John McCain and the Republican Woody for the Reaganesque
With Christopher Buckley’s “coming out” for Obama, he joins a handful of disappointed conservative icons and leaders. I will sit back and enjoy it, glad of converts and of anything, really, to get this election finished in Obama’s favor. But I can’t help but remark on Buckley’s comments. They hit my nausea center. I want to share the offending paragraphs:
:
McCain rose to power on his personality and biography. He was authentic. He spoke truth to power. He told the media they were “jerks” (a sure sign of authenticity, to say nothing of good taste; we are jerks). He was real. He was unconventional. He embraced former anti-war leaders. He brought resolution to the awful missing-POW business. He brought about normalization with Vietnam—his former torturers! Yes, he erred in accepting plane rides and vacations from Charles Keating, but then, having been cleared on technicalities, groveled in apology before the nation. He told me across a lunch table, “The Keating business was much worse than my five and a half years in Hanoi, because I at least walked away from that with my honor.” Your heart went out to the guy. I thought at the time, God, this guy should be president someday.
A year ago, when everyone, including the man I’m about to endorse, was caterwauling to get out of Iraq on the next available flight, John McCain, practically alone, said no, no—bad move. Surge. It seemed a suicidal position to take, an act of political bravery of the kind you don’t see a whole lot of anymore.
But that was—sigh—then. John McCain has changed. He said, famously, apropos the Republican debacle post-1994, “We came to Washington to change it, and Washington changed us.” This campaign has changed John McCain. It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget “by the end of my first term.” Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?
All this is genuinely saddening, and for the country is perhaps even tragic, for America ought, really, to be governed by men like John McCain—who have spent their entire lives in its service, even willing to give the last full measure of their devotion to it. If he goes out losing ugly, it will be beyond tragic, graffiti on a marble bust.
Please. What Buckley and all those republican columnists and icons aching for the romance of the Reagan days fail to recognize are the politics of expediency. This is to say that McCain could effectively play his “mavericky” persona when there was room to do so.
Republicans, especially those with access to the media, seem to think the operatic heroes of the right exist without context or history. Reagan could not have sung without the economic and foreign policy travails of the 1970s and the reheated leftovers of the Cold War. McCain could not exist without the silent resentment of conservatives toward the emerging religious right and the nostalgic attachment to a man who suffered nobly in the face of a national defeat. Was it McCain’s fault that his party grudgingly accepted the ascendancy of Jerry Falwell? No. Did he court that silent discontent? Of course he did. He was mavericky.
I should not complain at this unidimensional enshrinement of the likes of Reagan and McCain. Political fanboys and girls, like all other converts, are welcome to my part of the bandwagon. Yes, I’m glad for these types of endorsements, but the collective Republican woody for the Reaganesque still makes me want to throw up.
Cy Cobb
