Dionne: No More Mr. Maverick

Friday, September 5, 2008; Page A21

ST. PAUL, Minn. -- Once upon a time, John McCain promised to be a different kind of politician and a different kind of Republican. He was about straight talk, reform and nonpartisanship, a resolute foe of the slashing politics of the slaughterhouse.

McCain wants voters to remember that man. But that man has disappeared. His convention, including his running mate Sarah Palin's big speech Wednesday, dripped with divisive ridicule as speaker after speaker worked to aggravate the country's cultural schisms and replay worn-out lines about weak liberals who are soft on terrorism.


McCain has not changed his party because he has not even tried. To win the presidential nomination, McCain has pandered to a Republican right wing he once disdained on issue after issue, from oil drilling to immigration to tax cuts for the wealthy.

Just as important, he has decided that his last chance for the presidency rests on a systematic effort to make the old politics of demonization work one more time. No matter how much McCain talks about his desire to transcend Washington's partisan divides, his campaign and his convention will leave behind a bitterness that will turn his promise of a new day into ashes . . .


McCain will certainly try to remind us of the man he once was, to draw on his past as the maverick statesman-politician willing to join his Democratic colleagues in grappling with some of the country's most difficult issues.

It will be a hard sell because McCain has capitulated to the very Washington he so often condemned and is employing the very tactics that were used so ruthlessly and so unfairly against him when he first ran for president eight years ago.


read: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/09/04/AR2008090402842_pf.html

K&R!

their tune in the last few weeks. This article pretty much buys the Kerry/Biden claims that candidate McCain is not a maverick any more.

The Washington Post's Op-Ed page - where Dionne is published - has steadfastly run both sides of the story. Even when their resident assface, Richard Cohen, went from cheerleading the Iraq invasion to opposing it, there was always a diversity of opinion on the Op-Ed pages.

Their editorials, though, have remained steadfastly behind Fuckface and whatever harebrained scheme he comes up with. I subscribed to the Post for more than 30 years, but had to cancel my subscription when their blind encouragement of this thug in the Oval Office became as hard to take as watching the RNC these past few days.

Someone in the press is bringing up that mccain is not even close to a maverick..more like a clone of bush.