John McCain in his element
TELEVISION
Commentary: He'll guest on 'Late Night With Jay Leno' in the kind of setting where he's free to be himself.
Sen. John McCain is scheduled to make his first postelection television appearance tonight on "The Tonight Show With Jay Leno" -- bookending his loss, as it were, with visits to NBC late night. The weekend before the election found him back on "Saturday Night Live," a show with which he has had a long and friendly relationship and whose renewed fortunes owe him much. (Specifically, they owe much to his choice of a running mate.)
He participated in two fairly funny sketches. The first was a QVC-style infomercial for his campaign, with Tina Fey as Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin; it leaned heavily on silly puns ("Sarah Palin's William Ayres Freshener," a collection of "McCain Fine Gold" jewelry). In the second, he outlined a few "radical last-minute strategies," including "The Double Maverick" ("That's where I go totally berserker and just freak everybody out") and "The Sad Grandpa" ("That's where I get on TV and go, 'C'mon, Obama's gonna have plenty of chances to be president. It's my turn!") On Monday, in a bit surely taped earlier, he introduced "Saturday Night Live Presidential Bash 2008," a clip show mostly of recent sketches from the long electoral season.
While the McCain camp often painted Sen. Barack Obama as an inscrutable man of mystery, he struck me as an open book compared with his Republican opponent, who, over the course of the campaign presented himself -- intentionally, it seemed at times, and helplessly at others -- in a variety of guises, from straight-talker to name-caller, from wise elder to sputtering senior.
Of course, I wouldn't presume to know what was actually going on in his head. But that it was hard even to guess made him the more fascinating candidate. Obama has in many ways the better life story, which sews exotic details onto a classic narrative of American self-realization, but McCain was the more dramatic character: Citizen McCain.
One view -- a view I tried to share, just as one human watching another -- was that somewhere beneath all these swirling personas, like a crab at the bottom of a roiling ocean, the real McCain, the go-his-own-way, no-bull guy of media legend, was waiting to reemerge. Politics is in no small part performance, after all, and every good performer adjusts his material to his audience, sees what works and repeats it. Yet McCain often seemed like a man in a cartoon with an angel on one shoulder and a devil on the other; or the ventriloquist in a horror movie who finds himself mouthing the words of his own dummy.
