Buried deep in John Heilemann & Mark Halperin’s best-selling Game Change is an epitaph for McCain’s campaign, and as good a single example of why Obama won as I’ve seen in print. The book, in case you missed it, is a kind of pot-boilerish account of the ’08 election, chock-full of cliches, gossip, a lot of stories you remember all too well — but absolute buttered popcorn for politics lovers.
At the end of September of that year, in the midst of complete meltdown of our financial system, JMC suspended his campaign — and then returned to Washington for a White House summit that he asked for and then failed to lead. Obama throughout was calm — while McCain seemed increasingly passive and confused. Jim Wilkinson, who was working as Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s chief of staff, is quoted saying:
“I’m a pro-life, pro-gun Texas Republican. I worked all eight years for Bush. I helped sell the Iraq War. I was in the Florida recount. And I wrote a letter to John McCain asking for my five-hundred-dollar contribution back, when he pulled that stunt and came back to DC. Because it just wasn’t what a serious person does.”
Wilkinson was more than your average Bushie: he appears in Mission Al Jazeera (the book I wrote with former Marine captain Josh Rushing) as a serial propagandist, practically a dirty trickster of the Nixon stripe. He strutted around Centcom during the run-up to the Iraq invasion, wearing a three-star general’s uniform. And he wasn’t just “in the Florida recount”; he helped orchestrate the Brooks Brothers riot, one of the key roadblocks to a legitimate tally of votes in that state’s primary.
“To his amazement,” the authors write, “Wilkinson determined he would be voting for Obama.”
What, I wonder, does Wilkinson make of McCain’s current denial that he asked for that meeting at the White House? The senator, facing a challenge from JD Hayworth, a Tea Party radio host in the GOP AZ primary, is trying to s say he was “misled” by Paulson, Bush, the whole TARP thing. But as he likes to say of his opponent (and as someone like Wilkinson can remind him) “facts are stubborn things.”