The Palin Pick -- The Devolution of McCain
In one of our many conversations as we crisscrossed the country during his campaign for the 2000 Republican presidential nomination, John McCain said to me, "I've always tried to act on what I thought was the best for the country. And that has guided me.... The only thing I can do is assure people that I would act on principle."
I traveled with McCain for weeks that political season, stayed in Arkansas with him, Cindy, and their children, and - for a Vanity Fair cover profile -- filled dozens of notebooks and tapes with observations from and about a potentially heroic politician who seems far removed from the man running for president today.
Three weeks after the 2008 Republican convention, on the cusp (maybe) of the first presidential debate, it is time to confront an awkward but profound question: whether in picking Sarah Palin as his running mate, John McCain has committed -- by his own professed standards of duty and honor -- a singularly unpatriotic act.
"I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war," he has said throughout this campaign. Yet, in choosing Palin, he has demonstrated -- whatever his words -- it may be permissible to imperil the country, conceivably even to "lose" it, in order to win the presidency. That would seem the deeper meaning of his choice of Palin.
Indeed, no presidential nominee of either party in the last century has seemed so willing to endanger the country's security as McCain in his reckless choice of a running mate. He is 72 years old; has had four melanomas, a particularly voracious form of cancer; refuses to release his complete medical records. Three of our last eleven presidents (and nine of all 43) have come to office unexpectedly in mid-term from the vice presidency: Truman, who within days of FDR's death was confronted with the decision of whether to drop the atom bomb on Japan; Lyndon Johnson, who took the oath in Dallas after JFK's assassination; Gerald Ford, sworn in following the resignation of Richard Nixon. A fourth vice president, George H.W. Bush, briefly exercised the powers of the presidency after the near-assassination of Ronald Reagan.
Given that history, what does John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin -- the cavalier, last-minute process of her selection and careless vetting; and her over-briefed, fact-lite performance since -- reveal about this military man who has attested to us for years that he is guided by his personal code of honor? "Two things I will never do," McCain told me, "are [to] lie to the American people, or put my electoral interests before the national interest" -- an obvious precursor of "I would rather lose a political campaign than lose a war."
McCain, I wrote for Vanity Fair, "often speaks of the duty to follow his conscience in politics, rather than polls or party discipline. This, he says, comes from having escaped death and becoming 'more aware of the transience of everything we do.'"
"I've always had a pretty good idea about how to define something as to whether it's right or wrong," he told me. "I don't mean that I'm better or worse than anybody else. I just mean that when I see an issue and think about it and talk to people, I do generally have the ability to know what's the right course of action, even if it may not be what the majority wants. So I have a certain amount of confidence that I don't have to have a majority opinion on my side."
It does not take a near-death experience to know that Sarah Palin is not qualified to be commander in chief, or that -- in choosing her -- McCain has ignored his own oft-avowed code of conduct. "McCain made the most important command decision of his life when he chose Sarah Palin as his vice presidential nominee," noted David Ignatius in the Washington Post. "....No promotion board in history would have made such a decision."
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Above all, the John McCain I covered in 1999-2000 was -- he said -- convinced that two factors were undermining the interests of the United States: its cultural wars, causing political gridlock in Washington and civic discontent across the land; and the unbending agenda of the right-wing of the Republican party that, in his view, had been captured by the Christian conservative movement and bore disproportionate responsibility for the poisonous state of American politics. Exhibit One: the scorched-earth campaign that George W. Bush was then waging against McCain's insurgent run for the Republican presidential nomination.
Yet, McCain, is, in fact, running the kind of campaign against Barack Obama that George Bush ran against him in 2000, which he regarded rightly as dishonest, dishonorable and diversionary in terms of the truth about him and about the nation's problems.
