He was born in a world without chocolate chip cookies. For more, check out Things Younger Than John McCain.
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Category: McCain
Glenn Greenwald has been one of the best – and most influential – voices in the blogosphere. Every day he writes an incisive piece exploring some hypocrisy within the Republican establishment and/or the press. He has been one of the few voices keeping alive such vitally relevant stories as the Pentagon propaganda scandal, the US attorney firings scandal, the many torture scandals, and the general media acquiescence to telling their stories on terms set by the Right. Greenwald’s writing does have a particular sense of continuous outrage that becomes off-putting. As serious as the issues we face are, outrage can become wearing. Despite this stylistic critique, I have found Greenwald to be one of the most insightful commentators on our current politics.
But since Glenn Greenwald has gotten back from his book tour, his writing has seemed off. Take these three lines from three of his latest blog entries:
They’re as transparent as they are dishonest and bloodthirsty.
The central truth of the 2008 election is that, with the exception of a few relatively inconsequential and symbolic matters, John McCain enthusiastically embraces the Bush/Cheney worldview in every way that matters.
John McCain is the ultimate embodiment of America’s hoary, Vietnam era “stabbed-in-the-back” myth. We should fight wars with massive bombing campaigns and unleashed force, unconstrained by excessive concerns over “collateral damage” and unimpeded by domestic questioning. That’s how we could have (and should have) “won” in Vietnam and how we’ll “win” in Iraq. That’s why the central truth of the 2008 election is that, when it comes to foreign policy, the Kristol/Lieberman-supported John McCain is a carbon copy of the Bush/Cheney warmongering mentality except that he’s actually more extreme about its core premises.
With all of these, I agree with the basic points Greenwald is making – but he veers into the territory of unconvincing polemicism instead of the more nuanced yet strongly worded critiques that are his best. For me, even worse are the topical errors he has made.
In today’s piece about McCain embracing the “stabbed-in-the-back” narrative about Vietnam, Greenwald has to retract one of the more damning insinuations he makes – that McCain cares nothing for civilian casualties in war.
In another piece last week, Greenwald wrote about “The right’s selective political manipulation of Catholicism.” But instead of taking the arguments of his opponents seriously, he – whether through laziness or misunderstanding – simply ignores their points. Kathyrn Jean Lopez of the National Review is an extremely lazy thinker who Greenwald should be able to defeat handily in a blog-battle. Yet Greenwald’s response to Lopez ends up being wildly off the mark. He tries to attack her for hypocrisy for saying she wants to protect innocent human life while supporting Republicans. Republicans have started a war that has cost over a million lives, Greenwald rightly points out. What he fails to acknowledge is that Lopez would point to the hundreds of millions of “innocent lives” lost to abortion as a countervailing force.
She can – and should – still be taken to task for hypocrisy. Andrew Sullivan has been especially effective on this front. But Greenwald ended up seeming like a petty hack.
I know he’s better than that which is why I’m disappointed.
I have hope though that after some time to recuperate, the real Greenwald will be back.
Categories
Gas Tax Politics
Tom Friedman of the New York Times on the gas tax proposals:
The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”
Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering…The McCain-Clinton proposal is a reminder to me that the biggest energy crisis we have in our country today is the energy to be serious — the energy to do big things in a sustained, focused and intelligent way. We are in the midst of a national political brownout.
Paul Krugman – whose loathing for Barack Obama is one of the mysteries of this campaign – must have had some trouble writing these lines:
John McCain has a really bad idea on gasoline, Hillary Clinton is emulating him (but with a twist that makes her plan pointless rather than evil), and Barack Obama, to his credit, says no…
Oh wait – but he can hedge a bit. Krugman wouldn’t want anyone to think he might actually consider Obama an acceptable candidate because of the vast policy differences they have (a.k.a. two minor ones that have led to about a dozen columns of polemic attacks):
Just to be clear: I don’t regard this as a major issue. It’s a one-time thing, not a matter of principle, especially because everyone knows the gas-tax holiday isn’t actually going to happen.
Obama’s seeking to make some political hay out of this. Once again, he’s betting the American people will pay enough attention to what’s going on to give him credit for doing the right thing.
