No wonder John McCain "suspended" his presidential campaign Wednesday to focus in a bipartisan manner on a grave national crisis -- he's been pulling the same stunt for nearly a decade now, boosting his poll ratings by pretending not to care about them.
You probably remember his suspension of the Republican National Convention's first day of business in order to raise funds and awareness for the victims of Hurricane Gustav (a move that, besides allowing umpteen convention speakers to praise McCain's selfless patriotism, neatly airbrushed the unpopular sitting president and vice president from the proceedings).
But McCain first used the tactic to spectacular effect way back in March 1999, when -- even though his White House run had been chugging along for five months -- he postponed the "official announcement" of his candidacy so that the nation could focus as one on the week-old war in Kosovo. "It's not appropriate at this time," the somber senator said then, "to launch a political campaign."
How did that play out? As McCain's sympathetic first biographer, Robert Timberg, wrote, "His decision amounted to a masterful political stroke."
Overnight, McCain became the go-to guest on cable news shows, rallying the bipartisan cause for military intervention, urging his Senate colleagues to put patriotism ahead of party and saying he'd rather lose an election than lose a war. "Professional politicians of both parties were wowed by McCain's beau geste," the Washington Post's Mary McGrory wrote at the time (as noted by Timberg). "[McCain] is getting yards of publicity for a non-event."
With all that free media -- including separate appearances in a single day on Fox News, CNN, PBS, CNBC and MSNBC -- the Arizona senator's poll numbers shot up from the statistically insignificant to the respectable double digits. McCain enthusiast David Brooks, writing in these pages in February 2000, identified Kosovo as the metaphorical jumper cables on the Straight Talk Express. "Suddenly," Brooks wrote, "McCain was being quoted all over. He emerged as the most prominent GOP voice on foreign affairs. As the Carnegie Endowment's Robert Kagan noted, Kosovo was the first primary and McCain won it."
As this week has shown, the act of "suspending" a presidential campaign is a mostly nonsensical idea 40 days before an election. McCain and his subordinates are still all over television, still running advertisements, still holding conference calls with reporters and still collecting donations.
