Mario Piperni dot Com

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Dana Milbank laments.

I miss John McCain.

I miss the McCain I sat with on a flight from San Diego to Phoenix back in 1999, when he defended his oft-ridiculed belief that campaign finance was the most important issue in America: because the corrupting influence of money in politics was preventing all other issues — taxes, abortion, you name it — from being solved.

“Until I draw my last breath, I will fight for it,” he liked to say back then.

A couple of weeks ago, the Supreme Court issued a ruling that gutted the McCain-Feingold campaign-finance legislation, essentially destroying the cause that had been so dear to McCain.

His response: Whatever.

“I don’t think there’s much that can be done, to tell you the truth,” he told CBS’s Bob Schieffer. “It is what it is,” he added.

“Reform is dead?” Schieffer asked.

“Oh, I think so,” McCain answered, at least for now. “The Supreme Court has spoken. I respect their decision.”

So much for that bit about “last breath.”

I’m not sure if the John McCain Milbank misses ever really existed as anything more than an image McCain created to serve his purpose at the time.  Case in point, this story from the 2008 campaign describing the turning point of the 2000 Republican primaries.

John McCain took the New Hampshire primary and was favored to win in South Carolina. Had he succeeded, he would likely have thwarted the presidential aspirations of George W. Bush and become the Republican nominee. But Bush strategist Karl Rove came to the rescue with a vicious smear tactic.

Rove invented a uniquely injurious fiction for his operatives to circulate via a phony poll. Voters were asked, “Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?” This was no random slur. McCain was at the time campaigning with his dark-skinned daughter, Bridget, adopted from Bangladesh.

It worked. Owing largely to the Rove-orchestrated whispering campaign, Bush prevailed in South Carolina and secured the Republican nomination. The rest is history–specifically the tragic and blighted history of our young century. It worked in another way as well. Too shaken to defend himself, McCain emerged from the bruising episode less maverick reformer and more Manchurian candidate.

The former crusader against the Republican establishment has since turned into a Bush-hugging, business-as-usual politician who has backed down from many positions that set him apart from conventional conservatives. Before, McCain supported the separation of church and state; now he wants a Christian in the White House. The confederate flag, which he once considered an offensive symbol, no longer troubles him. And he has come to believe that tax cuts are a good idea.

I don’t want to say that McCain sold his soul to the devil, since I believe that religious metaphors have no place in politics. But consider this: shortly after losing the 2000 election, McCain told an interviewer that there must be “a special place in hell” reserved for the rumormongers.

Seven years later, who is running McCain’s South Carolina campaign? Charlie Condon, the former State Attorney General who in 2000 helped spread the innuendo targeting Bridget. If you can’t beat them, hire them–even if they’ve launched racist attacks against your own daughter.

My belief is that John McCain has few true convictions. The ‘maverick’ image served him well for many a year but with the selection of Palin as his running mate in 2008, the last vestiges of honor were forever lost. He risked placing the country he claimed he loved in the hands of an incompetent, unqualified and ignorant fool all for the chance of being called President McCain.

John McCain sold out his soul a long time ago and the man who had no qualms in hiring a strategist he once thought only fit for hell, now pounds his chest and makes statements like this one.

“President Obama is leading an extreme, left wing crusade to bankrupt America. I stand in his way every day. If I get a bruise or two knocking some sense into heads in Washington, so be it.”

Sure John. Whatever.

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