Reidblog [The Reid Report blog]

This, despite the fact that John McCain has a history of being wrong on racial matters (he voted against making Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday in Arizona), and a hypocrite (he is as cozy with lobbyists as any politician, and was knee deep in the Keating scandal in the 1980s.) It was McCain's biography -- his willingness to fight, and to remain in captivity in Vietnam, while George W. was scurrying away from his guard units back home that made him seem heroic, even deserving of the White House. 

That was then. Now, McCain is seeking the White House based on that same biography and sense of heroism and entitlement. He has been given a boost on the latter by the sheer viciousness of Bush's campaign against him in 2000, which makes him seem the appropriate candidate to be repaid by the party in 2008. And yet, the thought of John McCain as president now fills me with dread.

Maybe it's because I know more about him now. Or because he has shown himself to be an unadulterated war monger, still tromping through the lush jungle trenches in his mind, and determined to fight the Vietnam war wherever he can find space to send in the guns, and for the rest of his life. McCain now strikes me as a rather pathetic figure, who seems convinced that a nation's only virtue is in war, and so it is to war that he is committed, even at the expense of his fellow warriors (he has so far, even failed to support a new GI bill put forth by fellow vets like Jim Webb.) 

McCain's inability to grasp the differences between the fighting factions in Iraq, something he demonstrated again over the weekend on Fox News (the right place to do so, after all,) and his dogged determination to convince the American people that things are going swimmingly in Iraq, even though most of us have long stopped listening, is written off by his doting media coterie as momentary slips of the toungue, or even the quirkiness of old age. I see something more cynical in it: a sense that McCain will do anything, and say anything, to keep the war going. And if he manages to get into the White House, as he himself has said, "I hate to tell you, but there's gonna be more wars." Something to look forward to for the paranoids on the right, who obsess constantly about "Islamofascism" on talk radio and in the blogosphere,  but not exactly an affirmative reason to elect John McCain.

There's also his famous temper, and the judgment of his own GOP colleagues, the men who work most closely with him, that he lacks the temperament to be president (Sen. Thad Cochran's now famous line about the thought of McCain being president sending a cold chill down his spine is echoed by other Senators who have been on the receiving end of his tirades...) He is also famously arrogant, intolerant of dissent, and goes beyond making his colleagues nervous by actually spooking some military leaders (and I assume they don't scare easily.)  

In the tortured mantra, "my friends," that he reels off through gritted teeth, one detects a seething rage and a deep-seated need to still be the brave young admiral's son who stayed five more years in that Vietnamese gulag rather than go home without his brothers. It's also, and I feel badly saying it, rather pathetic. You get the sense that McCain is like one of those former high school football stars who still squeezes into his old uniform, won't change the haircut he had 20 or 30 years ago, and fights the future so ferociously, that it becomes clear to everyone that his best days are behind him, and he knows it.  I just get the sense that John McCain's best years are behind him, too, and that he left the best of himself on that slab in Vietnam.

When McCain returned from Vietnam, as a genuine hero, he did what a lot of veterans of the various wars of the 1960s -- actual and social -- did: he joined the rat race. Some civil rights veterans (think Andrew Young or Vernon Jordan) became high flying businessmen, so steeped in corporate and professional success that you almost forget they were a part of the movement at all. Others, like McCain, became prototypical politicians: cozying up to lobbyists, leveraging his position overseeing the telecom industry to woo his way onto the private jets and yachts of the rich and entitled, and even dumping the wife who waited for him to come home -- never knowing if he ever would -- for a liquor heiress. At the end of the day, you just get the feeling that the only thing that is special about John McCain IS his service in Vietnam. Other than that, he's just your average pol. 

Worse, McCain is a typical politician who, because of his warrior past, has canonized himself, elevating himself among the other, mere mortal elected officials around him. He tells them how to finance their campaigns. He tells them what corruption is. Never mind the Keating Five, or the fact that his campaign employes more than 40 lobbyists -- more than any other in the race -- including Charlie Black, an uber-lobbyist who cavorts with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. 

But the worst thing about McCain, for me, is the fact that I just don't see in him the potential for greatness. That sounds harsh, because there is greatness in his past.  But today, because his politics are so mundane, McCain strikes me as a man who would be a George H.W. Bush -- great resume, so-so president. It may be unfair, but to be a great, or even a near-great president, requires a curious and unique combination of biography, optimism, charisma, and moment. McCain lacks the middle two in spades, and though he has the bio, it is a biography rooted in the distant past. McCain strikes me as a man desperate to have the presidency, but not destined to be a great president. He is so cranky and miserable, it's hard to imagine him having an optimistic bone in his body, let alone imparting that optimism to a weary public, the way FDR was able to do at the height of the Great Depression, or the way Reagan did in the waning years of Carter's "Stagflation," or the way Bill Clinton did as the country was just beginning to emerge from the malaise of the Bush I years. At a time when Americans are fitful and pessimistic, and desperately in need of a psychic (as well as an economic) boost -- even a little inspiration -- what McCain promises as a potential president is little more than a droning on of the tedious "war on terror," a never-ending occupation of Iraq, an extension of the mess in Afghanistan, perhaps waged a bit more competently, and more of the same on crucial domestic matters like the economy, free trade and jobs. 

McCain cannot inspire the nation to rally on the domestic front, not only because he has no agenda, but because he lacks the language of optimism, or the charisma to deliver it. His speeches are like long, mournful hums -- so boring that it takes real effort just to get through them. This morning, MSNBC cut into his major Iraq address four times, and finally gave up covering it altogether in favoring of watching that multiple marriage cult in Utah  (it's fitting that the first cut in was to announce fresh mortar fire into the Green Zone in Iraq, just as McCain was congratulating himself for supporting the surge, in front of -- wait for it -- an audience of Veterans of Foreign Wars. Predictability -- another nagging McCain trait.) 

And as if his total lack of charisma weren't bad enough, there's the matter of McCain's advanced age. Unlike Reagan, who was sort of an elegant, "Dynasty" or "Dallas" old that fit the over the top requirements of the 1980s, McCain is just plain old. One wonders whether the country is ready to face the 21st century with a man of the mid-20th -- a man who most people can't imagine serving more than one term. 

He wouldn't. If elected, I predict McCain's presidency would produce four years of agony, as Americans become increasingly hopeless on the war, and the economy continues to drizzle down the drain, while McCain's attention is focused on pursuing military glory. When the time comes to reassure the nation, a President McCain addresses would be exercises in mind-numbing patronization -- the man simply lacks the ability to inspire with his words. Young people would completely tune out of the political process. Why bother, when the geezers are running everything? Black voters would feel utterly alienated from a man who can barely hold the interest of white people, let alone us. And the rest of the world, while relieved to be rid of George W. Bush, would likely be constantly on edge about what McCain might do next. Moreover, the world would be puzzled by America's failure to capture a genuine moment of opportunity to renew and reinvigorate this country and its politics, by electing someone capable of rallying the American spirit, and in so doing, to lift the spirits of people around the world.