He was on the right-hand side of most "values" issues--at a time when they had NOT been endorsed by Democrats. In economic policies, McCain's priorities also revealed the same type of free-market principles as Phil Gramm of Texas, "Boll Weevil" Democrat-turned-Republican, who moved from the House to the Senate in the early 1980s and would continue to be one of McCain's closest allies, even though they diverged on campaign finance reform and tobacco legislation.
As a freshman senator and something of a POW celebrity in Washington, McCain also got a seat on the powerful Armed Services Committee, which controlled budgetary appropriations.
McCain's third committee appointment, to the Commerce Committee, has proved to be the area of his greatest legislative publicity. Tobacco legislation, and his advocacy for telecommunications deregulation, emerged from his role on this committee.
As chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, McCain became the senator charged with the issue of forging consensus on tobacco legislation--an unlikely issue in that McCain was himself an avid smoker in the Hanoi Hilton. The bill, christened the McCain bill, passed through the Commerce Committee by a vote of 19-1. Members of both parties, with an eye to events beyond the 1998 mid-term elections, suggested that McCain's skill in shepherding such a contentious issue through committee demonstrated presidential caliber. (The sole dissenting negative vote belonged to the conservative Republican John Ashcroft of Missouri.)
McCain got a seat on a committee dealing with aging issues, crucial in a state that, because of its dry, temperate climate, had absorbed many retirees from other parts of the country.
By 1984, he got on the choice Armed Services Committee which was crucial in a state that had many high-tech defense-related industries. In a larger sense, however, being on the Armed Services Committee also played to McCain's political strength in national-security affairs and foreshadowed a wider, perhaps less parochial focus in the upcoming Senate race, which he surely must have been contemplating after winning an easy reelection to the House in 1984.
Ultimately, McCain is an internationalist with a populist touch. A former soldier, he shares with Reagan a skepticism about so-called experts, yet McCain's skepticism is leavened by long operational experience. Unlike Bush the elder, McCain is immunized from the charge of being an East Coast internationalist, a Rockefeller Republican. Unlike Bush the younger, McCain has demonstrated a flare for foreign policy, with a capacity to engage in a thrust-and-parry that runs beyond coached lines.
The strength of McCain is that he speaks with a sense of gravity, [and] with the sense of conservative caution in the face of many threats to America's security.
The Bush team had asked what McCain had actually accomplished in Washington. What were his so-called reforms? On key issues, they argued, McCain had been consistently shot down. McCain had failed to persuade Congress to pass either tobacco legislation or campaign finance reform.
Second, the Bush campaign attacked McCain's claim to outsider status. Reminding voters that McCain was far more the Washington insider than he suggested, Bush took to calling the senator "Chairman McCain." Of course, McCain had indirectly given them this issue, by overplaying his outsider status.
Third, Bush stole McCain's message, in effect, calling himself a "reformer with results."
Most Republican primary voters got exactly what they wanted: NOT reform but restoration, albeit one with a patina of reformist veneer to make it palatable.
Though the McCain-Feingold proposals have gone through multiple incarnations, the gist of the reform legislation touched on accepting voluntary spending limits, which differ from state to state, in exchange for free broadcast time and other concessions. A second component has involved banning so-called "soft money," that is, money given, not to the candidates outright, but for party-building purposes. "Soft money" is, in fact, a camouflaged donation to candidates, a way of evading the campaign finance laws.
Many Republicans have opposed McCain-Feingold because it would constrain their ability to rake in money from corporate donors. Quite simply, Republicans currently have a fund-raising edge over Democrats. By contrast, the Democrats, with the support of organized labor, are better organized at the grass-roots level, which perhaps makes them objectively less dependent upon, but in reality no less addicted to, "soft money." Though less conspicuous, Democrats have discreetly opposed any reform of the campaign finance laws for much the same reasons as Republicans have. Nonetheless, because they are a minority party within Congress (and thus have less to lose from opposing the status quo), Democrats have tended to support reform.
The issue of campaign finance reform has made McCain the darling of many who believed that money has indeed corrupted the political process; it also has, however, made him something of a persona non grata among those within his own party who rather like the status quo.
McCain has not reassured his GOP fellow travelers how such reform would work to their mutual advantage. He has not convincingly suggested how it would be tactically shrewd for conservatives to get ahead on the issue. In short, he has not argued the case on its conservative merits. Instead, McCain has framed the issue in terms that played to his maverick strengths but also to his maverick weaknesses.
Ultimately, reform is a complicated process of watering down strident ideas, thereby bringing change, but perhaps not too much.