The conservative commentator George Will has been especially incisive of late about the "dismaying," "un-presidential temperament" of McCain and the sleazy tenor of his campaign. Karl Rove (!) has responded to the incessant lying of McCain's ads (one claims falsely that Obama has promoted "comprehensive" sex education for five-year-olds -- he had, in fact, endorsed legislation to insure that kindergartners were warned about sexual predators), by saying, yes, the McCain camp's mendacity has "gone one step too far."
Meanwhile, McCain's frequent invocations of the need for bi-partisan statesmanship are interspersed with the angry themes of cultural warfare and of the Republican convention orchestrated by his handlers, the most dominant of them practitioners from the campaigns of George W. Bush: attacks on "tax-and-spend Democrats," on the dependable liberal bogeyman, on "the angry Left," on Constitution-rewriting federal judges (including, incongruously, three of the Supreme Court justices who voted to uphold McCain's singular legislative achievement: the campaign-finance act he authored with Democrat Russ Feingold).
"If hypocrisy were gold, the Capitol would be Fort Knox," McCain once famously said. "Some of those guys," he said, referring to his fellow senators, "have they even had lives? What have they done?" He added, "Aw, jeez, this is exactly the kind of thing that gets me into trouble." Indeed.
McCain's first choices to be his running mate were former Gov. Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania and Senator Joe Lieberman, the Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut, and former vice presidential nominee of his former party. Neither passed the ideological litmus test of the Republican-Right -- "The Base" -- because each holds pro-choice views. Certainly both are qualified to step into the presidency in terms of national security credentials -- regardless of whether one agrees with their particular politics -- in the event of the death of the president. McCain's "Hail Mary" pick -- Palin -- was hastily decided on the next-to-last day of the Democratic convention, by which time it was evident that Obama's convention was winning over independent voters; all that remained was the final night and the opportunity for Obama to deliver a speech that would further work to his advantage, and debilitate the McCain campaign. Only by exciting "The Base" could McCain remain competitive and win, it was calculated.
The distance from McCain's ads and assertions about his presidential opponent and Democrats generally, and his decision to run a "persona-based" campaign, as opposed to being specific on the issues, is of a piece with his choice of Palin to be his running mate. As another conservative commentator sometimes critical of McCain -- Peggy Noonan -- has noted, the "narrative" of a life [McCain's, Palin's], takes over from existential political fact in the type of campaign run by McCain and his handlers. We have heard an awful lot in the past few weeks, especially from Sarah Palin, about John McCain "The Maverick," just as we did in the convention narrative. But what McCain has actually been doing in this campaign, rather than actually being The Maverick, is conveying the appearance of iconoclasm, and playing to the crowd. (Hence, perhaps, "suspending" his campaign -- and trying to postpone the first presidential debate while his poll numbers are sinking -- to deal with the financial crisis?) At this point, the maverick claim seems no more genuine than Sarah Palin's charade foreign-policy tour of Manhattan with no witnesses -- reporters -- permitted to observe the proceedings.
The issue of Palin's relative ignorance about international affairs and the larger world beyond America's shores (compared to previous vice presidential nominees), her attendant arrogance in seeming to revel in it, and McCain's decision to subject the country to it in choosing a possible president -- is the biggest question in this election, or perhaps ought to be. It goes to the core of who the John McCain of this campaign is.
Another conservative commentator, David Brooks, wrote last week: "Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she'd be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter. She has not been engaged in national issues, does not have a repertoire of historic patterns and, like President Bush, she seems to compensate for her lack of experience with brashness and excessive decisiveness."
The more we learn, the more we realize the vetting process was -- given the rush of the circumstances -- hopelessly inadequate: McCain didn't know many aspects of Palin's record or her reputation (none of which is to say she wouldn't be a congenial fit as, say, Secretary of Interior in a McCain administration). McCain's first choices for a running mate -- Ridge and Lieberman -- were light years ahead of Palin in the vice presidential-qualification department. But they didn't meet the ideological test, exactly the ideological litmus test that McCain has attacked his whole political career and told us he would never succumb to.
