This is a point so important that it deserves its own post for emphasis. It isn't just that McCain has flip-flopped on nearly every important issue imaginable...
And its not just that he really has no clue how this Google things works....
It's also that he has spent nearly two decades working hard to become a media darling, sitting down in front of a camera to offer up some "straight talk" whenever possible.
And that means that there is just tons of footage out there that can and will be run every time McCain decides to offer up a new position on whatever happens to be the big issue that day.
The common wisdom is that Senators almost never win the presidency in modern times because they have a voting record far too deep and complex to stand up to the scrutiny of a national campaign. And although that's true, I don't think it fully explains what's going on.
Senators, unlike lowly Reps, have the opportunity to make themselves into national political figures through the Washington press corps. Many choose to forgo this approach, but some - think Biden, McCain, Lieberman, for example - decide its the way to go. If there's an open mic somewhere, these guys will find it. And that creates a very, very long public record, one full of video and audio clips that can and will be used against them should they decide to make a run for president.
Over the last decade or so, no one has embraced this approach to being a Senator more than John McCain. No one. From 1997 to 2007, for example, he appeared on the Sunday talk shows 124 times. That's an average of more than once a month for ten years. And that's just one 2 hour block one day a week. Extrapolate that behavior out over a full week, and well....
McCain's accessible audio-visual history is longer and deeper than any other candidate for the presidency in our history. Digital storage means that its all out there, just waiting to be mined. But as I explained earlier, McCain and his people just don't get how much that changes the rules of the game. They don't understand the way shifts in media technology have fundamentally altered our politics. Not yet, anyway. But soon....
Subscribe to this blog's feed
