ATLANTA — The McCain campaign has bet the '08 election on a belief that facts, reality, history and issues don't matter anymore. All that matters is projecting a version of reality that voters find attractive.
In one sense that's nothing new, and nothing unique to the McCain campaign. Political campaigns, especially at the presidential level, have long been little more than contests in image-making. But the McCain camp has taken that approach still further by creating a version of reality that is no longer tethered in any way to actual reality. They believe they can treat facts as "facts," and once you believe you hold that power, a whole world of possibilities opens to you.
Just this week, Sen. John McCain completely shed his identity as an ardent and longtime advocate of financial deregulation. It was as if the past had never happened and that earlier version of John McCain had never existed. Suddenly, McCain 2.0 was a populist scourge of Wall Street, railing about the evils of unregulated corporate greed, and to hear the McCain campaign that's all he had ever been.
Earlier campaigns would not have attempted such a shameless reinvention, fearful what would happen when the chasm between reality and fiction was exposed in the media. The McCain campaign has no such fear. As one McCain spokesman admitted last week, "We're running a campaign to win, and we're not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it."
McCain strategists also understand that people who want to believe your version of reality aren't going to be stopped by petty things like facts. If you give them even the flimsiest justification for dismissing reality, they will seize it like starved dogs.
For example, does Sarah Palin know enough about foreign policy to step in as president? Well, she's governor of Alaska, and you can see Russia from Alaska.
As a foreign-policy credential, that's laughable, but the McCain camp pushed it nonetheless, because it gave those who want to believe the excuse to do so. If it wasn't reality, so what? They could at least see reality from there.
In fact, those who criticized the Palin selection because of her blank public record miss the true genius of the move. The lack of a record wasn't a handicap; it was Palin's greatest attribute. It offered the McCain campaign a blank canvas upon which to paint whatever image it wanted. You rarely get a chance to create a candidate out of whole cloth, with no baggage or previous public image to mar your work, and the McCain camp jumped at the chance.
McCain campaign manager Rick Davis even admitted as much in an interview with The Washington Post.
"This election is not about issues," he said. "This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates — their values, their character, their opinions, their principles."
And in the case of Palin, Davis said, "I have the luxury of being able to fill in blanks that exist in her record. I mean, she wasn't out debating the war in Iraq the last two years."
That's telling: He fills in the blanks, not Palin. She is his creation, the epitome of his art.
That also explains why the McCain camp failed to vet Palin as thoroughly as previous campaigns would have. Why obsess over the facts if the facts can be rewritten? Who cares if she fought hard for the Bridge to Nowhere, campaigning on its behalf long after Congress had killed its funding? Through mythmaking, you transform her into the very opposite and dare anyone to stop you. A fact becomes a "fact."
By now, the American people ought to know the dangers of such a course. In its eight years in power, the Bush administration also lived in a world of its own invention, a world in which Iraq would finance its own reconstruction, there were no refugees at the New Orleans Convention Center, Brownie was doing a great job and the fundamentals of the economy were sound.
But as it turns out, in real life it matters whether a story is real or invented. If we've learned nothing else in the last eight years, we've learned that matters very much.
