Would you like to make this site your homepage? It's fast and easy...
Yes, Please make this my home page!
The McCain Phenomenon
Who is this guy, anyway, and why is he
threatening to snatch the Republican nomination from Dubya? He
won’t, of course. Bush may roll into
Philadelphia on fumes, but McCain will end up in a ditch
somewhere between Texas and Florida. Nonetheless, he has given
those who clamored for "a debate, not a coronation"
more than they could have hoped for. How has he done it? What
does he bring to the table?
- A History. One of the unfortunate
side effects of our prosperous age is that we have become
a timid and rather bland people. This is why we have
become fixated on eccentric celebrities, and it also is a
part of McCain’s appeal. Regardless of what Bush,
Gore or Bradley say, they have all led rather easy and
pampered lives. Heroes are not formed from Jell-O, they
are forged in the searing furnace of human tragedy. John
McCain has gone to hell and back, and it shows. Some
people have commented on his relative "gravitas".
I do not think he is serious in any meaningful way, but
he wears a halo of heroism like a friendly old sports
coat, and it shows. It implicitly defines him as the anti-Clinton
in a way unmatchable by any other candidate.
- The Media. It is hard to describe
the media’s relationship with McCain in other than
sexual terms. They don’t just like him. They don’t
just love him. They lust after him, they pant, they drool.
I cannot help but think that Chris Matthews has naked
pictures of McCain in his office. I have never seen
anything like it, and I am not sure that I can explain it.
When the Media Research Center or someone else does the
usual analysis of "positives vs. negatives" I
am sure they will find an incredible positive bias for
John McCain. Part of it may be the longing for a good
race to report. Part of it is rooting for the underdog (but
that wouldn’t explain why they persistently ignore
Keyes). Part of it is their joy at finding a "good’
Republican. And part of it is their selfish enthusiasm
for campaign finance reform. Put the package together and
you find an unrelenting drumbeat of pro-McCain propaganda
that is worth literally tens of millions of dollars to
his campaign. He wouldn’t have won diddly without it.
- An Important Sounding but utterly
meaningless agenda. John McCain has perfected the
Clintonian art of heaving out big, important sounding
phrases, while simultaneously running away from any
concrete issues as fast as his beltway legs will carry
him. This is actually very smart. The American people don’t
want anything to do with real issues, which carry with
them confrontation and hard choices. They would much
rather hear nice thoughts, and McCain does as good a job
as anyone of befuddling the electorate with serious
sounding nonsense.
- Candor. McCain seems to
have tapped into the Jesse Ventura campaign manual,
pushing hard to develop a reputation for "telling it
like it is" in order to bunish his reformist image.
As I have pointed out elsewhere, candor is a tenuous
virtue at best, and despite the media's enthusiasm for
this aspect of McCain's persona, it may come back to bite
him in the forms of salacious revelations of politically
incorrect blurtings.
The last ten years have seen the destruction of
unifying political themes. This is good. It means that the fears
and dangers than united the people in broad political teams have
largely evaporated. We are fat and happy. The reason we don’t
see another Reagan on the horizon is that Reagan’s world is
no more. We struggle to put the pieces together in ways
appropriate to the new world, and the resulting confusion
produces Perots, Venturas, and Buchanans. At heart McCain is
taking advantage of this confusion. In the end, despite his
heroism, his media support and his demagoguery, he will come up
against the hard reality that most Republicans prefer a candidate
who acts like a Republican.
Related Pieces:
Campaign
Finance Reform
A
Letter to John McCain
Candor
