Better Know a District - Lynn Westmoreland Update

Olbermann's "Worst Persons in the World" for Today

I try to keep some distance from Olbermann's ratings, but these specimens for "worst persons of the world" are candidates for a hall of fame, somewhere.

Randy Shiner

Deep Down, We Can’t Fool Even Ourselves

July 1, 2008

Findings

Deep Down, We Can’t Fool Even Ourselves
By JOHN TIERNEY

In voting against the Bush tax cut in 2001, Senator John McCain said he “cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate.” Today he campaigns in favor of extending that same tax cut beyond its expiration date.

Senator Barack Obama last year called himself a “longtime advocate” of public financing of election campaigns. This month, he reiterated his “support” for such financing while becoming the first major party presidential nominee ever to reject it for his own campaign.

Do you think either of these men is a hypocrite?

If so, does this hypocrite really believe, in his heart, what he is saying?

Fortunately, we don’t need to get into the fine points of taxes or campaign finances to take a stab at these questions. We can probably get further by looking at some experiments in what psychologists call moral hypocrisy.

This is a more devious form of hypocrisy than what was exhibited by, say, the governor of New York when he got caught patronizing a prostitute. It was obviously hypocritical behavior for a public official who had formerly prosecuted prostitutes and increased penalties for their customers, but at least Eliot Spitzer acknowledged his actions were wrong by anyone’s standards.

The moral hypocrite, by contrast, has convinced himself that he is acting virtuously even when he does something he would condemn in others. You can understand this “self-halo” effect — and perhaps discover it in someone very close to you — by considering what happened when two psychologists, Piercarlo Valdesolo and David DeSteno, tested people’s reactions to the following situation.

You show up for an experiment and are told that you and a person arriving later will each have to do a different task on a computer. One job involves a fairly easy hunt through photos that will take just 10 minutes. The other task is a more tedious exercise in mental geometry that takes 45 minutes.

You get to decide how to divvy up the chores: either let a computer assign the tasks randomly, or make the assignments yourself. Either way, the other person will not know you had anything to do with the assignments.

Now, what is the fair way to divvy up the chores?

When the researchers posed this question in the abstract to people who were not involved in the tasks, everyone gave the same answer: It would be unfair to give yourself the easy job.

But when the researchers actually put another group of people in this situation, more than three-quarters of them took the easy job. Then, under subsequent questioning, they gave themselves high marks for acting fairly. The researchers call this moral hypocrisy because the people were absolving themselves of violating a widely held standard of fairness (even though they themselves hadn’t explicitly endorsed that standard beforehand).

A double standard of morality also emerged when other people were arbitrarily divided in two groups and given differently colored wristbands. They watched as one person, either from their group or from the other group, went through the exercise and assigned himself the easy job.

Even though the observers had no personal stake in the outcome — they knew they would not be stuck with the boring job — they were still biased. On average, they judged it to be unfair for someone in the other group to give himself the easy job, but they considered it fair when someone in their own group did the same thing.

“Anyone who is on ‘our team’ is excused for moral transgressions,” said Dr. DeSteno, a psychologist at Northeastern University. “The importance of group cohesion, of any type, simply extends our moral radius for lenience. Basically, it’s a form of one person’s patriot is another’s terrorist.”

If a colored wristband is enough to skew your moral judgment, imagine how you are affected by the “D” or the “R” label on your voting registration. If you are a Democrat, you are more likely to think Mr. McCain hypocritically switched tax policies to pick up conservative votes, but Mr. Obama’s decision to abandon public financing probably looks more complicated. If you’re a Republican you’re likelier to figure Mr. Obama did it just so he could raise more money on his own, but you’re more willing to consider Mr. McCain’s economic rationales.

The more interesting question is how presidential candidates, and their supporters, turn into hypocrites. It has been demonstrated repeatedly in experiments that humans are remarkably sensitive to unfairness. We’ve survived as social animals because we are so good at spotting selfishness and punishing antisocial behavior.

So how we do violate our own moral code? Does our gut instinct for self-preservation override our moral reasoning? Do we use our powers of rationality to override our moral instinct?

“The question here,” Dr. DeSteno said, “is whether we’re designed at heart to be fair or selfish.”

To find out, he and Dr. Valdesolo brought more people into the lab and watched them selfishly assign themselves the easy task. Then, at the start of the subsequent questioning, some of these people were asked to memorize a list of numbers and retain it in their heads as they answered questions about the experiment and their actions.

That little bit of extra mental exertion was enough to eliminate hypocrisy. These people judged their own actions just as harshly as others did. Their brains were apparently too busy to rationalize their selfishness, so they fell back on their intuitive feelings about fairness.

