Saluting the Maverick warts and all
The passing of Arizona Senator John McCain is poignant for a number of reasons. Probably none more than that he represented the last of a dying breed of forward-looking Republicans unafraid to reach across the aisle and work with Democrats, and to criticize their own party when necessary. In the wake of his death we've heard words like patriot, hero, honorable, integrity and maverick and all of those words describe who John McCain was. But he was also a complicated, flawed man and one can acknowledge those flaws and still admire the man.
Being a political geek I'd watched McCain on the Sunday shows for a decade before his 2000 presidential run and devoured his 1999 bestselling memoir “Faith Of My Fathers.” His harrowing story of military service in Vietnam, surviving the USS Forrestal fire, being shot down on his 23rd bombing run and spending five and a half years of confinement and torture as a POW was genuinely moving.
I admired the work he'd done in the Senate with veterans and POWs and the fact that, along with John Kerry, was instrumental in normalizing relations with Vietnam.
Having started my voting life off as a 1984 Walter Mondale liberal Democrat, growing into a centrist third-way Bill Clinton “New Democrat” I was intrigued by a politician who could bridge the gap between right and left. Obviously I disagreed with McCain on many issues and thought he was too hawkish. But I admired his authenticity. So I supported John McCain in the Republican primary in 2000. In fact, I credit John McCain for inspiring me to leave the Democratic Party and becoming an independent in 2000, which I've been ever since.
I found McCain's struggle between his ambition and principles intriguing. In 2000, during the race for the Republican presidential nomination, McCain hid his opposition to the Confederate Flag in South Carolina fearing it would lose him votes. Instead he said the flag represented Southern heritage to him. He later took to the airwaves to apologize and admit he'd sold out his principles. (In fact, later on Fox News, he called what he did in South Carolina, “An act of cowardice.”) What politician does that? Most politicians would make excuses but that wasn't McCain.
I don't require inspirational people to be perfect. In fact, I relate better if I know they struggle like I do. Martin Luther King Jr. battled depression as a youth and reportedly attempted suicide. The fact that he plagiarized passages in his doctoral dissertation or was a well-known womanizer doesn't diminish his accomplishments. I want to be able to admire the man, not a myth.
However, I was horrified to see the maverick John McCain literally hugging George W. Bush. When he followed it up by recanting his earlier criticism of the Rev. Jerry Falwell as an “agent of intolerance” his famous “straight talk” became double talk. It was another example of McCain's greatest flaw: the tendency to subjugate his lofty principles to political expediency.
He wasn't done. McCain did serious harm to his reputation and legacy by selecting Sarah Palin as a running mate during the 2008 presidential campaign especially with a campaign slogan of “Country First.” Palin was the worst possible choice because her unpreparedness put the country at risk. It was a cynical ploy devised by his campaign advisers that he should've rejected. McCain, ever the maverick, had wanted to run with independent Joe Lieberman, who'd been the Democratic vice-presidential candidate with Al Gore in 2000. Party leaders balked at that idea and McCain caved.
It's the stuff of legend what happened later at a campaign rally in Minnesota, when John McCain set a woman straight who'd called Barack Obama an “Arab.” (Some nitpickers use the incident to blast McCain as being Islamophobic for answering the woman by saying Obama was a decent family man, as if Arabs could not be. But Obama had been smeared as an Islamic terrorist in the campaign so he knew what she was implying.) Earlier in the same rally when an audience member claimed to fear an Obama presidency McCain told the bewildered crowd that they had nothing to fear from Obama in the Oval Office.
This was the decent, patriotic straight talker I remembered from the 2000 race. This was the honorable John McCain who forbid his campaign from running any ads mentioning Obama's relation with firebrand preacher Jeremiah Wright.
However, that woman who called Obama an Arab and others who called him a terrorist and worse were ginned up by the divisive rhetoric of his running mate, Sarah Palin and the campaign. Saying Obama was “palling around with terrorists” and proclaiming her followers “real Americans” who wanted to “take their country back” the 2008 seethed with the vitriol and white resentment that would fuel the Tea Party and Donald Trump's hostile takeover of the White House in 2016. Setting that woman straight was extinguishing a fire McCain's campaign had set.
Yes, John McCain was no saint. Let's face it, even our saints aren't saints. In his last years I think John McCain reestablished his credibility. He did it by going back to his core values. Back to the man unafraid to reach across the aisle in an era that penalizes politicians who do so. Unafraid to speak his mind and buck his party. John McCain, in the twilight of his career with no more mountains to climb, was freed to unleash his inner statesman without further interruption from his ambitious id.
John McCain quietly spent his time during the Trump presidency visiting our allies and reassuring them of our commitments despite the horror show they were seeing in the Oval Office.
When McCain flew back to Washington to give a dramatic thumbs down to Trump's Obamacare repeal it saved health care for millions and solidified his commitment to country over party. But he also gave an impassioned speech about going back to regular order in the senate. What congressional Republican has been talking about working with the Democrats? Who is reaching across the aisle?
After Donald Trump's embarrassing capitulation in Helsinki before Vladimir Putin, it was John McCain's voice that rang the loudest in a caustic statement. “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory...No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”
And in his last public speech John McCain showed why he's been the conscience of the Republican Party.
"To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of Earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”
Well known political figures are often lionized in death, their shortcomings minimized and their virtues burnished. And no doubt John McCain's legacy benefits from passing away at a time of feckless Republican inaction, unprincipled weakness and the chaotic reign of an incompetent idiot who should've never been elected president. It's easy to look like a giant when surrounded by dwarves. But from his military service, public service and continued struggle to do the right thing in serving a cause larger than himself, he earned his place of reverence in American history.