John McCain is a serious man, as anyone who has spent time with him knows. But he has not run the kind of serious campaign he once promised.
Not for the first time, as many of his fellow Republicans (as opposed to friendly reporters and sympathetic Democrats) had long maintained, McCain's more reckless inclinations and lesser impulses prevailed. A great political movement that would transcend rabid partisanship and hard ideology does not seem in the cards.
And if he wins the election, Sarah Palin -- who in her first post-convention discussion of foreign policy indicated a willingness to go to war with Russia over Georgia -- stands a heartbeat away from the presidency.
Ultimately it is the choice of Palin, made in the moment when action speaks loudest, that may undermine a quarter-century of assertions by John McCain about the preeminence of duty, honor and country in his political schema.
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MY POST CONTINUED
Liberal or Conservative I hope that the "undecided" citizens will wake up and realize that we should want our leaders to be smarter than us. Do I want a leader who might be elitist because he is more educated and wordly than me? You bet you life I do!! Especially after the mentally challenge POTUS we have had for 8 years.
I would rather have an elitist POTUS with true intelligence on his side who can take an issue, analyze and digest it, consult with even more wordly people, and then make wise decisions, than a C-grade rich kid who has insulted my intelligence by thinking that his being president is all that matters and his "trophy" VP can just stand alongside, smile and wave like a good little woman should . He pushes her to the forefront and stands back like - see America...
The GOP leadership and speech writers cannot feed her enough sound bites to cover-up for her lack of substance as a leader. Cover-up and Rove-style politics go hand-in-hand again, but the distraction is becoming a detraction.
We can only hope for the continued DEVOLUTION of McCain
Bob you are so right. McCain picking Palin was one of the most UNPATRIOTIC decisions he could have made and does not show any love of country on his part. I hope it will prove to be his downfall. His campaign has spent so much time criticizing Obama lacking substance and experience, for taking action based merely on political posturing, for riding the "celebrity train" due to Obama's winning personality yet picking Palin is doing such posturing in even a worse way. She may draw crowds but it is mainly due to the curiousity of people rather than support.
His selection of Palin shows a serious lack of judgement not only for the patronizingly, blatant insult to the American people that they think by her being a woman, we would overlook her lack of even the basic qualifications and intellect, but that he selected a "person" with such a minimal level of the requirements to lead our nation. Even if she does not end up being challenged to be POTUS if something happens to them, she is not even qualified to sit at the head of Congress and make leadership decisions that fall on the VP. She doesn't even understand what the job responsibilities of the VP. It is not just giving a good speech, smiling, and kissing babies (hers or anyone elses)
COUNTRY FIRST.....
Granting the vague possibility for a moment that you might actually be serious, thank you for making our point so much better than we ever could.
We support Palin 100%. All you liberals lie about her. She is what this country needs. She wants Christian God in our schools. Christian Prayer in class. Creationism taught in Science. She is our savior. Assault rifle in one hand, Bible in the other. What more is needed in a President or VP? She wants Ten Commandments in government buildings. She is our savior - she wants no abortions. Rape victims should not have abortions. This is what God wants. She reads the Bible literally, she follows God's word. She is our Christian Savior. Palin - McCain. She voted against the Bridge you liberal liars. Wasilla rape victims should indeed pay for rape kits. This is less government. Go Palin. Great Mayor of Wasilla. Great Alaskan Governor. This is what Palin wants - to cut government and regulations. We want a free market. Get rid of regulations. That is how we can prosper. Republicans are Christians for free markets and God directing our government policies. Liberal Democrats are godless and want regulations to kill all business. Vote for Palin for VP then President. America needs Palin. America must drill off shore and wherever oil can be found. Drill baby Drill. Alaska oil. Keep God in America. VOTE REPUBLICAN.
This country was founded on separation of Church and State for a reason. Laws must be made with fairness and clarity for all - not just fundamentalist Christian beliefs. You speak of God but at the same time dismiss all other religions who also believe in God, but practice their beliefs in a different way. I would think that in the Republican party you also have Jews, Muslims, Buddist, and just plain old unaffiliated God fearing folk.
