John McCain is not responsible for John McCain

(Saturday afternoon update:  Scroll down for new posts and videos. More to come.)

I wound up blogging ServiceNation the way I used to blog before I had a blog, before there were blogs---I did a lot of scribbling in my notebook.  I'm working on turning the notes into posts, so please keep checking in over the weekend.    Meanwhile, though, Matt Yglesias has beaten me to the punch on something that came up during the Presidential Forum last night.  Matt notes:

Speaking last night at the national service forum, John McCain got asked a question about why his campaign keeps making false accusations. /;”First of all this is a tough business,” the Arizona senator said. “Second of all, I think the tone of this whole campaign would’ve been very different if Sen. Obama had accepted my request for us to appear at town hall meetings all over America.”

In other words — it’s Barack Obama’s fault, Obama is forcing him to lie by refusing to engage in a series of town hall debates.

This struck me as really strange.  Apparently it didn't strike either moderator, Judy Woodruff or Richard Stengel, as strange enough to warrant a follow up so McCain didn't explain how his town hall meetings would have kept the tone of the campaign on a higher and nobler and politer plane.

Was McCain saying that his campaign turned mean and nasty out of spite?

He's mad at Obama for not going along with the town hall idea so he's going to show him?

Or did he mean to suggest that if he and Barack Obama were spending more time together they would have had to play nicer together?   Would McCain have been too embarrassed to run a nasty campaign based on lies and smears if he had to face Obama and explain himself every night?

Either way, McCain was, as Matt says, blaming Obama for McCain's own bad behavior.  In the first case, he's suggesting that Obama should have known better than to not let McCain have his own way and it's Obama's fault for not spoiling him and giving in before he decided to hold his breath and turn blue, and in the second case, he's saying that he wouldn't have drawn all those nasty caricatures on the blackboard if only the teacher had stayed in the room and kept the chalk away from him.

As I said, Wodruff and Stengel didn't make him explain himself.  But Woodruff came back to the theme in a way.  A little bit later she noted the irony of McCain's coming to ServiceNation to praise people who could all be described as "community organizers" and to encourage others to become "community organizers" themselves when the Republican National Convention had pretty much devoted an evening to making fun of Barack Obama for having been a "community organizer" and the GOP attack machine has taken that ball and run with it.

Obama's fault again, McCain said.  Sarah Palin was responding to Obama's criticism of her time as mayor of Wasilla.

If Obama and the Democrats had refrained from criticizing Palin, then the McCain's campaign wouldn't have had to sneer at and belittle all the people who work so hard to make the world a little better place.

Now, frankly, I think the questions were dumb, given the situation.  What was McCain supposed to say?  "Well, gee, Judy, now that you mention it, I feel really bad about using a tactic that is about the only one I can use, considering there's no way I can run on the merits of my proposed policies.  For example, who'd vote for me if I went around admitting that my health care plan depends on raising taxes on working people who have health care benefits?  And why should I give it up when it's so obviously working to my advantage, thanks to the years journalists like you have spent building up my image as an honorable man and a straight-shooter so that when I lie and throw mud at my opponents now people can't believe that's what I'm doing so they assume the lies are the truth and the mud just what my opponents deserve?"

Gotcha questions are fairly useless anyway, even if the journalist asking them is prepared to hammer away after a politician has done the expected and ducked and dodged in response.  But not only didn't Woodruff follow up here, she couldn't even if she'd wanted to, not given the point of the forum, which was to have both candidates come and explain exactly what their administrations would do with all the people who responded to their calls for service.  Nobody was there to listen to Woodruff and McCain go back and forth about whether or not John McCain fights dirty.

You'd think that a journalist with Woodruff's years of experience would have known better.  Why set up a politician like that, knowing all you'll get is a self-serving pile of horse hockey?  But this happens so often you almost have to believe that the point is to give the politician the opportunity to be self-serving.   The journalist gets to look and sound as though she's doing her job while in fact she's doing the politician a favor.

