Cris-a-tunity

The recent Ted Stevens indictment reminds me of one of my favourite scenes in The Simpsons. After Homer gets kicked out of Moe's, he lies sulking on the couch:

Marge: What if you pretended that this couch were a bar? Then you could spend more nights at home with us. Huh?

Homer: I'm not going to dignify that with an answer.

Lisa: Look on the bright side, Dad. Did you know that the Chinese use the same word for "crisis" as they do for "opportunity"?

Homer: Yes! Cris-a-tunity!

John Avlon (from RCP) has been thinking on similar lines, that John McCain should switch to offense and go after the kind of things he's been campaigning against for years:

John McCain has been a constant critic of the unprecedented levels of pork barrel spending that took hold of the Republican Congress during the Bush Administration. And there is no better symbol of that excess then Senator Ted Stevens' infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," the $398 million dollar boondoggle to an island in Alaska where less than 10,000 people lived.

(...)

Luckily for the GOP, John McCain is the perfect antidote to the excesses of the former Republican Congress. He's taken heat for his criticism of fellow Senate club members before - shining light on absurd appropriations and bucking ideological litmus tests - but those principled stands of independence are precisely what made McCain one of the most widely admired political leaders in America. It's hard for some professional Republican partisans to understand, but John McCain is competitive in this election because of his independence, not in spite of it.

Ironically, now polls show that McCain is being hurt by his association with the damaged Republican brand. One of the best ways to create daylight between himself and the Bush administration would be to revive his profile as a fearless reformer with a forceful new condemnation of the culture of corruption in Washington. He should hold out the examples Ted Stevens, Monica Goodling, Tom DeLay and Jack Abramoff as counter examples of the direction in which he wants to lead his party and his nation. He can harness the anger toward Bush-era Republican excesses while pointing the way to a new McCain brand of the Republican Party.

Absolutely, John McCain is the perfect candidate to go after this kind of thing. As much as he may not be the most popular guy with the base, he's who the party nominated and as much as I don't like a lot of his policies, he should be himself. The worse thing he could do now is to try to act like the establishment choice.