The man behind the facade

San Francisco vitrine, which sadly reminded me not of childhood games, but of the underhanded political games being played in the American presidential election.

Updates here, here and here.

Want to know more about the real John McCain? Read this excerpt from Frank Rich's brilliant article Sunday in The New York Times (italics emphasis mine):

"..What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

"With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

"McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

"McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

"Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” — as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”

Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being “proud” of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about “whitey.” But we still haven’t been inside Cindy McCain’s tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she controls, “lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve public health and safety,” in opposition to groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain’s future role in her beer empire won’t be revealed before the election.

"Some of those who know McCain best — Republicans — are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration’s first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama — temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others — are missing in McCain. “He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,” Hauser told me. “If John says ‘I’m going with so and so,’ you can’t count on that the next morning,” she complained, adding, “That’s not the man we want for president.”

"McCain has even prompted alarms from the right’s own favorite hit man du jour: Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry as co-author of “Unfit to Command” in 2004 and who is trying to do the same to Obama in his newly minted best seller, “The Obama Nation.”

"Corsi’s writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi’s publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author’s “scholarship.” If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi’s research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi’s scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received “strong” financial support from a “group tied to Al Qaeda” and that “McCain’s personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.”

"As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there’s one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told."

Comments

[Christina]

I have pulled up a few articles by Frank Rich and find his words very informative. A few weeks ago John Mccain was here in Milwaukee speaking to a full house at a minority community center, he got on stage and said something like there's no denying that Barack Obama guy is a smart guy. I wanted to crawl inside of myself.
Thank you for this : )

[annieelf]

Foisted was probably a poor word choice. Media has been pushing too hard to direct voters in a particular direction which I find objectionable. When it was Clinton and Obama, I preferred Clinton because of her much greater experience at a federal level. I cannot use the same criteria for McCain and Obama because though clearly more experienced at a federal level than Obama, I disagree with McCain on many funadmental matters. The choice therefore creates a dilemna for me.

[Colette]

Today, August 18, McCain is STILL talking about the "surge" and Obama. A whole lecture on Obama and the Surge. Good grief!! Enough with the surge. I don't understand McCain or anyone who sits and listens to this old hackneyed stuff. I so dislike people who twist the facts to suit themselves. McCain's karma is getting worse by the minute.

[annieelf]

It is reports such as this that continue to make me ill-at-ease about McCain. On the one hand, we have a candidate who has been foisted upon us after a white hot race with Clinton and on the other hand, we have the grand old warrior. Choices are not looking great on either side, as far as I’m concerned.

Tara responds:
Obama wasn't "foisted on voters;" the majority of delegates and super-delegates voted for him. I don't understand how anyone can read platforms of both candidates, look at their voting records and listen to their words and comportment and not be able to make a clear choice about what's best for our country.

[tangobaby]

Frank Rich is one of the few great journalists left (imho) who calls it like it is in regard to our national circus.

Although this information comes as no real surprise to me, I feel more and more that this election is going to come down to the wire, to a very small number of votes. Living in the bubble of San Francisco, I know that there's a lot of the country that loves every bit of War Hero McCain.

Let's just hope that the Supreme Court isn't picking this next president too.

[pam aries]

I don't understand why in the world politics can't get it right! Uhhh... why doesn't everyone tell the truth ..stick to the problems /resolutions and do the best job for the people! Election time is like highschool..or even grade school. Lying, scheming, whining, tattling. THe media is the absolute worst . Ackkk. Tara..thank you for all the information you always bring us. Love you!