The favor Woodruff did for McCain, though, was to allow him to whine and weasel.  "It's not my fault.  It's never my fault.  If I do something that appears bad, it's only because the other guy made me."

Barack Obama should have given John McCain what John McCain wanted.  Barack Obama should have known better than to have criticized John McCain's choice for a running mate.

Pundits like James Carville and Chris Matthews who are having trouble believing that "honorable" John McCain would run a dirty campaign have missed an important aspect of John McCain's character---his sense that he is owed and that anybody who doesn't pay up then deserves whatever sort of abuse McCain decides to heap upon them.  (They also apparently missed the fact that McCain started running dirty and nasty against the Republicans standing in between him and the nomnation.  It's not something he was forced to do by staff to counter Barack Obama, says Kevin Drum, and it's something he apparently likes to do.)  It's not McCain's fault if he gets mad at you, it's your own.  John McCain isn't responsible for John McCain and you should know better than to expect him to be.

Comments

[lina]

whenever he's asked about the lies and distortions in his advertising, he responds by blaming Obama for not doing townhall meetings with him. i've yet to see anyone follow up with a question like "how is that related to what I just asked you?"

[minstrel hussain boy]

mcCain has always, always been that way. he didn't have grades or achievements that would have secured him an appointment to annapolis. he used family connections. while a midshipman, had he been anyone but the son and grandson of highly placed and respected admirals, he would have been given a three year tour in the fleet chipping paint. instead he graduated fifth from the bottom and was given flight school, then jets, then carrier ops over the heads of more qualified men. while serving as an aviator his conduct was often suspect, his sobriety and judgement were not trusted. his record as a pilot, and his conduct while off duty would have gotten anyone else cashiered. when your father's CINCPAC, you simply outrank every officer trying to command you.

the time he was shot down made the fifth plane he had been piloting when it was ruined. any other pilot gets his job and performance called into question for a close call.

he's another legacy brat. another 'c' student with a taste for giving it back to all of us silly folks who did stupid stuff like studying.

[Victoria]

RE: "Sarah Palin was responding to Obama's criticism of her time as mayor of Wasilla."

Never mind that Obama didn't do that. Yes, there was a campaign office memo - hardly as mean-spirited as Palin's community organizer sneer (and never repeated on the campaigh trail), but Obama course-corrected before the day was out.

McCain's entire conversation has fallen so low and to such irrational extremes that all that's left is for people - and that means everyone who interviews him - to say, "You can't really mean that" and "I don't believe that. You can't possibly believe what you just said.It makes no sense!" over and over and over again. The man deserves to have the word *dishonorable* coming at him day and night. He's earned it. Let him deal with it.

Carville and others need to wise up to the fact that the real John McCain is out and about and poisoning the well of American democracy.

[Paul Lamb]

C'mon now. John McCain is the man to lead the country into the TWENTIETH Century!

This election we have a choice between making history, or repeating it.

[Linkmeister]

Apparently John McCain has appropriated (without attribution, natch) Flip Wilson's phrase and modified it: "Obama made me do it!"

[Falstaff]

I genuinely hesitated for a moment before saying this about a man of his age and experience, but in this particular situation McCain reminds me of nothing more than a spoiled kid sticking out his lower lip.

"But Dad, Barack made me do it! I didn't want to!"

The word, as you so aptly used it yourself, Lance, is "horse-hockey."

[George Orwell]

This is consistent with a the portrait of serial abuser. McCain is blaming Obama just as a wife beater blames his wife and/or a rapist his victim -- "She made me do it!" McCain never presents himself as a fully responsible moral agent, and neither do his enablers and defenders. It's always "his campaign" or someone else's behavior that is making him do it.

"The devil made me do it" would be more appropros.

A further red flag is the time framed offered in McCain's defense. There was little less than a week between the announcement of Palin and her speech on Thursday. During that period of time (and to this day I might add) no one in Obama's campaign was engaged in the behavior that McCain attributes to him.