McCain’s Apology Undone; Will His Reputation Follow?

As Jake Tapper explained this morning part of the convention surrounding the whole “don’t mention the Keating Five when talking about how great John McCain is” issue is that McCain is unusually good at apologizing for doing the wrong thing:

On Monday the Obama campaign will start hitting Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on his role in the late 80s/early 90s Keating 5 scandal, despite previous indications by Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill, made months ago, that the scandal was not “germane” to the presidency because McCain had apologized for his role.

But as John Aravosis observes, McCain now seems to be un-apologizing for pressuring regulators at Keating’s behest, instead insisting that he did nothing wrong:

Then McCain’s lawyer dropped the real bomb.

The Keating Five Investigation was “a political smear job on John [McCain].” WTF? He called Howell Heflin, who led the hearings, a “stooge” of the Democratic machine out to get poor, innocent John McCain.

Ben Smith points out that this would be the final unraveling of the increasingly threadbare sweater that is John McCain’s reformer image:

I’d always thought McCain’s great strength in defending the Keating affair was that he’d acknolwedged making a huge mistake, and spent his career repenting by recasting himself as a reformer.

I’ll give McCain this. While conventional wisdom holds that it’s admirable for a politician to put a sense of personal “honor” over a desire to win the election, I think that CW comes from a place that ultimately trivializes the stakes involved in big time politics. The outcome of this election will have a meaningful impact on literally the entire population of the planet, and Presidential decision-making often turns out to be a life-or-death decision for tends of thousands of people. McCain thinks that advancing his agenda of tax cuts, deregulation, indefinite occupation of Iraq, and starting “other wars” is important enough to be worth risking his reputation over and on some level I can’t help but admire his willingness to go all in.