes to talk about. We just look at her bemused, kind of the way Obama looked at McCain last night. For those of us who never knew, all we see is a man out of control, trying to tear down Obama by innuendos and exploiting people's racial prejudices. McCain has signed on to the year-long underground wingnut attacks on Obama, that have tried to push Obama as a secret Muslim terrorist.
Maureen Dowd skips the snark and tells of McCain's descent:
NYT: But if McCain loses, he will have contributed to his own downfall by failing to live up to his personal standard of honor.
John McCain has long been torn between wanting to succeed and serving a higher cause. Right now, the drive to succeed is trumping any loftier aspirations. He cynically picked a running mate with less care than theater directors give to picking a leading actor’s understudy. And he has been running a seamy campaign originally designed by the bad seed of conservative politics, Lee Atwater.
It was adapted in 2000 in Atwater’s home state of South Carolina by Atwater acolytes in W.’s camp to harpoon McCain with rumors that he had fathered out of wedlock a black baby (as opposed to adopting a Bangladeshi infant girl in wedlock). Sulfurous Atwater-style rumor-mongering by Bush supporters — that McCain had come home from a Hanoi tiger cage with snakes in his head — aimed to stop him during that primary after he had zoomed in New Hampshire.
Atwater relished teaching rich, white Republicans to feign a connection to the common man so they could get in office and economically undermine the common man. In the 1988 campaign, the Machiavellian ran to help George Bush Sr. defeat Michael Dukakis with this unholy quintet of charges:
The Democrat was a ’60s-style liberal who would raise taxes and take away guns. He was weak and would not protect the country militarily. He was a member of the elite “Harvard Yard’s boutique.” He had a foreign-sounding name and was not on “the American side.” He was on the side of the Scary Black Man.
Sound familiar?
