He's John McCain and He Approves This Message

By Todd Gitlin | bio

Senator Straight Talk is getting a lot of mileage out of a campaign ad trashing Hillary Clinton for supporting a $1 million expenditure for a Woodstock Museum. As you may have heard, it recycles McCain's laugh line from last week's debate event:

Now my friends, I wasn't there. I'm sure it was a cultural and pharmaceutical event. I was tied up at the time--

"referring," in the words of an AP reporter, "to being held prisoner in North Vietnam" at the time of the Woodstock festival of 1969.

Behind McCain's last-minute bid for attention in his not-good-enough campaign is, of course, the enduring stab-in-the-back theme on which I wrote in The New Republic (Oct. 8). Expect to hear more, a lot more, about stabs in the back in the coming months. I guess we'll have to wait till the next century for a presidential campaign (or am I optimistic?)