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By Jack Nichols
The Log Cabin Republicans have already provided John McCain with $40,000 in campaign
contributions. On the surface, he's the singular Republican presidential candidate who seems, his reputed temper notwithstanding, to pass muster as a human being. And it's becoming clearer now to Republican primary voters that George W. Bush is a moron, cursed with an inferior brain and an unfortunate physical likeness to televangelist Pat Robertson, whose favor he curries. McCain remains Bush's only real rival.
McCain, no doubt, has presence, even though some report that in person he looks frail. Such a presence gets augmented somehow by the fact that he's a war hero, that he suffered imprisonment and wounding at the hands of the North Vietnamese. Photos of McCain taken in the early days of his military service show, without a shadow of a doubt, that he was extraordinarily handsome. Truth is that the young Dwight Eisenhower wasn't a bad looker, either. But handsome-hunk war heroes, while dandy as eye candy, don't necessarily make Grade-A politicians.
McCain hopes, by reason of his military background, to stand tall next to candidate George W., and to hold cards that neither of his potential Democratic rivals carries. He comes in first, many assume, in the 'character' race, having risked his life and limb for his country, so to speak. This ought to be enough, almost, to assure him a win in the New Hampshire primary.
Faith of My Fathers—McCain's autobiography—details his Vietnamese imprisonment. It may seem reasonable to admire him because of his courage alone. But courage, like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. It is more often the immediate response of an individual to circumstances that appears heroic to those with more timid mindsets, but to the actor himself is simply perceived as the rather ordinary right thing to do. This is not to denigrate McCain's sacrifice in North Vietnam. But to those with only a faint memory of the war that the United States waged and lost there, McCain's current refusal to regard it as unholy and unjust spares him from their more critical appraisals. Secretary of Defense McNamara, responsible under Lyndon Johnson for waging the Vietnam conflict, wrote a confessional only a few years ago admitting he'd told Johnson—as early as 1967-- that the Vietnam war could not be won. Johnson turned a deaf ear to McNamara but refused to run again for the presidency in 1968, feeling he'd already been beaten by a war he should never have waged. But he didn't tell a soul what McNamara had confided to him, while in that ten-year conflict, fifty thousand Americans—approximately the same number killed annually in automobiles—failed to return to the States alive. Johnson was guilty, in other words, of genocide.
Just what does that quote mean? It means that John McCain seeks his realities in the past, that his long ago wartime experience will always thoroughly color his responses to current events. This is, from my standpoint, a scary prospect. My politics demands answers built on these times, not on knee-jerk reactions to long-ago occurrences. McCain gave a clear indication during the 1999 Kosovo bombings that he wanted ground troops to invade, a solution Clinton adamantly avoided. The difference between McCain and Eisenhower, I'd say, is that President Eisenhower—who'd once commanded America's forces in Europe during World War II—knew the follies—through rich experience-- of too much reliance on military force. He'd warned—in his last speech to the American people prior to taking leave of office—that the military-industrial complex had become what he called the greatest threat to democracy. Military types like McCain disparaged that speech, however, saying it had been written by somebody else and that Eisenhower hadn't actually realized what he was saying. True, McCain has had some minor dealings with the Log Cabin Republicans and he hardly seems to be anti-gay on a personal level. Even so, he would not want to accept homosexuals working beside his dear fellow soldiers. He'd do nothing to open up the Armed Forces to openly gay servicemembers. If he lacks the vision to see patriots who are gay working side by side with others in his beloved military bastions, I, for one, can't begin to visualize McCain seated in the Oval Office. |
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