The McCain story may well turn out to be the not-so-sharp instrument with which the New York Times delivers the coup de grâce to Hillary Clinton’s candidacy.

Here’s the thought: Ten straight victories mean that Barack Obama’s had nothing but good press since the February 9 contests. What’s more, Obama’s been gaining in national polls and in Ohio and Texas. The only plausible way that Hillary could stem that tide is to get some seriously bad news about Obama on the television and the front pages of the newspapers and the interwebs. That would be a tall order in any case—witness the flame-out of the plagiarism and Michelle-is-finally-proud-of-the-country stories. But now the McCain did-he-or-didn’t-he spectacular (combined with the should-the-Times-or-shouldn’t-they minitacular) is guaranteed to occupy the journalism corps for at least a week. Which means that HRC really only has March 3, the day before the big primaries, to get whatever nasty thing she has to say about Barack up and into the news cycles. And by then it’ll be too late.

Okay, don’t forget about McCain. But don’t let this suck all the air out of this, which is probably more important in the long run and certainly casts a suspicious light on this.

Here’s the nub of the issue:

The government’s top campaign finance regulator says John McCain can’t drop out of the primary election’s public financing system until he answers questions about a loan he obtained to kickstart his once faltering presidential campaign.

Federal Election Commission Chairman David Mason, in a letter to McCain this week, said the all-but-certain Republican nominee needs to assure the commission that he did not use the promise of public money to help secure a $4 million line of credit he obtained in November.

Which suggests that McCain would do well to get his own house in order before swinging after Obama in the name of campaign finance reform.*

++++++++

*Clarification/correction [2/22]: McCain’s nascent FEC troubles only have to do with public financing in the primary election, so they probably don’t have much to do with his challenge to Obama, as I originally speculated.

Forget McCain, here’s the really promising story out of today’s NYT: “More Americans Are Giving Up Golf”

Does this story solve this mystery?

UPDATE [2/21]: Yes.

According to the NYT the response in Miami to Castro’s announcement to step down yesterday was “mostly muted, with scattered joy.”

Tomorrow, expect steady exhilaration till early afternoon. A suspicious calm will set in around evening and last till Friday AM. Possible storms this weekend.

This AP photo appeared in today’s New York Times next to a story about the end of the BBC’s shortwave service. It caught my eye not because the man seated at the microphone is John Dos Passos—I would have never known it was him without the caption—but because of the poster that hangs over his shoulder, which reads “be like dad, Keep Mum!” That poster was part of a WWII campaign in Britain against loose talk—you can just make out the tagline running along the poster’s bottom edge, which reads, “Careless Talk Costs Lives.”

If you’ve read the first volume of Javier Marías’s excellent Your Face Tomorrow, you might remember the Keep Mum poster; it’s one of many from the campaign that is reproduced in the novel’s pages (this one shows up on page 320). If you haven’t, here’s some of what Peter Wheeler, one of the book’s characters, has to say about it:
(more…)