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GUEST: Paul Waldman, co-author (with David Brock) of “Free Ride: John McCain and the Media”

The presumptive Republican Presidential candidate John McCain, embarked on a week-long “Service To America biography tour” last week, showcasing his military record and garnering local media coverage. The move is part of McCain’s attempt at reinventing himself for this year’s election, with some bloggers suspecting Karl Rove’s involvement. McCain’s military record and the 5 years he spent as a prisoner-of-war in Vietnam have long been the centerpiece of his public persona. But the Democratic National Committee released research studying focus groups of voters in swing states, saying that McCain has a “backward-looking approach and …is badly out of touch with the realities average people face in their lives today.” McCain has staked his campaign on firmly backing Bush’s war in Iraq, despite negative public opinion against the war. Still, for all that the Democrats and the general public make of John McCain, his image as a staunch reformer, independent, and maverick will likely stick to him through this campaign. But does McCain deserve the reputation of being a courageous, go-it-alone, anti-politician? And how did he cultivate such an image in the first place? A new book, called Free Ride, by David Brock and Paul Waldman examines the media’s love affair with John McCain and their role in the “making of a maverick.”

For more information, visit www.mccainsfreeride.com.

Rough Transcript:

Sonali: First, let’s talk about what I mentioned is the defining aspect of McCain’s public persona – his military record. It seems as though, especially from reading your book and the evidence you cite, not an article goes by in print or featured on tv that doesn’t mention McCain’s five years spent as a prisoner of war. How has the media helped glorify McCain’s military record?

Paul: It really is quite extraordinary. I don’t think there’s any other politician for whom something that they did 40 years ago plays such a central role in the way that they’re discussed today. First of all, nobody denies that McCain went through terrible suffering when he was a prisoner of war or that he showed courage. That’s something that’s not disputed by anybody. But the question is how does it function in terms of the image that the media create of John McCain. And, what you find is that they tend to drop it in even when it has nothing to do with the story that they’re writing about. You’ll see things that say John McCain, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, today gave a speech on the economy. And, you think, what does that have to do with the speech on the economy? But, we find that over and over again. And one of the other things that is interesting about the way that the press talks about this is one of the stories that they tell is that McCain is very reluctant to bring up Vietnam, he doesn’t like to talk about it. He’s too modest, so full of integrity that he doesn’t want to raise this fact that he was a prisoner of war. We see that from reporters all the time that they say this. But the fact is that’s just not true. McCain is quite happy to bring it up. And in truth, the fact that he was a prisoner of war has been the basis of his entire political career dating back to his first run for Congress in 1982. It was the thing that got him elected in the first place and it’s been really at the center of every campaign that he has run and right now his campaign recently unveiled its first general election television ad, which was about McCain being a prisoner of war. They ran ads like that in the primaries too. He ran ads like that in his 2000 race. It’s always at the center of the story that he and his campaign tell about John McCain. Now there’s nothing wrong with that. He has every right to do that if he wants. But the press shouldn’t be telling us that he’s not doing it because he is so modest. That’s just not true. He does use it. He uses it all the time and he will continue to do so until the election.

Sonali: How does the media’s treatment of McCain compare to other elected officials who are war veterans and who might have had similar pasts?

Paul: Well, you know, every case is a little bit different but you do find that there is a kind of unquestioning glorification with McCain that nobody else gets. For instance, there are some frankly pretty crazy people who think that John McCain is a traitor and that when he was a prisoner of war he betrayed the country. They’re pretty crazy but they’re out there. And the media, I think appropriately, doesn’t give them any credence, doesn’t give them any attention and treats them as though they’re not worthy of being noticed. But, when the swift boat veterans for truth came out with, frankly what was a dossier of lies about John Kerry, every one of which practically was eventually proven to be false, what happened was the press gave it an extraordinary degree of attention and it took months before they finally got around to asking whether or not the things the swift boat veterans said were true. And, it turns out they were false. But, by the time that happened they had been given all kinds of attention in every single different major medium that you could think of. So, I think that when it comes to McCain and his POW service, there’s kind of a different standard because it’s not just about the facts of what happened there, but it’s almost as though it creates a halo around him that is the answer to any question about his character. You know, just last week, Howard Dean said, at one point when he was talking about McCain, that McCain was an opportunist. A couple of days later, John Kerry was on Fox News Sunday, their Sunday show, and Chris Wallace, the host, said, Howard Dean said that John McCain was an opportunist. Was he an opportunist when he refused early release from that POW camp? That’s the question he asked John Kerry as though there is no character attack that can be made on John McCain as far as the press is concerned that shouldn’t be answered with,’but he was a POW’. Now, that’s part of the story of his life and it’s part of his character but it’s not the entirety and that shouldn’t render him immune to any kind of other questions about his character because there are some legitimate questions about his character.

