Al Gore never claimed that he invented the Internet. Howard Dean didn’t scream. Hillary Clinton didn’t say she was staying in the race because Barack Obama might be assassinated. And Wesley Clark didn’t impugn John McCain’s military service.

Scott McClellan, the former White House press secretary, titled his tell-all memoir “What Happened.” But a true account of modern American politics should be titled “What Didn’t Happen.” Again and again we’ve had media firestorms over supposedly revealing incidents that never actually took place.

The latest fake scandal fit the usual pattern as an awkwardly phrased remark, lifted out of context and willfully misinterpreted, exploded across the airwaves.

What General Clark actually said was that Mr. McCain’s war service, though heroic, didn’t necessarily constitute a qualification for the presidency. It was a blunt but truthful remark, and not at all outrageous — especially given the fact that General Clark is himself a bona fide war hero.

Yet the Clark affair did reveal something important — not about General Clark, but about Mr. McCain. Now we know what a McCain administration would represent: namely, a third term for Karl Rove.

It was predictable that the McCain campaign would go wild over the Clark remarks. Mr. McCain’s run for the White House has always been based on persona rather than policy: he doesn’t have ideas that voters agree with, but he does have an inspiring life story — which, contrary to the myth of the modest maverick, he talks about all the time. The suggestion that this life story isn’t relevant to his quest for office was bound to provoke a violent reaction.

But the McCain campaign went beyond condemning General Clark’s remarks; it went out of its way to distort them. “This backhanded slap against John as not being a worthy warrior because he just got shot down is one of the more surprising insults in my military history,” said retired Col. Bud Day, who participated in a conference call organized by the campaign. In fact, General Clark had said no such thing.

The irony, not lost on Democrats, is that Col. Day himself has done what he falsely accused Wesley Clark of doing: he appeared in the 2004 Swift boat ads that impugned John Kerry’s wartime service.

The willingness of the McCain campaign to engage in these tactics, employing such tainted spokesmen, tells us that the campaign has decided to go negative — specifically, to apply the strategy Karl Rove used so effectively in 2002 and 2004 (but not so effectively in 2006), that of portraying Democrats as unpatriotic.

And sure enough, Adam Nagourney of The New York Times reports signs of the “increasing influence of veterans of Mr. Rove’s shop in the McCain operation.”

Will Rovian tactics work this year?

In 2002 and 2004, Republicans were so successful at playing the patriotism card thanks to a combination of compliant media and cowering Democrats. At first, the Clark affair suggested that nothing has changed. News organizations reported as fact the false assertion that General Clark criticized Mr. McCain’s military service, and the Obama campaign rushed to “reject” his remarks.

“Two days into the Wesley Clark fallout,” wrote the Columbia Journalism Review on Tuesday morning, “the press, the G.O.P., and the Obama campaign all seem to have agreed that Clark’s recent remarks on John McCain’s service record were at best impolitic and at worst despicable.”

Since then, however, both the press and the Obama campaign seem to have recovered some of their balance. Opinion pieces have started to appear pointing out that General Clark didn’t say what he’s accused of saying. Mr. Obama has also declared that General Clark doesn’t owe Mr. McCain an apology for his “inartful” remarks and denies that his own condemnation, in a speech given on Monday, of those who “devalue” military service was aimed at the general.

In the end, the Clark affair may have strengthened the Obama campaign. Last week, with his cave-in on wiretapping, Mr. Obama was showing disturbing signs of falling into the usual Democratic cringe on national security. This may have been the week he rediscovered the virtues of standing tall.

Furthermore, my sense, though it’s hard to prove, is that the press is feeling a bit ashamed about the way it piled on General Clark. If so, news organizations may think twice before buying into the next fake scandal.

If so, the campaign has just taken a major turn in Mr. Obama’s favor. After all, if this campaign isn’t dominated by faux outrage over fake scandals, it will have to be about things that really did happen, like a failed economic policy and a disastrous war — both of which Mr. McCain promises will continue if he wins.

While politicians have been debating endlessly over the best ways to reform the American health care system, the plight of American patients has rapidly worsened. A new national survey found that an alarming 20 percent of the population, some 59 million people in all, either delayed or did without needed medical care last year, a huge increase from the 36 million people who delayed or did not seek care in 2003.