“Hypocrisy is driven by mental processes over which we have volitional control,” said Dr. Valdesolo, a psychologist at Amherst College. “Our gut seems to be equally sensitive to our own and others’ transgressions, suggesting that we just need to find ways to better translate our moral feelings into moral actions.”

That is easier said than done, especially in an election year. Even if the presidential candidates know in their guts that they are being hypocritical, they cannot very well be kept busy the whole campaign doing mental arithmetic. Besides, they are surrounded by advisers with plenty of spare mental power to rationalize whatever it takes to win.

Politicians are hypocritical for the same reason the rest of us are: to gain the social benefits of appearing virtuous without incurring the personal costs of virtuous behavior. If you can deceive even yourself into believing that you’re acting for the common good, you’ll have more energy and confidence to further your own interests — and your self-halo can persuade others to help you along.

But as useful as hypocrisy can be, it’s apparently not quite as basic as the human instinct to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Your mind can justify double standards, it seems, but in your heart you know you’re wrong.

This is Unbelievable

Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir

June 17, 2008
Army Overseer Tells of Ouster Over KBR Stir
By JAMES RISEN

WASHINGTON — The Army official who managed the Pentagon’s largest contract in Iraq says he was ousted from his job when he refused to approve paying more than $1 billion in questionable charges to KBR, the Houston-based company that has provided food, housing and other services to American troops.

The official, Charles M. Smith, was the senior civilian overseeing the multibillion-dollar contract with KBR during the first two years of the war. Speaking out for the first time, Mr. Smith said that he was forced from his job in 2004 after informing KBR officials that the Army would impose escalating financial penalties if they failed to improve their chaotic Iraqi operations.

Army auditors had determined that KBR lacked credible data or records for more than $1 billion in spending, so Mr. Smith refused to sign off on the payments to the company. “They had a gigantic amount of costs they couldn’t justify,” he said in an interview. “Ultimately, the money that was going to KBR was money being taken away from the troops, and I wasn’t going to do that.”

But he was suddenly replaced, he said, and his successors — after taking the unusual step of hiring an outside contractor to consider KBR’s claims — approved most of the payments he had tried to block.

Army officials denied that Mr. Smith had been removed because of the dispute, but confirmed that they had reversed his decision, arguing that blocking the payments to KBR would have eroded basic services to troops. They said that KBR had warned that if it was not paid, it would reduce payments to subcontractors, which in turn would cut back on services.

“You have to understand the circumstances at the time,” said Jeffrey P. Parsons, executive director of the Army Contracting Command. “We could not let operational support suffer because of some other things.”

Mr. Smith’s account fills in important gaps about the Pentagon’s handling of the KBR contract, which has cost more than $20 billion so far and has come under fierce criticism from lawmakers.
While it was previously reported that the Army had held up large payments to the company and then switched course, Mr. Smith has provided a glimpse of what happened inside the Army during the biggest showdown between the government and KBR. He is giving his account just as the Pentagon has recently awarded KBR part of a 10-year, $150 billion contract in Iraq.

Heather Browne, a spokeswoman for KBR, said in a statement that the company “conducts its operations in a manner that is compliant with the terms of the contract.” She added that it had not engaged in any improper behavior.

Ever since KBR emerged as the dominant contractor in Iraq, critics have questioned whether the company has benefited from its political connections to the Bush administration. Until last year, KBR was known as Kellogg, Brown and Root and was a subsidiary of Halliburton, the Texas oil services giant, where Vice President Dick Cheney previously served as chief executive.

When told of Mr. Smith’s account, Representative Henry A. Waxman, the California Democrat who is chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said it “is startling, and it confirms the committee’s worst fears. KBR has repeatedly gouged the taxpayer, and the Bush administration has looked the other way every time.”

Mr. Smith, a civilian employee of the Army for 31 years, spent his entire career at the Rock Island Arsenal, the Army’s headquarters for much of its contracting work, near Davenport, Iowa. He said he had waited to speak out until after he retired in February.

As chief of the Field Support Contracting Division of the Army Field Support Command, he was in charge of the KBR contract from the start. Mr. Smith soon came to believe that KBR’s business operations in Iraq were a mess. By the end of 2003, the Defense Contract Audit Agency told him that about $1 billion in cost estimates were not credible and should not be used as the basis for Army payments to the contractor.

“KBR didn’t move proper business systems into Iraq,” Mr. Smith said.

