At this point I really am actually starting to feel sorry for the guy.
Sen. John McCain, the presumptive nominee for the Republican nomination, was born in 1936. That was the year the Hoover Dam was finished, Gone with the Wind was first published, the Triborough Bridge was opened, and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade sailed (no airplanes!) from New York City on its way to Spanish Civil War. He's older than Scrabble, the Area Code, the TV Dinner, and chocolate chip cookies.
So its really not his fault that he doesn't understand the Internet. When he was born, recording technologies were few and far between. What you said today wasn't just gone tomorrow, unless someone was there to hear it and write it down it was almost like it was never said at all. And even if someone happened to be there taking notes, unless they happened to write a column for a major urban newspaper, it wasn't terribly likely that anyone would ever know what you had said. Your words were temporary, and so long as you were careful you could carefully shift your position to match the mood of whatever crowd or moment you happened to be standing before.
But no longer. With the Internet everything you say or do is recorded forever. YouTube, blogs, searchable databases, and The Google make shifting your position to pander to this or that group a dangerous endeavor. And if you don't understand the Internet, you're not likely to recognize that fact.
John McCain clearly doesn't understand the Internet.
James Rubin, writing in today's WaPo:
But given his own position on Hamas, McCain is the last politician who should be attacking Obama. Two years ago, just after Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections, I interviewed McCain for the British network Sky News's "World News Tonight" program. Here is the crucial part of our exchange:
I asked: "Do you think that American diplomats should be operating the way they have in the past, working with the Palestinian government if Hamas is now in charge?"McCain answered: "They're the government; sooner or later we are going to have to deal with them, one way or another, and I understand why this administration and previous administrations had such antipathy towards Hamas because of their dedication to violence and the things that they not only espouse but practice, so . . . but it's a new reality in the Middle East. I think the lesson is people want security and a decent life and decent future, that they want democracy. Fatah was not giving them that."
For some Europeans in Davos, Switzerland, where the interview took place, that's a perfectly reasonable answer. But it is an unusual if not unique response for an American politician from either party. And it is most certainly not how the newly conservative presumptive Republican nominee would reply today.
Given that exchange, the new John McCain might say that Hamas should be rooting for the old John McCain to win the presidential election. The old John McCain, it appears, was ready to do business with a Hamas-led government, while both Clinton and Obama have said that Hamas must change its policies toward Israel and terrorism before it can have diplomatic relations with the United States.
Even if McCain had not favored doing business with Hamas two years ago, he had no business smearing Barack Obama. But given his stated position then, it is either the height of hypocrisy or a case of political amnesia for McCain to inject Hamas into the American election.
Either McCain thought he could lie and get away with it - in which case he doesn't understand the way the world has changed these past 10 years - or he has forgotten his position from just two short years ago on one of the most important foreign policy questions facing our nation - in which case he is simply too old and forgetful to serve as President of the United States.
YouTube, take it away...
Over time, these mistakes will continue to pile up. As McCain ramps up his 10 regional campaign chairmen organization, the problem will only get worse. Bob Dole all over again? Worse, actually. Because Dole's 1996 campaign was the last campaign before the Internet really began to take hold.
And if this crazy "no moderators, just the two of us on stage together" debate format takes hold, you can just forget about it. McCain will make so many mistakes that it will be almost hard to watch. And when he does, Obama will press him on it, and out will come that famous temper of his. As Olbermann would say "old men yells at cloud" isn't the best way to win an election, particularly when the things you are yelling today are the opposite of what you were yelling the day before.
UPDATE: Worth adding... as Ambinder points out, yesterday really was a disastrous day for McCain. Not only did this story break, but he also gave his bizarre "in the year 2013 there will be ponies and unicorns" speech, a moment that was designed (in theory at least) to give him some separation from the White House.
But the the president went Munich on Obama, and suddenly McCain and Bush were tied more closely than ever.
Remember: McCain hasn't successfully run a competitive campaign in decades. Earlier this year, his primary campaign had spectacularly imploded, and were it not for the fact that he was, a) running against a bunch of chumps, and b) evangelical leaders were simply too stupid to pick the right guy, he'd never be the nominee today. The field was simply so bad that he could implode and still win.
So McCain really doesn't know how to handle the rigors of a national campaign. His messaging is awful. His ability to coordinate and control multiple media cycles is virtually nonexistent. Put aside his biography and you'll see that he's really an awful candidate.
Bob Dole in the age of the Internet. It's gonna be a train wreck, people.
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