Boy, that escalated quickly. After a weekend in which McCain groupies David Ignatius and Richard Cohen disavowed their one-time infatuation with that noted celebrity, Ruth Marcus became the latest WaPo columnist to wake up to the contemptible sleaziness of candidate McCain. Finally, the media is noticing: McCain is running a campaign with which even Karl Rove is embarrassed to be associated. The narrative is building.
More below the fold.
Writing in today's WaPo, Marcus begins by calling out the media for their faux and craven deference to notions of "balance" in attributing the sliminess of the current campaign to both candidates equally:
And it is a phony evenhandedness, comfortable for journalists but ultimately misleading, that equates these failures without measuring the grossness of their deviation from the standard of decency.
In the 2008 race, and especially in the past few weeks, the imbalance has become unnervingly stark. Ideological differences aside, John McCain's campaign has been more dishonest, more unfair, more -- to use a word that resonates with McCain -- dishonorable than Barack Obama's.
Indeed, she notes that "McCain's trangressions, though, are of a different magnitude," and that "his whoppers are bigger; there are more of them." Continuing the trend of actual journalism we first saw - and I still can't believe this - on Fox News, when Tucker Bounds was eviscerated for lying about Obama's tax plan, Marcus continues:
The most outrageous of McCain's distortions involve Obama on taxes. He asserts that Obama's new taxes could "break your family budget," and that an Obama presidency would inflict "painful tax increases on working American families." Hardly. Obama would lower taxes for most households, and lower them more than McCain would. The only "painful tax increases on working American families" would be on working families making more than $250,000.
Marcus concludes by admonishing McCain for the blatant and repeated lies about Palin's record. But the Bridge to Nowhere is nowhere near as important as McCain's outright lies about Obama's tax plan. Reprising the GOP oldie-but-goodie of Obama as a "tax-and-spend liberal" (is that as opposed to a Bush "spend-and-create-huge-deficits conservative?), the McCain campaign has tried to scare middle class voters into thinking that Obama will hurt their pocketbooks even more than the Republicans already have (likely an impossibility, I know). This is the issue of the campaign: showing voters that McCain has embraced the same economic policies and priorities as Bush, while Obama will fight for the middle class. Palin and the Bridge to Nowhere is just window dressing.
Marcus finishes with a flourish, wondering "Is there any reason to trust that a man running this campaign would go on to be an honest president?" Indeed, the last eight years have shown us how Rove politicians govern. We can't take four more years. Hopefully, the rest of the media will look at this miracle of a campaign McCain has created and begin similarly asking him: when did he decide he'd rather lose his honor than a campaign?