Along with the auditors, he said, he pushed for months to get KBR to provide data to justify the spending, including approximately $200 million for food services. Mr. Smith soon felt under pressure to ease up on KBR, he said. He and his boss, Maj. Gen. Wade H. McManus Jr., then the commander of the Army Field Support Command, were called to Pentagon meetings with Tina Ballard, then the deputy assistant secretary of the Army for policy and procurement.
Ms. Ballard urged them to clear up KBR’s contract problems quickly, but General McManus ignored the request, Mr. Smith said. Ms. Ballard declined to comment for this article, as did General McManus.

Eventually, Mr. Smith began warning KBR that he would withhold payments and performance bonuses until the company provided the Army with adequate data to justify the expenses. The bonuses — worth up to 2 percent of the value of the work — had to be approved by special boards of Army officials, and Mr. Smith made it clear that he would not set up the boards without the information.

Mr. Smith also told KBR that, until the information was received, he would withhold 15 percent of all payments on its future work in Iraq.

“KBR really did not like that, and they told me they were going to fight it,” Mr. Smith recalled.
In August 2004, he told one of his deputies, Mary Beth Watkins, to hand deliver a letter about the threatened penalties to a KBR official visiting Rock Island. That official, whose name Mr. Smith said he could not recall, responded by saying, “This is going to get turned around,” Mr. Smith said.

Two officials familiar with the episode confirmed that account, but would speak only on the condition of anonymity out of concern for their jobs.

The next morning, Mr. Smith said he got a call from Brig. Gen. Jerome Johnson, who succeeded General McManus when he retired the month before. “He told me, “You’ve got to pull back that letter,”’ Mr. Smith recalled. General Johnson declined to comment for this article.

A day later, Mr. Smith discovered that he had been replaced when he went to a meeting with KBR officials and found a colleague there in his place. Mr. Smith was moved into a job planning for future contracts with Iraq. Ms. Watkins, who also declined to comment, was reassigned as well.

Mr. Parsons, the contracting director, confirmed the personnel changes. But he denied that pressure from KBR was a factor in the Army’s decision making about the payments. “This issue was not decided overnight, and had been discussed all the way up to the office of the secretary of defense,” he said.

Soon after Mr. Smith was replaced, the Army hired a contractor, RCI Holding Corporation, to review KBR’s costs. “They came up with estimates, using very weak data from KBR,” Mr. Smith said. “They ignored D.C.A.A.’s auditors,” he said, referring to the Defense Contract Audit Agency.

Lt. Col. Brian Maka, a Pentagon spokesman, disputed that. He said in a statement that the Army auditing agency “does not believe that RCI was used to circumvent” the Army audits.
Paul Heagen, a spokesman for RCI’s parent company, the Serco Group, said his firm had insisted on working with the Army auditors. While KBR did not provide all of the data Mr. Smith had been seeking, Mr. Heagen said his company had used “best practices” and sound methodology to determine KBR’s costs.

Bob Bauman, a former Pentagon fraud investigator and contracting expert, said that was unusual. “I have never seen a contractor given that position, of estimating costs and scrubbing D.C.A.A.’s numbers,” he said. “I believe they are treading on dangerous ground.”

The Army also convened boards that awarded KBR high performance bonuses, according to Mr. Smith.

High grades on its work in Iraq also allowed KBR to win more work from the Pentagon, and this spring, KBR was awarded a share in the new 10-year contract. The Army also announced that Serco, RCI’s parent, will help oversee the Army’s new contract with KBR.

“In the end,” Mr. Smith said, “KBR got what it wanted.”

Who Is John McCain?

From the booth: The reviews of the books under analysis here should provide all the reasons a thoughtful person would need to make an informed assessment of what kind of person John McCain is and what kind he is not. For core issues that affect your wallet/purse/checking account, skip to the last paragraph. Then go back and figure out how this guy got to be the nominee of a major political party. He has manufactured his bona-fides out of polyester with the aid of a willing media that has cut him so much slack that it's hard to find where the rope begins. Gimme a side of chopped liver.

Randy Shiner

Volume 55, Number 10 · June 12, 2008
Who Is John McCain?
By Michael Tomasky

Free Ride: John McCain and the Media
by David Brock and Paul Waldman
Anchor, 218 pp., $13.95 (paper)

The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him—and Why Independents Shouldn't
by Cliff Schecter
PoliPoint, 186 pp., $14.95 (paper)

McCain: The Myth of a Maverick
by Matt Welch
Palgrave Macmillan, 226 pp., $27.95

It is little remembered today that the political career of John Sidney McCain III, a career now thoroughly laundered in mythology, began with the help of several fortuities. In 1973 he returned from his five and a half years of captivity in North Vietnam to Washington, or technically Arlington, Virginia, which had been his childhood home for more years than any other single place as he followed his father, a celebrated four-star admiral, on the elder McCain's naval assignments. He was one of 591 prisoners of war repatriated early that year as a result of Operation Homecoming, and was selected by the editors of US News & World Report as the one returning POW who would be given a thirteen-page spread in the magazine to describe his ordeal (having a famous father never hurts), which brought him the same kind of attention and acclaim that had earlier, for different purposes, been showered upon the young Hillary Diane Rodham and the young John Forbes Kerry.

