Man Of The West: McCain Not Just A Washington Insider
Washington Independent:
On Monday, when Sen. John McCain stepped onto a steamy tarmac in Fresno, Calif., he did so as a man who had come from somewhere else, as generations of people before him, who had placed his future in the faith of the West.
Thirty-five years had passed since McCain had returned home from Vietnam, and it had been 25 years since he first ran as a congressman in one of the most Western of all Western states -- Arizona. Now he was the man who, perhaps without knowing it, wrapped himself in the mythology of the American West that, in truth, is the story, movement, of America itself.
It is hard, for many, to think of McCain as a man of the West. He was, and is, the product of the Eastern establishment, son and grandson of admirals, a graduate of Annapolis. Among those of us who call the nation's capital home, he seems inseparable from the corridors of the Senate, of press conferences announcing the culmination of some bipartisan deal.
But to see McCain solely as a man of Washington is to miss the point. We like to think of those west of the Mississippi as descendants of ranchers, of men like John Wayne's troubled-and-torn hero in John Ford's black-and-white epic "The Man who Shot Liberty Valance." But it is also the story of Wayne's counterpart in the film, the idealistic lawyer played by Jimmy Stewart, who comes from his safe Eastern trappings to make something of himself, to re-imagine himself, and who would, in short order, represent the needs of his adopted home in Washington.
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First Posted: 06-25-08 01:42 PM | Updated: 07- 3-08 05:12 AM