Richard Cohen is in accidental genius in that he often tells the truth without realizing what he’s really said. From yesterday's WaPo:
He's been running around the country costumed as a George W. Bush conservative. McCain's tax plan is a joke, and his foreign policy is frightening.
That's a pretty telling insight into the mind of the press covering McCain, and why they continue to assure the public they'll get around to giving critical coverage eventually. They think he’s playing. They can’t actually conceive of the idea that McCain is putting forth policy he would follow through on as president. What’s the point of scrutinizing McCain now, Cohen seems to say, when he’s clearly just saying all these things he doesn’t believe? Better to wait until he reverts to the McCain the press loves to love, at which point they wouldn’t actually have anything critical to say.
Cohen dings McCain for the Obama/Hamas smear, but he never explains exactly why McCain’s foreign policy is frightening, or why he believes McCain doesn’t really mean it. That would seem to me to be a far more important topic, but any fair evaluation would require an acknowledgement that, as Matthew Yglesias points out in this months' issue of TAP, McCain was always more Dubya than Dubya, even in 2000, when Cohen “boarded the Straight Talk Express” and “never got off.”
—A. Serwer