By 1977 he held the post of naval liaison to Congress, his father's old position, and shortly thereafter attained the rank of captain. It was on Capitol Hill that he met and befriended important senators—Gary Hart of Colorado, William Cohen of Maine, and most of all John Tower of Texas, the buddy to whom he was closest during a period of his life that included its share of carousing and irreparably strained his marriage to his first wife, Carol. When asked to explain the dissolution of their marriage in the late 1970s, she said, "I attribute it more to John turning forty and wanting to be twenty-five again than I do to anything else."

But here was the first piece of luck, for his split from Carol enabled him to romance Cindy Hensley, an Arizonan seventeen years his junior whom he had met while vacationing in Honolulu in 1979 (he was separated) and with whom he was in love, he has written, by the end of their first evening together.

They married in May 1980, and from this union tumbled other fortuities. That she lived in Arizona meant that McCain would be moving to a state—with which he'd had even less association than Hillary Clinton had had with New York in 1999—whose growing population would gain it an extra congressional seat after the 1980 census, a circumstance on which his eye was keenly fixed. Her background—her father, Jim, ran the country's largest Anheuser-Busch distributorship—meant he would have the money and connections to launch the political career he had been coveting since he started meeting those famous pols. McCain hardly knew a soul in Arizona, but already he was telling friends in 1981 that he would swoop into the new seat in 1982 and then succeed Barry Goldwater in the Senate when Goldwater retired.

Then, one piece of bad luck: the new district would be cut in Tucson, not Phoenix. But this was soon followed by the greatest fortuity of all. John Rhodes, the Phoenix Republican who was the House minority leader, unexpectedly announced his retirement. The McCains lived just outside the Rhodes district, but Cindy's money ensured that they were able to buy a house in it and move in immediately. During a primary campaign against three other Republicans, he was, inevitably, branded a carpetbagger and opportunist. Confronted with these allegations at a candidates' forum, he delivered a riposte that would win him the seat and would foreshadow the kind of rhetorical agility that has so impressed reporters. The point of his zinger of a last sentence was not lost on his audience even then:

Listen, pal. I spent twenty-two years in the Navy. My father was in the Navy. My
grandfather was in the Navy. We in the military service tend to move a lot. We
have to live in all parts of the country, all parts of the world. I wish I could
have the luxury, like you, of growing up and living and spending my entire life
in a nice place like the First District of Arizona, but I was doing other
things. As a matter of fact, when I think about it now, the place I lived
longest in my life was Hanoi.

As Matt Welch notes in McCain, this wasn't exactly true; but invoking northern Virginia, where he had actually lived for a combined decade or more, would hardly have put across the desired point. As McCain's career has shown, sometimes the narrative is far more powerful than mere facts.

Twenty-six years later, McCain has secured the Republican presidential nomination and launched his general election campaign, itself the result of even more happy coincidences—Rudy Giuliani's inexplicable decision to skip all the early contests, Mitt Romney's unsteadiness on the national stage, the absence of a consensus on a "real conservative" choice, and press reports suggesting that the initially unpopular troop surge in Iraq, on which he'd placed his bet in late 2006 when President Bush was considering the Iraq Study Group report, was beginning to achieve some success. This should by all rights be a Democratic year, but the Democrats have been locked in ferocious battle, ensuring that one final piece of good fortune awaits McCain in that he will in all likelihood face a black man who no longer "transcends race" in anything like the way he did a few months ago or, if she keeps fighting and somehow manages to pull it off, the country's most polarizing woman, who could secure her party's nomination only by alienating large sections of its base.

But as Arnold Palmer reportedly once said, "It's a funny thing, the more I practice, the luckier I get." McCain's career is undeniably built also upon skill and shrewdness unusual among contemporary American politicians. It's not that he's been an especially accomplished legislator, although passage of the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act ("Bickra," in wonk-speak) took years and much resolve, as Elizabeth Drew shows in her engrossing Citizen McCain from 2002.[1] Nor has he been an especially energetic servant of his Arizona constituents. Welch even asserts that McCain "is infamous throughout his home state as someone who studiously avoids mixing with the little people."