What is perhaps most intriguing about McCain 2000 was the loneliness of his message. He has ventured down a public road that politicians, particularly senators, tend not to take, preferring instead the technical aspects of brokered deals. McCain possesses Clinton's policy knowledge but matches it to Reagan's conviction and credibility and, in the politics of reform, credibility is the most important asset. What is certain is that change will take place. The real question concerns the direction of change, and just how much influence McCain will have. And that is a chapter that remains to be written.
Slowly but surely, however, things began to unravel, precipitated by the tobacco companies' media blitzkrieg against the McCain bill. Ultimately, the tobacco companies spent nearly $50 million in media spots.
The tobacco industry advertisements fixed on one subtle, though not insurmountable contraindication to the McCain bill. If tobacco was indeed addictive, then the addicted smoker was all but compelled to pay increased taxes. The fact that the majority of cigarette smokers were in lower income brackets made it an even more regressive tax. The McCain bill failed in the Senate.
Early in his political career, McCain had actually bragged that he could bring back fat defense contracts to his Arizona district. McCain emerged, not only as a sophisticated voice on national security issues, which he was, but also sufficiently secure to rail against Pentagon procurement waste on an issue-specific basis, and to do so while still maintaining his hawkish credentials.
Only the former POW, third generational scion of a military family, and currently second-ranking member on the Senate Armed Services Committee, could begin that overdue house-cleaning at the Pentagon, which so many idealistic, committed officers view as necessary.
To contemporaries, Slew was something of a proverbial "old salt," ready to cuss the elements with a colorful turn of the phrase. It was said he spoke in two languages: English and profane. Indeed, he was known as one of the best cussers in the entire Navy. Popular, combative, feisty, Admiral Slew McCain was a character, and to be a character is in some senses to have a reputation, not altogether positive, that follows one like a shadow. He appeared a throwback--perhaps to the age of frigates and the naval melee.
In an age of increasingly sophisticated naval technology he seemed one governed by impulse and instinct. He seemed, in short, an old-fashioned sailor.
McCain was born in the Panama Canal Zone. In reality, he was born into that reassuring American blue and gold universe that one could find in naval installations from San Diego in the Pacific to Norfolk in the Atlantic. In common parlance, McCain was what was affectionately known as a Navy brat.
More to the point, McCain was a Navy junior, which carries a certain elite connotation, possibly reserved for the children of high-ranking officers. The term "brat" suggests that the child is something of a benign nuisance; "Junior" suggests a measure of entitlement and continuity.
Then he went on to write that he turned his reputation as a "credible athlete" and a "troublemaker" into a distinction as a "leader of sorts." For McCain, sport formed an outlet for his competitive streak; it was a way for overcoming any and all insecurities. McCain contrasted himself with his father, who had not such outlet or perhaps even aptitude for athletic context and who later poured all his nervous, brittle energy into his work.
At Virginia Episcopal, McCain's prep school, sport is never simply about sport. The prep school approach to sport tended to resemble the Spartan ethic in which the student is thrown into the maelstrom of competition whether he likes it or not.
"Pick on someone your own size" seems to be a very McCain trait. He may have been an irritant to many in his Academy days, but he was never a bully. In this, he completely resembled Dwight D. Eisenhower in his cadet days.
One wonders if McCain deliberately looked for ways to make his life hard, to pick struggles for the sake of struggle as if to prove a certain worthiness for life's battle. It is a resistance to the charge of softness.
In every instance, in the active pursuit of a combat assignment in Vietnam, in his confrontation with his Vietnamese captors, in his pursuit of campaign finance reform in the face of mounting and often bitter opposition within his own caucus, McCain has not chosen the path of least resistance. He has chosen the hardest--and in Vietnam, the most honorable--path. Having made the choice, McCain rarely backs down. By contrast, he shows a tendency to proverbially dig in his heels and not give ground.
When McCain went to Florida for the physical screening, he urged the doctors to make their assessment on his physical suitability for flying, not on how his arms looked, which was, admittedly, not good. (Even to this day, he cannot raise his arms to comb his hair.) McCain had, however, regained much of his movement, thanks to the intensive physical therapy. Ultimately, he passed the physical and was cleared for a flying assignment.
McCain, however, had several advantages. He had a measure of name recognition on the right, which loved its war heroes, particularly if they could work the circuit. McCain had "test-marketed" his story in the popular press. {And he had] personal discipline: after the Hanoi Hilton, the marathon of running a campaign, of taking the hits and giving them back, was child's play.
McCain, along wit John Glenn, found himself caught in the middle of an unfortunate investigation. Both men were linked by association with three senators--Cranston, DeConcini, and Riegle--whose actions were highly questionable. Both McCain and Glenn had their otherwise sterling reputations tainted. Three years later, the congressional verdict questioned their judgement, but absolved them of charges, and stipulated that they should not have been subject of inquiry in the first place.
