McCain “Smitten with the Celebrity of Power”

As I remarked in a couple of posts last week, I often find attempts to limn Republican presidential wannabe John McCain’s motivations to be overly complex. Most notably was Matt Bai’s NYT Magazine piece that tried to somehow link McCain’s experience as a POW with his ridiculous embrace of Bush’s war in Iraq. My response was that there really is no complex worldview when it comes to McSame, no nuanced position on the use of American military might, and certainly no sense of honor bound duty to his fellow fighters.

Rather, McCain’s “positions”—if you can dignify his empty posturing as such—are the result of political expedience. John McCain, though touted as a maverick, just put his “Straight Talk Express” on what he thought was the straightest road to the White House—if he wanted the Republican nomination, he had to go along not just to get along, but to get the financing he needed, too. What motivates this third generation Navy man to embrace a “strategy” that continues to send his brothers and sisters to their needless deaths? Naked ambition, pure and simple.

Many who have crossed paths with McCain in the last few decades have observed as much, though some try to put in nicer terms. Now, writing in the New York Times, David D. Kirkpatrick has given us more evidence of McCain’s lust for power. . . not to mention his penchant for hypocrisy.

Mr. McCain has often said he decided to run for office because he felt his war injuries would make attaining the same rank as his father and grandfather “impossible.” But Mr. Lehman, now an adviser to the McCain campaign, and two other top Navy officers familiar with Mr. McCain’s file insist that was not the case.

Instead, many who knew him say, Mr. McCain seemed bored by Navy life. “Sitting down with Anwar Sadat or Deng Xiaoping and being treated as an equal — that is pretty heady stuff,” said Rhett Dawson, a former aide to Mr. Tower who is now president of an electronics trade group. “It had opened his eyes to a much broader world.”

Mr. McCain was captivated, recalled Jeffrey Record, then an aide to former Senator Sam Nunn, the hawkish Georgia Democrat. “He thrives on competition, and he thrives on political combat,” Mr. Record said. “He saw the glamour of it. I think he really got smitten with the celebrity of power.”

Considering that former Press Secretary Scott McClellan, who is now making the rounds promoting his book, attributes much of what went wrong during the Bush Administration to what’s been called the “permanent campaign”—using the authority of the office for partisan gain—and the president himself becoming overly impressed with his own power, does America really want another chief executive that thrives on political combat? And can we survive another four years of a man so taken with the idea of power for power’s sake?

I think the whole world—from the sultans to the serfs, from the admirals to the GIs, from the celebrities to the wannabes—knows the answer. Well, the whole world minus one, I guess.


(cross-posted on guy2k and The Seminal)

Evaluating McCain’s Vietnam “Experience”

Jason’s comment on my Wednesday post got me thinking a little more about McCain’s biography—most specifically the Vietnam War part—and what role it should play in the 2008 battle for the White House. . . and what was going to be a one-sentence response grew into something more like a post of its own.

First, the comment:

McCain will absolutely say anything to be elected, but I did find interest in Bai's piece. Not so much for the psychoanalyzing as for the Vietnam question.

For whatever reason, McCain believe[s] we could have and should have won Vietnam by committing more troops. That's a very interesting question to start debating right now, with the parallels with Iraq so obvious. Yet, I feel, lots of portions of America don't really want to ask that question. It brings up an era many would like to forget. Very interesting indeed.

Indeed. Therefore, my response:

That McCain thinks we could have "won" the Vietnam War is not only ignorant, it's dangerous.

Many questions were asked about Vietnam throughout the '70's and '80's. There are lots of good books (Karnow, Halberstam, and Shawcross come to mind), with lots of good insights, and they all tell us that we didn't just fight incorrectly, we fought for the wrong reasons.

Was there a way to "win" in Vietnam? I suppose we could have talked with Ho when he first turned to the US—and he did turn FIRST to the US—for help fighting a repressive colonial occupier. Short of that, there is no right answer.

I feel the right is forcing us to re-debate Vietnam history as a rehearsal for the eventual rewrite of Bush's Iraqi incursion. Imagine, even now, asking the "how could we have won Iraq" question.