But what McCain has been, of course, is a brilliant strategist of the culture of Washington, and particularly of the arbiters of conventional wisdom in the national press. "The press loves McCain," Chris Matthews said in 2006. "We're his base." McCain understands intuitively how reputations are built and maintained. As David Brock and Paul Waldman of the liberal nonprofit group Media Matters for America put it in Free Ride, McCain has "cracked the media code" of how to turn these ostensible adversaries into his allies and, on numerous occasions, even his apologists.

He became the press's darling in 1999 and 2000, during his first presidential run, the famous "Straight-Talk Express" days. He has since transformed himself into a very different and much more conventional conservative politician. But the fact of that transformation hasn't really taken hold yet in the national press. There is therefore the expectation—or, among liberals, fear—that the mass media will give McCain the benefit of every doubt against Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton. The tendency is already in evidence here and there—the proposed elimination of the federal gas tax for the summer, endorsed first by McCain and then by Clinton, resulted in Clinton receiving far more criticism for pandering than McCain did.

So the season has come for anti-McCain books from detractors. Whether the three under review here have any impact on the election discourse will depend, to some extent, on the course of events and the effectiveness of the Democratic fall campaign. But each of the three—all follow the same basic template of critically reassessing the stages of McCain's career—makes persuasive arguments that while there has been much to respect in McCain in the past, there remain today only shards and vestiges of that man; that in doing what he had to do to become the nominee of a party of orthodox conservatism, he has so sublimated his honorable instincts that they have all but atrophied. He's not only adopted domestic policy positions he'd long opposed, he has openly pandered to the conservative Republican base by supporting most of Bush's positions in legislation on the treatment of detainees.

The McCain myth, as we know, is built on the foundation of his five and a half years of captivity in Hoa Lo Prison, aka the "Hanoi Hilton." He was flying a bombing raid in October 1967; his plane was shot down, he parachuted into the middle of a lake in Hanoi, and, with two broken arms and one broken knee, swam to shore. He was stabbed and beaten—bone sticking out of his right knee—and taken to Hoa Lo. His captors did not set his fractures and tortured him regularly, trying to drag false admissions out of him. When they learned that he had a famous father—who was, by 1968, the commander of all US naval forces in the Pacific—they offered him an early release for PR purposes. Because military regulations held that captured prisoners must be released in the order in which they were captured, he refused, spending much of the remainder of his captivity in solitary confinement. It's a staggering story, told most grippingly, in my reading, by David Foster Wallace.[2]

It is also just the right tale of heroism for an unwanted war. If McCain had shot down the greatest number of North Vietnamese, who would celebrate him? If he had led a great raid, most people would be indifferent to him, or—worse—Seymour Hersh or some other investigative journalist would likely have found out by now that innocent women and children were slaughtered. It was by suffering in a cell, serving as a kind of metaphor for American suffering in a war most Americans gave up on early in his confinement, but at the same time holding fast to principle under the most unimaginable circumstances, thereby redeeming some notion of American honor in a dishonorable situation, that McCain became an American hero. Liberal opponents of the war, who seldom acknowledged the repressive brutality of the North Vietnamese regime, were put on the defensive by the story of how he was tortured.
The tale has had a particularly talismanic effect on Baby Boomer journalists, many of whom probably opposed the war when they were young, or did not serve, or both, and thus reflexively grant McCain great moral authority. Brock and Waldman write:

And since few of the reporters who cover him were themselves in the armed forces
in Vietnam, there may be no small amount of guilt involved, or at least the
belief that they have not earned the right to ask him critical questions. On a
2006 episode of Hardball, Bloomberg News reporter Roger Simon noted that
reporters have given McCain "a break or two or three or four or five hundred,"
to which host Chris Matthews immediately replied, "Because he served in Vietnam,
and a lot of us didn't." ...[Journalists] testify that his POW experience is not
only the sum total of McCain's "character," but constitutes the lens through
which character itself must be viewed in any race in which McCain
participates.

Even so, attaining icon status took a while. He first made national headlines as a senator in the late 1980s, as part of the Keating Five, a group of senators who had lobbied in defense of a failing savings-and-loan company, owned by Charles Keating, that was under investigation during the S&L scandals. Keating had made large campaign contributions, including $112,000 to McCain, as well as paid for trips to his Bahamas house. But McCain was less involved with Keating than some of the other senators, and he got only a minor rebuke from the Senate Ethics Committee, which said his conduct was "questionable."