Sonali: Now, you say the press’s affection for John McCain is built on three foundations: his Vietnam experience, his advocacy for campaign finance reform and his style in dealing with reporters. So, let’s talk about the campaign finance reform issue. We’ll go back to 2002. How did the media treat McCain’s efforts in the campaign finance reform act – something he’s become famous for championing, even against his own party members?

Paul: Well, this is a story that people, by now, are probably already forgetting but the battle over campaign finance reform lasted for a long, long time. And what you had basically was most Democrats on one side and most Republicans on the other with a few people from each side going back and forth. But, the story that the press told about that was that it was a lonely crusade by one man, John McCain. You know, the McCain/Feingold Bill, when it was first written, used to be referred to in the press as the Feingold/McCain Bill. But, gradually, McCain became the star of that story and I think, for a lot of reporters, the way we put it in the book is that it became sort of a vessel where they could pour all their disgust with the political system. You know, people have often said that laws and sausages are the two things one should never watch being made. And, the reporters, the Capital Hill reporters, are the people who walk the halls of the sausage factory and they used the issue of campaign finance reform as a way to report on all of those unseemly aspects of politics – all the influence peddling, all of the special interest contributions. And there was no doubt who the hero of that story was. The hero was John McCain. He was the one who was pure as the driven snow himself and was going to clean up the political system. And that issue lasted for so long and they wrote that story about him so many times that it really engrained in their minds the idea, not just that he was a reformer, but that he somehow is outside the dirty aspects of politics. But the truth is that he’s not outside the dirty aspects of politics. He is as enmeshed with lobbyists and special interests as anyone in Washington. You know, we have a website: mccainsfreeride.com If you go there, we have a nice chart that charts all of the different lobbyists who work for McCain. Now, his campaign manager is a corporate lobbyist; his deputy campaign manager is a corporate lobbyist; his chief fund-raiser is a corporate lobbyist; his chief political advisor is a corporate lobbyist. It goes on and on. There are dozens and dozens of them. And if you look over his career, what you find out is that, in contrast to the image that’s been portrayed of him, he’s not pure as the driven snow. He is as enmeshed in that Washington culture as anyone.

Sonali: Give us some examples of how the media then, despite of the evidence that you’ve just stated, still continues to portray him as somebody who is this very honest anti-politician who is unlike all the other scum that we see on Capitol Hill.

Paul: Well, you know, that is really the kind of thematic thread that you see running through it – that he’s different, that other politicians do things for political reasons but not McCain. He just operates on principle. And, so all of the sins of politicians whether it’s pandering or flip-flopping are explained away when McCain does it. Let’s talk about flip-flopping. We’ve seen in recent days a number of occasions, and they’re up at mediamatters.org, of commentators saying, well, you know, unlike some other people in his party, he refused to pander to the anti-immigrant forces in the Republican Party that were pressuring him. We’ve seen this said a number of different times just in the last couple of weeks by commentators, by reporters. But the truth is that John McCain did pander to the anti-immigrant forces. He had one position on immigration which is he sponsored a bill that was a comprehensive immigration reform bill and when asked about building fences, he said that a fence wouldn’t work unless you had comprehensive immigration reform including a path to citizenship. That became problematic for him with the Republican base and so he did a 180. And now his position is that the first thing we have to do is build a fence. He was asked whether he would vote for his own bill in a Republican debate in the primaries and he said no. So, if it were a different candidate, the reporters would look at that and say, okay well, what does that tell us about him? He’s pandering to the base and he’s flip-flopping, right? Those are two things that normally we condemn politicians for. If it had been, say, Mitt Romney, they would have pointed it out and say this shows us something about who he is. But, since it was John McCain, they’ve already decided who he is. And one of the things that they decided is that he doesn’t pander and he doesn’t flip-flop. And so when he actually does those things, they find ways to either deny it or explain it away as though it never happened. And we see that kind of thing over and over again. The rules are always different for John McCain.