Christopher Hitchens is a fine writer, and on rare occasions, a reflective thinker – when he avoids hurling words as weapons and distorting facts like the fascist he must be in his heart of hearts. Today, he managed to avoid his militant fascist thought in discussing John McCain’s temper:
One reason that I try never to wear a tie is the advantage that it so easily confers on anyone who goes berserk on you. There you are, with a ready-made noose already fastened around your neck. All the opponent needs to do is grab hold and haul. A quite senior Republican told me the other night that he’d often seen John McCain get attention on the Hill in just this way. Not necessarily hauling, you understand, but grabbing. Again, one hopes that the nominee has been doing this for emphasis rather than as a sign that he is out of his pram, has lost his rag, has gone ballistic, has reported into the post office that he’s feeling terminally disgruntled today. (Or, as P.G. Wodehouse immortally put it, if not quite disgruntled, not exactly gruntled, either.)
Thomas Jefferson used to note of mild George Washington that there were moments of passionate rage in which “he cannot govern himself.” We often forgive what we imagine, to use Orwell’s words about Charles Dickens, are the moments when someone is “generously angry.” Yet how are we to be sure that we can tell the hysterical tantrum from the decent man’s wrath? The answer ought to be that we cannot know in advance of a presidency what causes people to become choleric, so anger management is yet another name—and yet another reason—for the separation of powers.
Image by Wigwam Jones.
[digg-reddit-me]The purest treasure mortal times afford
Is spotless reputation.
That away,
Man are but gilded loam or painted clay.
-William Shakespeare
John McCain has a reputation as an independent, a moderate and a maverick. This reputation is his greatest asset – far more important than his speaking ability or war record or anything else. It is the reason he was the Republican best positioned to keep the White House with the political tide clearly favoring the Democrats.
He built this reputation over many years by repeatedly taking stands against his party in the 1990s – on campaign finance reform, on tobacco legislation, and on pork spending – and in the early years of the Bush administration – on torture, on tax cuts, and on immigration reform – and by then staking his presidential campaign on the issue of Iraq against the political zeitgeist. But since his political near-death experience this past summer, McCain has either softened his opposition to the Republican Party line or embraced it, potentially destroying this reputation. The famous aphorism states: “Good will, like a good name, is got by many actions, and lost by one.”
So, there is a great deal at stake when the question is asked: Why did he change his positions?
For those who do not wish to give McCain the benefit of the doubt, the answer is obvious: he is pandering to win an election. For those who do wish to give McCain that benefit, the answer is less clear. Generally, the defenses of these changes in position range from denying there has been a change to explaining in various ways how the change shows consistency to a whole hodge-podge of other excuses.
As someone who was an admirer of Mr. McCain’s in 2000 and through the early years of the Bush administration; as someone who talked to and emailed all of my friends asking them to support McCain in his primary fight in 2000 ((I also was a fan of Bill Bradley.)) ; as someone who believes that politicians are politicians even if their reputations are golden ((This includes Barack Obama – my favored candidate this go-round.)) – I see three plausible and non-exclusive explanations for McCain’s change that are consistent with his appeal, his reputation, and his career.
1. McCain’s Last Chance for Glory
Coming into the 2008 race as the establishment candidate, McCain saw his last chance to become president slipping through his fingers, because of his unorthodoxy. He who had once described himself as the unrepentant champion of lost causes, decided to reconcile himself to the Republican base and reject these initial stands, these bases on which his reputation was built. This is the explanation that both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama have offered up:
“There was a time when some Republicans like John McCain agreed with me,” Obama said, of his calls to roll back Bush’s temporary tax cuts for the richest Americans instead of making those tax cuts permanent.
“There was a time when Senator McCain courageously defied the fiscal madness of massive tax cuts for the wealthy in the midst of a costly war,” Obama said. “That was before he started running for the Republican nomination and fell in line.”
2. Unprincipled Moderation
McCain was never truly a conservative in the Burkean sense or a man of strong principles, but merely a political moderate who has been constantly seeking the center ground, no matter how far the center shifts. During the Reagan years, McCain comfortably held the right-center. After Bill Clinton’s election, McCain operated in the left center. In 2000, with a mainly pragmatic liberal consensus, McCain campaigned as a moderate liberal. As Bush pulled the country right, so McCain went – but this time with a bit of a lag. McCain’s response to Bush’s radicalism is to accommodate it. Now, running in a Republican primary, McCain has adapted – and running for president in the general, he will again. His “principled stands” were merely accidents of history, or perhaps occasionally orchestrated stands to enhance his reputation.
3. Manichaeism
McCain has always sought enemies in his career – and has organized all of his political positions by who he saw as the most serious enemy. The Soviet Union provided the first threat which ordered all of his political priorities, and so he entered Congress as a self-confessed ideologue, a “foot soldier” in the Reagan Revolution. He was a conservative Republican. With the fall of the U.S.S.R., he needed to find a new enemy. By the mid-1990s he settled on corruption in Washington. He backed campaign finance legislation to limit the influence of the lobbyists and big money contributors; he championed the Line Item Veto Act of 1996 to eliminate pork spending ((A victory which was overturned by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional in 1998.)) . Identifying another enemy he pushed to increase cigarette taxes to fund anti-smoking campaigns with the backing of the Clinton administration. When he launched his 2000 presidential campaign he said his goal was to “take our government back from the power brokers and special interests and return it to the people and the noble cause of freedom it was created to serve.” In a perfect encapsulation of his fervent yet ironic crusade, he compared his campaign to Luke Skywalker attacking the Death Star of special interests (including the Religious Right and the Republican establishment.)
After September 11, McCain had found a new enemy that was greater than the corruption of the political process and he was willing to put aside all of his domestic agenda to focus on the new enemy. So, McCain’s changes in position reflect his changing ranking of enemies. He is willing to compromise all of his past positions because they are insignificant in the face of islamist extremism.
Concluding Thoughts
These are the three explanations that I have come up with consistent with McCain’s career, his character, and his politics. In the end, I think each explanation plays a role – but the dominant explanation seems to be the final one. It most fully explains McCain’s appeal, his reputation, and the timing of his changes. And frankly, it is the reason why I would be most wary of a McCain presidency now, at this moment in history.
[digg-reddit-me]Comments like these by Charles Krauthammer on McCain’s plan to create a League of Democracies ((An idea which I believe could make a positive impact under certain circumstances.)) make you realize what is at stake in the coming election:
“What I like about it, it’s got a hidden agenda,” Krauthammer said March 27 on Fox News. “It looks as if it’s all about listening and joining with allies, all the kind of stuff you’d hear a John Kerry say, except the idea here, which McCain can’t say but I can, is to essentially kill the U.N.”
It’s clear that McCain’s primary foreign policy instincts are Manichean, and that it seems likely that he would continue the worst of Bush’s policies, rather than following in the tradition of Dwight Eisenhower, George H. W. Bush, and Bill Clinton.
It is only because of the contrast between the radical, ideological “conservatism” of the Bush administration that McCain’s policy positions appear reasonable today.
This “reality-based conservatism” of McCain’s led him to question the initial push to go into Iraq for a while; to stand against torture for a while; to reject Bush’s tax cuts in a time of war at first; to champion immigration reform for quite a while. But as he saw his last chance to become president slipping through his fingers, John McCain, who had once described himself as the unrepentant champion of lost causes, decided to reconcile himself to the Republican base and reject many of the principles he stood for.
Since his political near-death experience this summer, McCain has moderated his opposition to torture (refusing to extend its prohibition to the CIA), given up on immigration reform (focusing instead on cracking down on undocumented immigrants), stopped hinting to the press that he would withdraw from Iraq if there wasn’t sufficient progress (as was widely reported in the summer of 2007), embraced Bush’s tax cuts (after calling them irresponsible and regressive). Some have called this shifts part an indication of his conservatism in the tradition of Edmund Burke. But what these observers fail to understand is the radical nature of the Bush presidency.
Edmund Burke believed that we must balance accommodation to the reality of our times with our core values. He believed in gradual change and opposed sudden changes in policy – but he also stridently opposed the radicalism of the French Revolution which had a similar foreign policy to the Bush administration, seeking to export the values of liberty, fraternity, and equality through the force of arms ((As pseudoconservativewatch (an excellent Google find) explained:
Edmund Burke invented the articulate philosophy of modern conservatism on the very basis of his critique of the French Revolution (see his Reflections on the Revolution in France). And yet in twenty-first century America, many who call themselves “conservative” are advocating a foreign policy of spreading principles of liberty and freedom to foreign countries in a manner hardly distinguishable from radical French revolutionaries.))
The irony is that McCain’s defenders, including Jonathan Rauch, defend his accommodations to radicalism by invoking the immutable opponent of radicalism, Edmund Burke himself.
Andrew Sullivan nails it. He compares whether Mr. McCain or Mr. Obama would better be able to withdraw troops from Iraq, but then issues this damning and dead-on projection of a Ms. Clinton presidency:
The one thing I do know is that Clinton would be paralyzed. Unable to withdraw swiftly for fear of looking like a “weak” leader, and unable to unite the country behind staying, a president Clinton would mean the status quo in Iraq indefinitely. She is tough when resisting attacks; she has never been tough and effective in forging difficult new policy. On that score, she is merely ideological and brittle and unpersuasive. Like Bush.
Categories
Duck-and-cover
I think Abe Greenwald’s post over at the Contentions blog of Commentary magazine is fascinating – especially when coupled with the comments.
Mr. Greenwald is writing about Senator John McCain’s new ad and how damned effective it is. The supremely effective theme of the ad is summarized as follows: “What must a president believe about us? About America?” Mr. Greenwald concludes:
Thanks to Jeremiah Wright and Michelle Obama. McCain will be able to stay on this point for as long as he wishes.
A commenter readies to parry the inevitable counter to the ad by asking the obvious question: “How long until the media brands this ad as unfairly questioning Obama’s patriotism?” As Mr. Greenwald points out, if the ad is directed against Mr. Obama – which he believes it is – then this is clearly the point of the ad – to question whether Mr. Obama believes about America what he should. A few comments below this one, someone called CK McLeod explains what the ad is doing:
Barack can swear up and down the street that he loves this country and all the people in it, but the issue joined here isn’t what he or McCain says he is, but who each really is.
Clearly, the people here believes that the ad is questioning Mr. Obama’s patriotism – and they also seem to be preparing to call “Foul!” when the media – or anyone else – point this out.
But my favorite line in this whole mish-mash is Mr. Greenwald’s conclusion:
With the Obama hysteria having been exposed for what it is (to a degree), it’s hard to imagine what kind of second wave the Illinois senator will be able to marshal against this McCain attack.
Reading that – and most of the comments – I realize that these “conservatives” have no idea what an Obama candidacy would mean.
There are many plausible scenarios in which Mr. McCain might win the election – but if it is “hard to imagine” how Mr. Obama would respond to this ad, Mr. Greenwald and his readers have not been paying attention. It is precisely on this type of question, in response to this type of attack, that you will find Mr. Obama’s strength.
The problem with most politicians is that the public can sense a certain tension between their public persona and their inner selves. Ms. Clinton, Mr. Kerry and Mr. Gore all have been skewered on this issue – as their stodgy, careful, parsing outward personality seemed inauthentic. Mr. Obama seems comfortable with himself, and unashamed of what he believes. He does not debate from an ideological defensive crouch, but in an open, unapologetic manner.
William Kristol made a similar argument to Mr. Greenwald in his New York Times column several weeks ago – arguing that Mr. Obama, by not apologizing for his wife’s comments (only saying she misspoke), by not apologizing for taking off his American flag pin, and by not being candid about his relationship with Reverend Wright and by choosing instead to explain why he acted as he did – was showing arrogance that was dangerous and would cost him the election.
I think perhaps that Mr. Kristol actually sees precisely what Mr. Greenwald misses – that Mr. Obama’s authenticity is a significant strength. Mr. Kristol is attempting to undermine this strength by painting it as a tragic flaw. While most politicians – when confronted over these issues – would try to apologize, minimize, and move on, hoping the public will forget, Mr. Obama has done the opposite because he believes he is in the right and he has seen, and felt as the rest of us have, how this duck-and-cover strategy has failed, allowing especially Democratic candidates to be painted as weak.
Mr. Greenwald – and quite a number of other conservatives – won’t be able to see what’s hit them come September and October.
Excerpts from my Journals
[The week of January 21st, 2000; shortly before the New Hampshire primaries.]
If neither McCain nor Bradley make it past the primaries, I will be disillusioned. I am confident that if either one makes it to the general election, he will win. I find it hard to see how someone can vote for Gore or Bush unless they have some vested interest in one of their candidacies, or because of single-issue loyalty. The two establishment candidates merely want to win. Bush makes careful statements to secure the loyalty of those hardliners in his party yet avoid arousing the ire of those who disagree with him in the mainstream. There is nothing wrong with that – it merely shows shrewdness, but it seems hard to believe Bush thought of these careful statements himself. He seems a man propped up by aides, a cardboard figure given life by the establishment, a soul whose only joy is victory. Gore comes off as more pathetic – a Pinocchio trying to pretend to be a real politician to voters, a man who lacks charisma trying to charm, someone who hates defeat but does not consider himself worthy of winning.
In the end, I voted for Ralph Nader – because I could not bring myself to vote for either candidate. I can see now how my decision was wrong – and how Mr. Gore, although a poor candidate, would have made a competent president. I also seriously underestimated the radical nature of the Bush presidency. What I believed the country needed in 2000 was a non-establishment president – and so, I set my hopes on John McCain and Bill Bradley.
Unfortunately, we were forced to choose between Mr. Gore and Mr. Bush.