Every presidential campaign has its pivotal moments as defined or, in some cases, abetted by the media. 2008 is shaping up as no exception. At the very time when Barack Obama is said to be inoculating himself against the far left liberal label with his positions on FISA, gun rights, the death penalty and federal faith-based programs, two of the leading lights of the Washington Post opinion page are inoculating serial reversal artist John McCain against charges of flip-flopping.
On June 22, the Post's David Broder took Obama to task for rejecting the McCain camp's proposal for a series of town hall meetings. While taking for granted that the trustworthiness of the supposed maverick McCain is somehow beyond reproach, Broder portrays Obama as a cipher:

"McCain benefits from a long-established reputation as a man who says what he believes. His shifts in position that have occurred in this campaign seem not to have damaged that aura. Obama is much newer to most voters, less familiar and more dependent on the impressions he is only now creating...
...By refusing to join McCain in these initiatives in order to protect his own interests, Obama raises an important question: Has he built sufficient trust so that his motives will be accepted by the voters who are only now starting to figure out what makes him tick?"

Just two days later, the Post's Richard Cohen grabbed the baton from Broder. Attacking Obama over his decision to forego public financing in the general election, Cohen's self-described "keen eye" saw McCain's "sense of honor" as unshakeable in the face of the man's countless policy retreats.

"In some recent magazine articles, I and certain of my colleagues have been accused of being soft on McCain, forgiving him his flips, his flops and his mostly conservative ideology. I do not plead guilty to this charge, because, over the years, the man's imperfections have not escaped my keen eye. But, for the record, let's recapitulate: McCain has either reversed himself or significantly amended his positions on immigration, tax cuts for the wealthy, campaign spending (as it applies to use of his wife's corporate airplane) and, most recently, offshore drilling. In the more distant past, he has denounced then embraced certain ministers of medieval views and changed his mind about the Confederate flag, which flies by state sanction in South Carolina only, I suspect, to provide Republican candidates with a chance to choose tradition over common decency. There, I've said it all.
But here is the difference between McCain and Obama -- and Obama had better pay attention. McCain is a known commodity. It's not just that he's been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It's also -- and more important -- that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. This -- not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the Straight Talk Express -- is what commends him to so many journalists.
Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don't know what they are...But the character question hangs -- not because of any evidence to the contrary and not in any moral sense, either, but because he is still young and lacks the job references McCain picked up in a North Vietnamese prison. McCain has a bottom line. Obama just moved his."

While the McCain team couldn't have written a better script for the unfolding campaign, they tried nonetheless. Hoping to build on early polls showing voters trust John McCain more even on issues where they favor Barack Obama, strategist Steve Schmidt issued a memo titled "Country First vs. Self-Serving Partisanship" to enlarge the GOP's manufactured character gap. Asking Americans to selectively ignore John McCain's rapid fire flip-flops, Schmidt with no sense of irony argued:

"It's a statement of fact that he discards people, and he discards positions when they become inconvenient for him. When politicians say one thing and then do another, like Senator Obama has done, voters wonder about the steadfastness of the character of the person sitting in the Oval Office."

Needless to say, the campaign's surrogates picked up the talking point and ran with it. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) insisted, "He's a calculating politician...he's going to take a tack that allows him to win. He wants to win beyond anything else, even more than keeping his word." As for the candidate himself, on Saturday John McCain said simply, "Senator Obama's word cannot be trusted."
Given McCain's history of breaking his word and reversing course on literally dozens of issues in pursuit of the White House (including 10 times in a two week span in June), these charges would normally be laughed off by the American media as the hypocritical tripe they are. But not when it comes to John McCain. As MSNBC's Chris Matthews aptly put it:

"The press loves McCain. We're his base."

Which is exactly what the McCain camp is counting on. Its just-launched "Straight Talk Express" campaign jet features "a special area toward the front where McCain will conduct group interviews with the press, in the same way he does on his chartered bus." And as Newsweek learned the hard way, not just any reporter gets access to it:

McCain senior aide Mark Salter quipped this morning that "only the good reporters" would get to sit in the specially-configured section for interviews. "You'll have to earn it," he said.

As for the Washington Post's David Broder and Richard Cohen, they are welcome to come aboard. They earned it.