Senator McCain – Hardly the Lion
This is tough to write, as I’m struggling a bit with my feelings about Senator John McCain. McCain is being lionized by the media and political pundit class. While I respect his service and many of his accomplishments, he was hardly the maverick he fancied himself, and leaves a mixed political legacy, and ironically, much of the blame for the ascendency of Donald Trump.
McCain was a military brat (by his own admission). He got a Naval Academy appointment by virtue of his family legacy and finished at the bottom of his class. He was a less than exemplary pilot crashing several planes. McCain was a partier and a ladies’ man who took the social life more seriously than his early training. Of course, we are all aware of his being shot down over Vietnam and his time spent being tortured as a Prisoner of War (POW). (I’ll talk more about this later.)
Once he got back to the U.S. he didn’t waste a lot of time getting back to his “Top Gun” partying and womanizing ways, having numerous affairs as his wife was recovering from serious auto-accident injuries. Still married, he began dating Cindy Hensley, the daughter of a very wealthy beer distributor. He pressured his first wife into a divorce, married Cindy, and then used her money to finance his political career. Her father hired him into the company and opened the door to useful contacts such as financier John Keating.
He won election to Congress from Arizona in 1982. From the beginning, he looked a lot like the Republican party of today.
- He embraced right-wing dictators in Latin America. He traveled to Chile to meet with Augusto Pinochet.
- He opposed Martin Luther King Day as a national holiday. (He did later claim he regretted this).
- He was a big supporter of Gramm-Rudman, forcing automatic budget cuts when budget deficits occurred.
- At fundraisers in the 1990s he had a favorite joke he loved to use, “Do you know why Chelsea Clinton is so ugly?
Because Janet Reno is her father.” - He supported a constitutional amendment to end abortion.
- He criticized Obama for pulling out of plans to build a missile defense complex in Poland that was unnecessary.
- He had previously supported climate change until Obama was for it, and then he refused to engage in any meaningful discussion.
- He led the filibuster to stop the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” When it finally was repealed, he said that it was “a very sad day” that would undermine the military.
- He had once been a sponsor of the DREAM Act, but once it was an Obama initiative, he voted against it.
- McCain was on the front lines accusing Hillary Clinton of awful things that she was not responsible for, calling it worse than Watergate
- McCain was all about intensifying the war in Syria.
- He voted for the judges, voted for Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, voted for almost the entire Trump/Ryan/McConnell policy agenda.
In 1986 he made it to the Senate. He loved gambling and that led him to sponsor the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988. He took a seat on the Armed Service Committee, using it to make his love of American militarism his top policy priority.
He made it into the spotlight in as part of the Keating 5. His buddy Allen Keating had given McCain over $100k in campaign funds along with free flights and lots of other “perks.” Along with four other Senators, Alan Cranston, John Glenn, Dennis DeConcini, and Donald Riegle, Keating had given out over $1.3M and had to call in the favor when the federal government came after Keating for his crimes during the savings and loan scandal. Those five intervened on behalf of Keating, getting the Federal Home Loan Bank Board to back off its investigation. It all came out came out when the company collapsed in 1989, defrauding 23,000 bondholders. This was one of the first times McCain “reached across the aisle.
Somehow the corruption never stuck, and he kept getting re-elected to the Senate.
We know he was very much pro-war. Perhaps the thing that defines him more than any other is that every time we had a crisis with another nation (usually caused by our own imperialism) he would go on TV and massively exaggerate its importance to show the need for Americans to show toughness and, of course, bomb people. 1
McCain badly wanted to be President and was screwed over by Karl Rove in the 2000 primary after winning New Hampshire. Rove and his agents started claiming McCain had fathered a black child out-of-wedlock, a reference to his adopted daughter from Bangladesh. Never mind Strom Thurmond had actually done that, this worked in South Carolina which that pretty much ended it for McCain. But he still wanted to be President, so he continued to show the right-winger he was and spent the next 8 years supporting most of the Bush agenda.
As Erik Loomis wrote:
So McCain spent the Bush years cheerleading for the Iraq War except for the torture, which wouldn’t stop him from voting for the war but made for good soundbites to sound mavericky. He said publicly that the U.S. would be greeted as liberators by the Iraqis, which if that ever was true, didn’t last more than a New York minute. His main concern with the Iraq War in the early years was that we didn’t have enough troops there, publicly criticizing Donald Rumsfeld for believing we needed relatively few. And when the war did go disastrously for the United States, McCain was the main force in Congress behind the 2007 troop surge, which had some military effectiveness, but also made McCain completely unable to separate himself from an unpopular and pointless war at the moment he was preparing another run for the White House. 2
Despite all this, there were the occasional glimpses of the Maverick he seemed to want to be. I think, unfortunately, his political ambitions overtook the maverick in him. While McCain wasn’t the worst Republican, we have to acknowledge how low that bar is set.
- He helped normalize relations with Vietnam and was a critical voice on this issue when it was still sensitive.
- He vigorously opposed the normalization and use of torture.
- He wanted to regulate the tobacco industry more heavily which was controversial at the time.
- While he got his jump-start in politics with his wife’s fortune, he did understand that outside campaign funding was a problem in our political system. McCain-Feingold is not the greatest piece of legislation, but it moved the ball toward a goal of better democracy and was probably the best bill that could be passed at the time, or since.
- There was, of course, the time he stood up to the little confused lady at one of his campaign rallies calling then-Senator Obama an Arab. He calmly but sternly corrected her.
- And there was the dramatic vote which saved the Affordable Care Act. But on that one, it is to wonder whether it was a moment of clarity of conscience or a “fuck you” to Donald Trump. Either way, I’ll take. I’d almost respect more if the vote were a FU, no one deserved it more than Trump.
But John McCain, with his choice of Sara Palin as his running mate, opened the door for the rabidly racist wing of the Republican party to gain a beachhead. To a large extent, this emboldened the Krazy Kristian Kooks of his own party to elect Trump and visit their rabid racism and xenophobia on the rest of the country. The media will likely never associate McCain with the mess that will take a generation to reverse (if the Republic survives), but I suspect thoughtful historians will not be as kind to McCain as the pundits are this week.
However, there is no escaping the fact that he served with honor and heroism, and despite Trump’s attempts to take that way from him, it can not be ignored. As part of military family, I know he would have been instilled with a sense of honor and duty. For that service, he deserves the honor and respect being extended to him and his family this week.
As for his politics, I really want to believe that John McCain wanted to do what was right. We had glimpses of that better man … the maverick, but as too often happens in Washington, I think he let the prospect of being President and partisan politics overcome his better angels.
- “McCain’s Georgian Hyperbole,” Reason, Matt Welch, August 18, 2008
- “McCain,” Lawyers, Guns and Money, Erik Loomis, August 25, 2018