Sonali: So, now let’s talk about what it is about John McCain’s approach to media, how he personally deals with reporters that plays a large part in this glorifying that the press does of John McCain. You say that John McCain’s act is not having an act. What does that mean?

Paul: He basically cracked the media code in a way that no other politician has. And I think that part of the beauty of it is that it looks like it’s just him being a nice guy. But, in fact, it is a very carefully planned strategy. What McCain figured out is that the relationship between politicians and reporters ordinarily is very tense. The politicians tend to be afraid always that they’re going to say something that’s going to get them in trouble and cause a controversy and so they’re very careful and measured around reporters and very suspicious, don’t want to say anything too controversial. The reporters in turn are incredibly frustrated by that. It drives them crazy. And so they, it gets to the point where they’re just waiting to pounce on something that the politician says so it’s this kind of vicious cycle. McCain said, okay, I’m going to turn that upside-down. I’m going to make myself completely available to reporters. I’m going to talk to them as though I like them and value what they do. I’m never going to go off the record. I’ll invite them into my office, onto my bus, I’ll talk for hours and hours and hours. I’ll even say some uncomplimentary things about myself, tell them stories in which I’m not the hero. And what happened was reporters just fell in love with that, most importantly because nobody else was doing it. And the consequence – it may have looked like a risky strategy but in fact it turned out not to be so risky because what happens is that when McCain does say something that could get a different politician in trouble, the reporters give him a pass because they say, ‘oh, well that’s John McCain, we know him.’ So, for instance, on the 2000 campaign bus, a couple of times he referred to Vietnamese as ‘gooks’. Now, we saw what happened to George Allen in Virginia when he used the word, ‘macaqua’. It basically destroyed his Senate campaign. But, when that happened on the bus in 2000, none of the reporters who were there decided to write anything about it. It turned up in an article in The Nation. And then after that, some Asian-American groups got very angry and started raising a stink until finally, after they put pressure on the reporters, they asked McCain about it and he was forced to answer some questions. But it just shows that that affection that he builds up with them means that when he does something or says something that might either counteract the vision that’s been built up of him or just get him in trouble, they’re going to find a way to either ignore it or explain it away.

Sonali: We had covered recently on this program McCain’s most recent, let’s just say slip-of-the-tongue when he associated Al-Qaida with militants being trained by Iran and how the media had certainly reported it but perhaps another politician would have gotten a much worse treatment. Paul, let’s talk about the term, ‘maverick’ that is so often used in describing McCain. Where did it come from and is it well-deserved?

Paul: It’s almost become part of his name. It’s difficult to pick up an article about John McCain that doesn’t refer to him as the ‘maverick Arizona senator’. And the truth about this maverick label that gets used literally thousands of times for McCain is that it’s been wildly exaggerated. It’s not that he never goes against the Republican Party but the fact is that everyone in Congress goes against their party sometimes. McCain votes with the Republicans about 85% of the time, which puts him pretty much in the middle of the pack when it comes to other senators. But, there’s something different that happens on those occasions where McCain does buck his party. If there’s a conflict between Democrats and Republicans about some piece of legislation and some other senator decides – let’s say Dianne Feinstein decides that she’s going to vote with the Republicans this time as she sometimes does – it’s doesn’t change the story that the press writes about that issue. It’s still a conflict between Democrats and Republicans even if there are a few defectors here and there. But if McCain is the one who decides that he’s going to buck his party on this particular issue, it completely transforms the story that the press tells. All of a sudden, Democrats disappear from the story. It’s no longer a conflict between Democrats and Republicans. Now, it’s a story about John McCain and his heroic rebellion. He’s the one who gets on the Sunday shows to talk about it, he’s the one whose name is in the headlines, the story comes on the front page and the press reiterates those other relatively infrequent occasions in which he has decided to vote with Democrats. And, so what happens is that even though these occasions are few and far between, they get this elevated play in the press that convinces everyone that he is somehow different, that he’s the one who will go against his party when no one else will when, in fact, no senator has a 100% party unity vote. That just doesn’t happen. But when McCain does it, it gets a different story told about it. And he also has very carefully, with the press, played up this image by doing things like, in private, he’ll say to a reporter something insulting about another senator which makes them feel like he’s letting them in on something and really displaying part of something hidden about his personality and one of the interesting things about it is that it plays right to the way that reporters like to think of themselves. So, this image that McCain has built up – that he’s the guy who takes on the powers that be and isn’t afraid to ruffle feathers and isn’t tied to partisanship – that’s how reporters like to think of themselves. So, it’s very attractive and compelling to them. And so when you combine that with the fact that, unlike most other politicians John McCain is always telling reporters how much he likes them and respects what they do, that really makes them feel like he’s on their side. And that’s reflected in the coverage of him.

