or two. Could McCain be losing his base? While it's still a trickle, the number of pundits who are disenchanted with St. McCain is growing. First it was Joe Klein, then Howard Fineman and Jonathan Alter who discovered feet of clay at the base of their hero's statue. Now it's Maureen Dowd, who actually writes a serious hard hitting column about McCains "a noun, a verb, and POW" campaign.
In a refreshing change from her kewl kidz snark, Dowd writes:
So it’s hard to believe that John McCain is now in danger of exceeding his credit limit on the equivalent of an American Express black card. His campaign is cheapening his greatest strength — and making a mockery of his already dubious claim that he’s reticent to talk about his P.O.W. experience — by flashing the P.O.W. card to rebut any criticism, no matter how unrelated. The captivity is already amply displayed in posters and TV advertisements.
After ennumerating several recent invocations of the POW excuse, Dowd closes with a warning:
The real danger to the McCain crew in overusing the P.O.W. line so much that it’s a punch line is that it will give Obama an opening for critical questions:
While McCain’s experience was heroic, did it create a worldview incapable of anticipating the limits to U.S. military power in Iraq? Did he fail to absorb the lessons of Vietnam, so that he is doomed to always want to refight it? Did his captivity inform a search-and-destroy, shoot-first-ask-questions-later, "We are all Georgians," mentality?
I don't know where this Maureen Dowd has been for the past several years, but I would like to see more of her.