For most of the last twelve months, John McCain has been the luckiest man in American politics. As the Democrats self-flagellate their way towards an elusive nomination, he stands ready to ride a second wave of political infighting all the way to the White House. A few months ago he was an outsider in a large field of younger, better-funded and more traditionally conservative candidates. Then, in a series of peculiar misjudgments, his rivals lost their footing in unanticipated, often inexplicable ways. Fred Thompson’s allegedly Reaganesque charms never showed up; Rudy Giuliani foolishly sat out too many early primaries; old-fashioned fear-mongering brought out the Christian vote for Mike Huckabee against Mitt Romney, and soon there was enough chaos in the system for the nearly bankrupt McCain campaign to parlay an early win in New Hampshire into a Cinderella story.
Since then, despite the longstanding mistrust of conservative Republicans, despite relative old age, a legendary bad-temper, and an unenviable list of dubious former friends and associates, McCain’s chances in the general election have improved due to further windfalls. The unappeasable Hillary Clinton has loosed so many salvoes against Barack Obama, opening him up on several fronts – race, religion, “patriotism,” “experience” – that the Republican Party has effectively been gifted millions of dollars of pre-campaign attack ads. Even so, Senator Clinton has done little to make herself more electable in this no-holds-barred endgame for if, somehow, she were to out McCain and wrest the nomination away from Obama, she will have alienated so much of her party’s base along the way that her candidacy would likely be fatally compromised from the start.
Political luck has given McCain enough time to rebrand himself as a genuine conservative, and he has done his best to shore up his reputation as a veteran legislator and uber-patriot. But if his opponents suddenly mend fences, this may not be enough. Democrats remember too well the hounding of John Kerry as a “flip-flopping” opportunist, deceitfully contrasted with the inflexibly constant president who warned against “changing horses in mid-stream.”
Ironically this very charge may well be McCain’s Achilles heel in the fall. For although he tirelessly casts himself as an honourable warrior, especially when cheerleading for the then-unpopular troop ‘surge’ in Iraq (“I’d rather lose a campaign than a war”), the Democratic counternarrative now sputtering into action will soon present a much more ambiguous character.
In recent months McCain has abandoned his belief that illegal immigrants should be allowed the chance to earn American citizenship; he has come out in support of the Bush tax cuts he used to oppose; and he has reportedly revisited his commitment to Roe vs Wade. There are even signs that he may be succumbing to the general antipathy to the war by promising to bring the troops home as soon as possible instead of the infamous “hundred year” scenario he flirted with not so long ago.
By themselves these volte-faces would be enough to expose any candidate to the sort of attacks that Kerry had to endure, but McCain has also exposed himself in other areas. After bragging of his ignorance in economic matters, he has reinforced this impression by offering vague nostrums on America’s mortgage and credit crises, and a myopic proposal for temporary relief from the gas-tax. Populist gambits and changes-of-heart may win over the 30 per cent of die-hard Republicans who still approve of President Bush, but the crucial swing voters needed to defeat either Democrat in November will be looking for something more substantial.
But in America, as in most other countries, ideas alone hardly ever win elections. Month after month of feuding amongst the Democrats has shown that US politics is nothing if not emotional. The media circus that has stalked Clinton, Edwards and Obama, turning each gaffe and peccadillo into major news items, ought to find McCain an easier target – once they can get over their reverence for him. Up to now the press corps has been astonishingly indulgent of candidate McCain – many journalists too awed by his military record to risk seeming disrespectful – but this will change.
America may still be emerging from its memories of Vietnam forty years later, but the war in Iraq offers a far more pressing instance of dishonest government to quarrel over, and both remaining Democrats – especially Obama – are on the right side of the argument. McCain’s loyalty to the President, however much it has been recast as respect for and solidarity with the military, is just as likely to be a liability as an asset if the political situation in Iraq fails to improve.
In personal terms, McCain’s military past is unassailable. As a prisoner of war in Vietnam, he refused an early release and endured five and a half years of captivity and torture. In a recent profile in the New York Review of Books, Michael Tomasky notes that this was “just the right tale of heroism for an unwanted war. If McCain had shot down the greatest number of North Vietnamese, who would celebrate him? … by suffering in a cell, serving as a kind of metaphor for American suffering in a war most Americans gave up on early in his confinement, but at the same time holding fast to principle under the most unimaginable circumstances, thereby redeeming some notion of American honour in a dishonourable situation, … McCain became an American hero.”
In 2008, that honour, however considerable, has to be qualified by the knowledge that this hero has repeatedly sided with an administration that tricked the country into a different, and arguably less-justifiable foreign war – for which it still lacks an exit strategy five years later. Moreover, despite the Bush campaign’s disgraceful personal attacks on candidate McCain in his first presidential campaign in 2000, the senator has allowed himself to be closely linked to the “callow, lazy and ignorant president” (as described by the New Yorker columnist Hendrik Hertzberg) who has led America into its present moral and political isolation, perhaps for a
generation. The Bush record is bad on so many fronts: wiretaps without warrants, the suspension of habeas corpus, a deliberate encouragement of torture and other un-American activities, endless cases of cronyism and incompetence. All of it baggage that McCain needs to lose quickly – some Democrats have already nicknamed him McBush – even though an overhasty farewell may cost him the sympathy of the Republican base.
McCain will also have to work on his repeated confusion of Sunni and Shia, his apparent ignorance of who controls Iran’s nuclear programme, and his penchant for off-the-cuff remarks that a friendly press corps has allowed him to get away with in the past. (The hysterical over-reaction to Hillary Clinton’s remarks about Robert Kennedy’s assassination, or the fallout from Obama’s aside about bitterness, guns and religion, are ominous signs of what might lie ahead.) So far he has been unusually lucky with the few exceptions to this rule.
When the New York Times ran its expose of his relationship with a lobbyist as a sex story, it was easily repudiated as an intrusion into his personal life, when it really ought to have raised questions of political access. Future revelations, and muckraking retrospectives which rehash his notorious involvement with the Savings and Loans conman Charles Keating – will be much harder to dismiss.
But until the Clintons find a way to leave the Democratic campaign with a modicum of dignity – no small task after the last few months – or Obama is undone by some mysterious and as yet unforeseen circumstance, McCain can luxuriate in the strategizing, fundraising, rest and relaxation opportunities that neither of his opponents will enjoy. If the campaigns so far are anything to go by, he should make the most of that advantage.