Sonali: He sounds as though he sets it up so that reporters feel like they can relate to him like as if he and them are on the same team looking at politicians through the same lens.

Paul: Exactly. It’s an extraordinarily clever strategy. And, you know, one often wonders why other politicians don’t do the same thing.

Sonali: In your book, you have a fantastic table or graph that shows how many times the press has mentioned the word ‘maverick’ within ten words of McCain’s name from 1996 all the way through 2006 so it remains to be seen how that features this year during a presidential election where McCain is the presumptive Republican candidate.

Paul: The answer is it’s even more so.

Sonali: Have you tabulated that already?

Paul: Yeah, we started to look at it and you can find, I think it was 1,000 references to him being a maverick just in newspapers in the first couple of months of the year. So, it’s increased.

Sonali: Wow. Let’s talk about McCain’s personality trait that doesn’t seem to get that much play in the media. He seems to have a bit of a temper, something he’s even deployed occasionally against reporters. But the media downplays that.

Paul: You can find occasional references to it. But, for the most part, it hasn’t been given any sort of extended discussion, especially not on this campaign. But, the truth of the matter is that John McCain has an absolutely volcanic temper. Washington, D.C. and Arizona are littered with people who have been insulted and yelled at and threatened by John McCain. It’s happened to other politicians. It’s happened to even just ordinary people. And, this is something that people who are sort of insiders know about but it’s not something that gets discussed much. And, when you think about the way that so much of the coverage of a presidential campaign is about character and who these people really are at heart, you know, who influenced them when they were kids, what are their personalities really like? A lot of reporters see that as their main job, to just sort of expose the person behind the persona. But, this aspect of John McCain’s character, which is something that a lot of people who have worked with him or near him know about, is something that doesn’t get discussed a lot. But there are even Republican senators who say that they wouldn’t want his finger on the button because he’s so volatile. And, if we’re going to have a discussion in the press that’s about character, that deserves to get talked about too, not just the fact that he was courageous when he was a POW in Vietnam 40 years ago.

Sonali: Now, Paul, local Arizona reporters, where of course John McCain is a senator, seem to know him or just have a more realistic picture of who John McCain is. Why is that?

Paul: Well, they’re the ones who know him best and have known him the longest. And what you see is that his relationship with the Arizona media is very, very different than it is with the national media. The picture that people in Arizona get from their press on John McCain is much more of a warts-and-all picture. They talk about his good sides and also his not so good sides. And, as a consequence, his relationship with them has been very contentious and testy. In 2000, he wouldn’t even let the reporter from the Arizona Republic, the largest newspaper in his home state, he wouldn’t let her have a seat on the Straight Talk Express. So, while all the national reporters were sitting in the back of the bus, you know, drinking and having a grand old time with Senator McCain, she had to follow the bus along in a rental car and that’s just sort of one thing that’s kind of symbolic of the way that relationship has evolved. You know, the Arizona Republican is a fairly conservative paper but, nonetheless, because they have at times criticized him, he’s never had the same kind of friendly and chummy relationship with them that he has had with the national media. And one of the things you notice, people who watch cable news may have noticed in recent months that, for instance, reporters from Chicago have started to turn up on television to talk about Barack Obama. So, people who report for the Chicago Tribune, the Chicago Sun-Times, since they know more about Obama and have known him longer than the national media have, they’ve become people that the national media have turned to for their insight. But, I haven’t seen any reporters from Arizona be interviewed in national media to talk about John McCain. Maybe that’s because the national media feel like they already know McCain well enough and they don’t need to hear from the people in his home state but if they did they would get a somewhat different story.

