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Incidentally, like Ross, I really don't buy the idea that McCain gets favorable coverage from the press because he's a high-ranking member on the Senate Commerce Committee, and thus in part dictates their corporate future. Chairman Daniel Inouye isn't really a media darling, and nor is Ted Stevens, John Rockefeller, or Mark Pryor. Rather, reporters just like John McCain. Tucker Carlson actually did a terrific article about riding on McCain's Straight Talk Express in 2000. I can't find it online, but it's collected in his book Politicians, Pundits, and Parasites, which is well worth the cost of entry. A taste:
McCain understands that if you're going to play the reformer, sad-eyed disapproval won't do. You've got to pick up the hatchet. McCain does a terrific Cary Nation impression. It's effective because on some level it's true. McCain has a genuinely bad temper. He is a genuinely tough guy.During his first run for office, McCain learned that one of his opponents had tracked down his first wife, looking for dirt. According to a political consultant who worked for him at the time, McCain cornered the man at the next candidate's forum. "I want you to know," McCain said, "that campaign aside, politics aside, if you ever do something like that again -- anything against a member of my family -- I will personally beat the shit out of you."It's impossible to imagine Chris Shays threatening to personally beat the shit out of anyone. But it would be a lot easier to like him if he did.There are a lot of dimensions to the press's adoration of McCain, but this is a significant one: The qualities we most admire in others are those we don't have, or fear we don't have, in ourselves. The press isn't impressed by smart, cerebral candidates because the press is full of smart, cerebral, people, who sort of believe they are smarter and more cerebral than the politicians they cover. There's almost a resentment there, and it comes out in the reporting which often tries to show that the reporter is smarter because they can take down the candidate. They can win the debate, poke flaws in the argument, identify inconsistencies.What very few (male) reporters feel comfortable with is their personal physical courage. Their ability to fare well in a bar fight, or make a credible threat to someone stalking their wife, or endure five years of torture in a Vietnamese prison camp. McCain has something that they don't understand, and that they want. And it's one reason they like him. Because not only does he possess those qualities, but he also appears to like them. And that validation from a tough guy is reassuring. Add in that they've not had any reason to go after him -- it's always easier to like a scrappy insurgent -- and you've got a recipe for a pretty adulatory relationship. The question is what happens now, when he's the nominee, and they have to go after him, and he stops liking them, and some of that angry toughness is turned against their friends.