As expected, people who have no health insurance — there are some 47 million of them — were most likely to make that difficult choice. But insured people also chose to go without care in ever-larger numbers.

According to the survey, the main reason is soaring medical costs, which have outstripped the modest growth in wages in recent years. High costs are deterring not only the uninsured from seeking care, but also many insured people who are struggling with higher deductibles, co-payments and other out-of-pocket expenses as their employers or health plans shift more of the cost burden to them.

Many patients with insurance said they went without care because their health plans would not pay for the treatment or their doctors or hospitals would not accept their insurance. Both insured and uninsured patients said they skipped treatments because they had trouble getting timely appointments, were unable to get through on the telephone, or could not make it to a doctor’s office or clinic when it was open. No doubt a weakening economy, high fuel prices, the home foreclosure crisis and general economic anxiety also played a role.

Sadly, previous gains in caring for low-income children have reversed, largely because their parents lost employer-sponsored coverage.

The telephone survey of some 18,000 Americans was conducted by the Center for the Study of Health System Change, a respected nonpartisan research group, and was financed by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. It relied on respondents’ views that they needed the care and did not explore what health consequences resulted.

Champions of so-called “consumer-directed health care” might argue that the market is working — people are wisely delaying or forgoing care of low marginal value. But it is disturbing that unmet medical needs increased the most for people in poor or only fair health — those most likely to get even sicker if they don’t get treatment.

The new survey further strengthens the case for universal coverage, with moderate cost-sharing provisions. All Americans should be able to get medical care when they need it.

PARIS

In the French imagination, Barack Obama is already the president.

To the French, the Democratic primary was the general election.

The word “elite” is not a pejorative here; it’s a compliment. It does not occur to Parisians that Americans will choose the old, white-haired one if they can have the cool, skinny one with the Ray-Bans, John le Carré novels, chic wife and secret cigarettes.

Newsstands carry a whole magazine devoted to “La révolution OBAMA.” The papers are avidly following Obama’s post-Hillary quest to “cherche les femmes,” and on Friday, Le Figaro led with the headline that he had widened his lead over his “rival républicain.”

There was nothing on Le Figaro’s front page about that other American guy who was over here, munching on langoustes at the Élysée Palace with Sarko and the seductress Carla (animated and dazzling with a midnight blue dress and a hopelessly long, thin cigarette).

“You kind of wrote my political obituary tonight,” W. teased the French president after Sarko’s toast Friday night, adding that he still has six months left and a lot of work to do.

In Old Europe, they’ve moved on, assuming that the American president has done all the damage that he can do. The blazing hostility toward W. has faded to indifference and a sort of fatigued perplexity about how les imbeciles de regime cowboy got into office, and how America could have put the world through all this craziness.

Even as the Supreme Court slapped him back for the third time on the suffocation of civil liberties at Guantánamo, President Bush gave the keynote speech of his European farewell tour extolling the virtues of liberty. He celebrated European unity at the very instant it was falling apart, thanks to an Irish donnybrook.

Paris responded with a yawn. (Freedom’s just another word for nothing left to say.) A Bush organizer asked people sitting in the back of the hall to move to the front, so the empty seats would not be visible on TV. The image of the U.S. abroad has improved slightly, according to a new Pew poll, but only in anticipation of seeing the back of this president.

In a way, W. is very different from the cocky, know-nothing, chip-on-his-shoulder “Bully Bush” I followed on his maiden European tour in 2002. His disdain for Jacques Chirac and Gerhard Schröder, and theirs for him, was bristlingly clear. He told the bemused French that he’d heard tell from Jacques about their “fantastic food,” and he lectured the bewildered Germans, as though they were thick on the subject, that Saddam was evil because he “gassed his own people.”

This time, he left the heavy lifting on Afghanistan to the more popular Laura Bush, while he hung out with French, German and Italian leaders he likes. “Your Eminence,” he told the pope, “you’re looking good.” Angela Merkel dodged when asked at a press conference whether she would miss W., but said she liked being able to “call a spade a spade with him.” He enthused that “German asparagus are fabulous,” and wryly told a Paris audience that “my hair is a lot grayer,” assuming that the French, with their history of foiled colonialism, would know why. He seemed, all these years later, intent on spiritual absolution.

