AZspot AZspot

blue bits. red rocks.
Friday 5 September 2008

McCain once claimed to hate the kind of politics he now embodies, and with the current low standing of the people who turned his party into a cesspool, he had a great opportunity to rise above it this year: rising to the status of party nominee over the dead bodies of the party faithful who loathe him because they judge him guilty of having the personality of a liberal, he could have capitalized on widespread disgust with the Rove-Bush way of doing things and taken the high road, secure in the knowledge that Obama wouldn’t get down in the mud without a shove; Obama can only lose this election if enough people respond to the sleaziest kind of negative campaigning. Between the two of them, they could have taken American politics out of the pattern of mutually assured destruction that it’s been stuck in since at least the end of the Cold War. But something in him, whether it was terror overcoming him as he accepted the fact that this is his last chance, or a misguided, grudging decision that Rove and Bush are right after all but their way being the only way to win elections, or the genuine contempt he feels for Obama, which seems to be rooted in nothing more elevated than his resentment at having to share the fawning good opinion of the media with anyone else, caused him to buckle, and so now, unable to rise to the standard set by his opponent, he’s running a campaign that, at its best, is based on sneering sarcasm at the whole idea of eloquence and inspiration. The maverick’s last message to us is, stop all that high-falutin’ jibberjaw and get down here in the pigpen with us good small-town people. Phil Nugent

A GNT creation ©2007–2012