Daily Howler on Klein/McCain

Since we've been discussing Klein and McCain, The Daily Howler just wrote about Klein and McCain. Somerby argues that Klein blows with the wind, supporting whoever's on top. What's great is that he compares Klein's contemporaneous coverage of McCain's 2000 campaign with Klein's 2006 book. There are inconsistencies:

In January 2000, Klein specifically cited health care as a topic McCain hadn’t bothered to master—even though “he [was] running for president.” But so what? Six years later, Klein portrayed a candidate “on a white horse”—and he specifically cited “health-care reform” as a topic on which McCain had shown his brilliance! But that’s the way a guy like Klein works, when he starts front-running for a candidate. In 2006, he presented a standard profile of McCain on a horse. At the time, Saint McCain was the presumptive Republican nominee for president.

Similarly, Somerby notes that in 2000 Klein praised Bush's warmth and decency in the face of the South Carolina campaign and decried Gore's negativity. In 2006, Klein wrote of the 2000 Bush as "a cardboard candidate, ghostly pale in the face of his opponent’s florid humanity". Of course, Bush was significantly less popular in 2006 than in 2000.