Somewhere in the bowels of a diary enthusing over the (very ambiguous) WaPo piece about "lack of evidence" for McCain's charges against Obama, there was a comment with a link to today's Richard Cohen column. I made the mistake of following it, and won't be able to sleep anymore.
"Just tell me one thing Barack Obama has done that you admire," I asked a prominent Democrat. He paused and then said that he admired Obama's speech to the Democratic convention in 2004. I agreed. It was a hell of a speech, but it was just a speech.
On the other hand, I continued, I could cite four or five actions -- not speeches -- that John McCain has taken that elicit my admiration, even my awe.
If not fictional, Cohen's "prominent Democrat" acted much like a prominent Democrat - damning his own side with faint praise. Or perhaps he was just ignorant.
But what excuse does Cohen have? I mean, he's a journalist, no? Supposedly well-informed? Off the top of my head, I can think of three amazing Obama accomplishments in the last six months alone: He got the Iraqis, the American military and even McCain to agree on a withdrawal timetable; he came out of nowhere to win a primary against the Clinton political machine; and got millions of youth in this country to care about politics.
Cohen cites McCain's legislative accomplishments, such as campaign finance reform (McCain-Feingold). But he doesn't know, or pretends not to know, that in his short US Senate tenure, Obama has had at least equal success. He sponsored and passed the Coburn-Obama Government Transparency Act of 2006, the Lugar-Obama Nuclear Non-proliferation and Conventional Weapons Threat Reduction Act, and the 2007 Government Ethics Bill. OK, so I had to look up the names of these laws. But most of us here at DK knew about their existence and Obama's role in passing good legislation. How can Cohen not know?
He also apparently doesn't know that McCain has flip-flopped on every issue -- the list is over 60 long by now. But surely he remembers that a few years back McCain called the religious right "agents of intolerance", and today he eats from their hands? Surely he's heard McCain's blunders, one after another?
If this is a "liberal" columnist's idea of being "fair", God help us.
How can we get information such as the list of McCain's flip-flops and Obama's legislative accomplishments onto the mainstream press?