Nine months ago today, I wrote about whether I could live with a President McCain and said, largely, "I think so." But no more.
The NYT Magazine will apparently be printing a story on the failures in McCain's campaign, but I'm more interested in the failures in his character. The smear campaign that he is now running, which Barack hasn't turned back against him as effectively as he could have, has really hit bottom.
McCain used to be an honorable kind of guy. That is, if you ignore the ugly affair and divorce and a few personal failings, including a Senate Ethics investigation. However, in politics, he seemed the type not to capitulate principles for political gain. What we've seen over the past few months is the erosion of this honor and an evolution into a "win at any cost" liar of epic proportions.
McCain capitulated piecemeal: by hiring on the Bush crew to run his campaign, then this summer moving up wedge/smear-artist and Karl Rove's 2004 assistant Steve Schmidt to run the campaign and finally giving up his last remaining vestige of honor last month in hiring Eskew and the crew who smeared him in SC during the 2000 GOP primary, giving himself over to their Rove-Atwater tactics. And we see the fruits of it in Palin's recent "palling around with terrorists" and other BS. The coup de grâce, and this is truly amazing, is that McCain went beyond the typical dirty politics of using third-party groups to do robocalls by doing them himself (after complaining years ago about this)...and even hired the same crew who smeared him in 2000.
Whatever McCain once was, he is no more.
