Six John McCains, But No Sale

The Instant Information Age goes a step further with a retrospective about the failed McCain campaign in the New York Times Magazine next Sunday, nine days before the election and, true to the spirit of déjà vu on steroids, available online four days earlier.

Time-scrambling aside, "The Making (and Remaking) of McCain" offers a compelling inside view of how the man who might have won the presidency against Al Gore in 2000 will lose it by lurching "from tactic to tactic" this year against Barack Obama, the legacy of George W. Bush and the self he lost in the intervening eight years.

Robert Draper's report is based on talks with "a half-dozen of McCain’s senior-most advisers--most of them more than once and some of them repeatedly" as well as "midlevel advisers and to a number of former senior aides" over the past months.

The campaign, in the classic pattern of losing enterprises, burned through six different narratives about their candidate in a desperate search for a winning formula:

*The Heroic Fighter vs. the Quitters (pumping up the tentative gains of the Surge into Victory with Honor)

*Country-First Deal Maker vs. Nonpartisan Pretender (the maverick who fought his own party as opposed to the newcomer who is all rhetoric)

*Leader vs. Celebrity (to counter the success of Obama's triumphant trip to the Middle East and Europe by picturing him as a celebrity akin to Paris Hilton)

*Team of Mavericks vs. Old-Style Washington (the "Hail Mary" choice of Sarah Palin as a running mate rather than Joe Lieberman, whom he really wanted)

* John McCain vs. John McCain (going along with smears of Obama despite his own misgivings so that he "sometimes seemed to be running against not only Barack Obama but an earlier version of himself")

*The Fighter (Again) vs. the Tax-and-Spend Liberal (a "cobbled together one last narrative with less than a month to go").

All these McCains running in so many different directions make for wistful thinking about what might have been if John McCain, in true maverick style, had overridden all his advisors and campaigned as himself.

Blowing Smoke for Freedom

In a barely disguised attempt to help elect John McCain, a non-profit group called Vets for Freedom is running TV ads to sell voters on the success of the Surge in Iraq.

Starting with $1.5 million worth on national cable as well as in Michigan, Nevada, Virginia, Ohio and Colorado this week, the commercials don't mention candidates' names but end their pitch with the claim, "We changed strategy in Iraq and the surge worked. Now that’s change you can believe in.”

The enormity of this insult to our intelligence--that dying and bleeding and spending billions in an endless war that should never have been waged is "change" underscores one of the 20th century's most striking achievements: the spreading of a Big Lie through mass communications.

Ironically, "Freedom" has always been a useful word to enslave public opinion, starting with that charlatan, Edward L. Bernays, who promoted himself as the master manipulator in "an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country."

In a triumph of misdirection for the tobacco industry in the 1920s, he sent models to march in a suffrage parade, telling the press they would be lighting "Torches of Freedom," which turned out to be cigarettes to promote the idea of women smoking in public.

Now, just as Bernays hid behind women's suffrage to hawk cancer, Vets for Freedom are using patriotism to sell more death and destruction in Iraq, with tactics crude enough to have sent Joe Lieberman and Lindsey Graham scurrying off their advisory board six weeks ago.

If he is the model of probity he has always claimed to be, John McCain will follow suit and tell Vets for Freedom to stop blowing smoke on his behalf.