Your type of opinion fall exactly in-line with that of the terrorists
(MODS: this comment actually belongs here.)
Granting the vague possibility for a moment that you might actually be serious, thank you for making our point so much better than we ever could.
Thank you, Governor Palin, for that unsolicited self-endorsement. Or, is that you, John?
“Let the woman learn in silence, with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived, was in the transgression” (1 Tim. 2:11-14).
There ya go - Palin as VP would be sinnin' according to your bible..
Like Jesus would own a gun and vote Republican. Hah.
Ok all you liberal liars out there, let's let out one unified HURRAH! for this uhhh...opi
Is this for real, or tongue in cheek. There are the kind of people who are supporting McCain. I left an 18th century country governed by Church/State as one. For one thing, it destroyed the Church, because once the people got out from under the yoke of oppression, they abandoned the Church. It no longer governs that way, so I think maybe it is time I go back.
To those folks supporting McCain, I have a beautiful bridge here in the San Francisco Bay Area called the Golden Gate Bridge (it actually goes somewhere) that I would like to sell you. By picking McCain as his running mate, he's told America the quality of his judgment. And, to think I once thought that McCain might be a Repo I could vote for.
When McCain won the nomination, I seriously considered voting for him, because of who he used to be. I wonder what happened.
Who he used to be. Back in 1999, he was using the same old "I'd rather lose the election than lose the country", when he declared he was suspending announcing his intent to run for President, because of the week old war in Kosovo, even though he had already been running for seven month's. He said it was not an appropriate time to make the announcement. Suspending the debate just didn't work this time, John. The people saw through it. He is just a MORE OF THE SAME guy.
Seems to me that Palin is McCain's Agnew with lipstick. It speaks to McCain's character: reckless and impulsive. With little thought to the American people, who would be stuck with Palin if McCain were to win and die while in office.
Or does this make McCain Palin's Nixon?
"Agnew's moderate image, immigrant background and success in a traditionally Democratic state made him an attractive running mate for Nixon in 1968. In line with what would later be called Nixon's "Southern Strategy," Agnew was selected as a candidate for being sufficiently from the South to attract Southern moderate voters, yet not as identified with the Deep South, which could have turned off Northern centrists come election time. Agnew was Nixon's "hatchet man" when defending the administration on the Vietnam War. Agnew is to date the only Vice President in U.S. history to resign because of criminal charges."- Wikipedia
first off if Pres.McCai
I agree with you. Palin is another seat holder for the neocons, just a null set who will do whatever she is told by the non-elected shadow government that has been running the show for 8 years now.
Not to mention the Reagan Adminstration. All the far right needs is one of those wooden puppets to lip synch the dogmatic polemics of its lords and masters - what's the word I'm looking for? Oh yeah, a dummie...
You nailed it Mr. Bernstein. You express what 95% of honest Americans are thinking about Palin. I'm including couragous Republicans who are putting extreme partisanism aside; are speaking with an honest soul and broad minded intelligence. It's really sad, I used to like John McCain, I respected him. He had me fooled. After he picked Palin. I lost all respect for him. I felt double crossed and betrayed by his words "Country First". It should have been a requirement for Palin to be on the T.V. show "Are you smarter than a 5th grader", before she was considered to possibly hold the second highest position in the Free World.
Alaska went through corruption and elected Governor Palin...lo
We are looking for a CHANGE, but yes, you are right... I had my vote to McCain is limbo by VP selection. For the sake of choosing a woman... Dole, Hutchinson, Rice... there are much more capable women in Republican party...
Our country need to get back on track... collapse of US trademarked "Wall Street" major financial institutio
This is when we need... best talent in Capitol Hill... I watched Fey as Palin in Saturday Night video again... we laughed... but - it could be reality. Senator McCain will be so hand full trying to teach someone who has never been to more than 1 country for many years...