In other ways, however, W. was not very different. He was still pushing, but more softly, the same refrain that turned Europe so virulently anti-American: his muscular proselytizing that sometimes military power is necessary to break up terror networks, and that there is “a moral obligation” to extend “a more hopeful and compelling vision” of democratic ideals to “provide our security and to spread the peace.”

Europeans overwhelmingly agree with Scott McClellan, the former Bush press secretary, that this approach amounts to “coercive democracy,” and that the administration’s “compelling vision” on Iraq was undergirded with a brazenly untruthful and cynically manipulative propaganda campaign.

On the illicit rush to war, W. ne regrette rien. He reiterated a rhetorical sop to those who yearn for a scintilla of remorse, telling The Times of London that his gunslinging talk made him seem like a “guy really anxious for war,” and that phrases like “dead or alive” and “bring them on” “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace.”

The Bushes have a hard time with the connective tissue between words and actions. In this case, the words, while dime-store Western, were not the problem. The actions were the problem. W. was really anxious for war. He felt that if he could change Middle East history, he could jump out of his father’s shadow forever.

A Democratic lawmaker who saw the president in the Oval Office recently and urged him to bring the troops home from Iraq quickly recounted that W. got a stony look and replied that 41 had abandoned the Iraqis and thousands got slaughtered. “I will never do that to them,” 43 said.

Sounds like Oedipal déjà vu all over again.

Last December, as his campaign was floundering, John McCain responded to a questionnaire on executive power, spying and torture that was distributed to all candidates by The Boston Globe’s Charlie Savage. McCain explicitly refused to answer whether he thought there was “any executive power the Bush administration has claimed or exercised that . . . is unconstitutional.” But on one critical issue — whether he thinks the President possesses “inherent powers” under Article II “to conduct surveillance for national security purposes without judicial warrants, regardless of federal statutes” — McCain gave an answer that was basically the equivalent of the ACLU/Russ-Feingold/Chris-Dodd view, and completely at odds with the Bush/Cheney/Yoo view of executive power. McCain answered:

There are some areas where the statutes don’t apply, such as in the surveillance of overseas communications. Where they do apply, however, I think that presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is.

Savage followed that up with a related question and McCain was just as clear:

Globe: Okay, so is that a no, in other words, federal statute trumps inherent power in that case, warrantless surveillance?
McCain: I don’t think the president has the right to disobey any law.

That view as stated by McCain is the diametric opposite of the Bush administration’s view, which asserts that the President has the power under Article II to spy on Americans without warrants even in the face of a law that criminalizes such warrantless spying (FISA). Just to underscore how radical McCain’s December answer was for today’s Republican Party, the answer McCain gave on that question was identical to the one given by Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Hillary Clinton, Ron Paul, and Barack Obama, but it was glaringly at odds with the evasive one given by Mitt Romney (”Our most basic civil liberty is the right to be kept alive”) and Rudy Giuliani (”the president has certain core constitutional responsibilities to ensure that our nation can defend itself and our fundamental liberties in times of emergency”).

But that was December. Now that McCain is desperate to shore up the support of right-wing extremists, he just gave the exact opposite answer yesterday. Over the last couple weeks, a controversy arose among right-wing executive power fanatics because a McCain representative said at a campaign event that McCain opposes telecom amnesty in the absence of probing hearings and an apology from the telecoms — a reversal of McCain’s January vote for full telecom amnesty without those conditions. That was followed by a Washington Post article containing quotes from a McCain spokesman suggesting that McCain’s support for telecom amnesty was now less than absolute.

That series of confused responses from McCain on telecom amnesty and subsequent protests from the Right led the McCain campaign to issue a memo last week claiming that the Post story was “negligently written,” that “the author of the article (Jonathan Weisman) displayed a reckless disregard for key facts,” and that “John McCain’s position on immunity has not changed. Period.” The McCain memo was posted a few days ago on National Review’s Corner. But that memo did not satisfy National Review’s Andy McCarthy — one of the nation’s most extreme advocates of unchecked executive power — and he then posed a long list of questions suggesting that McCain might be suspect when it comes to defending the Yoo theory of executive power and full-scale domestic surveillance.

