McCain Unhinged

Chris Mathews calls it “Razzle Dazzle”.   George Will has taken to calling John McCain the Queen of Hearts. 

Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.

Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked The Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”

Once again, and this is a disturbingly regular pattern, whenever things get a bit sketchy for the Senator from Arizona, he throws a Hail Mary.  Just to pick three examples . . .

• Cancel the first day of the Convention
• Sarah Palin
• Attack Christopher Cox

And now this.  Cancel the debate.

Chris Mathews take on this (on Rachel Maddow’s show on MSNBC) is that whenever McCain becomes concerned that the public might actually start paying attention, he does the razzle dazzle to distract attention. Why now?  He’s just launched another round of particularly heinous attack ads at a time when his party is taking it in the shorts over the mess the economy has become.  Poor John is in a pickle as he’s not only been an ardent deregulator, but there’s the nasty bit of him getting caught up in the last real estate-led meltdown when he anchored the Keating Five. Having slimed Obama he decided not to stick around for the return volley.

Rachel Maddow points out that over the past forty years, the debates have gone forward in close proximity to various and sundry disasters including . . .

• Bombing of Times Square (Nixon Kennedy).
• Bombing the USS Cole (Bush Gore).
• Iranian Hostage Crisis (Reagan Carter)

. . .  Just to pick three examples (there are others). 

For a man who at one pointed wanted to run on his leadership qualities, this is truly scary.  When things get dodgy he clearly and obviously panics. To repeat myself, he throws a Hail Mary.  Again, and again, and again.  It’s probably not even a good way to fly a fighter plane.  It’s a hell of a way to run a campaign. You tell me. Is that how you want our country to be run?

Again from George Will . . .

McCain’s smear — that Cox “betrayed the public’s trust” — is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people.

And this . . .

Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.

It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency. It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency. Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?

Tags: JohnMcCain, George Will, Chris Mathews, Razzle Dazzle, Rachel Maddow