McCain seems to have learned two lessons from the episode. First, he decided that campaign finance reform was an important issue to pursue (partly on the merits, partly to repair his reputation). Second, as Welch notes, he learned "the practical benefits of media over-exposure":

By answering hostile questioning for nearly two full hours, until the reporters
had exhausted their lines of inquiry, McCain found himself praised by his
hometown paper for manfully owning up to his misdeeds. By making himself
available to almost any reporter at any hour, he found that he had sown some
useful empathy.

So the courtship started there. And McCain's new openness with the press may have extended beyond merely "owning up to his misdeeds." Brock and Waldman, citing a 2000 Boston Globe article, say "there is considerable evidence that McCain's office was the source of leaks...that...undermined three of the four other senators." One of the alleged leaks was of a memo that made the role of another Keating senator, Dennis DeConcini of Arizona, seem more incriminating than had been known. Another leak, of a Senate ethics panel report recommending that McCain be dropped as a target of inquiry, led to a New York Times article the very next day. McCain denied under oath in 1992 that he was responsible for any leaks, but according to Brock and Waldman, the man who led a probe of the leaks for the General Accounting Office has said he thinks McCain was responsible, as do DeConcini and former GOP senator Warren Rudman.

McCain's post-Keating efforts on campaign finance attached him to a good-government issue that liberal editorial boards love. It also separated him from most of his fellow Republicans. This is when the words "McCain" and "maverick" started appearing together regularly—also with regard to his effort during the same period to raise the federal tobacco tax. It all culminated in his first presidential run in 2000, when journalists were astounded to be invited into his inner sanctum and made privy to his unfiltered thoughts. Brock and Waldman cite a column by the conservative writer Andrew Ferguson describing the seduction process:

Here's what happens. The reporter—call him Joe—hops aboard McCain's old
campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express. He knows the Arizona senator's
well-known charms. He will not be seduced.

Chatting amiably, Joe asks about a Republican colleague. With ironic
solemnity, McCain responds by describing his fellow senator with an anatomical
epithet. Against his better judgment, Joe chuckles. (Never heard that from a
presidential candidate before!)

He asks a probing question about McCain's personal life—and the senator
answers without hesitation, never asking to go off the record. (Is there nothing
this guy won't be candid about?)

Joe's detachment is already crumbling when McCain offhandedly mentions a self-deprecating anecdote from his time "in prison." The reporter knows the reference is to McCain's years as a POW in Vietnam, back when Joe was sucking bong hits at Princeton. (Guilt, guilt, guilt...)

McCain asks Joe about his kids, by name, then recommends a new book
he's been reading—something unexpectedly literary (I.B. Singer's short
stories?). Seamlessly, he mentions an article Joe wrote—not last week, but in
1993!

The reporter has never voted for a Republican in his life. But he's a
goner.

The vicious campaign that George W. Bush ran against McCain in South Carolina, finally forcing him out of the race after McCain had won seven primaries, only made him an even more sympathetic figure. He emerged from the race the closest thing American politics has had to a hero, even to many liberals, since possibly Bobby Kennedy.

In the Bush years, the halo got brighter. He was of course much sought after by television after September 11. His imprimatur was crucial to Bush's "war on terror." And he still continued to go his own way here and there. Campaign finance reform finally passed in 2002, over the howling objections of conservatives, who continued to loathe McCain because of his various apostasies and on the simple grounds that if that many liberals and journalists liked him, something had to be wrong. He considered, for a few fleeting moments, John Kerry's 2004 offer to be his running mate. The love affair with the press only intensified.

Those few who bothered to try to lift the curtain noticed, especially as the Bush years progressed and he began to prepare for 2008, that there were aspects to McCain's personality and career that didn't quite fit the myth. There are three main ones.

First of all, we have the matter of his famous temper. This has received press attention from time to time. But it hasn't really hurt him, because it's so easy to spin "violent temper" into "passionate beliefs" and make it sound positive. In fact it's not too much to say that a trait that might have mortally wounded other politicians has been described as a strength: "The flip side of 'temper' is feistiness," The Economist explained in a typical assessment from 2007.

Brock and Waldman, Welch, and Cliff Schecter each write at length on McCain's anger, cataloguing instances of him popping off at fellow senators and others and holding grudges for long periods of time, and then denying flatly in on-the-record quotes that he ever loses his temper or holds a grudge. Schecter, a freelance liberal commentator who contributes frequently to The Huffington Post, recounts, for the first time, a tale—confirmed to him, he writes, by three Arizona reporters—that in 1992, after Cindy McCain teased her husband about his thinning hair, McCain snapped at her, in front of the reporters and two staffers: "At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you c—." One wonders if on such occasions she reminds her husband who it was that made his political career possible. She has recently called the idea that her husband has a temper "a concoction."