I wonder how people in Alaska feels? Sure, you wanted to be proud... What is your bet on Biden/Palin debate... hope is not the same as Katie's interview.
to find out how Alaska feels about her check out this site:
http://www
When she returned to Alaska the first time after her great debute at the convention
My sentiments exactly!!!!! I feel betrayed by John McCain. How could he be so careless with his country???
Thanks for the excellent article. In this regard, I've tried to express the events of the last week or so in verse:
The Ballad of John and Sarah
McCain didn’t think
Palin didn’t blink
Now they’re in a mess.
The economy’s in trouble
Wall Street burst its bubble
We’ll all feel the pain.
First do no harm, Obama said
Let’s issue a joint statement
And continue the campaign.
Oh, I’ll fix it, said McCain
The economy is tanking
And though I don’t know banking
I must rush in to help.
(My VP choice is flubbing
In her debate she’ll take a drubbing
I must help her out.)
Congress was close to consensus
When McCain flew into town
And then the deal did not go down.
You’re no patriot, said McCain
If you debate, you do not care.
I’ll go there anyway, Obama said
I’ll debate an empty chair.
Most were unimpressed
With McCain’s shenanigans
So then the debate was on again.
McCain didn’t think
Palin didn’t blink
Now they’re in a mess.
-EmmyG (with help from the doggerel doctor)
I'd like to add more stanzas to keep this up to date, but may not have the time...
Although I believe Palin to be driven in the totally wrong direction, I kind of feel sorry for her. McCain set her up to fail. She is probably sorry that she took the position offered by the facade of the real McCain. He is probably rude and condescending to her most times, except when he is ogling her behind in hopes. I'm sure he is the same with all women. In studying his past, I'd say he is overcompensating for his misjudgements, miscalculations, inadequacies and guilty conscience. In my view, she should, and probably will, vote for Obama.
As much as I can't believe I am saying this...I have to agree... I have to feel sorry for her. And now that the people of Alaska know her better, she is going to have a really hard time going back to her old life. She will be lucky if she doesn't get impeached as Governor. Also, what you say about McCain is right on.
There is a price to pay when you DON'T BLINK!
I do not feel any pity for Sarah Palin. If someone asked her to do brain surgery, she would refuse on the grounds that she does not have the skill. She took this nomination and she had to have known the ramifications of the vice-presidency under a 72-year old man. If she doesn't know that she is absolutely unqualified to possibly ascend to the highest office in the land, she should.
I'd bet that almost anyone on HuffPo, if asked, would turn down the position because we wouldn't feel qualified. And there are a lot of really intelligent people on here who would be able to do a better job than either her or McCain, who is also no braintrust.
The McCain I've seen in this campaign - erratic, flaky, cynical, dishonest - makes me wonder whether the McCain I thought I perceived of 2000 was real. I think the closer he gets to the presidency the more layers of civility are stripped away. The core I see is not something I can respect. What a sad devolution.
If McCain was sincere about the things he said in 2000, we must conclude that in 2008 McCain was seduced by the dark side of the force.
On the other hand, the straight talking maverick of 2000 may have been a facade he used because at that time it was useful. In that case he has abandoned the facade since it is no longer useful and shown us the real McCain.
In either case, he must not be allowed to become President.
aside from mccain's twisted reasoning for choosing sarah palin to be on the ticket, the thought of this person being a 72 yr old, not so healthy old man's heart beat away from running the country - scares the hell out of me........
McCain always says that he would rather lose an election than a war. His VP pick in Sarah Palin makes the point that McCain will do ANYTHING to win an election. I think this action alone speaks volumes about his character. He will remind us of his experience in Vietnam at the drop of a dime after reminding us that he didn't win the congeniality award again in an effort to portray himself as a maverick. The false image of McCain is starting to unravel.
Step down Sarah...ju
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