From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
By Jay Bookman

The McCain campaign has bet the ‘08 election on a belief that facts, reality, history and issues don’t matter anymore. All that matters is projecting a version of reality that voters find attractive.

In one sense that’s nothing new, and nothing unique to the McCain campaign. Political campaigns, especially at the presidential level, have long been little more than contests in image-making. But the McCain camp has taken that approach still further by creating a version of reality that is no longer tethered in any way to actual reality. They believe they can treat facts as “facts,” and once you believe you hold that power, a whole world of possibilities opens to you.

Just this week, Sen. John McCain completely shed his identity as an ardent and longtime advocate of financial deregulation. It was as if the past had never happened and that earlier version of John McCain had never existed. Suddenly, McCain 2.0 was a populist scourge of Wall Street, railing about the evils of unregulated corporate greed, and to hear the McCain campaign that’s all he had ever been.

Earlier campaigns would not have attempted such a shameless reinvention, fearful what would happen when the chasm between reality and fiction was exposed in the media. The McCain campaign has no such fear. As one McCain spokesman admitted last week, “We’re running a campaign to win, and we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

McCain strategists also understand that people who want to believe your version of reality aren’t going to be stopped by petty things like facts. If you give them even the flimsiest justification for dismissing reality, they will seize it like starved dogs.

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