McCain's 'Cone of Silence'

A strange pattern has developed in John McCain's run for the highest office in the land. The Arizona senator has offered a series of suspect recollections of his time in captivity, delivered speeches with passages oddly reminiscent of Wikipedia text, and even lifted a campaign slogan. Each of these minor, if not trivial hiccups, taken in isolation, would not make much of ripple in the race. Together, however, they paint a picture of a man who, at best, is not quite in control of his own narrative, and, at worst, calls his credibility into question.

To this list we can now add the bizarre turn of events that transpired over the weekend at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church. Before questioning Barack Obama, Warren assured the audience that McCain was backstage in a "cone of silence" (of "Get Smart" fame) so that he wouldn't hear any of the questions that would later be put to him, too. The problem is, as Warren and McCain now acknowledge, McCain was riding in his limo at the time, and full well could have been listening in to the program. Of course, this is largely Warren's fault, and McCain might indeed have been rocking to an ABBA CD while en route to Saddleback. Then again, is it credible that neither McCain nor a single member of his entourage tuned in to hear what Obama was saying? I mean, you're on your way to the first real face-off of the campaign, and you're not curious to hear what the other guy is saying?

The cone of silence is a good metaphor for the race McCain is running. Like the rigging of a 1950's game show, in which contestants stood in their own leaky isolation chambers, the question before voters is whether or not one can trust McCain's version of the past, be it distant or immediate.

My colleague, Dave, thinks this all amounts to nothing more than a swift-boating of the Republican nominee, especially those who question the evolution of McCain's "Cross in the Dirt" story, and its striking similarities to a passage in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's (one of McCain's heroes) The Gulag Archipelago.



And didn't pundits (myself included) rip Hillary Clinton for her revisionist memory on her Bosnia trip? Sure, there are plenty of people out there who want to denigrate McCain's service, and do so in a despicable way. But if McCain's own statements about his captivity have morphed, or seem borrowed, that seems like fair game to me -- particularly when, as with John Kerry in '04, the candidate is using that memory to sell himself to audiences (especially Christian ones).