Sonali: Let’s talk in the last part of this interview, Paul, about the presidential campaign that McCain is running. It’s going to be interesting to see how McCain carries out this campaign. On the one hand, he has very strongly identified with President Bush’s war on Iraq and is a very staunch conservative. And on the other hand, his own party and the conservative Republican Party base is a little skeptical of him because of this reputation he’s cultivated as an independent. It’s going to be interesting to see how he walks the line. What do you think John McCain’s strategy is going to be and is this ‘Biography Tour’ he had last week, is that part of it?

Paul: Well, one of the things that McCain understands better than most politicians I think is that ultimately presidential campaigns are not about the details of issues, they’re not about ten-point plans and position papers. They’re about identity and character. He spent a lot of time in the primaries trying to convince Republicans that he was one of them, that he really was a staunch conservative and the fact is that’s really true. They were basically taken in by the same media image that everyone else has been taken in by, that he’s some sort of maverick and independent, when, in fact, that is really paper-thin, once you begin to examine this in detail. So, I would anticipate that he understands that this is really his greatest asset. It’s the affection of the press and this image that we call the ‘myth of McCain’ that has been built up over the last decade or so. So, I would anticipate that he’s going to spend less time talking about how conservative he is and more time reiterating these same kinds of words and phrases that have been said about him so often by his friends in the media, that he’s the maverick, he’s the straight-talker, he’s the one who stands up to the special interests. Those are all part of an identity that he’s been building up with the cooperation of the media very carefully for the last 10 or 12 years and I think that he and his campaign have faith that that will be enough to carry him to the White House.

Sonali: Now, what about him setting himself up in relation to President Bush? How do you think he’s going to approach that given that Bush is so highly unpopular at this point?

Paul: Well, that really remains to be seen and he’s in kind of a quandary because on the one hand he needs to retain the affection of those conservatives who are the last people who support President Bush and I know that a lot of Democrats feel like that’s his greatest vulnerability. You know, there’s this famous picture of him giving Bush a big hug that, I’m sure, is going to turn up in television ads and in flyers in peoples’ mailboxes and things like that. So, he can’t alienate conservatives on the one hand but on the other hand he has to reach out to the middle and he can do that through this image that he’s created for himself. But every step he takes in one direction makes it more dangerous for him to secure the people in the other direction.

Sonali: In reality, Paul, is McCain more like Bush than he’d like for people to think?

Paul: Oh, I think absolutely. He’s an extremely conservative politician and always has been and particularly on foreign policy, if anything, he’s more bellicose than Bush. You mentioned before what he did conflating Iran, saying that Iran was training Al-Qaida which is kind of like saying that the Yankees are training the Red Sox. That’s the same kind of sort of simplistic all-our-enemies-are-bad-so-they-must-all-be-working-together kind of thinking that got us into Iraq in the first place and was so characteristic of the Bush Administration’s approach. And, McCain, you know, has said he’s willing to keep troops in Iraq for 100 years. He’s extremely enthusiastic, it seems, about future military adventures. And so, if you look at the foreign policy that he’s advocating, and also a lot of the neo-conservative all-star team are advising him and have been for a long time.

Sonali: Has he not hired most of Bush’s campaign veterans?

Paul: He hired many of Bush’s campaign veterans. His chief foreign policy advisor is someone who comes from the Project for a New American Century, which is kind of the central neo-conservative think tank. He’s certainly part of that. If you look at who is advising him and what he thinks and what he wants to do in foreign policy he’s part of this continuous line running from the Bush Administration on. So, it’s going to be hard for him to argue in any kind of substantive way that he’s very different from George Bush. But the question often doesn’t turn on that substance, it turns on whether you can create that image of yourself as being an independent and he’s been working on that for a long time and the press is certainly going to help him in that because they’ve already been persuaded that that’s who he is.

Sonali: So, the question really is: Is the press going to reveal how Bush-like McCain is? Paul, repeat that website once more that you have more information on.

Paul: It’s: mccainsfreeride.com There’s lots of interesting stuff there so people should check it out.

Sonali: Paul Waldman, thank you for joining us.

Special Thanks to Julie Svendsen for transcribing this interview