Thomas Edsall, yesterday’s New York Times op-ed page (TimesSelect link):

The two Republican candidates leading in polls, John McCain and Rudy Giuliani, both fail the consensus test. Each stands to the left of the party — well to the left in Giuliani’s case — on the “traditional values” issues: sexual mores, family structure, reproductive choice, gay rights, embryonic stem cell research, and so forth.

This is the most dangerous paragraph in America. It is patently untrue in regards to McCain, yet it preserves the narrative that McCain is a maverick, a moderate, a centrist, a bipartisan rebel, and even liberal. These ingrained media perceptions of McCain have no basis in reality, though they succeed in creating the reality through which most Americans form their opinions about John McCain.

The danger of this paragraph is two-fold. Both reasons connect to the media-created perception on McCain as a maverick. First, McCain has been actively shifting is ideology to the right on social issues over the last six years. He has become a diminutive clone of George W. Bush and has flip-flopped consistently to the right on social issues. If he was at one time too liberal for far right, he has remade himself into a scion of Falwell (even hiring Falwell’s former staffer Brett O’Donnell). McCain supports an immediate reversal of Roe v. Wade - I don’t think there’s a more regressive stance on abortion than that. McCain cut commercials in support of Arizona’s gay marriage ban. He is no liberal; his beliefs are squarely in line with the far right of the Republican Party.

McCain is going to spend the next two years talking directly with Republican voters and far right interest groups. He will tell them all about what he really believes and he will debunk the myths about him being a moderate and a maverick in the confines of town halls in Iowa and rubber chicken dinners in South Carolina. He will talk the language of Falwell and Dobson to their followers because he is one of them.

The second problem with Edsall’s Conventional Wisdom paragraph is that it will be written and uttered repeatedly by media figures for the next two years. Liberal and moderate voters will be told time and again that McCain stands with them on divisive social issues. The McCain qua maverick narrative will be internalized by voters and pundits alike, assuring that McCain’s far right pandering will never be given proper attention.

The end result is that McCain will get to eat his cake and have it too when it comes to his positions on social issues. He can be the ultra-conservative Republican that he is, yet be consistently represented as a moderate and a maverick in the press. McCain will remain the most viable national candidate as long as paragraphs like this one are written about him by an unquestioning national press.

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