With all due allowance for our concerns about Obama and his campaign, the grim reality is that we mustn't allow McCranky to be elected

Last night -- let's not kid ourselves, they're not the same.

by Ken

Howie and I were chatting last night, and he told me about the experience of watching Senators Obama and McCranky at the Saddleback Church do. As he's still without a usable home computer, he suddenly has time for all sorts of normally neglected activities.

ASIDE ON HOWIE'S COMPUTERLESSNESS

Now I realize that what I described in a comment as hot-shot corporate techs consulting on Howie's case were in fact merely the tech-support drones from his cable company, which is already mystified as to why he can't get CNN, alone among the channels in his cable package. (He recently upgraded to one of those triple packages with cable, computer, and phone service.) Since CNN is one of only three channels he watches, and he'd already seen the History Channel's Chinese-emperor extravaganza several times, that left him, shall we say, open to other options.

He also reminded me of an anecdote he'd already told me about a memorable experience he once had with a deacon of Saddleback. (I remembered the anecdote pretty vividly, just not the Saddleback connection.) He planned to use that anecdote to lead off the hypothetical post he couldn't write based on watching last night's festivities. However, I think I better leave that story to him to tell!

Let me say at once that I was not watching the Saddleback festivities. Sooner than that I would -- in fact did -- watch a little of the Jets-Redskins preseason football game. My goodness, watching preseason football games! Has it come to that? Actually, I kept noticing recently that there were preseason games on TV, but none of them involved teams I care about, which is to say the New York teams, of course. It so happened that I was online last night and stumbled across news that the Jets' newly acquired QB, Grampa Bret Favre, had hurled a TD pass on the team's opening drive. [Oops, turns out it was the Jets' second drive.] Realizing that this had happened perhaps only minutes before, I searched out the game on the TV, and found it apparently still in the first quarter. But Gramps's night, it seemed, was already over.

However, I digress. What struck Howie about the presidential contenders' Saddleback appearances was (a) the difference in their respective modes of presentation and (b) the difference in the audience response.

With regard to (a), Obama genuinely tried to engage on serious issues, thoughtfully and substantively. McCranky, meanwhile, bloviated with prescripted, pandering imbecilities. (At one point, I was told, he even announced, "I'm pandering.") With respect to (b), the audience greeted Obama respectfully, but went batshit crazy over Young Johnny's disgraceful brain-rotted imbecilities.

Which is, come to think of it, and even allowing for the giant disappointment many of us feel about the progress of the center-hugging, mush-mouthed Obama campaign, the inescapable difference between the candidates. Don't get me wrong. The disappointment many of us feel with regard to both the Obama campaign and Obama as candidate is important, and I don't mean to minimize it. I myself have been contemplating for several weeks now writing an agonized post of heart unhappiness. Yet I think it's maybe more important right now to step back and reregister this crucial, unchanging difference between the candidates.

The more I see and hear of McCranky, the more horrified I am.

Anyone who's looked into his past knows that he was never the mythical maverick of legend. He's always been way more conservative than his admirers realized, and all his post-Vietnam life he's had a shockingly sleazy record in financial matters.

His involvement in the Keating Five scandal turns out not to have been incidental or aberrant. It was, rather, utterly typical behavior for a man perpetually on the make for a quick buck, not least in the whole sordid episode of dumping his first wife in favor of the lovely Cindy the beer heiress. We mustn't forget that unlike the four Democratic senators who got caught in the Keating muck, McCranky actually had a personal relationship with muckmaster Charles Keating.

Even the most laudable undertaking of McCranky's political career, his passionate involvement in campaign finance reform, looks in retrospect suspiciously like a desperate attempt to put the scandal behind him. His more recent approach to campaign finance has made a mockery of the whole spirit of the McCain-Feingold reforms, limited as they were.

CONFIDENTIAL TO SEN. RUSS FEINGOLD

Depressingly, Russ Feingold seems not to have noticed his old crusade mate's metamorphosis, or for that matter his lifelong sleaze streak, and continues to speak of him as if he were the mythical Maverick McCain.

Confidential to Russ: Hey, Russ, shut the fuck up, why dontcha?

(Come to think of it, you have to wonder how much contact Russ has had recently with his old comrade. It's not as if they're likely to have crossed paths in the Senate, where Young Johnny has hardly shown his face in the last year.)

And the worst of it with Young Johnny, even worse in my mind than the question of how much of his faculties he may have lost to age, is that when you look really closely at the McCranky record, as our pal Cliff Schecter did in his still-indispensable book The Real McCain, it's hard to find anything Young Johnny really believes in as a matter of principle beyond his own ambition.

One of these days I'm sure I'll be upset enough with Obama and his campaign to write that agonized cri du coeur I've got percolating. But it's not going to change the grim reality that, after eight years of Cheney-Bush atrocities, we really and truly have no choice in this election. Not only is there no hope of a McCranky administration seriously addressing the wreckage left behind by the Bush regime. There is a frightening possibility that a President McCranky could actually do worse.

And the horrifying reality, at least from my vantage point, is that, for all that the McCranky campaign appears to be a cross between a stumbling shambles and a train wreck, it seems to be working. Pretty much the way it worked last night at Saddleback.

Go, Barack!

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