Retro Garlic: We Knew They Would Come Around

My, My, My ...

We had strong suspicions, that the longer Stumblin' Bumblin' John McCain goes in this campaign, it will become more-and-more obvious, the similarities between Fly Boy and the former GOP flag-carrier, Bob Dole.











And today (yesterday, actually) author and journalist John Heilmann has a very thorough (i.e. long) article in New York Magazine;

Is John McCain Bob Dole?; Or is he Dwight Eisenhower? (Actually, that may depend on whether Barack Obama is Mike Dukakis or John Kennedy.) A handicapping

Here's a few clips;

So if McCain is no longer the bracing iconoclast he was in 2000, who the hell is he?

“I’ll tell you,” this person says. “He’s morphed into Bob Dole.”

This was not my first encounter with the McCain-is-Dole meme. I had first run across it back in January, on the night of the final Republican debate, in Simi Valley, California, when McCain’s crabbiness and sarcasm on stage had prompted a former GOP player now tilling the corporate field to make the comparison over dinner. As it turned out, the idea was also being promulgated sub rosa by a number of Mitt Romney’s senior strategists. A few days later, on the morning of Super Duper Tuesday, it popped out of Mitt’s own mouth. “There are a lot of folks that tend to think maybe John McCain’s race is a bit like Bob Dole’s race,” Romney snarked on Fox News. “That it’s the guy who’s the next in line; he’s the inevitable choice and we’ll give it to him, and then it won’t work.”

But few of the other likenesses between McCain and Dole can be spun so benignly. There’s the septuagenarian-ness (McCain is 71; Dole was 72 when he ran). There’s the physical frailty, courageously earned in war, that nevertheless serves as a constant reminder of his advanced years. There’s the legendary shortness of his fuse. (McCain has yet to have a full-on “Stop lying about my record” moment on the trail, but his testiness was on display the other day in a widely YouTubed confrontation on his campaign jet with the Times’s Elisabeth Bumiller.) There’s the firm conviction, as Time journalist Mark Halperin has noted, that “being on Meet the Press is more important than going to church—actually, that being on Meet the Press is going to church.”

Arizona Bob, perhaps, can be applied for SB John.

The Retro Part

The Bob Dole For The New Millennium

For, if they get Obama, it will be the Kennedy-Nixon Debate every single day of the campaign, McCain tripping over his Father Time beard, a skeletal-dust-filled suit laying in front of the voting stations by the time election day rolls around.

The youth and exuberance, the oratory skills, of Obama will paint the Straight Talk Express bus into a hearse, McCain's campaign posters into The Picture of Dorian Gray.

Hmmm ... Didn't Bob Dole have his own bag of war heroism, and his own deep Senatorial experience?

Once we get past the Dem's Primary, this is going to be so much fun ...


Bonus Stumblin' Bumblin' John Riffs

I Missed Home Ec For This!

Breaking News! MLK, Posthumously, Pardons McCain

Perrin On McCain, Clinton and Pornographic Ringtones

The Gift That Refuses To Stop Itself From Giving