The Instant Information Age goes a step further with a retrospective about the failed McCain campaign in the New York Times Magazine next Sunday, nine days before the election and, true to the spirit of déjà vu on steroids, available online four days earlier than that.
Time-scrambling aside, “The Making (and Remaking) of McCain” offers a compelling inside view of how the man who might have won the presidency against Al Gore in 2000 will lose it by lurching “from tactic to tactic” this year against Barack Obama, the legacy of George W. Bush and the self he lost in the intervening eight years.
Robert Draper’s report is based on talks with “a half-dozen of McCain’s senior-most advisers–most of them more than once and some of them repeatedly” as well as “midlevel advisers and to a number of former senior aides” over the past months.
The campaign, in the classic pattern of losing enterprises, burned through six different narratives about their candidate in a desperate search for a winning formula: