This article is the third in a four-part series.
For many who have found themselves disillusioned or driven to indifference by politics, their cynicism can be attributed to some singular event. In my mother’s age cohort, the transformative episode was Watergate; in mine, it was Lewinsky. In moments such as those, the façade of glamorous and prestigious respectability slips from the proud portrait of American politics, revealing the ugly Darwinism and constantly collapsing scenery of Washington underneath. For most, the death of the noble politick is only a private sadness in the childhood of our adulthood, but for John McCain, the realization seemed to occur tragically too late: February of 2000, in South Carolina.
Senator McCain and Governor Bush were embroiled in a close race for the nomination, McCain had just decisively won in New Hampshire, and the upcoming primary in South Carolina offered him an opportunity for checkmate. But Bush, sensing danger, launched an appalling smear campaign against the senator. Among the innuendos and outright suggestions made by the then-governor’s surrogates and proxies were that McCain had abandoned his fellow veterans, that his wife was a drug addict, and most famously, that he had illegitimately fathered a black child. McCain’s own feeble retaliations backfired, he lost the primary and his support, and never regained his footing in the race; less than a month later, he had quietly withdrawn. Now for Bush and his disgraceful associates – and for the rest of us, too – this was merely an entr’acte in a ballet we had all seen many times before, and would see many times again. The particulars were uncharacteristically hideous, but the theater itself was familiar. However, for the senator, who had promised his legion of supporters a campaign of amity, this was enough to send him into the throes of an existential crisis. And eight years later, the calluses of that affair have left him as different as did his captors in Vietnam.
He still boasts the most diverse array of political weaknesses. At seventy-two, he would be the oldest man to take office for the first time. He still has that legendary penchant for rudeness, impetuousness and occasionally, outright stupidity. And now, unfortunately, any political support for him requires a defense of the war as a prerequisite. By his own admission, he knows little about economics, and judging by some of his recent blunders, he doesn’t seem to know a lot about geopolitics, either. The truth is, in this election, Senator McCain is just intellectually outmatched by his opponents.
But he is also a genuine patriot, one of the noblest and most inspiring breed. His personal account of his experience in Hanoi is still stirring and inspirational, and without the slightest hint of disingenuousness. Four generations of military service – his own children included – stand as testimony to their sincerity, and swiftboating of any kind should be met only with our absolute condemnation and dismissal. And regardless of his current rhetoric, what makes him palatable to moderates and Democrats is precisely what has always made him the opposite to his own party; he is not a reliable conservative. He’s just an honest, plainspoken man who doesn’t ultimately wish to answer to the bureaucrats of either persuasion. But his politics will forever be overshadowed by the legacy of his heroism, a fate to which he seems rather comfortably resigned. Perhaps he should be; the important question now is, when the charge is leveled on a national stage – as it will be, by everyone – that Mr. McCain is the most dignified candidate, the most fitting, the most honorable, what will be the response of the beloved junior senator from Illinois?
