McCain: The Myth of a Maverick
Matt Welch
Palgrave-Macmillan; 226 pages
I‘m inclined to agree with a recent David Broder column. I was going to say that is not necessarily a common occurrence, but Broder is so anodyne a denizen of the middle of the establishment road that it is often difficult to disagree with him all that sharply, Anyway, he argues that John McCain missed an important opportunity on his recent trip to Iraq. Short version: Broder notes that last week Gen. Petraeus, of all people, noted in an interview that "no one," Iraqi or American, "feels there has been sufficient progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation," or even in the provision of basic government services.
This could have given McCain an opportunity to identify with Petraeus and the basic mission in Iraq, while distancing himself a bit from Bush, which could be important come November. He could have made sure to lecture Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki, in a friendly way but in a way that would have been certain to get publicity, on the necessity of the Iraqi government getting cracking on those political "benchmarks." That would have signaled that unlike Bush he was being hard-headed with those for whom our military people are shedding blood.
Instead McCain simply drank the Kool-Aid, saying "I will be glad to stake my campaign on the fact that this [presumably meaning the surge] has succeeded and the American people appreciate it." Then he went on to confuse the Sunni al-Qaeda with the Shia militias that may well be getting assistance from Iran (indeed, may be essentially Iranian puppets), thus thoroughly undermining whatever impression may still linger that his long experience sitting in committee rooms has given him knowledge that is especially useful on the ground. I suspect that like many neoconservatives (McCain was their preferred candidate back in 1999 and they’re having paroxysms now that he’s the presumptive Republican nominee), McCain is in more love with the idea of war in the abstract than in apprehension of any definable objectives in Iraq or understanding of the challenges facing us there.
It doesn’t denigrate his POW experience, during which, despite having cracked at least once, he seems to have faced with courage and resolve, to note that he served as a Navy pilot rather than a grunt on the ground during Vietnam. To a pilot war can seem more abstract and distant than it does to an infantryman facing mud and blood every day. I don’t think it’s indulging too much in psychohistory to suggest the possibility that war is more abstract than concrete to John McCain even now.
Whatever one may think of him, John McCain is the presumptive Republican nominee, and if the Democrats keep squabbling their way toward self-destruction over race and gender (how deliciously ironic!), he may well be our next president, even in a year that doesn’t look good for Republicans as a party. So what kind of president is he likely to be if elected?
According to Matt Welch, now back at Reason magazine as editor after a stint on the L.A. Times editorial page, he is likely to be the most instinctively bellicose and militaristic president since Teddy Roosevelt, as well as an advocate of increased government power and regulation domestically. Given that most of the media, taken some years ago by Sen. McCain’s considerable personal charm on the self-aggrandizingly-named Straight Talk Express and his personal story, have delved hardly at all into his policy preferences, Welch’s book, McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, would be salutary reading for those curious about what this country would be letting itself in for with John McCain as president.
It is significant that John McCain’s personal hero among presidents is Teddy Roosevelt, who famously compensated for childhood asthma by embodying and championing the strenuous life for himself and the beginnings of empire and bellicosity as policy for his country. Matt Welch also finds it significant that his favorite book is said to be Ernest Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, a Spanish Civil War tale of a man who fights on despite losing personal contact with whatever it was he was fighting for and ends in a glorious blaze of artillery. Fighting, even or perhaps even especially for lost causes seem to be central to his being.
McCain’s deviations from Republican orthodoxy, of course, are well-known. He was a co-author of the notorious McCain-Feingold campaign finance restrictionist bill that bars political speech by independent groups too close to an election, a provision whose "actual purpose," as columnist George Will put it, "is to protect politicians from speech that annoys them." He has supported (as has President Bush) the McCain-Kennedy immigration bill that provides a path to citizenship for illegal aliens, something most Republicans oppose. He opposed President Bush’s tax cuts before he supported them.
McCain has flip-flopped on ethanol subsidies, on constitutional amendments to ban abortion and gay marriage, and supports drastic action on global warming. He famously trashed preachers like Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell as "agents of intolerance" in 2000 but has spent much of the past year trying to convince the religious right he is really with them.
Matt Welch notes that McCain’s real personal political philosophy emerged in the late 1990s, with the bitter memory of Vietnam having been exorcised by the establishment of diplomatic relations with Vietnam (something McCain worked and advocated for) and the apparent success of the First Gulf War. The quasi-intellectuals over at the Weekly Standard took note and reinforced it with quasi-intellectual justifications for his growing desire to (re)establish "national greatness" largely through military might and adventures.
Thus the thread running through Sen. McCain’s emerging political positions is a love for national glory, usually expressed through military endeavors. As the son and grandson of Navy admirals – his grandfather was part and believed strongly in of TR’s project to use sea power to project American influence – he comes by it honestly. The question is whether this country can stand a believer in the rightness of establishing U.S. influence worldwide fervent enough to make George W. Bush look like a pacifist.
It’s not just in military affairs that McCain oozes contempt for those who seek to live their own lives by their own lights as peacefully and productively as possible. He disdains "merely material" success, lecturing us that we must serve a "cause greater than ourselves" (a phrase that only began to appear in his speeches as he found himself in the late 1990s). But the "cause greater" is always nationalism as defined by the government, not devotion to helping the poor or seeking religious enlightenment or – perish the thought! – expanding individual liberty. He sees mere individualism as puny and selfish.
The restrictions McCain would place on ordinary economic activity, lobbying or donating to political candidates are aimed at restoring confidence in … government, of course, a curious goal in a country whose founders and Constitution expressed the necessity of constant skepticism toward government.
It is hardly uncommon for a man of personal charm also to be personally pugnacious, and McCain’s temper is legendary. We at the Register experienced it in an editorial board meeting some years ago when the senator blew his stack over some issue so minor we have forgotten what it was. Matt Welch illustrates with a number of examples that McCain is most likely to explode when a criticism can be taken as a personal affront (which he does more readily than most) and, most significantly, contains a strong element of truth. He also shows that from an early age McCain was frequently looking for a fight, eager to show he was a tough guy.
It was not difficult for Welch to find veteran Republican operatives in Arizona willing to criticize McCain for his combative temper, his unnecessary denigration of aides and volunteers, and his disdain for many ordinary folks. Perhaps the fact that he grew up near the nation’s capital and spent most of his life there or overseas, and entered Arizona politics largely by marrying an Arizona heiress, accounts for many Arizona Republicans’ ambivalent attitude toward him. It becomes clear also that Barry Goldwater disliked and disagreed with him, largely on the importance of individual liberty.
McCain has admirable qualities, including personal charm, personal courage and perseverance that contributed to his unexpected (by most pundits) political success this year. As president, however, he would likely be more than a little dangerous to the country and to its citizens’ freedoms.
