Rolling the Dice

Tucker Bounds, a spokesman for McCain, said "It's not true, and I ask you to please consider the source."

Asked why Huffington would make up her story about McCain not voting for Bush, longtime McCain aide Mark Salter -- who has previously tangled with the Huffington Post -- ripped into her. "Why would she make something up? Because she's a flake, and a poser, and an attention seeking diva. And that's on the record."

Arianna responds here, and explains her reasoning in this post:

"The John McCain the media fell in love with in 2000 isn't on the ballot in 2008. And the proof has all but jumped up and grabbed the media by the throat: the ring-kiss of 'agents of intolerance' Falwell and Robertson; the decision to make permanent tax cuts he twice voted against, saying he could not 'in good conscience support' them; the campaign finance reformer replaced with a candidate whose campaign is run by lobbyists and fueled by loophole rides on his wife's jet; the hard-line stance against torture replaced by a vote allowing waterboarding; the guarded-by-a-battalion stroll through the 'safe' neighborhoods of Baghdad; the use of Karl Rove as an advisor . . . and the embracing of the disastrous policies of a man he so abhorred he would not vote for him.

"What will it take for the Swift Boat Media to realize that John McCain jumped the shark a long, long time ago?"

The day's best essay is in New York magazine, where Kurt Andersen examines the media's infatuation with Obama:

"It's ironic that the media and their fellow upscale Americans are now disposed to like Obama precisely because he resembles them in so many ways. The difference is he's relatively unsullied, an exquisite, idealized version of themselves: educated, thoughtful, twigged to nuance, a lovely writer, well-traveled, witty, cool, dignified, candid, a little quixotic, a clued-in grown-up but not yet ruined by the ugly facts of Washington life. . .

"It's not only that the people who create and run the media--and who love Obama--occupy the social and cultural upper rungs. The world depicted in "the media," broadly construed--not just straight journalism but everything we watch and read and hear--is overwhelmingly a bright, shiny, upscale, youngish world. Uneducated white people, residents of the so-called C and D counties, and the elderly--in other words, Hillary Clinton voters--are seldom allowed into the mass-media foreground, and when they appear it's usually as bathetic figures, victims or losers . . .

"The media didn't see this coming. Back in February, when the new prince was gliding thrillingly up and up toward nomination, a part of the thrill for the media was their happy astonishment that they were no longer cosmopolitan outliers but finally (unlike in 1984 with Gary Hart) in sync with America: Regular folks, white people in Iowa and Virginia and Wisconsin, were actually voting for Obama!

"That was then. With the ten-point loss in Pennsylvania, the latest Reverend Wright eruption, and the shrinkage of Obama's leads in the polls, the media are feeling lousy, and not just because their guy is taking a beating. If Obama is deemed to be an effete, out-of-touch yuppie, then the effete-yuppie media Establishment that's embraced him must be equally oblivious and/or indifferent to the sentiments of the common folk."

Is the right reassessing Hillary? You get that impression from this Noemie Emery piece in the Weekly Standard:

"After March 4, she suddenly seemed to look and sound different: She began to seem real. The shrillness was gone, and so was The Cackle, and so were the forced southern accents that once caused so many so much merriment. Hillary!--whoever that was--never really cohered as a character; her previous poses--the Perfect Wife, the Aggrieved Wife, the Empress-in-Waiting--were all unconvincing, but in her new role--the scrapper, forced to the wall and hanging in there with ferocious and grim resolution--she is suddenly all of a piece.