McCain, Inc.



Remember when it was cool to be a McCain supporter? Back before Centrism was all the rage, it was just a few of us in the blogosphere? That was back when McCain was brutally brought low in South Carolina with the Rovish charges of an "illigitimate black baby (Exaggerated cough suggesting feigned detachment)." Now, of course, McCain has tacked far right, breaking all our hearts. And now, it seems, with all his talk of "troop surge" -- a move now embraced by the Bushies and decried by Colin "lonely voice in the wilderness" Powell -- McCain looks to be THE Republican Establishment candidate (Even as his archnemesis Karl Rove bids farewell to Presidential politics).

According to our favorite Dickensian villain (Think of the full bodied lips, those impeccably tailored three-piece suits, that single-minded devotion to a capital gains tax cut), Robert Novak:

"Thirty invited corporate representatives and other lobbyists gathered at the Phoenix Park Hotel on Capitol Hill Tuesday to hear two senior mainstream Republican senators pitch the 2008 presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain. They were selling him to establishment Republicans as the establishment's candidate. Nothing could be further from McCain's guerrilla-style presidential run in 2000, which nearly stopped George W. Bush.

"Invitations to Tuesday's event were sent by Trent Lott, the newly elected Senate minority whip. Over coffee, Lott and Sen. Pat Roberts pushed McCain, though neither previously was seen as a McCainiac. They were not for McCain in 2000, and neither were the assembled party activists.

"It is beginning to look like ''McCain, Inc.'' -- that is, party regulars, corporate officials and Washington lawyers and lobbyists moving toward McCain, the man they feared and loathed eight years ago."

Plus ca change ...