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JONATHAN CHAIT JULY 13, 2010

Understanding McCain

BY JONATHAN CHAIT

It's hard to imagine that another John McCain profile could be interesting -- by this point the man's character and ideology seem completely transparent -- but New York's Joe Hagan pulls it off. (New York magazine has published some hugely impressive political coverage under Adam Moss.) It's hard to summarize the piece, but it gets at McCain's mentality -- angry, entitled -- and the rifts among his advisers.

Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias invokes the liberal conventional wisdom on McCain:

After losing the 2000 primary he spent several years acting like a huge sore loser and racking up one of the least-conservative voting records of any Republican. Then he tacked right starting in 2004, and after losing to Barack Obama’s he’s been acting like a sore loser again.

I liked it better when sore loserdom pointed in the direction of opposition to Bush’s tax cuts than in the direction of opposition to carbon pricing, but it’s really two sides of the same coin.

The trouble with this analysis is that McCain's ideological heterodoxy began years before, with his advocacy of campaign finance reform. And his most heterodox position, opposition to tax cuts, began in 1999. Well before George W. Bush won the 2000 GOP nomination, McCain was attacking Bush's tax cuts plan as not only fiscally irresponsible but an immoral sop to the rich. This was an astonishing position. You can find Republicans straying from the party line on climate change, immigration, campaign finance reform, or other issues where McCain staked out liberal ground. Every once in a while you can find an elected Republican who expresses some muffled reservation about tax cuts -- but only on grounds of fiscal responsibility. To describe tax cuts for the rich as tax cuts for the rich, and to attack them on moral grounds, was and is totally verboten in the GOP.

Now, it's possible and even likely that pique with Bush drove McCain further to the left after Bush won the nomination. But to interpret his entire leftward shift as sore loserdom is just not a tenable analysis. I think that McCain's constant retail politicking in 1999, especially the endless town hall question and answer sessions, broke him out of the Republican bubble and put him in touch with the reality of an economy that did not need tax cuts, especially for the rich. He became unmoored from Republican domestic orthodoxy, and that process fed on itself as he became alienated from the party establishment. But starting in 2004, McCain decided to seek the 2008 GOP nomination and has been fervently abandoning every element of his heterodoxy, to the point of outright comedy, such as denying that he ever considered himself a maverick.

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"He became unmoored ...." You should have ended the sentence there. Though the verb "became" suggests that he was, at some point in his life, "moored" - moored, that is, to anything other than sense of entitlement and overwheening ambition. His life's history is that of an angry, entitled brat; his record as a public servant is that of an angry, entitled brat; as a husband, the man who called his wife a cunt, his demeanour is that of angry, entitled brat. Sore loser or not, he is an angry, entitled brat, and the less we hear of this old goat the better.

- icarusr

July 13, 2010 at 10:51am

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Chait smashes the preposterous Yglesias, once again, and this time, far from the Levant. The "analysis" by Yglesias is untenable. I watched John McCain's political evolution with astonishment from 1999 onward; I do need to lean on your account, Jonathan, accurate as it is. Yglesias is a lazy ideologue, so it is facile and convenient for him to frame John McCain the way he does. Every time I see Andrew nominate someone for an Yglesias Award for intellectual honesty at the Dish, I laugh to myself, or if my wife is nearby, I will relate to her why this Award is bogus. In early 2000, I walked into a tiny campaign office in a mini-mall that John McCain's presidential campaign had leased and offered my services, about five blocks from where I sit typing this. The pretty young thing who greeted me was manifestly full of enthusiasm for McCain and we bantered on about our admiration for McC. I wasn't married at the time and I thought to myself, here is yet another reason to visit that office often. I am married now, not to her, but to my wonderful Sheena, though that young McCain lady was plenty nice. So McCain's course from 2004 on has been very painful to me, in a personal way. Memo to Yglesias: get off your sorry butt and do some reporting, instead of erecting cardboard stereotypes that conform to your pathetic ideology.

- liberal reformer

July 13, 2010 at 10:52am

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John McCain endured torture at the hands of the gentle North Vietnamese Communists and emerged ramrod straight (I write this as one who demonstrated against the Vietnam War). Would you have come out so well, icar? Would I have? No one knows, we cannot rerun history as a lab experiment. As for the "cunt" remark, that is dubious but it is not surprising to see you cite it as granitic fact.

- liberal reformer

July 13, 2010 at 10:57am

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Apples and oranges. It is possible to respect McCain's breathtaking strength as a POW and proud exemplar of a glorious warrior clan as a soldier AND find him to have evolved into a hateful, extravagantly dishonest hack who doesn't know the first thing about what he is taking about. Ever. Life is complicated that way. He's both, human beings don't like "both" very much. We like our categories - good guy, bad guy. McCain's verbal abuse of Cindy has been well known in DC for years. While unpleasant, I generally find it irrelevant.

