Why John McCain Can't Tell The Truth (Iraq, patriot, campaign)

[remedy a4]

Finally someone nailed it; Jonathan Chait from The New Republic this morning for the win:

http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=71756e51-a09c-4b7d-b270-c6327191b341&p=1

Those of us who have admired McCain are not used to analyzing his actions in purely amoral terms. This is a man with a history of true heroism who takes honor seriously. What happened to him?

The McCain campaign and its sympathizers have offered one semi-acknowledgment in public. According to their theory, McCain tried to run a high-road campaign, but was ignored by the press and rebuffed by Obama. McCain, complained his former aide, Dan Schnur, "had a poverty tour and nobody covered it." (McCain's tour did get some coverage, but not the commanding attention McCain hoped for, possibly because he had no actual poverty proposals to accompany it.) Likewise, McCain cites his unrequited offer to hold joint town halls as evidence of his good faith. "I think the tone of this whole campaign would've been very different," he said recently, "if Senator Obama had accepted my request for us to appear at town hall meetings all over America." McCain's proposal of joint town halls was salutary, but it wasn't an act of charity--the obvious purpose was to draw Obama into a forum where McCain excels. Even if McCain did make the offer out of a pure-hearted desire to lift the public discourse, Obama's refusal hardly justifies embarking upon a sustained campaign of slander. McCain's rationale is a bit like saying your rejection from law school forced you to turn to a life of crime.


Any attempt to determine McCain's true motives is necessarily pure speculation. It's possible that McCain has convinced himself to actually believe the lies he has been telling. But here's a more likely explanation: All this dishonesty can be understood not as a betrayal of McCain's sense of honor but, in an odd way, as a fulfillment of it

McCain's deep investment in his own honor can drive him to do honorable things, but it can also allow him to believe that anything he does must be honorable. Thus the moralistic, crusading tone McCain brings to almost every cause he joins. In 2000 and afterward, McCain came to despise George W. Bush and Karl Rove. During his more recent primary campaign, McCain thought the same of front-runner Mitt Romney. Not surprisingly, Romney was the target of McCain's most unfair primary attack--an inaccurate claim that he favored a withdrawal timetable in Iraq.

In time, when Bush's support became necessary for his second presidential campaign, McCain reconciled himself to his former rival--and even to Rove, whom he has reportedly taken on as an outside adviser. More recently, he apparently changed his view of Romney. Now, Obama is the villain. "The contempt that many McCain aides hold for Barack Obama," The Atlantic's Marc Ambinder wrote this summer, "rivals the contempt that McCain held for Mitt Romney a year ago." As Time reported, "McCain and his aides now view Obama with the same level of contempt they once reserved for tobacco-company executives, corrupt lawmakers and George W. Bush. They have convinced themselves that Obama is not honorable, that he does not love his country as much as himself."

The pattern here is perfectly clear. McCain has contempt for anybody who stands between him and the presidency. McCain views himself as the ultimate patriot. He loves his country so much that he cannot let it fall into the hands of an unworthy rival. (They all turn out to be unworthy.) Viewed in this way, doing whatever it takes to win is not an act of selfishness but an act of patriotism. McCain tells lies every day and authorizes lying on his behalf, and he probably knows it. But I would guess--and, again, guessing is all we can do--that in his mind he is acting honorably. As he might put it, there is a bigger truth out there.