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How McCain Got Caught in His Own Vicious Cycle
In the final debate John McCain constantly strove to translate policy into a personal code of behavior.
Nobody should be confused that John McCain’s campaign is dizzying in its gyrations, seemingly without direction and sputtering. McCain’s basic problem is that he does not really have politics. He has a sense of honor and an instinct for revenge when he feels his honor has been besmirched. That is the heart of his “politics.” He has no feel for them. His career consists of episodes where he finds himself trapped in affairs of honor or dishonor, from Vietnam to the Keating Five, from his campaign against George W. Bush to the one against Barack Obama.
As the son and grandson of admirals and with a lineage tracing back to George Washington’s staff in the Revolutionary War his code is military. In that respect he is the opposite of George W. Bush, son and grandson of politicians, and Barack Obama, who has found his home and identity in politics despite his “post-political” rhetoric.
McCain truly hates only Republicans, from Bush to Tom DeLay.
McCain is the Republican Party nominee only because of the party’s disintegration, the shattering of the party’s center as Bush had constructed it, and the conservative inability to coalesce even as a faction amid the ruins. For the same reason, McCain’s difficulties—all of them—stem from the implosion of the Republican Party under Bush, the strange death of Republican America.
McCain’s most virulent enemies have not been Democrats. Some of his best friends are Democrats—and not just Joe Lieberman. He is a maverick as a Republican in that he has few if any enemies on his left but only on his right. He truly hates only Republicans, from Bush to Tom DeLay. And the feeling is mutual. Since the dirty tricks campaign in the GOP South Carolina primary of 2000, he has sought vengeance against those who violated him—the gang of operatives who aided and abetted Bush’s campaign against him, many of them close to DeLay—including Jack Abramoff, whose crimes McCain through his chairmanship of the Indian Affairs Committee exposed.
McCain chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential running mate as an impulsive act to assert his own authority against Bush and Rove who were pushing Romney on him and in defiance of his staff’s insistence of the madness of his preference for Lieberman. The Bush White House intensely dislikes him today, more than a few months ago, regarding him as a hopeless politician. Despite his selection of Palin, the right remains wary of him. They back him out of the desire for power, not shared values or politics. Mistrust continues to plague McCain within the GOP.
McCain mixes extreme individualism into his anti-political core. A natural-born fighter pilot, a solo operator, he is highly temperamental, easily upset, often unmanageable, loves to gamble (including at the craps table), and willing to plunge into risk. He has never been anything else. He has always flown on a wing and a prayer. Unsurprisingly, he does not think logically in policy terms. His erratic and impulsive pattern is utterly predictable.
Hardly anybody within the Republican Party trusts him—not the White House, not Bush’s close allies, not business, not evangelicals, not conservatives generally. As a presidential candidate, whenever McCain’s alienation from his party is threatened, he desperately runs to embrace the conservative wing by doing something, almost anything to satisfy it. Many of McCain’s shifts have been necessary to allay the right’s long-held and well-founded suspicions of his betrayals. Every time McCain moves to his right, it is because he’s not trusted within his own party. Every time he swivels away from the right, the mistrust between McCain and Republicans signals a larger collapse of ideology.
On one level, the more McCain’s incoherence has been exposed, the more erratic and impulsive he has become. But, on another level, he’s predictable. McCain inevitably comes to regard the objects of his scorn as dishonorable. His contempt for Obama is rooted in his ingrained military sensibility. Obama is trying to become commander-in-chief without having earned his stripes. His campaign against Obama has turned into an effort to disqualify him as dishonorable. Caught in a vicious cycle, McCain returns to his “politics” of honor.
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Jacob Bernstein is a senior reporter at The Daily Beast. Previously, he was a features writer at WWD and W Magazine. He has also written for New York magazine, Paper, and The Huffington Post.
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Lloyd Grove is editor at large for The Daily Beast. He is also a frequent contributor to New York magazine and was a contributing editor for Condé Nast Portfolio. He wrote a gossip column for the New York Daily News from 2003 to 2006. Prior to that, he wrote the Reliable Source column for the Washington Post, where he spent 23 years covering politics, the media, and other subjects.
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Jeff Madrick is a contributor to the New York Review of Books and a former economics columnist for the New York Times. He is editor of Challenge Magazine, visiting professor of humanities at Cooper Union, and senior fellow at the New School's Schwartz Center for Economic Policy Analysis. He is the author of Taking America, The End of Affluence (Random House) and The Case for Big Government.
McCain at War with His Own Party
Sidney Blumenthal, former assistant and senior adviser to President Bill Clinton, and senior adviser to Senator Hillary Clinton, is executive producer of the Oscar winning documentary, "Taxi to the Dark Side," and author most recently of "The Strange Death of Republican America."
McCain is turning into a bumbling old man. The debate performance was awful. All he could do was whine and point fingers. He had no strategy of his own. All he ever says is, "We can do this or do that." LIke everything is easy. He and Palin are showing to depth. By the way, here is a website I found that shares all the Sarah Palin Pictures and supports Barack Obama!
