John McCain this week asks conspiratorially, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" at conservative GOP rallies. The candidate is trying to reignite a faux controversy, Obama's service on a non-profit board with a Chicago college professor who was a '60s radical.
McCain's running mate Sarah Palin, in an attempt to prove she actually reads a newspaper, referenced Williams Ayers, the former Weatherman, and the New York Times.
The McCain-Palin attempt to recycle dirt about Obama actually soils the shoveling duo.
Americans have had more than 20 months to probe Obama. The senator from Arizona needs to be careful, lest more people ask instead, who is the real John McCain?
Rolling Stone magazine this week published "Make-believe maverick," a devastating profile of McCain. If the senator were Wile E. Coyote, the hapless cartoon character, he was just get hit over the head with an anvil dropped from the sky.
Rolling Stone inventoried the hard-drinking, skirt chasing, underperforming acts of the Navy commander who they reported totaled two fighter jets. Other Navy pilots would have lost their wings, but no, the child of a dad and grandpa who both were four-star admirals had the family connections to get rescued.
The piece is well sourced. Military people and Republican politicians came forward to speak on the record about McCain. The Rolling Stone expose could not have appeared at a worse time.
The Rolling Stone account was an exclamation point compared to a similar damning expose that ran this summer by the Guardian of London. That piece noted that McCain's first wife Carol was living quietly in Virginia Beach, Va. She was so disfigured in a 1969 automobile accident, after two dozen surgeries, her height shrunk by five inches. McCain left the former model in order to marry Cindy Lou Hensley, the wispy blond and daughter of a multimillionaire beer distributor.
The Guardian and Rolling Stone also reported that McCain married Cindy before his divorce to Carol was final. That's contrary to what the senator has said in his 2002 memoir.
So, since he is raising character issues about Obama, again, who is the real John McCain?
Last weekend, Frank Rich of the New York Times said McCain was tanking, and post-debate Obama is playing like he is ready to run up the score like a vengeful football coach.
A friend told me that a "Tom Joyner Morning Show" jokester Wednesday said Obama looked like he was getting a pedicure during Tuesday's debate. He sat serenely on his stool as McCain nervously did laps around the stage.
That night was so bizarre CNN analysts had to tell McCain supporters that their cameras were not ignoring their man in order to fawn over the Obamas; the McCains left the Belmont University auditorium immediately after the debate in Nashville.
Instead of soaring on the campaign trail, McCain, just days away from the third and final debate on Wednesday, appears to be crash landing.
