Frank Rich sets the record straight on John McCain

I think Frank Rich earned his NYT salary this week. First, he took a swipe at the 'chicken littles':

AS I went on vacation at the end of July, Barack Obama was leading John McCain by three to four percentage points in national polls. When I returned last week he still was. But lo and behold, a whole new plot twist had rolled off the bloviation assembly line in those intervening two weeks: Obama had lost the election!

Then he was "churlish" enough to point out some actual facts and ended that section by pointing out that the most significant poll was one by the Pew Research Center which found "that only 26 percent feel [they've heard too much] about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him." He then proceeded to set the record straight on McCain in blistering language.

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president's response to Katrina; he fought the "agents of intolerance" of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain's imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

Next he delineated just why each aspect mentioned above is inaccurate. He continued on with an assessment of the media's laziness in covering McCain. I suspect he's thinking of the broadcast media types though he didn't say that specifically. TalkingPointsMemo came in for a great acknowledgment of their coverage of McCain.

While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his "independence," his "maverick image" and his "renegade reputation" -- as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is "graded on a curve."

Most Americans still don't know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail "McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries' names wrong, forgets things he's said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused." Most Americans still don't know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press's previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

He further illustrated the difference in diligence by discussing the coverage of the potential first ladies and here The Jed Report was used as a source on Cindy McCain's numerous residences.

To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama's Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being "proud" of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about "whitey." But we still haven't been inside Cindy McCain's tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she controls, "lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve public health and safety," in opposition to groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain's future role in her beer empire won't be revealed before the election.

He noted his conversation about McCain's unreliability with Rita Hauser who's co-founded the Republicans for Obama group and concluded his column with this admonition.

As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there's one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told.

So CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC .... consider yourselves admonished and get on with telling all of McCain's story. I have no hope for Fox ever telling anything like the truth.

And thanks, Frank, for speaking out so clearly.