Getting McBush back to center stage

Editorial Reviews
Review
"How the journalistic elite got taken for a ride on the Straight Talk Express is one of the revelatory sagas of modern-day Washington. Matt Welch has the audacity to think that John McCain's views matter, not only his legends, and he smokes out McCain with gusto. You don't have to follow him every inch of the way into libertarian politics--as I do not--to be dazzled by the light he casts on a telling tragedy of American politics."--Todd Gitlin, author of The Bulldozer and the Big Tent: Blind Republicans, Lame Democrats, and the Recovery of American Ideals

"John McCain's love affair with the news media is a decade old. But McCain makes clear that that love affair is over."--Glenn Reynolds, author of An Army of Davids: How Markets and Technology Empower Ordinary People to Beat Big Media, Big Government, and Other Goliaths, and blogger at Instapundit

Praise for Matt Welch's Op-Ed piece on John McCain in the Los Angeles Times, "Do We Really Need Another T.R.?":

"I hope a lot of Americans read Matt Welch’s definitive LAT editorial on the subject of McCain’s political philosophy.... t should be a reputation-maker for Welch."-- Colby Cosh, columnist for Canada’s National Post

"Congratulations to the LAT’s Matt Welch for this morning’s penetrating column on John McCain.... Listen up, pundits. Matt Welch has sent you a signal. It won’t kill you to look into the mind of the desert angel and see what he thinks." -- Todd Gitlin, author of The Intellectuals and the Flag

"The redoubtable Matt Welch does the unconscionable today: he writes an op-ed for the LA Times in which he examines John McCain’s actual views on the issues.... Hear hear.... [McCain’s] flip-flops get a lot of attention mainly because they’re easy to find and satisfying to point out. Actually looking past his occasionally “maverick” views is far more important." -- Kevin Drum, The Washington Monthly

"Matt Welch of the Los Angeles Times does a significant public service in exposing John McCain’s intrusive, statist agenda." --Doug Bandow, author of Foreign Follies: America’s New Global Empire

"Kudos to Matt Welch for managing to reveal some truths about St. McCain without falling into the usual trap of trying to argue about where he actually fits on the imaginary political spectrum and instead just telling us what the dude thinks about things." --Duncan Black, proprietor of the Eschaton (Atrios) blog

"[A]n astute analysis." --Joel Connolly, Seattle Post-Intelligencer

"Great op-ed by Matt Welch on what John McCain actually thinks about the world." --Matthew Yglesias, The American Prospect

"Matt Welch, now with the Los Angeles Times, perspicaciously sizes up everyone’s favorite politician -- especially given that no one seems to actually care about his political beliefs -- Sen. John McCain. [...] [R]ead the whole thing, before this whole “McCain for President” thing goes too far." -- Brian Dohery, Reason

Product Description
John McCain is one of the most familiar, sympathetic, and overexposed figures in American politics, yet his concrete governing philosophy and actual track record have been left curiously unexamined, mostly because of the massive distractions in his official biography, but also because of his ingenious strategy of talking ad infinitum to each and every access-craving media person who happens by. The more he has spouted, the less journalists have bothered trying to see through the fog.

McCain gives the voting public what it wants but can’t find -- a flesh-and-bones political portrait of a man onto whom people are forever projecting their own ideological fantasies. It is a psychological key for decoding his allegedly ‘maverick’ actions, and the first realistic assessment of what a John McCain presidency may look like. McCain will quickly lay out in overlapping detail the root cause of the senator’s worldview: his personal transformation from underachieving punk to war hawk uber-patriot, in which he used the "higher power" of American nationalism to save his life and soul.

As McCain wrenches himself inside-out in pursuit of the prize that eluded him in 2000, McCain will look behind the war hero, behind the maverick reformer. Journalist and pundit Matt Welch brings to this project an investigative eye and a coolly analytical mindset to provide Republicans, Democrats and Independents a picture of the man in full before they enter the voting booth in 2008.

February 15, 2008
The McCain "Maverick Myth"

But is John McCain really a maverick? A look beyond the media's repetition of the word at McCain's actual record suggests that the answer is no. In fact, McCain is a reliable conservative, and if not a perfectly loyal Republican, at least a reasonably loyal one.

According to Congressional Quarterly's party unity scores, which track how often members of Congress side with their party on key votes, over the course of his career McCain has voted with his party 84 percent of the time"not the highest score in the Senate but hardly evidence of a great deal of independence. Similarly, the American Conservative Union gives McCain a lifetime rating of 82.3, making him a solid friend of the right's. And according to the widely respected Poole-Rosenthal rankings, McCain was the eighth-most conservative senator in the 110th Senate.

...McCain's breaks with the GOP are "high profile" precisely because the press is so eager to paint him as a maverick and rewrite a story with which they are well familiar.

Here's how it usually works. Imagine that the Democrats and Republicans have a conflict over a piece of legislation, and on both sides, party unity is fairly strong.

Only a couple of senators"let's say Democrat Ben Nelson of Nebraska, and Republican Olympia Snowe of Maine, two centrists"have decided to break with their respective parties and join the other side. Reporters will find the positions taken by these two unremarkable, since Nelson and Snowe have crossed the aisle many times before (their party unity scores are regularly in the 50s, compared to McCain's 84).

The news stories that follow will still describe the story as a clash between the two parties, and Nelson and Snowe will be footnotes at best, bit players in the drama whose actions don't change the underlying news narrative.

But if John McCain decides that he will join Snowe and side with the Democrats, the story being written in the media undergoes a dramatic shift. It now becomes not a story about a conflict between the Democrats and the Republicans, but a story about a conflict between John McCain and the Republicans. He instantly becomes the lead actor in the tale, as Democrats fade into the background. His name will be in the headlines, and every article about the topic will include quotes from McCain, reminders of past breaks with his party, a quote from a representative of a conservative interest group attacking McCain, and stirring descriptions of the Arizona senator's courageous independence, political consequences be damned.

There is one other key factor to understand in the making of the "maverick" myth. Look at the times when McCain has differed with his Republican colleagues, and what you find is that in almost every case, the position held by most in the GOP was broadly unpopular with the public. Campaign finance reform, regulation of tobacco, even the Bush tax cuts (to which the public was indifferent and which McCain could hardly support, having criticized them as Bush's opponent in the 2000 presidential race)"in every case, the position McCain took put him on the right side of public opinion. So what the press calls "maverick" stands could just as easily be interpreted as highly political efforts to maintain McCain's strong popularity with the general public.

http://www.brendan-nyhan.com/blog/2008/02/the-mccain-mave.html