Being a political geek I'd watched McCain on the Sunday shows for a decade before his 2000 presidential run and devoured his 1999 bestselling memoir “Faith Of My Fathers.” His harrowing story of military service in Vietnam, surviving the USS Forrestal fire, being shot down on his 23rd bombing run and spending five and a half years of confinement and torture as a POW was genuinely moving.
I admired the work he'd done in the Senate with veterans and POWs and the fact that, along with John Kerry, was instrumental in normalizing relations with Vietnam.
Having started my voting life off as a 1984 Walter Mondale liberal Democrat, growing into a centrist third-way Bill Clinton “New Democrat” I was intrigued by a politician who could bridge the gap between right and left. Obviously I disagreed with McCain on many issues and thought he was too hawkish. But I admired his authenticity. So I supported John McCain in the Republican primary in 2000. In fact, I credit John McCain for inspiring me to leave the Democratic Party and becoming an independent in 2000, which I've been ever since.
I found McCain's struggle between his ambition and principles intriguing. In 2000, during the race for the Republican presidential nomination, McCain hid his opposition to the Confederate Flag in South Carolina fearing it would lose him votes. Instead he said the flag represented Southern heritage to him. He later took to the airwaves to apologize and admit he'd sold out his principles. (In fact, later on Fox News, he called what he did in South Carolina, “An act of cowardice.”) What politician does that? Most politicians would make excuses but that wasn't McCain.
I don't require inspirational people to be perfect. In fact, I relate better if I know they struggle like I do. Martin Luther King Jr. battled depression as a youth and reportedly attempted suicide. The fact that he plagiarized passages in his doctoral dissertation or was a well-known womanizer doesn't diminish his accomplishments. I want to be able to admire the man, not a myth.
However, I was horrified to see the maverick John McCain literally hugging George W. Bush. When he followed it up by recanting his earlier criticism of the Rev. Jerry Falwell as an “agent of intolerance” his famous “straight talk” became double talk. It was another example of McCain's greatest flaw: the tendency to subjugate his lofty principles to political expediency.
He wasn't done. McCain did serious harm to his reputation and legacy by selecting Sarah Palin as a running mate during the 2008 presidential campaign especially with a campaign slogan of “Country First.” Palin was the worst possible choice because her unpreparedness put the country at risk. It was a cynical ploy devised by his campaign advisers that he should've rejected. McCain, ever the maverick, had wanted to run with independent Joe Lieberman, who'd been the Democratic vice-presidential candidate with Al Gore in 2000. Party leaders balked at that idea and McCain caved.
It's the stuff of legend what happened later at a campaign rally in Minnesota, when John McCain set a woman straight who'd called Barack Obama an “Arab.” (Some nitpickers use the incident to blast McCain as being Islamophobic for answering the woman by saying Obama was a decent family man, as if Arabs could not be. But Obama had been smeared as an Islamic terrorist in the campaign so he knew what she was implying.) Earlier in the same rally when an audience member claimed to fear an Obama presidency McCain told the bewildered crowd that they had nothing to fear from Obama in the Oval Office.
This was the decent, patriotic straight talker I remembered from the 2000 race. This was the honorable John McCain who forbid his campaign from running any ads mentioning Obama's relation with firebrand preacher Jeremiah Wright.
However, that woman who called Obama an Arab and others who called him a terrorist and worse were ginned up by the divisive rhetoric of his running mate, Sarah Palin and the campaign. Saying Obama was “palling around with terrorists” and proclaiming her followers “real Americans” who wanted to “take their country back” the 2008 seethed with the vitriol and white resentment that would fuel the Tea Party and Donald Trump's hostile takeover of the White House in 2016. Setting that woman straight was extinguishing a fire McCain's campaign had set.
Yes, John McCain was no saint. Let's face it, even our saints aren't saints. In his last years I think John McCain reestablished his credibility. He did it by going back to his core values. Back to the man unafraid to reach across the aisle in an era that penalizes politicians who do so. Unafraid to speak his mind and buck his party. John McCain, in the twilight of his career with no more mountains to climb, was freed to unleash his inner statesman without further interruption from his ambitious id.
John McCain quietly spent his time during the Trump presidency visiting our allies and reassuring them of our commitments despite the horror show they were seeing in the Oval Office.
When McCain flew back to Washington to give a dramatic thumbs down to Trump's Obamacare repeal it saved health care for millions and solidified his commitment to country over party. But he also gave an impassioned speech about going back to regular order in the senate. What congressional Republican has been talking about working with the Democrats? Who is reaching across the aisle?
After Donald Trump's embarrassing capitulation in Helsinki before Vladimir Putin, it was John McCain's voice that rang the loudest in a caustic statement. “Today’s press conference in Helsinki was one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory...No prior president has ever abased himself more abjectly before a tyrant.”
And in his last public speech John McCain showed why he's been the conscience of the Republican Party.
"To fear the world we have organized and led for three-quarters of a century, to abandon the ideals we have advanced around the globe, to refuse the obligations of international leadership and our duty to remain ‘the last best hope of Earth’ for the sake of some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems, is as unpatriotic as an attachment to any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.”
Well known political figures are often lionized in death, their shortcomings minimized and their virtues burnished. And no doubt John McCain's legacy benefits from passing away at a time of feckless Republican inaction, unprincipled weakness and the chaotic reign of an incompetent idiot who should've never been elected president. It's easy to look like a giant when surrounded by dwarves. But from his military service, public service and continued struggle to do the right thing in serving a cause larger than himself, he earned his place of reverence in American history.
Comments