- WandreyCer

July 13, 2010 at 12:29pm

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I agree, Yglesias' ideology is so tilted towards sneering an anyone who isn't a hard-line Democrat, and so this is a perfect case-study for him to laugh at how idiotic McCain's fans were. However, it is definitely true that McCain's positions are driven mostly by emotion. They were back then, and they probably are now. The theory that I hear is that his aides were instrumental in guiding him towards centrist positions, and since their departure he's veered right. But the bottom line is, these days politicians are only as "maverick" has they have to be. Olympia Snowe, Susan Collins and Scott Browns navigate the waters of the New England Republicans as best they can, and everyone else pretty much has to follow the line. Just the way it is these days.

- ulexamp

July 13, 2010 at 12:39pm

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I thought that article was the best treatment of McCain since the one in the New Yorker a few years back. It was grounded in good source material and had a relatively shrewd analysis of the guy's political and personal motivations. What the article made manifest was that McCain, like Arlen Specter before him, refuses to have his political career ended by the Tea Party. They simply handled that drive differently: Specter left his party and was bashed for it. McCain has veered rightward and is being bashed for it. Both deserve the bashing, but aren't all successful politicians opportunists? I guess Salter thought McCain was not, but he himself--according to the article--has displayed opportunism in continuing to make $12,000 per month writing for a guy with whom he doesn't really agree while searching out other future opportunities. In short, I think Wandrey's notation of the appeal of categories is spot on.

- propjoe

July 13, 2010 at 12:58pm

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I should have written "I do not need to lean on your account, Jonathan ...."

- liberal reformer

July 13, 2010 at 1:02pm

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McCain is a sore subject for me - I grew up in a McCain worshiping household around former military guys, all McCain's age. They are all silent about him now, but it is hard. I stood in line for book autographs like every other dutiful, puppy-eyed center left city dweller out there. I always gave the autographed books to my Dad for Christmas, who cherished them. Bottom line, ulexamp has a point - expecting loyalty from a politician in any way is foolish (remember Truman's line "if you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog." Obama is feeling that acutely right about now). Nonetheless, it remains difficult for me to be objective about the man. Yes, I think he stunk up the entire country with his atrocious 2008 campaign and his continuing befoulment of our political culture, but like Joe Klien, there is always a whiff of betrayal in my posts on him.

- WandreyCer

July 13, 2010 at 1:15pm

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Wand: we've had this exchange many times before - I really do understand and admire your love of the man and his fortitude is certainly worthy of recognition - but it is his record as a public figure is what chagrined me all the way back in 2000, and everything since then has served only to confirm his character as a mean, unscrupulous, dishonourable cad. While I do not like delving into people's private lives - we are, none of us, without blemish on that score - I do believe snippets here and there are useful in giving the measure of a man, or woman. His verbal abuse of his wife, in public, in those terms, demonstrates either lack of control or lack of decorum, or both, neither of which is healthy in a politician. However, what sealed my impression was his embrace of Bush after W maligned his daughter in SC in 2000. There is no public purpose, no public duty, no higher calling, no expedient in that would induce me to actually embrace a man who, in running for office, would malign a daugher or a sister or a mother (or a brother, for that matter, or a son) in those terms. If a man is unwilling, for the sake solely of political expediency, to stand up for the honour of his own daughter, he is not morally fit to be trusted the keys to the kingdom.

- icarusr

July 13, 2010 at 3:21pm

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You can still easily explain most of McCain with one sentence: He gains animosity toward, and holds grudges against, those he runs against. It's the logical combination of anger and entitlement.

- ackyri

July 13, 2010 at 3:21pm

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I love how vast numbers of people have such a low opinion of politicians. I love politicians. In democratic societies, politicians are between us and potential civil war, like the Cavaliers and the Roundheads in the 17th Century. They negotiate, they compromise, they are the forges of a democratic polity. Well, one particular political party isn't so good at compromise at present, but one day it will return to sanity, one hopes. The people aren't so hot, anyway. There are betrayals and lies and homicides and scurrility and other ignominious behaviors among them, believe it or not. When is the last time you can recall of a politician committing murder? Out of 18,000-plus homicides in 2009 in America, few were done by elected officials. As I say, I love politicians. Not all of them, not equally, of course. But still I do.

- liberal reformer

July 13, 2010 at 4:57pm

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I still have some residual good will towards McCain. I really believe America would have been much better off had he won the GOP nomination in 2000. I believe he would have handily defeated Gore. I believe he wouldn't have made SOME of the mistakes Bush made.

- MikeB.

July 13, 2010 at 10:42pm

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