The second issue is more substantive and deals with McCain's policy record—both his votes as a senator and the positions he's taking as presidential candidate. In many matters, it is far from consistent. Schecter's The Real McCain chronicles, in fine-grain detail, McCain's votes and positions, showing that they often seem to reflect hypocrisy, flip-flopping, and pure expediency, rather than the political courage for which he is famous.

In a telling example, McCain has backed off the very issue that first won him such goodwill. For a while after the passage of the McCain-Feingold bill, McCain stuck with the issue, supporting reform of the so-called 527 groups that can spend large sums for advertisements attacking an opposition candidate and not exceed the limits on contributions (the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth were one such). But by July 2006, his old allies on campaign finance—Democratic Senator Russ Feingold, Republican Congressman Chris Shays, and Democratic Congressman Marty Meehan—introduced a bill to shore up the public financing of presidential campaigns. McCain had put his name on essentially the same piece of legislation in 2003. Three years later, it was absent.

Earlier this year, McCain unilaterally informed—by law, he was supposed to ask—the Federal Election Commission that he would not abide by primary spending limits he had previously accepted. He faces potentially severe financial penalties for doing so, although the FEC has become deeply politicized and hamstrung. In any event, McCain doesn't talk much about campaign finance reform today, instead concentrating his rhetoric about reform on the far more conservative-friendly topic of cutting government spending and pork.

Such instances are numerous. He voted against the Bush tax cuts originally; he now supports extending them. On immigration reform—another issue on which his views were welcome in the press and among liberals—he has stopped talking about "comprehensive" reform that would include a path to citizenship for undocumented aliens, and begun emphasizing the border fence. In 1999, he said, "I would not support the repeal of Roe v. Wade, which would then force X number of women in America to [undergo] illegal and dangerous operations." By 2006, he said its repeal "wouldn't bother me any." And last month, McCain's campaign indicated that he would no longer continue his long-held support for adding rape-and-incest exceptions to the GOP platform plank that opposes abortion. This is as extreme a position on abortion as exists in American electoral politics.

Most strikingly of all, the man who was repeatedly tortured by the Vietnamese has backpedaled even on the issue of torture by American officials. In 2005, he inserted language into the Detainee Treatment Act that Bush disliked because it forbade the military to use some methods of interrogation. The next year, after the Supreme Court had rebuked the Bush administration positions on detention in its Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision, McCain fought the administration for long enough to receive favorable attention in the press. But he finally declared—in a much-discussed "compromise" with the administration—that he was satisfied with the infamous Military Commissions Act, which contained provisions that prevented prisoners from challenging the basis of their detention. The bill gave the White House the power to ignore the Geneva Conventions if it wished to.

The record, then, shows five serious shifts of position—four of them on some of the most contentious issues before the country, and one, on campaign finance reform, which was once the accomplishment most closely identified with him. Surely any other politician with this record would have been called a "flip-flopper" (he does appear to have remained consistent on global warming, whose existence he acknowledges and which he says he would address). The book by Brock and Waldman provides much critical insight into the important question of how the press failed to deal with McCain's actions.[3] They note that not only were no accusations of inconsistency made, but by and large the press shielded McCain from any such charges after theMilitary Commissions Act passed:

Yet in the week or so between the announcement of the "compromise" and the more
thorough analyses of the final product, McCain seemed to disappear from the
story. Though he had received reams of praise while the negotiations were going
on, once the bill's details were revealed, hardly anyone in the news media held
McCain accountable for his role in its creation.

There is a final matter about McCain, the new and reinvented McCain, that the press hasn't quite taken in. The McCain of 1999 and 2000 was running a campaign that was also a movement. His most famous quote from those days, which he used repeatedly, invoked the idea of public service and usually went something like this, from a convocation speech at Boston College in 2006:

Those who claim their liberty but not their duty to the civilization that
ensures it, live a half-life, having indulged their self-interest at the cost of
their self-respect. But sacrifice for a cause greater than your self-interest,
and you invest your lives with the eminence of that cause, your self-respect
assured.

This belief was at the core of his earlier campaign. Welch, an editorial-page editor at the Los Angeles Times of libertarian bent and a former editor at Reason magazine, devotes considerable space to exploring this aspect of McCain's professed values. His book is the best of the three. The other two, though useful, would have little rationale if McCain weren't a presidential candidate; but Welch has produced a thorough critique that digs deep into McCain's belief system and will have a shelf life beyond this election cycle.

