McCain's Base

On Dec. 9, 1999, after riding the Straight Talk Express in New Hampshire, I wrote a Post piece headlined "Nothing Succeeds Like Access; Does John McCain Have the Media Eating Out of His Hand?"

It was the first of many reports I would file on the McCain-media romance, both in that campaign and again this time around. So I don't need much convincing that the Arizona senator is adept at working the press.

But there are differences in this campaign, and some critics are painting with too broad a brush. Now that he's the presumptive Republican nominee, and doing well in head-to-head matchups with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, some liberal critics are complaining that the press is prostrate when it comes to the 71-year-old Republican. Why aren't reporters tearing him down?

To start with the obvious, many journalists admire McCain's military service and his courage as a POW. They like his maverick approach to politics. They appreciate being able to spend hours each day questioning him, and are usually less likely to play "gotcha" because they understand the fuller context of his answers. Still, that doesn't amount to immunity: When he screwed up on Iran and al-Qaeda, everyone reported it.

More in a moment, but first let me turn to a journalist and author I admire, Neal Gabler, who argues in a NYT op-ed that reporters are in such a swoon that they have practically become McCainiacs:

"Seeming to view himself and the whole political process with a mix of amusement and bemusement, Mr. McCain is an ironist wooing a group of individuals who regard ironic detachment more highly than sincerity or seriousness. He may be the first real postmodernist candidate for the presidency -- the first to turn his press relations into the basis of his candidacy . . .

"Yet however much his accessibility, amiability and candor may have defined the news media's love affair with him in 2000, and however much they continue to operate that way in 2008, there is also something different and more complicated at work now. Joan Didion once described a presidential campaign as a closed system staged by the candidates for the news media -- one in which the media judged a candidate essentially by how well he or she manipulated them, and one in which the electorate were bystanders . . .

"What makes 2008 different -- and why I think Mr. McCain can be called the first postmodernist presidential candidate -- is his acknowledgment of the symbiosis between himself and the press and, more important, his willingness, even eagerness, to let the press in on his own machinations of them . . .

"Though Mr. McCain can be the most self-deprecating of candidates (yet another reason the news media love him), his vision of the process also betrays an obvious superiority -- one the mainstream political news media, a group of liberal cosmologists, have long shared. If in the past he flattered the press by posing as its friend, he is now flattering it by posing as its conspirator, a secret sharer of its cynicism . . .

"The candidates who are dead serious about politics, even wonkish, get abused by the press for it. Mr. McCain the ironist gets heaps of affection. In this race, though, it has forced some press contortions. While John McCain 2000 was praised for being the same straight talker off the bus as he was on it, John McCain 2008 is praised precisely because he isn't the same man. Off the bus he plays to the rubes (us) by reciting the conservative catechism; on the bus he plays to the press by giving the impression that his talk is all just a ploy to capture the Republican nomination."

Here are some of the inconvenient facts that Gabler leaves out: