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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/21470
It is little remembered today that the political career of John Sidney McCain
III, a career now thoroughly laundered in mythology, began with the help of
several fortuities. In 1973 he returned from his five and a half years of
captivity in North Vietnam to Washington, or technically Arlington, Virginia,
which had been his childhood home for more years than any other single place
as he followed his father, a celebrated four-star admiral, on the elder
McCain's naval assignments. He was one of 591 prisoners of war repatriated
early that year as a result of Operation Homecoming, and was selected by the
editors of US News & World Report as the one returning POW who would be given
a thirteen-page spread in the magazine to describe his ordeal (having a
famous father never hurts), which brought him the same kind of attention and
acclaim that had earlier, for different purposes, been showered upon the
young Hillary Diane Rodham and the young John Forbes Kerry.
By 1977 he held the post of naval liaison to Congress, his father's old
position, and shortly thereafter attained the rank of captain. It was on
Capitol Hill that he met and befriended important senators—Gary Hart of
Colorado, William Cohen of Maine, and most of all John Tower of Texas, the
buddy to whom he was closest during a period of his life that included its
share of carousing and irreparably strained his marriage to his first wife,
Carol. When asked to explain the dissolution of their marriage in the late
1970s, she said, "I attribute it more to John turning forty and wanting to be
twenty-five again than I do to anything else."
But here was the first piece of luck, for his split from Carol enabled him to
romance Cindy Hensley, an Arizonan seventeen years his junior whom he had met
while vacationing in Honolulu in 1979 (he was separated) and with whom he was
in love, he has written, by the end of their first evening together.
They married in May 1980, and from this union tumbled other fortuities. That
she lived in Arizona meant that McCain would be moving to a state—with which
he'd had even less association than Hillary Clinton had had with New York in
1999—whose growing population would gain it an extra congressional seat
after the 1980 census, a circumstance on which his eye was keenly fixed. Her
background—her father, Jim, ran the country's largest Anheuser-Busch
distributorship—meant he would have the money and connections to launch the
political career he had been coveting since he started meeting those famous
pols. McCain hardly knew a soul in Arizona, but already he was telling
friends in 1981 that he would swoop into the new seat in 1982 and then
succeed Barry Goldwater in the Senate when Goldwater retired.
Then, one piece of bad luck: the new district would be cut in Tucson, not
Phoenix. But this was soon followed by the greatest fortuity of all. John
Rhodes, the Phoenix Republican who was the House minority leader,
unexpectedly announced his retirement. The McCains lived just outside the
Rhodes district, but Cindy's money ensured that they were able to buy a house
in it and move in immediately. During a primary campaign against three other
Republicans, he was, inevitably, branded a carpetbagger and opportunist.
Confronted with these allegations at a candidates' forum, he delivered a
riposte that would win him the seat and would foreshadow the kind of
rhetorical agility that has so impressed reporters. The point of his zinger
of a last sentence was not lost on his audience even then:
Listen, pal. I spent twenty-two years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy.
My grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a
lot. We have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I
wish I could have the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending
my entire life in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was
doing other things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place
I lived longest in my life was Hanoi.
As Matt Welch notes in McCain, this wasn't exactly true; but invoking
northern Virginia, where he had actually lived for a combined decade or more,
would hardly have put across the desired point. As McCain's career has shown,
sometimes the narrative is far more powerful than mere facts.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Twenty-six years later, McCain has secured the Republican presidential
nomination and launched his general election campaign, itself the result of
even more happy coincidences—Rudy Giuliani's inexplicable decision to skip
all the early contests, Mitt Romney's unsteadiness on the national stage, the
absence of a consensus on a "real conservative" choice, and press reports
suggesting that the initially unpopular troop surge in Iraq, on which he'd
placed his bet in late 2006 when President Bush was considering the Iraq
Study Group report, was beginning to achieve some success. This should by all
rights be a Democratic year, but the Democrats have been locked in ferocious
battle, ensuring that one final piece of good fortune awaits McCain in that
he will in all likelihood face a black man who no longer "transcends race" in
anything like the way he did a few months ago or, if she keeps fighting and
somehow manages to pull it off, the country's most polarizing woman, who
could secure her party's nomination only by alienating large sections of its
base.
But as Arnold Palmer reportedly once said, "It's a funny thing, the more I
practice, the luckier I get." McCain's career is undeniably built also upon
skill and shrewdness unusual among contemporary American politicians. It's
not that he's been an especially accomplished legislator, although passage of
the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act ("Bickra," in wonk-speak)
took years and much resolve, as Elizabeth Drew shows in her engrossing
Citizen McCain from 2002.[1] Nor has he been an especially energetic servant
of his Arizona constituents. Welch even asserts that McCain "is infamous
throughout his home state as someone who studiously avoids mixing with the
little people."
But what McCain has been, of course, is a brilliant strategist of the culture
of Washington, and particularly of the arbiters of conventional wisdom in the
national press. "The press loves McCain," Chris Matthews said in 2006. "We're
his base." McCain understands intuitively how reputations are built and
maintained. As David Brock and Paul Waldman of the liberal nonprofit group
Media Matters for America put it in Free Ride, McCain has "cracked the media
code" of how to turn these ostensible adversaries into his allies and, on
numerous occasions, even his apologists.
He became the press's darling in 1999 and 2000, during his first presidential
run, the famous "Straight-Talk Express" days. He has since transformed
himself into a very different and much more conventional conservative
politician. But the fact of that transformation hasn't really taken hold yet
in the national press. There is therefore the expectation—or, among
liberals, fear—that the mass media will give McCain the benefit of every
doubt against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. The tendency is already in
evidence here and there—the proposed elimination of the federal gas tax for
the summer, endorsed first by McCain and then by Clinton, resulted in Clinton
receiving far more criticism for pandering than McCain did.
So the season has come for anti-McCain books from detractors. Whether the
three under review here have any impact on the election discourse will
depend, to some extent, on the course of events and the effectiveness of the
Democratic fall campaign. But each of the three—all follow the same basic
template of critically reassessing the stages of McCain's career—makes
persuasive arguments that while there has been much to respect in McCain in
the past, there remain today only shards and vestiges of that man; that in
doing what he had to do to become the nominee of a party of orthodox
conservatism, he has so sublimated his honorable instincts that they have all
but atrophied. He's not only adopted domestic policy positions he'd long
opposed, he has openly pandered to the conservative Republican base by
supporting most of Bush's positions in legislation on the treatment of
detainees.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The McCain myth, as we know, is built on the foundation of his five and a
half years of captivity in Hoa Lo Prison, aka the "Hanoi Hilton." He was
flying a bombing raid in October 1967; his plane was shot down, he parachuted
into the middle of a lake in Hanoi, and, with two broken arms and one broken
knee, swam to shore. He was stabbed and beaten—bone sticking out of his
right knee—and taken to Hoa Lo. His captors did not set his fractures and
tortured him regularly, trying to drag false admissions out of him. When they
learned that he had a famous father—who was, by 1968, the commander of all
US naval forces in the Pacific—they offered him an early release for PR
purposes. Because military regulations held that captured prisoners must be
released in the order in which they were captured, he refused, spending much
of the remainder of his captivity in solitary confinement. It's a staggering
story, told most grippingly, in my reading, by David Foster Wallace.[2]
It is also just the right tale of heroism for an unwanted war. If McCain had
shot down the greatest number of North Vietnamese, who would celebrate him?
If he had led a great raid, most people would be indifferent to him, or—worse
—Seymour Hersh or some other investigative journalist would likely have
found out by now that innocent women and children were slaughtered. It was by
suffering in a cell, serving as a kind of metaphor for American suffering in
a war most Americans gave up on early in his confinement, but at the same
time holding fast to principle under the most unimaginable circumstances,
thereby redeeming some notion of American honor in a dishonorable situation,
that McCain became an American hero. Liberal opponents of the war, who seldom
acknowledged the repressive brutality of the North Vietnamese regime, were
put on the defensive by the story of how he was tortured.
The tale has had a particularly talismanic effect on Baby Boomer journalists,
many of whom probably opposed the war when they were young, or did not serve,
or both, and thus reflexively grant McCain great moral authority. Brock and
Waldman write:
And since few of the reporters who cover him were themselves in the armed
forces in Vietnam, there may be no small amount of guilt involved, or at
least the belief that they have not earned the right to ask him critical
questions. On a 2006 episode of Hardball, Bloomberg News reporter Roger Simon
noted that reporters have given McCain "a break or two or three or four or
five hundred," to which host Chris Matthews immediately replied, "Because he
served in Vietnam, and a lot of us didn't." ...[Journalists] testify that his
POW experience is not only the sum total of McCain's "character," but
constitutes the lens through which character itself must be viewed in any
race in which McCain participates.
Even so, attaining icon status took a while. He first made national headlines
as a senator in the late 1980s, as part of the Keating Five, a group of
senators who had lobbied in defense of a failing savings-and-loan company,
owned by Charles Keating, that was under investigation during the S&L
scandals. Keating had made large campaign contributions, including $112,000
to McCain, as well as paid for trips to his Bahamas house. But McCain was
less involved with Keating than some of the other senators, and he got only a
minor rebuke from the Senate Ethics Committee, which said his conduct was
"questionable."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
McCain seems to have learned two lessons from the episode. First, he decided
that campaign finance reform was an important issue to pursue (partly on the
merits, partly to repair his reputation). Second, as Welch notes, he learned
"the practical benefits of media over-exposure":
By answering hostile questioning for nearly two full hours, until the
reporters had exhausted their lines of inquiry, McCain found himself praised
by his hometown paper for manfully owning up to his misdeeds. By making
himself available to almost any reporter at any hour, he found that he had
sown some useful empathy.
So the courtship started there. And McCain's new openness with the press may
have extended beyond merely "owning up to his misdeeds." Brock and Waldman,
citing a 2000 Boston Globe article, say "there is considerable evidence that
McCain's office was the source of leaks...that...undermined three of the four
other senators." One of the alleged leaks was of a memo that made the role of
another Keating senator, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, seem more incriminating
than had been known. Another leak, of a Senate ethics panel report
recommending that McCain be dropped as a target of inquiry, led to a New York
Times article the very next day. McCain denied under oath in 1992 that he was
responsible for any leaks, but according to Brock and Waldman, the man who
led a probe of the leaks for the General Accounting Office has said he thinks
McCain was responsible, as do DeConcini and former GOP senator Warren Rudman.
McCain's post-Keating efforts on campaign finance attached him to a
good-government issue that liberal editorial boards love. It also separated
him from most of his fellow Republicans. This is when the words "McCain" and
"maverick" started appearing together regularly—also with regard to his
effort during the same period to raise the federal tobacco tax. It all
culminated in his first presidential run in 2000, when journalists were
astounded to be invited into his inner sanctum and made privy to his
unfiltered thoughts. Brock and Waldman cite a column by the conservative
writer Andrew Ferguson describing the seduction process:
Here's what happens. The reporter—call him Joe—hops aboard McCain's old
campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express. He knows the Arizona senator's
well-known charms. He will not be seduced.
Chatting amiably, Joe asks about a Republican colleague. With ironic
solemnity, McCain responds by describing his fellow senator with an
anatomical epithet. Against his better judgment, Joe chuckles. (Never heard
that from a presidential candidate before!)
He asks a probing question about McCain's personal life—and the senator
answers without hesitation, never asking to go off the record. (Is there
nothing this guy won't be candid about?)
Joe's detachment is already crumbling when McCain offhandedly mentions a
self-deprecating anecdote from his time "in prison." The reporter knows the
reference is to McCain's years as a POW in Vietnam, back when Joe was sucking
bong hits at Princeton. (Guilt, guilt, guilt...)
McCain asks Joe about his kids, by name, then recommends a new book he's been
reading—something unexpectedly literary (I.B. Singer's short stories?).
Seamlessly, he mentions an article Joe wrote—not last week, but in 1993!
The reporter has never voted for a Republican in his life. But he's a goner.
The vicious campaign that George W. Bush ran against McCain in South
Carolina, finally forcing him out of the race after McCain had won seven
primaries, only made him an even more sympathetic figure. He emerged from the
race the closest thing American politics has had to a hero, even to many
liberals, since possibly Bobby Kennedy.
In the Bush years, the halo got brighter. He was of course much sought after
by television after September 11. His imprimatur was crucial to Bush's "war
on terror." And he still continued to go his own way here and there. Campaign
finance reform finally passed in 2002, over the howling objections of
conservatives, who continued to loathe McCain because of his various
apostasies and on the simple grounds that if that many liberals and
journalists liked him, something had to be wrong. He considered, for a few
fleeting moments, John Kerry's 2004 offer to be his running mate. The love
affair with the press only intensified.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Those few who bothered to try to lift the curtain noticed, especially as the
Bush years progressed and he began to prepare for 2008, that there were
aspects to McCain's personality and career that didn't quite fit the myth.
There are three main ones.
First of all, we have the matter of his famous temper. This has received
press attention from time to time. But it hasn't really hurt him, because
it's so easy to spin "violent temper" into "passionate beliefs" and make it
sound positive. In fact it's not too much to say that a trait that might have
mortally wounded other politicians has been described as a strength: "The
flip side of 'temper' is feistiness," The Economist explained in a typical
assessment from 2007.
Brock and Waldman, Welch, and Cliff Schecter each write at length on McCain's
anger, cataloguing instances of him popping off at fellow senators and others
and holding grudges for long periods of time, and then denying flatly in
on-the-record quotes that he ever loses his temper or holds a grudge.
Schecter, a freelance liberal commentator who contributes frequently to The
Huffington Post, recounts, for the first time, a tale—confirmed to him, he
writes, by three Arizona reporters—that in 1992, after Cindy McCain teased
her husband about his thinning hair, McCain snapped at her, in front of the
reporters and two staffers: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a
trollop, you c—." One wonders if on such occasions she reminds her husband
who it was that made his political career possible. She has recently called
the idea that her husband has a temper "a concoction."
The second issue is more substantive and deals with McCain's policy record—
both his votes as a senator and the positions he's taking as presidential
candidate. In many matters, it is far from consistent. Schecter's The Real
McCain chronicles, in fine-grain detail, McCain's votes and positions,
showing that they often seem to reflect hypocrisy, flip-flopping, and pure
expediency, rather than the political courage for which he is famous.
In a telling example, McCain has backed off the very issue that first won him
such goodwill. For a while after the passage of the McCain-Feingold bill,
McCain stuck with the issue, supporting reform of the so-called 527 groups
that can spend large sums for advertisements attacking an opposition
candidate and not exceed the limits on contributions (the Swift Boat Veterans
for Truth were one such). But by July 2006, his old allies on campaign finance
—Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, Republican Congressman Chris Shays, and
Democratic Congressman Marty Meehan—introduced a bill to shore up the public
financing of presidential campaigns. McCain had put his name on essentially
the same piece of legislation in 2003. Three years later, it was absent.
Earlier this year, McCain unilaterally informed—by law, he was supposed to
ask—the Federal Election Commission that he would not abide by primary
spending limits he had previously accepted. He faces potentially severe
financial penalties for doing so, although the FEC has become deeply
politicized and hamstrung. In any event, McCain doesn't talk much about
campaign finance reform today, instead concentrating his rhetoric about
reform on the far more conservative-friendly topic of cutting government
spending and pork.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Such instances are numerous. He voted against the Bush tax cuts originally;
he now supports extending them. On immigration reform—another issue on which
his views were welcome in the press and among liberals—he has stopped
talking about "comprehensive" reform that would include a path to citizenship
for undocumented aliens, and begun emphasizing the border fence. In 1999, he
said, "I would not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force
X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations."
By 2006, he said its repeal "wouldn't bother me any." And last month,
McCain's campaign indicated that he would no longer continue his long-held
support for adding rape-and-incest exceptions to the GOP platform plank that
opposes abortion. This is as extreme a position on abortion as exists in
American electoral politics.
Most strikingly of all, the man who was repeatedly tortured by the Vietnamese
has backpedaled even on the issue of torture by American officials. In 2005,
he inserted language into the Detainee Treatment Act that Bush disliked
because it forbade the military to use some methods of interrogation. The
next year, after the Supreme Court had rebuked the Bush administration
positions on detention in its Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, McCain fought the
administration for long enough to receive favorable attention in the press.
But he finally declared—in a much-discussed "compromise" with the
administration—that he was satisfied with the infamous Military Commissions
Act, which contained provisions that prevented prisoners from challenging the
basis of their detention. The bill gave the White House the power to ignore
the Geneva Conventions if it wished to.
The record, then, shows five serious shifts of position—four of them on some
of the most contentious issues before the country, and one, on campaign
finance reform, which was once the accomplishment most closely identified
with him. Surely any other politician with this record would have been called
a "flip-flopper" (he does appear to have remained consistent on global
warming, whose existence he acknowledges and which he says he would address).
The book by Brock and Waldman provides much critical insight into the
important question of how the press failed to deal with McCain's actions.[3]
They note that not only were no accusations of inconsistency made, but by and
large the press shielded McCain from any such charges after the Military
Commissions Act passed:
Yet in the week or so between the announcement of the "compromise" and the
more thorough analyses of the final product, McCain seemed to disappear from
the story. Though he had received reams of praise while the negotiations were
going on, once the bill's details were revealed, hardly anyone in the news
media held McCain accountable for his role in its creation.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
There is a final matter about McCain, the new and reinvented McCain, that the
press hasn't quite taken in. The McCain of 1999 and 2000 was running a
campaign that was also a movement. His most famous quote from those days,
which he used repeatedly, invoked the idea of public service and usually went
something like this, from a commencement speech at Boston College in 2006:
Those who claim their liberty but not their duty to the civilization that
ensures it, live a half-life, having indulged their self-interest at the cost
of their self-respect. But sacrifice for a cause greater than your
self-interest, and you invest your lives with the eminence of that cause,
your self-respect assured.
This belief was at the core of his earlier campaign. Welch, an editorial-page
editor at the Los Angeles Times of libertarian bent and a former editor at
Reason magazine, devotes considerable space to exploring this aspect of
McCain's professed values. His book is the best of the three. The other two,
though useful, would have little rationale if McCain weren't a presidential
candidate; but Welch has produced a thorough critique that digs deep into
McCain's belief system and will have a shelf life beyond this election cycle.
As a libertarian, Welch finds the above quotation about "sacrifice"
monstrous, a prettily packaged recipe for putting the people before the
individual and trampling liberty. But it was something that I think many
journalists and liberals and especially young people found appealing. David
Foster Wallace certainly loved it, and he points out in his essay that the
idea was part-and-parcel of the whole McCain package—the straight talk and
the POW years conferred upon McCain a legitimacy to demand sacrifice of
citizens, and his credentials made the call real and not "just one more piece
of the carefully scripted bullshit that presidential candidates hand us as
they go about the self-interested business of trying to become" president.
McCain's Web site features a section called "A Cause Greater," with links to
volunteer organizations and such, and he still uses the phrase at times. But
he's certainly cooled down the inspirational rhetoric aimed particularly at
young people (I was struck reading both Welch and Wallace at how much of what
they said about the vintage 2000 McCain has been said this time around about
Obama). McCain's favorite literary character is Hemingway's romantic
adventurer Robert Jordan from For Whom the Bell Tolls. His film hero is
Brando's Emiliano Zapata, who walked out into the village plaza alone to meet
certain death. McCain says he believes in the "beautiful fatalism" of noble
lost causes, and he confounded reporters in 2000 by exhibiting apprehension
after his New Hampshire win and relief after his South Carolina defeat. Such
responses captivated many people. That McCain is probably still in there
somewhere, if you dig deep enough. But the McCain we see publicly now is
determined to do anything he has to do to win.
It's probably unlikely that the larger national press will arrive at this
interpretation by November. The image of the straight-talking maverick who
bled in a cell while Baby Boomers indulged themselves is just too hard-wired
into their systems. In addition, McCain, still adept at the seduction of
journalists and the self-deprecating witticism, hides his rank ambition
better than, say, Hillary Clinton does.
Nevertheless, he has equally evident weaknesses. He is saddled with an
unpopular incumbent whom he will nevertheless have to embrace because he'll
need every vote he can squeeze out of the 29 percent who still like Bush. The
recent Republican losses in special House elections in strong GOP districts
in Illinois and Louisiana suggest a badly damaged brand, and McCain has not
so far proven himself the kind of leader who can fundamentally redefine his
party. Finally, his age might matter. If elected, he will turn seventy-three
seven months into his first term. A senior moment or two—further confusing
Sunni and Shia, which he's done twice now—would come in handy for his
opponent.
But for the most part, the Democrats will have to defeat McCain on substance.
They will begin with Iraq. McCain was much criticized for a previous
statement that a hundred-year US presence in the country would "be fine with
me"; so in a May 15 speech he bowed to political reality. He said that "among
the conditions I intend to achieve" would be victory in Iraq, and withdrawal
of "most of the service men and women," by 2013. But he presented no analytic
vision of how he would accomplish that, and trying to distance himself from
Bush's war policy after all this time may anger the neocons in his base more
than it placates moderate voters.
His rhetoric about Iran—which inevitably will be a factor in any solution—
has been belligerent. He calls it a "rogue state" and has spoken often of
"rogue-state rollback," deliberately invoking a word favored by the
hardest-line cold warriors; he recently said he never meant by the phrase
"that we should go around and declare war." On the Middle East, he said in
late April that "people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst
nightmare."
On health care, McCain's plan is built around tax credits ($5,000 for
families) that would cover less than half the cost of today's average family
plan and lead to high deductibles and much greater risk. His economic
policies would, if enacted, combine Bush's tax cuts with far more severe
spending cuts in a way that could ultimately destabilize Social Security and
Medicare, a goal fiscal conservatives have sought for decades; and he
recently announced that he would nominate Supreme Court judges like John
Roberts and Samuel Alito. So there's plenty for the opposition to work with.
Whether these matters will carry more weight than lapel pins or pastors or
the ghosts of Hanoi may well be the question of this year's campaign.
—May 15, 2008
Notes
[1] Drew and Simon & Schuster have reissued Citizen McCain this year with an
excellent new introduction by the author that raises all the pertinent
questions about McCain today and is well worth reading.
[2] Wallace covered the Straight-Talk Express for Rolling Stone in 2000. His
extended essay, "Up, Simba," appears in his Consider the Lobster and Other
Essays (Little, Brown, 2005). "Up, Simba" is being reissued this month as a
book, with an introduction by Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, under the title
McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight-Talk Express with John McCain and a
Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking about Hope (Back Bay). This new
edition was not yet available at press time.
[3] Since their book's recent publication, Brock and Waldman have added a new
chapter on press coverage of McCain, which is available at
mediamattersaction.org/freeride/addendum.
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Who Is John McCain?
By Michael Tomasky