Jacob Weisberg reads John McCain's mind

Writing in Newsweek, Slate Group chairman Jacob Weisberg demonstrates the ability to peer in John McCain's mind and discern the reason for his transformation into a "grumpy old man" (emphasis added):

McCain’s personality seems to have changed in a more fundamental way. Running for president in 2008 was as bad for McCain as running in 2000 was good for him. Playing the rebel against the Republican establishment made him young again. Running as his party’s standard-bearer turned him into a grumpy old man.

To some extent, this is a matter of physical decline... The larger factor may be the reactivation of McCain’s powerful sense of dishonor. Bear with me, because what follows is surmise based on long observation rather than hard evidence. But McCain looks to me like someone who bears an unacknowledged weight. If I had to guess, I’d say the weight was his shame over his poorly executed presidential campaign and his awful choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate.

In the past, McCain has dealt with fractures to his sense of honor in extraordinary ways. When he succumbed to Vietnamese torture and signed a “confession,” as a POW, he attempted suicide... Years after the Keating Five scandal, McCain wrote that the episode “still provokes a vague but real feeling that I had lost something very important, something that was sacrificed in the pursuit of gratifying ambitions.” If, as I suspect, McCain relives his 2008 experience as a shame on the scale of these events, he can’t simply apologize again. Acknowledging his mistake in picking Palin—someone he knows to have been utterly unready to become the leader of the free world—would be politically suicidal.

So instead of grappling with his damaged honor the way he has in the past—by examining his soul and apologizing—McCain has retreated into a kind of political second childhood...

Toadying to the right wing of his party has left McCain angry and frustrated, and is—to his old admirers—deeply disappointing. But as disappointed as some of us may be with the new John McCain, I expect he is even more disappointed with himself.

Note to analysts: When you have to qualify your article with disclaimers like "Bear with me," "what follows is surmise... [not based on] hard evidence," "If I had to guess," "I'd say," and "I expect," you're just making things up.

For everyone else, if you want to actually learn something about McCain, Joe Hagan has just published a long profile of McCain's primary campaign struggles in New York Magazine* that relies on reporting rather than armchair psychoanalysis. I recommend that you read it instead.

*Incidentally, Hagan's article includes no evidence for Weisberg's speculation that McCain's anger is the result of shame over picking Palin.

Comments

[Joshua Simeon Narins]

Hi, Brendan. I used to read Spinsanity.

I'd just point out one thing about Palin. I've seen three, major comments by McCain, where each time he basically goes a little out of his way not to refer to the fact that Sarah Palin exists.

As far as Hagan's piece goes, there's obviously a lot of Salter influence there (he, on the other hand, has not kept quiet about his views of Sarah) and I read "Old men get emotional, and less rational, the older they get."

[Phil]

The Republicans threw the 2008 election, so they would not have to own any of the stuph they did for the past eight years. It's been over a year since the election and nobody remembers what happened during the Bush administration, as it's now all Obama's fault.
Oh, yes, and the R's didn't tell McCain that they were throwing the election.