The only answer is by not invading in the first place. That McCain still does not understand this makes for a bad omen when considering how or whether he would end the Iraq fiasco, and is a scary indication of just how terrible McCain might be at handling other foreign challenges.

I think the most interesting tidbit in the Bai piece—and I touched upon this the other day—was the revelation, of sorts, that "Mr. Experience" actually decided how to handle a crisis from what he read in a few books, and not from some special lesson learned at the Hanoi Hilton.

I am not against psychobiography—I have read some good ones—but I would want to look at the total of McCain's life experiences. Having been in a POW camp or in the jungle doesn't by itself predict how a veteran/lawmaker sees Iraq (take Bob Kerrey, for instance, an Iraq hawk that witnessed the worst of the Vietnam war firsthand during two tours as a Navy SEAL).

When I look at McCain's life, I see the son and grandson of very successful men who goes into the family business and quickly finds he's just not as smart and not as good at it. He then spends the rest of his life trying to one-up Daddy to prove his worth.

Sound familiar?


(cross-posted on guy2k and The Seminal)

Let’s go to the videotape! (aka I told you this asshole would say anything to get elected)

As I wrote yesterday, I wasn’t particularly impressed with the complex rationalizations and simplified psychoanalysis that went into Matt Bai’s Sunday NYT Magazine piece about what might have shaped John McCain’s worldview—most notably what could inspire a man to embrace Bush’s failed and dangerous course in Iraq. It wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate the attempt at understanding the Asshole from Arizona, it was just that the highfalutin’ explanations provided in the article give McCain too much credit for thinking this through—and, more importantly, Bai’s “analysis” crowds out what to me is the most obvious and likely reason behind McCain’s ever-shifting positions: John McCain will say whatever he thinks he must to get elected president.

Think I’m oversimplifying? Then I ask you to take a look at the latest Real McCain video from Brave New Films.



And don’t just take my word for it (or McCain’s—again, watch the video), former Rhode Island Senator (and, now, former Republican) Lincoln Chafee agrees. Appearing Tuesday on WNYC’s The Leonard Lopate Show, Chafee said of his one-time friend and Senate colleague that his political shifts were clearly born of an overriding desire to grab the presidency (just before the 13 minute mark on the audio, or at about 1:30 on the YouTube):

Lopate: [McCain’s] gone back on any number of things. Do you think he’s done it because it’s the only way he sees to win, or do you think he’s had a change of heart?

Chaffee: I think the former—that he’s just looking at it politically—which is unfortunate from my perspective. I am also surprised that once locking up the nomination he hasn’t tacked toward the middle more. He’s still kowtowing to that rightwing base.

So, there you have it. No complex worldview. No nuanced shifts. Just naked ambition.

John McCain: Empty. Cynical. Hypocritical. Ruthless. Pandering to the extremist right. It’s really not that hard to understand, and really not that hard to recognize, either. In fact, we are all painfully familiar with the type.


Update: Oh, yeah, here’s what Barack Obama had to say on the matter last night in Iowa:

We face an opponent, John McCain, who arrived in Washington nearly three decades ago as a Vietnam War hero, and earned an admirable reputation for straight talk and occasional independence from his party.

But this year's Republican primary was a contest to see which candidate could out-Bush the other, and that is the contest John McCain won. . . .

I will leave it up to Senator McCain to explain to the American people whether his policies and positions represent long-held convictions or Washington calculations, but the one thing they don't represent is change.

(cross-posted on guy2k and The Seminal)

The Other McCain Doctrine

Here’s my biggest problem with Matt Bai’s longwinded window on the mad cow mind of presidential wannabe John W. McCain: it’s complete and utter hogwash.

