This Election IS About Personalities

McCain campaign manager Rick Davis made what Frank Rich of The New York Times called "one of the season's more notable pronouncements" during the Republican Convention.

"This election is not about issues," said Davis. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates."

One one level, this comment clearly reveals the McCain campaign's smoke and mirrors strategy to obscure the issues and sell fictional depictions of its candidates as Maverick crusaders for Change. The Obama campaign has been right to attack this statement and emphasize the political opportunism it reveals in McCain and Palin. After all, McCain has reversed himself on all of the positions that created his "Maverick" persona (taxes, immigration, climate change, energy, the Religious Right) while Palin was all for earmarks and Alaska Senator Ted Stevens before each became unpopular.

However, on another level, Davis' comment is dead on the mark. While McCain's pandering shifts on other issues leave us wondering what he would actually do as President, the one area in which McCain has not changed his stripes is foreign policy. As Rachel Kleinfeld points out in the Campaign Stops blog in The New York Times, McCain's response to the crisis in Georgia is the latest example of his reckless, impulsive temperament and poor judgement.

Now, I’m from a loud, combative family, and I’ve picked a good, principled fight time and again. But a fight on principle is different than a half-cocked drunken roundhouse. And that was the kind of fight Senator McCain was picking with Russia Thursday. Renewing the cold war as a cheer line for an otherwise flat campaign speech? That’s not being a maverick — that’s being reckless.

Senator McCain’s temper, renowned in Washington, may occasionally be principled when he is speaking as one of 100 senators, but it’s dangerous in higher office. A man who enjoys fighting as much as John McCain does, who is combative in his personal relations within his own country, that is not a temperament we need in the Oval Office. He wanted Thursday’s speech to be about character — and Americans should pay attention to his. A reckless man is a danger in a volatile world.

As Matthew Yglesias noted in The Amercan Prospect, this is a typical McCain response to a foreign policy question.

McCain, after all, is the candidate of perpetual war in Iraq. The candidate who, despite his protestations in a March speech that he "hates war," not only stridently backed the 2003 invasion of Iraq but has spent years calling on the United States to depose every dictator in the world. He's the candidate of ratcheting-up action against North Korea and Iran, of new efforts to undermine the United Nations, and of new cold wars with Russia and China. Rather than hating war, he sees it as integral to the greatness of the nation, and military service as the highest calling imaginable. It is, in short, not Bush but McCain, who among practical politicians holds truest to the vision of a foreign policy dominated by militaristic unilateralism.

Perhaps conservative columnist and former Bush speech-writer David Frum best described this tendency toward the reckless gamble as expressed by the choice of Palin as his running mate.

It's a wild gamble, undertaken by our oldest ever first-time candidate for president in hopes of changing the board of this election campaign. Maybe it will work. But maybe (and at least as likely) it will reinforce a theme that I'd be pounding home if I were the Obama campaign: that it's John McCain for all his white hair who represents the risky choice, while it is Barack Obama who offers cautious, steady, predictable governance.

Character is also revealed by honesty. A quick perusal of websites such as FactCheck.org and Politifact.com show that the McCain campaign has made approximately twice as many false or misleading statements as the Obama campaign. This numeric trend continued in the recently concluded conventions. While Obama was cited for stretching the truth in his acceptance speech, all of the speakers at the GOP convention attracted criticism from the fact-checkers, including both McCain and Palin.

A close examination of FactCheck's entries also shows a qualitative difference between the two campaigns. Criticisms of Obama show that he is at least in the ballpark with respect to the facts. His numbers are sometimes off or he will make a statement that is factually correct but will leave out context that might weaken his point. This occasional disingenuousness is in the realm of "spin" as practiced by most politicians and campaigns. The McCain campaign, on the other hand, is often called down by these web-sites for complete fabrications that are nowhere close to the truth. For example, The Washington Post ran an editorial last week that called the McCain campaign on systematically lying about Obama's tax proposals.

The country can't afford the tax cuts either man is promising, although Mr. McCain's approach is by far the more costly. We don't expect either side to admit that. But neither side should get to outright lie about its opponent's positions, either.

All of this demonstrates how the accepted media narrative of McCain as the safe, known choice and Obama as the risky newcomer has it exactly backwards. So, by all means, do as Rick Davis says and examine the public statements and past records of the candidates, sifting through them for evidence of personality qualities such as temperament, character, honesty and judgement. It comes down to a fundamental question: in an uncertain and dangerous world, who do you trust?

UPDATE: McClatchy comments on McCain's profanity-laced displays of temper with observations from both Republicans and Democrats in the Senate.

--Ballard Burgher