The Saddest Senator
Why John McCain has become so painful to watch.
By Jacob Weisberg
I’ve stopped reading news about John McCain for the same reason I tune out the daily updates on Afghanistan and the BP oil spill: It’s just too damned depressing. Well into the 2008 primary season, McCain still showed glimmers of a gutsy, independent spirit, speaking out of turn and bucking his party on issues of conscience, like the use of torture. Since losing to Barack Obama, however, he’s turned into the kind of party hack he used to live to mess with.
In the last few months, McCain has flipped his position on dropping the military’s anti-gay “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, soft-pedaled his support for climate-change legislation, and dropped his support for humane, comprehensive immigration reform. In just the past week, he has come out against Elena Kagan’s Supreme Court nomination on the lamest of grounds and defended Arizona’s ugly anti-immigrant law against challenge by the Justice Department.
It’s hard to believe that this is the same guy who, a decade ago, was denouncing Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as “agents of intolerance,” who reduced Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to a sputtering rage with his efforts to ban soft money, who opposed Bush’s tax cuts, and who stood up to Dick Cheney on the treatment of accused terrorists. When McCain told Newsweek earlier this year that he has never considered himself a “maverick,” it sounded like another confession under duress, with the Tea Party standing in for the Viet Cong….
To some extent, this is a matter of physical decline. As the inside account of his campaign in Game Change makes clear, fatigue brought out McCain’s cranky side. With his stiffness from war injuries and scars from cancer surgeries, McCain looks older than a lot of 73-year-olds—and apparently feels older, too. The other factor may be the reactivation of McCain’s powerful sense of dishonor. Bear with me here, because what follows is surmise based on long observation rather than hard evidence. But McCain looks to me these days like someone who bears an unacknowledged weight. If I had to guess, I’d say that weight is his shame over a barely competent presidential campaign and his awful choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate…(read full article)
July 11th, 2010 at 10:50 pm
The angry, groveling senator who denies he ever allowed an egalitarian thought penetrate his psyche, is painful to watch. We may be looking at a pitiable descent into senile dementia. If John McCain isn’t in his senescence, those u-turns are a slap in the face to his one-time supporters. Instead of casting their votes for a statesman who earned his stripes over the battlefields of Vietnam and in the United States senate, thoughtful voters must choose between the lesser of two evils. They deserve better than that.
July 11th, 2010 at 10:52 pm
John Mccain has now sponsored a Senate Bill (Open America’s Waters Act) that would kill the US Merchant Marine by allowing foreign flag shipping manned by non-American crews to operate between American ports. Effectively putting 100,000 Americans Seamen and port workers out of work. He has become just another Republican Conservative by kissing the backside of Big Business at the expense of American working men and women.