Desperately seeking an angle by which to sell editors and America alike on yet another feature article on the faux-maverick of the moment, Bai rolls out this theory at the beginning of his Sunday New York Times Magazine cover story:

There is a feeling among some of McCain’s fellow [Vietnam] veterans that his break with them on Iraq can be traced, at least partly, to his markedly different experience in Vietnam. McCain’s comrades in the Senate will not talk about this publicly. They are wary of seeming to denigrate McCain’s service, marked by his legendary endurance in a Hanoi prison camp, when in fact they remain, to this day, in awe of it. And yet in private discussions with friends and colleagues, some of them have pointed out that McCain, who was shot down and captured in 1967, spent the worst and most costly years of the war sealed away, both from the rice paddies of Indochina and from the outside world. During those years, McCain did not share the disillusioning and morally jarring experiences of soldiers like Kerry, Webb and Hagel, who found themselves unable to recognize their enemy in the confusion of the jungle; he never underwent the conversion that caused Kerry, for one, to toss away some of his war decorations during a protest at the Capitol. Whatever anger McCain felt remained focused on his captors, not on his own superiors back in Washington.

Net-net: McCain, locked up and tortured to his breaking point by what he understood to be his country’s enemy, never got to see for himself that quagmires like the war in Indochina cannot be “won” in any meaningful way through the use of any amount of US military force. Senators John Kerry, Jim Webb, and Chuck Hagel (and former Senator Max Cleland), having stayed out of North Vietnamese hands, can now understand the futility of the Bush-McCain approach to the Iraqi war and occupation.

That former Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey (who is quoted in the article dismissing the “McCain sees it differently because of his war experience” theory) was a hawk on Iraq, despite serving all of his time in Vietnam outside of a POW camp, is not broached by Bai.

I do not mean to dispute the idea that a man’s experiences in war might color his worldview from there on out, or even that Senator McCain’s view might be different because of his imprisonment. Rather, I take issue with the premise that McCain’s stance on matters Iraq can be explained through this particular glossy, psych-lite analysis.

And I’m not alone in my doubts. Beyond the aforementioned disbelief from Senator Kerrey, Bai himself seems to abandon the thesis by midway through the article—or earlier—ping-ponging between the notion that McCain has been erratic in his approach to the use of US military force, and the Senator’s own protestations that he has been nothing but consistent throughout his public life.

Bai does mention how the returning POW chose to study at the Naval War College—implying (to my way of seeing it) that a man whose “experience” we are supposed to favor over his election year competitors actually got his ideas from books. But Bai then explains that the intellectual history of the Republican Party breaks it into three groups—the isolationists, the realists, and the idealists—and then helps to burnish McCain’s “maverick” status by basically taking the Senator at his word when he infers that McCain’s views on military force don’t neatly fit into any camp (though Bai does write that he believes McCain to be closer to the idealists—those that would use military force to promote what they call democracy).

That the article’s central theory (theories?) serves as nothing more than a structure awkwardly wrapped around an excuse for a (another) canned and detail-deficient McCain peroration is made abundantly clear by one of Bai’s own realizations:

What was startling about this conversation was that, while McCain was talking about the dangers of intervening in a Zimbabwe or a Burma, he might just as well have been talking about the invasion of Iraq. Didn’t that country, too, have a colonial history that had been carelessly considered, to say the least? Didn’t the war’s proponents fail to plan more than a few weeks out or to ask the hard questions about how their soldiers might be greeted in the streets?

McCain disarmingly agrees with Bai, but then goes on to perpetuate the lie that Iraq was different because everyone believed at the start of the war that the alleged existence of WMD justified invasion. Bai, to his credit, mentions that this is an arguable point. Sadly, rather than argue it, though, Bai contends that the 2008 election is not about why we invaded, but whether we should stay.

That is convenient for the candidate, since avoiding the first five years of this war’s history allows McCain to skirt accountability for a long list of proclamations about Iraq—many of them contradictory, and all of them wrong.

As if to underscore that point, Bai mentions to McCain that he received a 10-page booklet from the Center for American Progress filled with the Senator’s unimpressive prognostications on Iraq.

McCain shrugs this off and insists that he will never waver from his support of the war, no matter what the personal cost. “As I said a year ago,” he told me, “I would rather lose a campaign than a war.” If he doesn’t make the most persuasive argument of his life, he risks losing both

And that’s the final line of the article—that’s where Bai leaves it. And, no doubt, Bai would like that to tie a nice little bow on his thesis—the steadfast candidate with the consistent worldview shaped by time spent as a POW 40 years ago.