As a libertarian, Welch finds the above quotation about "sacrifice" monstrous, a prettily packaged recipe for putting the people before the individual and trampling liberty. But it was something that I think many journalists and liberals and especially young people found appealing. David Foster Wallace certainly loved it, and he points out in his essay that the idea was part-and-parcel of the whole McCain package—the straight talk and the POW years conferred upon McCain a legitimacy to demand sacrifice of citizens, and his credentials made the call real and not "just one more piece of the carefully scripted bullshit that presidential candidates hand us as they go about the self-interested business of trying to become" president.

McCain's Web site features a section called "A Cause Greater," with links to volunteer organizations and such, and he still uses the phrase at times. But he's certainly cooled down the inspirational rhetoric aimed particularly at young people (I was struck reading both Welch and Wallace at how much of what they said about the vintage 2000 McCain has been said this time around about Obama). McCain's favorite literary character is Hemingway's romantic adventurer Robert Jordan from For Whom the Bell Tolls. His film hero is Brando's Emiliano Zapata, who walked out into the village plaza alone to meet certain death. McCain says he believes in the "beautiful fatalism" of noble lost causes, and he confounded reporters in 2000 by exhibiting apprehension after his New Hampshire win and relief after his South Carolina defeat. Such responses captivated many people. That McCain is probably still in there somewhere, if you dig deep enough. But the McCain we see publicly now is determined to do anything he has to do to win.

It's probably unlikely that the larger national press will arrive at this interpretation by November. The image of the straight-talking maverick who bled in a cell while Baby Boomers indulged themselves is just too hard-wired into their systems. In addition, McCain, still adept at the seduction of journalists and the self-deprecating witticism, hides his rank ambition better than, say, Hillary Clinton does.

Nevertheless, he has equally evident weaknesses. He is saddled with an unpopular incumbent whom he will nevertheless have to embrace because he'll need every vote he can squeeze out of the 29 percent who still like Bush. The recent Republican losses in special House elections in strong GOP districts in Illinois and Louisiana suggest a badly damaged brand, and McCain has not so far proven himself the kind of leader who can fundamentally redefine his party. Finally, his age might matter. If elected, he will turn seventy-three seven months into his first term. A senior moment or two—further confusing Sunni and Shia, which he's done twice now—would come in handy for his opponent.

But for the most part, the Democrats will have to defeat McCain on substance. They will begin with Iraq. McCain was much criticized for a previous statement that a hundred-year US presence in the country would "be fine with me"; so in a May 15 speech he bowed to political reality. He said that "among the conditions I intend to achieve" would be victory in Iraq, and withdrawal of "most of the service men and women," by 2013. But he presented no analytic vision of how he would accomplish that, and trying to distance himself from Bush's war policy after all this time may anger the neocons in his base more than it placates moderate voters.
His rhetoric about Iran—which inevitably will be a factor in any solution—has been belligerent. He calls it a "rogue state" and has spoken often of "rogue-state rollback," deliberately invoking a word favored by the hardest-line cold warriors; he recently said he never meant by the phrase "that we should go around and declare war." On the Middle East, he said in late April that "people should understand that I will be Hamas's worst nightmare."

On health care, McCain's plan is built around tax credits ($5,000 for families) that would cover less than half the cost of today's average family plan and lead to high deductibles and much greater risk. His economic policies would, if enacted, combine Bush's tax cuts with far more severe spending cuts in a way that could ultimately destabilize Social Security and Medicare, a goal fiscal conservatives have sought for decades; and he recently announced that he would nominate Supreme Court judges like John Roberts and Samuel Alito. So there's plenty for the opposition to work with. Whether these matters will carry more weight than lapel pins or pastors or the ghosts of Hanoi may well be the question of this year's campaign.

—May 15, 2008


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Notes
[1] Drew and Simon & Schuster have reissued Citizen McCain this year with an excellent new introduction by the author that raises all the pertinent questions about McCain today and is well worth reading.
[2] Wallace covered the Straight-Talk Express for Rolling Stone in 2000. His extended essay, "Up, Simba," appears in his Consider the Lobster and Other Essays (Little, Brown, 2005). "Up, Simba" is being reissued this month as a book, with an introduction by Slate editor Jacob Weisberg, under the title McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight-Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking about Hope (Back Bay). This new edition was not yet available at press time.
[3] Since their book's recent publication, Brock and Waldman have added a new chapter on press coverage of McCain, which is available at mediamattersaction.org/freeride/addendum.