Bill Kristol trots out the buzzwords of 2000 and 2004 in an attempt to link Barack Obama to negative stereotypes of Al Gore and John Kerry:

Barack Obama is an awfully talented politician. But could the American people, by November, decide that for all his impressive qualities, Obama tends too much toward the preening self-regard of Bill Clinton, the patronizing elitism of Al Gore and the haughty liberalism of John Kerry?

It’s sadly predictable. I can see “preening self-regard,” but how is Obama patronizing or haughty?

Kristol’s subsequent claim about how John McCain differs from Obama is even less believable:

It’s fitting that the alternative to Obama will be John McCain. He makes no grand claim to fix our souls. He doesn’t think he’s the one everyone has been waiting for. He’s more proud of his country than of himself. And his patriotism has consisted of deeds more challenging than “speaking out on issues.”

While it’s true that McCain himself doesn’t claim to “fix our souls,” his political program is based on the idea that dedicating oneself to the country is a patriotic duty that gives meaning to life, as Matt Welch writes in his book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick and a Reason Magazine article:

I have learned the truth,” he writes in Faith of My Fathers. “There are greater pursuits than self-seeking.…Glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself.”

That “something” is the “last, best hope of humanity,” the “advocate for all who believed in the Rights of Man,” the “city on a hill” once dreamed by Puritan pilgrim John Winthrop… Any thing or person perceived as tarnishing that city’s luster has a sworn enemy in the Arizona senator. “Our greatness,” he writes in Worth the Fighting For, “depends upon our patriotism, and our patriotism is hardly encouraged when we cannot take pride in the highest public institutions, institutions that should transcend all sectarian, regional, and commercial conflicts to fortify the public’s allegiance to the national community.”

…For years McCain has warned that a draft will be necessary if we don’t boost military pay, and he has long agitated for mandatory national service. “Those who claim their liberty but not their duty to the civilization that ensures it live a half-life, indulging their self-interest at the cost of their self-respect,” he wrote in The Washington Monthly in 2001. “Sacrifice for a cause greater than self-interest, however, and you invest your life with the eminence of that cause. Americans did not fight and win World War II as discrete individuals.”

McCain’s attitude toward individuals who choose paths he deems inappropriate is somewhere between inflexible and hostile. Nowhere is that more evident than when he writes about his hero Teddy Roosevelt, a man whose racism… and megalomania… do not merit more than a couple paragraphs’ pause in McCain’s adulation of his expansionist accomplishments. “In the Roosevelt code, the authentic meaning of freedom gave equal respect to self-interest and common purpose, to rights and duties,” McCain writes. “And it absolutely required that every loyal citizen take risks for the country’s sake.…His insistence that every citizen owed primary allegiance to American ideals, and to the symbols, habits, and consciousness of American citizenship, was as right then as it is now.”