What debate were you watching? I'm beginning to believe 2 things about Obama. 1. You have to support/vote for him, or you're a racist. 2. Having experience and a long history of service shouldn't be cast as a negative, but he's managed to shift it that way. Yes, it gives you more to examine and think about. HELLO? as opposed to almost nothing to examine? The devil you know is often better than the devil you don't know.
And how is McCain's passion and temperment a negative? Do we want somebody who avoids conflict - like Obama did about his own minister until he was right up to his candidacy announcement ceremony when he told his minister to stay away? He sat in that church for how many years and didn't know what kind of man that was? No, he knew. He just didn't want to rock the boat with his family and his supporters. Not the kind of character I want defending the country - WHICH by the way is Job 1 for the Federal Government - not giving everybody freebies we can't even begin to afford as of September 2008.
to zen waitress. it is fine to be a supporter of mccain, it is silly though to substantiate your support for him by saying obama has no experience. they both have experience. obama went to harvard law, was the president of harvard law review, practiced law, taught law, served in the illinois state senate, then the us.s senate. he has experience, you just don't want to vote for him. also, nowhere in the blumenthal piece does the author cast mccain or anyone else as a racist, nor does the article claim that if you support mccain then you must be racist. no one says that. on the other hand, when mccain supporters at rallies or interviews call obama a n*****, terrorist, colored, then you have racist on your hands. the author is critiquing the temperament and career of mccain and is describing his troubled relationship to his own party. these facts have nothing to do with obama or racism, rather with the fact that mccain is not the guy the republican party wanted to help them secure the white house in 2008.
We do know Obama, the ultra right wing conservatives are the ones who want you to think that we don't know him. The information is out there, you just need to look for it. Try Google, there are plenty of books and everything else. Do you really think that he would have so much support from the Jewish community if there was any chance he had radical muslim ties? This is nothing more than desperate tactics in the final hours.
McCain's plan for economic reform is nothing we haven't heard or seen before. Both McCain's and Sarah Palin's arguments have little substance. They evade questions who's answers the people want hear, and jump back the same old story about energy (among other things). They rely on these "cute", patriotic remarks about how America will once again regain glory and win the war. We are sticking our nose where it doesn't belong! Another Korea mistake...McCain makes it seem as if we, as spectators, wouldn't understand anything deeper (are we children?); again NO SUBSTANCE! Barack Obama speaks to people, he connects with people, and I believe this is essential in a good leader, trait McCain lacks.
A recent Rolling Stone article about McCain's career reinforces many of SB's themes here, especially in regards to Mc's history of reckless behavior. He was also a known philanderer in his younger days (whilst married with kids). In fact he was a child of military privilege, and called in favors several times early in his career to 1) avoid being thrown out of military school, where he finished very close to the bottom of his class; and 2) to advance his political career once he left the service.
This is all we need in the White House (not!)--another spoiled rich kid who works from his gut and likes to take wild swings. God help us.
McCain's supposed sense of honor was exposed as just so much BS when he let the Bushies off on the torture issue,simple as that.
Who is Sarah Palin? Since she won't do any interviews, we have no choice but to make our judgment about her based on her recent ethics conviction. What is she hiding?
I've been watching McCain for awhile and I see how his anger and frustration bubbles up.
This was a clear factor in the debate. For the first half of the debate, McCain was on the attack, which was good. But then he fell apart, his anger was apparent by his heavy breathing into the mic, interupting Obama and acting like a spaz.
I think he blew it.
And in light of this article, I agree, he is a war dog. We need someone with a cool head this time around. Not attack dogs like McCain and Palin.
McCain isn't good at debating, campaigning, speaking, nuanced politics, fund raising, reassuring Americans and making sound VP candidate picks. Yet he runs, I believe b/c of some sense of entitlement for the Presidency. I'm hoping for a landslide for Obama to see the one thing he is good at...losing.
Presidential candidates are not ordinary people. The one thing they all share is egomania. This is why we most closely examine what their values are, & how they have used their values in their life. Obama decided to community organize instead of join a lucrative law firm position. What did McCain give up for a life of politics? What might have he done instead of serve in the house and senate and run for president twice? I'm not convinced that McCain had to sacrifice much to get into politics. Obama seems to genuinely believe in his ability to be a great president, his faith enhances mine. There is not a single thing that McCain has ever said to lead me to believe that he is a first rate thinker(naval academy, learned to fly at
McCain airbase, keating 5, Sarah Palin, voting with bush, "victory" rhetoric). So obama wins the intellectual face off easily. But the character issue? Well McCain would easily trade the R for a D if it helped him advance, he barely acknowledged his opponent(that one!) until 3rd debate when he huffed and puffed and rolled his eyes. A 72 year old from the naval academy Rolled His Eyes multiple times at Obama's words. Obama went to Columbia and Harvard universities, headed the Harvard law review, practiced law, taught law. All this from someone whose mother obtained foodstamps when he was a child. He is not a legacy, he is not white, he is simply qualified to be the Executive of this country. Who the hell is undecided at this point? McCain has over 20 years of service, Obama has 2 autobiographies, the information is available, if u can't decide for yourself, vote for the guy who is least like our worst president, W
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