This NY Times profile of Cindy McCain and the McCain's marriage is one of the most thorough-going hatchet jobs I've read in an American paper.
It's a rare thing, a work of genius that stands comparison to the best British work in the genre. The Brits of course take great pleasure in the cutting essay; it's a beloved part of the political landscape in Britain. I do wonder though whether an American readership will fully appreciate how finely the NY Times' reporters, Jodi Kantor and David Halbfinger, have honed this piece to a sharp edge.
How many readers of the Times will pause to admire its literary economy, as virtually every sentence adds some new horror about the McCain's dysfunctional marriage or Cindy McCain's odd relationship to politics?
Rejected by the clubby Congressional wives, Cindy McCain tried to befriend her husband’s aides.
“She seemed lonely,” said Lisa Boepple, a former chief of staff. But “she was John’s wife, so we didn’t really want to hang around with her.”
Who will appreciate the tone of diffidence cultivated by the reporters, or the way it is used to such devastating effect to record a series of garish details regarding their personal lives?
In the master suite, she installed a fireplace carved with “MC,” for McCain.
Or the reporters' resort to ostentatiously anodyne phrases when summarizing Cindy's self-aggrandizing lies - which they then go to some trouble to expose?
Whatever stumbles she may have made in telling her story...
Will readers notice that every one of the McCain's actions described here carries negative implications for the attitudes of one or both of them?
As his poll numbers have slid recently, her devotion has seemed only to grow. When the McCain campaign recently stepped up attacks on Senator Barack Obama, Mrs. McCain joined in with startling intensity.
The piece is framed by the hostile reception that home-wrecker Cindy received in DC after her husband's first election. While nominally sympathetic to her plight, the article actually sets about demolishing the couple's public image systematically. We learn that Cindy has tried to model herself on Princess Diana of all people, even to the point of joining the same landmine-clearing organization; that Cindy has unexplained delusions about her own life, even to the point of claiming (falsely) that she intervened in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide; that John's birthday presents to Cindy come via her mother because he can't be bothered to order them himself; that husband and wife rarely cross paths except when he's campaigning for election.
Politics have always brought the McCains together: as she remarked during his failed 2000 presidential run, campaigns are when the two spend the most time with each other.
“Just when I think we’re complete opposites, it turns out we’re not, that we’ve had a common goal — first the children and now this,” she told Harper’s Bazaar last year.
I don't have any reason to doubt any of these personal details, or that together they portray John and Cindy McCain more or less accurately. It's just that I didn't expect to find them assembled and presented so cheekily in an American newspaper, least of all this close to the election, even as McCain's prospects fade. At the same time, incidentally, I didn't really expect the Times to bestir itself to report on the nasty robocalls that Republicans are generating once again.
It's practically an element of faith among many journalists in this country that they should take any steps necessary to avoid influencing an election. It's silly and highly ironic, but that is what they profess. Remember that 4 years ago the very same NY Times was busy burying a story about George W. Bush's illegal NSA spying program precisely because its editors feared that public knowledge of Bush's lawlessness might alter the election. Likewise, 2 years ago the GOP's barrage of misleading and harrassing robocalls in the weeks before the election went all but unreported by traditional media in the US. What could any reporter have said about those calls that would have shown "balance"?
But now the Times is actually drawing attention to the GOP robocall smears and shedding light on the McCain's strange personal lives. In both substance and tone, the NY Times of 2008 is significantly different and more aggressive than in the past. It's been apparent for some months that the Times has taken a more activist role in shaping public debate through its reporting.
What happened? It's tempting to think that the nightmare years of George Bush have made it nearly impossible for the Times' leadership to continue to pretend that they report on the news in a vacuum; that the greatest virtue of the journalist is to modulate criticisms and conceal shortcomings of the powerful. Or maybe it took John McCain's rancidly dishonest campaign to demonize Barack Obama this year to drive home what the stakes are for the country?
Anyhow, I don't know which I regret more – that the Times feels it's appropriate and necessary to publish a hatchet job such as this, or that Republicans in Washington have created an environment in which anybody thinks it's appropriate and necessary to demolish political rivals personally.
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