"There is no single English word for McCain the hero, the moral entity. But in Hebrew he would be called a tsaddick -- a man of such nobility and moral substance that he approaches holiness. If this assertion sounds crazy, that only shows how little we have thought about it." -- David Gelernter* in his article "Clean Hands and a Pure Heart: The Stature of John McCain" in the forthcoming issue of the Weekly Standard.
Well, David -- Can I call you David? -- I have actually been giving this issue considerable thought, as exemplified in my previous blogs "McCain Family Values (1)" (Sept. 8), "John McCain, Postmodern Candidate" (Oct. 7), "McNasty Thinks He Should Be President, But Those Who Know Him Well Express Alarm" (Oct. 13), "John McCain, Man of Honor" (Oct. 24), and "Vengeance Is Ours, Sayeth McCain-Palin" (Oct. 24). And at your suggestion I will give it even more thought right now.
I'll begin by invoking the work of the eminent social scientist Theodore Adorno. "The role of the woman, as seen by high-scoring men," Adorno wrote in his classic 1950 work The Authoritarian Personality ("high-scoring" refers to subjects of his study who scored high on a scale of authoritarian thought-patterns), "is one of passivity and subservience... She is an object of solicitude on the part of the man. The hierarchial idea corresponds to the well-known conventional cliché and at the same time offers the high-scoring man the much-needed opportunity of asserting his superiority... from them he wants material benefits and support more than he wants pure affection, for it would be difficult for him to accept the latter. There is relatively little genuine affective involvement in his non-marital sexual relations... On the whole, sex is for him in the service of status, be this masculine status as achieved by pointing to conquests, or be it social status as achieved by marrying the 'right kind' of woman."
Adorno wrote about a group of right-wing authoritarians who at the time constituted a fringe group in American politics, but who since have (as Adorno feared they might) moved into positions of substantial power in America at every level, including, with tragic consequences, the presidency. I make use of Adorno's research and theories in the introduction to You Don't Know Me: A Citizen's Guide to Republican Family Values in attempting to explain the recent unprecedented rash of sexual misbehavior among members of this now haughty elite.
Coincidentally or not, the description above also seems to fit Republican presidential candidate John McCain to a T. Let's go to another quote, this one from a piece Nicholas Kristof did about John McCain in the New York Times on February 27, 2000 called "P.O.W. to Power Broker, A Chapter Most Telling."
"It was 1979...his personal life was a mess. Although he was still living with his wife, he was aggressively courting a 25-year old woman who was as beautiful as she was rich... For a candidate running on character and biography, it is also an awkward time to remember. Mr. McCain abandoned his wife, who had reared their three children while he was in Vietnamese prisons. And then he began his political career with the resources of his new wife's family." These resources encompassed the beer distributing fortune to which his new wife was heir.
Kristoff also notes further down: "His best selling biography (Faith of My Fathers) ends with his release from Vietnam prisons, omitting everything afterwards."
When McCain left for service in Vietnam, his wife, Carol, was a tall, slender, attractive ex-model whom he called "Long Tall Sally." When he returned, she was four-to-five inches shorter, crippled enough to have to walk on crutches, and overweight. While he was away, she had suffered a terrible accident in which she lost control of her car on ice and crashed into a telephone poll. She had endured half a year in the hospital and twenty-three intricate surgeries.
Ross Perot, who spent generously from his fortune on the needs of Vietnam POWs and their families, paid for all of Carol McCain's medical care. According to an August 29 posting by Cenk Uygur on the Huffington Post headlined "How Is John McCain's affair different from John Edwards?" Perot has never forgiven McCain for his treatment of Carol after his return, and recently reiterated his view of McCain based on that period in these words: "McCain is the classic opportunist."
Perot introduced McCain and his wife to President and Nancy Reagan. They likewise took a shine to Carol, and were similarly offended by McCain's discarding of her. Nancy arranged for Carol to work at the White House after the divorce in events planning. Reportedly, Nancy, whose pro-forma endorsement of John McCain this fall consisted of saying, "Well, obviously, he is the nominee of the party," recently told a major newscaster off the record that she is planning to vote for Obama this Tuesday.
McCain met his current wife, the former Cindy Hensley, on a stopover in Hawaii during a trip to China with a group of senators. He was a congressional liason for the Navy. He conducted a cross-country affair with her for nine months while still married to Carol, and was still married when he and Cindy took out their wedding license, according to Tim Dickinson's recent Rolling Stone article, "Make-Believe Maverick: A closer look at the life and career of John McCain reveals a disturbing record of recklessness and dishonesty."
McCain was notorious for his carousing and womanizing before spotting Cindy across a crowded room in Honolulu (as he was before he married Carol). Dickinson reports (as others have) that McCain often romanced women by flying them around the country on Navy jets, and that he was also rumored to be sexually involved with female subordinates in the Navy. But Dickinson's real coup was his unearthing of the following priceless anecdote involving McCain and fellow Hanoi Hilton prisoner John Dramesi:
Dramesi and McCain ran into each other in Washington in the spring of 1974, not long after their release from captivity, while McCain was studying at the National War College and Dramesi at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces nearby. Dramesi told McCain he was going to be posted to the Middle East after graduation. The future proponent of the war in Iraq and the so-called "surge" asked him, in effect, why in the world was he going there? "It's a place we're probably going to have some problems," Dramesi ventured. Then McCain told Dramesi he was on his way to Rio, and Dramesi asked the reason for that.
"Because," McCain the husband and father of three explained, "I gotta better chance of getting laid."
*NOTE: David Gelernter is a professor of computer sciences at Yale University. He was a victim of a letter bomb sent to him by the Unabomber, the explosion of which seriously damaged one of his arms and one of his eyes. He first entered the field of political analysis with a series of commentaries claiming that liberals were in support of the Unabomber's aims and crimes, and particularly of the crime against him.