The Mysterious Mind of McCain

By Crispin Sartwell

 

 

The mind of John McCain can be a mystery. After opposing the Bush administration on matters of fundamental principle - including the administration's peculiar, persistent enthusiasm for torture - McCain is portraying himself at the moment as the administration's greatest, almost only, friend.

      During a southern Republican straw poll in which the Bill Frist brought home the bacon, McCain suggested that instead of voting for McCain, people should write in the name of George Bush. This is extraordinarily perverse on a number of grounds, not least is that without a constitutional amendment, Bush cannot be re-elected.

     Not surprisingly, Bush/McCain  finished a distant fourth, behind Frist, Mitt Romney, and George Allen.

    Meanwhile, the substantive support that McCain has recently lent to Bush, for example on the Dubai deal, and his professed sympathy with South Dakota's extreme anti-abortion law, have caused those who wanted to regard McCain as a "maverick" or a "moderate" within the Republican party to re-think their interpretation.

    But anyone who regards McCain's recent rapprochement with the right as mere strategy don't understand the man at all. McCain is a practical politician of some skill and willingness to compromise. But he is also rebel against the basic practices of politics. He is willfully contrarian, counter-consensus, as a way of issuing a continuous critique of the slavishness of political leaders to their own ambitions.

    If you think supporting the Dubai deal was the act of a calculating politician, you haven't been watching all the other presidential candidates. Democrats hopped all over the thing, having suddenly squared anti-Arab xenophobia with their beautiful liberal ideals. Republicans - including Frist - took one look at the polling on Dubai and on Bush and with visible pleasure "distanced themselves" from the administration.

     It is characteristic of McCain that as the polls drop for Bush, he rallies round; if Bus's approval rating was 76 rather than 36, McCain would be creating a drumbeat of criticism. In the current situation, that would be redundant.

    Now of course, McCain's task in positioning himself for the nomination is the reverse of Frist's: McCain must reach back right while Frist softens his conservatism.

    But McCain is the only politician in America who daily courts political suicide. His positions, and possibly his strategy, are counter-strategic. McCain has also supported Bush on Iraq, but with critical and constructive engagement. His argument that we should have doubled the force in Iraq early on - and his probable scepticism of Bush's hints of a rapid pullout now - are responsible positions. If McCain had presided over this war, it would have been infinitely expensive, but it would have ended in something like success.

     And he would have stirred us to support it; he is a prodigiously gifted and sincere advocate of his ideas.

    Anyone who thinks McCain's position on abortion is politically calculated has not listened to him over the course of his career; his concerns about abortion have always been principled. People who are strongly pro-choice will not be happy on that score with a McCain administration.

     But he does not use the issue strategically, or only uses it counter-strategically. In 2000, he intentionally alienated the Christian right forever by articulating a clear constitutional understanding of the relation of religion and politics.

    If advocacy of abortion rights is criterial for the status of "GOP maverick," McCain doesn't count. What you've got to understand is that McCain is a maverick not in virtue of conforming his positions to your laundry list, but in virtue of saying at any given juncture what needs to be said. What needs to be said is whatever runs against the blank yapping consensus of this moment.

     However, I still think it extremely unlikely that the Republicans will nominate McCain. Bush will anoint a successor. It might be Condoleezza Rice, Jeb Bush, or even Bill Frist, but it will not be John McCain.

     As I try to enter into the mysterious mind of McCain, he's always just about to realize that running for president as an independent is the right move for his temperament and the right move for the country.

    John McCain can call himself a Republican, but most Republicans won't; he will always already be an independent.