Well, the quote, and, even more to the point, Bai’s last line, are revealing, but not of anything that Bai discusses in his long story.

If there is a constancy to be gleaned here, if there is a motivation that is uncovered by McCain’s current conversation and his various political conversions, it is, to me, the most obvious one: ambition.

What runs consistently through John McCain’s lifetime of discourse on the use of his country’s military might is his own desire to win—not any war, but his own, personal battles. And, since the early 1980’s, those battles have been for higher and higher public office. If there appear to be inconsistencies in McCain’s positions, it is because deep down, at his core, John McCain is a man that wants above all else to be president—and his positions need to serve that ambition. McCain might rather lose a war than a campaign (though I would dispute even that), but the war in Iraq has already been lost, while the campaign is technically still an open question.

That the war was lost by the men that McCain was forced to embrace in order to win his party’s nomination just makes his true motivations more obvious. That the presumptive Republican nominee must now try to shoehorn that bear hug into a respectable narrative makes him rather pathetic.

Pathetic, too, is the way Bai and many of his establishment media cohorts can’t quite bring themselves to report on the obvious. The title of this article is The McCain Doctrines—plural—so Bai is apparently open to the idea that the POW theory is rife with inconsistencies. Granted, my take on this McMess is also psychoanalysis of the most amateur rank, but it seems just as plausible, and, being far more simple, much more likely.

Alas, Occam’s razor would probably not get Bai on the cover of the Times Magazine—and, if experience is any guide, it might get him thrown off the “Straight Talk Express.”

Which, of course, would not serve Bai’s ambition in the least.


(cross-posted on The Seminal and Daily Kos)

The day after the day after

From the New York Times’ Matt Bai’s post to The Caucus:

Yesterday, on a day when two languishing campaigns finally succumbed, I called Tracy Russo in Chapel Hill to find out what was happening. The 26-year-old Russo was in charge of John Edwards's blog strategy; you might say she fulfilled the traditional role of a press secretary, only for the netroots. I'd gotten to know her earlier this year through some other bloggers, and I knew she was a passionate believer in her candidate and his liberal cause. . . .

Ms. Russo had been keeping it together since the campaign's chairman, David Bonior, had finally informed the staff of Mr. Edwards's impending withdrawal a few hours before his speech yesterday. "I'm a basket of emotions," she said. "Campaigns are like families. It hit everybody at different moments this morning." Russo still had a job to do; she was still talking to bloggers on the phone and trying to get them the video of Mr. Edwards's exit speech in New Orleans. She had no idea where she'd be going next, or when. "At least now we have time to sleep in and go see the doctors we haven't gone to in six months," she said, trying, unsuccessfully, to sound upbeat.

. . . . When a campaign ends, the candidate goes on to campaign for someone else or to the lucrative life he had before, but the staff is left to figure out the numbing logistics of leases and U-hauls and W-2 forms. Those of us who cover campaigns never write about that part of the process; we check out of hotels and turn our attention elsewhere. For the people who work on losing campaigns, moving on takes longer. For them, today is all about the grief.

Over the course of the last couple of months, I had the good fortune to correspond (and even once actually have a phone conversation!) with Tracy, and I can corroborate Bai’s assessment of her passion and dedication. I will also add that she was just damn nice. I was amazed at how, even in the midst of the busy pre-Iowa crunch, Tracy would take a chunk of time to talk with a little ol’ C-list blogger such as myself. And not just about logistics, either. Tracy talked about politics at large, and talked about the Edwards campaign with enthusiasm, yes, but also with an unexpected degree of candor.

In fact, I found all the people that I met on this campaign to be open, honest, and, to a person, nice. If, as folks say, a campaign is a reflection of its candidate, then it speaks very well of John Edwards. I am sad that I will not get to work longer with Tracy and the others on this campaign. I am sad that I will not get to work longer to make Edwards our president.