McCain v McCain: Is his latest immigration flip-flop evidence of a Web minus-2.0 campaign?

Does John McCain understand which century he’s campaigning in? Last week, before heading home to barbecue ribs for would-be running mates over the Memorial Day weekend, McCain addressed a business roundtable gathering in San Jose. He was speaking to the element of the Republican Party that favors the accommodation of immigrants as a perennial source of cheap labor, and he told them what they wanted to hear: The next president must initiate comprehensive immigration reform along those lines.

McCain, of course, was for such a plan before he was against it. But his San Jose pronouncement amounted to a 180-degree turn from the “secure our borders” rhetoric that McCain has embraced for months as a means of ingratiating himself to the xenophobic and economically beset masses who form his party’s conservative Christian base. So it was not exactly a surprise when anti-immigration bloggers like John Hawkins and Michelle Malkin started pounding McCain. Yet when confronted with the reversal, the campaign seemed taken aback at getting caught and promptly executed another pirouette, claiming McCain’s remarks were “poorly worded.”

As Doctor of McCain Morphology Steve Benen writes at the Carpetbagger Report, “On Thursday, McCain was talking to a group of business leaders who liked McCain’s original approach to comprehensive legislation, and the senator sought input on how best to rally support for his own bill (which he now says he’d vote against). On Friday, McCain told opponents of his immigration bill that he didn’t mean any of what he’d just said. This is more than just a shameless flip-flop; it’s quickly becoming a character flaw. He’ll shovel whichever nonsense he has to say to please which ever audience happens to be in front of him at the time.”

That hardly makes McCain unique in the annals of politics. But McCain more than anyone else continues to act as if he is unaware that the Internet means you always have to say you’re sorry. There’s no such thing as a purely local audience or a purely local remark anymore. McCain is entirely accustomed to kid-gloves treatment from big-media pros, but he does not seem to understand that their voices are no longer the only ones who can amplify or criticize his own. All in all, the candidate who has made blogger-outreach a centerpiece of his campaign seems blissfully unaware of how technology has changed the dynamics of campaigning.

And so the list of flip-flops grows. How McCain must long for the good old days described by T. Harry Williams in his classic 1969 biography of Huey Long:

“The first time that Huey P. Long campaigned in rural, Latin, Catholic south Louisiana, the local boss who had him in charge said at the beginning of the tour: ‘Huey, you ought to remember one thing in your speeches today. You’re from north Louisiana, but now you’re in south Louisiana. And we got a lot of Catholic voters down here.’ ‘I know,’ Huey answered. And throughout the day in every small town Long would begin by saying: ‘When I was a boy, I would get up at six o’clock in the morning on Sunday, and I would hitch our old horse up to the buggy and I would take my Catholic grandparents to mass. I would bring them home, and at ten o’clock I would hitch the old horse up again, and I would take my Baptist grandparents to church.’ The effect of the anecdote on audiences was obvious, and on the way back to Baton Rouge that night the local leader said admiringly: ‘Why, Huey, you’ve been holding out on us. I didn’t know you had any Catholic grandparents.’ ‘Don’t be a damn fool,’ replied Huey. ‘We didn’t even have a horse.’”