Yesterday, the McCain campaign sought to extinguish this growing controversy by providing to National Review another statement setting forth McCain’s views of executive power and spying. But the views McCain gave yesterday are completely at odds with the ones he gave to the Globe last December (and also in conflict with the statements of McCain representatives both at last week’s event and in the Post):

Senator McCain supports the FISA modernization bill passed by the Senate without qualification. He believes no additional steps should be necessary to secure immunity for the telecoms; both the 109th and 110th Congresses have conducted extensive evaluation and examination of this topic and have satisfied the public’s need for appropriate oversight; hearings purportedly designed to “get to the bottom of things” have already occurred; and neither the Administration nor the telecoms need apologize for actions that most people, except for the ACLU and the trial lawyers, understand were Constitutional and appropriate in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001.

Last December in the Globe, McCain was embracing the ACLU position on spying and executive power; now, to National Review, he’s invoking the ACLU to demonize as civil liberties extremists whom McCain opposes.

Worse, when answering the Globe back in December, McCain said that “presidents have the obligation to obey and enforce laws that are passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, no matter what the situation is.” Yesterday, though, McCain said that the President and the telecoms did nothing wrong in spying on Americans without warrants and that such spying was “appropriate” and constitutional “in the wake of the attacks on September 11, 2001″. How can spying in violation of the law possibly be justified by the circumstances of 9/11 (as McCain said yesterday) if (as McCain said in December) the President is barred from spying outside of the law “no matter what the situation is”?

Worse still, look at what McCain said about spying and Article II yesterday to National Review:

We do not know what lies ahead in our nation’s fight against radical Islamic extremists, but John McCain will do everything he can to protect Americans from such threats, including asking the telecoms for appropriate assistance to collect intelligence against foreign threats to the United States as authorized by Article II of the Constitution.

In December, McCain said there was no such thing as Article II power to order surveillance in violation of FISA and agreed that, when it comes to warrantless eavesdropping, “federal statute trumps inherent power.” But yesterday, McCain invoked that very same Article II authority as a basis for having telecoms help him spy.

In response to this new McCain memo yesterday, even Andrew McCarthy admitted the obvious: namely, that McCain has dramatically changed his views on executive power and spying. McCarthy wrote proudly:

In my humble opinion, the McCain camp’s response is extremely significant in that it not only full-throatedly supports the surveillance reform being blocked by House Democrats; it marks a welcome evolution on the Senator’s thinking about executive power - bringing him more into line with prior administrations and influential federal court decisions which concede presidential power under Article II of the Constitution to order warrantless surveillance when the United States is threatened.

In a separate article yesterday, McCarthy excitedly declared that whereas McCain previously believed that the President’s spying program was illegal in violation of FISA, yesterday’s “response [in National Review] implicitly shows Sen. McCain’s thinking has changed as time has gone on.”

McCarthy is absolutely right about McCain’s reversal. In order to satisfy the right-wing extremists he now needs, McCain — who only six months ago was giving answers on spying and executive power that were exactly the same as though expressed by the ACLU, Russ Feingold and Chris Dodd — is now spouting theories of the Omnipotent President virtually equivalent to those used by John Yoo, David Addington and Dick Cheney over the last seven years to impose radical changes in how our Government functions. How far McCain has shifted is reflected by the fact that, in the December questionnaire, he said he would never use signing statements under any circumstances — a commitment not even Obama or Clinton would make. A speech McCain delivered to the Federalist Society a few weeks ago presaged this reversal, but yesterday’s statement leaves no doubt that McCain is now explicitly embracing the Bush administration’s most radical executive power theories.

The bulk of the Bush controversies over the last seven years are grounded in the Bush/Cheney view of executive power: that when it comes to national security, war and foreign policy (so broadly defined that it even includes what the Government does to U.S. citizens, on U.S. soil), nothing can constrain what the President does — not even laws enacted by the American people through their Congress. John McCain is now embracing those extremist theories in full. The only difficult question is to decide what’s more disturbing: that McCain switches positions so quickly and completely on such fundamental questions, or that he is now espousing a view of presidential power that has fueled the radicalism and lawlessness of the last seven years?

UPDATE: It’s also worth noting that these days, in order to please the self-proclaimed “small government” conservative movement, a candidate must now vow to spy on Americans with no warrants or oversight of any kind; reserve the right to torture; and even break the law — ignore popular will as expressed through acts of Congress — whenever such lawbreaking is deemed beneficial. Those are now defining planks in the limited-government “conservative” movement.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the Bush administration’s use of executive power, released in May 2006. His second book, “A Tragic Legacy“, examines the Bush legacy.

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