One is liable to suggest that justice was not properly served in the Keating Five investigation. But Cranston was unelectable. DeConcini and Riegle chose not to run for re-election. By contrast, both Glenn and McCain ran for re-election in 1992 and won with relative ease.
Roosevelt represented the forward-thinking, activist wing of his party against a stand-pat, pro-business wing. Roosevelt was, by virtue of his war experience and his early years into the Dakota Badlands, inoculated against being an effete reformer, a "good-government" know-it-all. How could McCain NOT want to compare himself with this canonized political figure?
Roosevelt was able to advocate reformist change by playing off two extremes of wild-eyed radicals and the worst do-nothing conservatives. In the current language of political campaigns, Roosevelt was able to "triangulate." That was a middle ground that, for all his efforts, McCain could not find, if only because the conditions were different. In short, the reality of present conditions did not match McCain's larger rhetoric.
American pilots encountered relatively little resistance from Soviet-made North Vietnamese jets. The real enemy was the North Vietnamese Soviet-built air defense systems, reckoned to be among the best in the world at the time.
In the narrative of his shoot-down, McCain refers to "jinking" the plane, that is, the grueling aeronautical acrobatics necessary to evade this type of defensive systems. McCain actually underplayed the risk to American pilots in what increasingly became something of a no-win situation, in which the American flyers were faced with a double jeopardy of antiaircraft fire on one hand and Soviet surface-to-air missiles on the other. It took nerves and skill, and one wonders if McCain was quite ready for his first combat flight over Hanoi, not because of his flying skills, but because of the novelty of the threat.
One suspects that, to this day, McCain cannot recount the incident without betraying intense emotions--the type that causes the speaker to lose composure. Aboard the Forrestal in that frightful day in the summer of 1967 the fire was eventually brought under control, but not before more than 100 crewmen lost their lives.
McCain immediately ejected out of the cockpit and was temporarily knocked unconscious by the force. The parachute opened and McCain regained consciousness before landing in a small, man-made lake in the center of Hanoi. Weighed down by 50 lbs of equipment and gear, McCain sank several times. A Vietnamese pulled him to shore.
A woman poured tea to McCain's lips, and photos were taken. Kindness or propaganda? Then came the stretcher, and McCain was deposited on a truck and taken to Hanoi's main prison: Hoa Lo, dubbed the "Hanoi Hilton."
Then an officer rushed in, claiming they just learned that McCain's father was a "big admiral." The North Vietnamese cleared McCain for surgery. The logic was clear enough: the son of a big admiral was a propaganda gold mine. Win him over, it was reasoned, and others would follow. McCain was, in their words, the "crown prince."
For propaganda, the patient must be made presentable, and so a cast was quickly fashioned. Without painkiller, McCain passed out several times as the exasperated physician tried to connect the broken bones in his arm. For propaganda, there must be a change of scenery, so McCain was put in a proper hospital room which was, for all practical purposes, a film prop.
The film of McCain was eventually aired for American audiences in early 1968. Many thought he looked drugged. He was, in fact, fatigued from the prolonged, and futile, medical treatment without painkiller. Nonetheless, McCain was given a leg operation, which the North Vietnamese also predictably filmed. Because of his "bad attitude," the camp authorities refused McCain a second operation--typical of their psychological punishment. Up to this point, the North Vietnamese seemed, if not sympathetic, certainly not conspicuously INhumane. It was only in the face of resistance from a specific POW or a group of POWs, that they brought the full weight of physical coercion down. But that would come.
Beaten and bloodied, McCain agreed to write the statement that he was sorry for the "crimes" he committed. The interrogator wrote the final draft and, as McCain noted, "it was in their language." For McCain, this was a victory of sorts: if forced to admit anything, the prisoner should keep it as close to communist rhetoric as possible, misspell words, dissemble--all in the goal of making it clear that the confession was with the work of someone who had been tortured, brainwashed, or not within his right senses. "I am a black criminal," wrote McCain, "and I have performed the deeds of an air pirate. I almost died and the Vietnamese people saved my life, thanks to the doctors." He wrote that he had bombed a school, which was yet another lie.
Given that McCain's argument that official lying carries profound policy consequences and corrodes trust between the governors and the governed, his silence on the origins of American involvement in Vietnam is an interesting omission. It may also be an issue that McCain, who spent 5 half years imprisoned as a result, does not care to pursue to its logical implications. In that he could be forgiven.
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The above quotations are from John McCain An Essay in Military and Political History, by John Karaagac. Click here for main summary page. Click here for a profile of John McCain. Click here for John McCain on all issues.
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