The corporate media, particularly the electronic division, keeps repeating certain shorthand, whether it’s true or not. One example, on display almost daily, is that "John McCain’s the maverick." I’ve gone to great lengths on this blog to disprove that notion. McCain is a fairly conventional "conservative" who once or twice bucked his party when it didn’t really matter. You can check his voting record. This is no secret.
McCain’s utter hostility to helping the state he claims to represent deal with the problems of rapid urbanization and funding the illegal alien surge that was so profitable to Republican businessmen shows how he will govern domestically. Likewise his "straight shooter integrity" image is shattered by the facts, from the Keating Five onward. (Check the McCain File to your right for more).
Now two more "givens" are in the teleprompter scrips. First is the idea that McCain is a national security expert, ready to be commander in chief on "day one" — Sen. Clinton helpfully said it herself. The second is that McCain is a "Theodore Roosevelt Republican."
There’s just one problem: Neither is true.
First, national security and commander in chief. For all the years McCain spent in the Congress and babbling in the national press (while his "home" state drifted into crisis), McCain eagerly embraced the cause of war with Iraq. This proven expert seemed to know little of Iraq’s complex and bloody history in Islam, tribal conflicts, geopolitical fragility. He did nothing as an army built for the Cold War was sent into an insurgency lacking even adequate equipment.
Contrary to the media narrative, he was slow and late to come out against Rumsfeld, who was the scapegoat anyway as the real war power rested with the vice president. McCain backed the escalation, which the media are cowed into calling a "surge," and now they all say it was a success. Yet the Iraqi government has not made the political progress the escalation was intended to achieve. It’s a no-brainer that more American forces, combined with paying off certain tribes and the completion of ethnic cleansing in many parts of Iraq would temporarily tamp down civil war. But the political progress has been nil, except for the inexorable drift to Iran. Now the Iraqi government wants us out.
McCain has been in lockstep with the "conservatives" in stonewalling investigations into pre-war intelligence, the monumental scandals involving private contractors, no-bid contracts for big oil companies, the little matter of subverting the Constitution, etc. He was against torture, until he changed his mind to secure the nomination. He ignored the mess in Afghanistan until Obama forced him to recognize it. He has been oblivious to the strain on American forces worldwide, and was against the New GI Bill for good measure. Gen. Wesley Clark, a Vietnam combat infantry hero and former Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, was absolutely right to say that McCain’s military service, however honorable, didn’t prepare him for the chief executive’s office. And the whole idea that Americans unquestioningly embrace militarism is unprecedented in our history (Had Kennedy listened to his generals in the Cuban Missile Crisis, we would have had nuclear holocaust).
McCain’s foreign-policy gaffes are almost daily occurrences, yet the media still pronounce him an expert. It’s Obama who has to prove himself.
Then, defaming Theodore Roosevelt. As with Scotty in the prelude to the bar fight in the Star Trek "Trouble with Tribbles" episode…now they’ve gone too far.
TR was one of the most remarkable men ever to inhabit the White House. Among other things, he was an intellectual, a policy wonk and into everything. Had the Internet been around then, TR would have had the first iPhone, the first sleek Mac, and would have spent hours online every day. McCain admits he doesn’t even know how to use a computer. Learning would probably be dangerous, given his famous temper.
When TR talked about the president’s "bully pulpit," he didn’t mean he wanted a bully at the pulpit.
More to the point: TR was complicated. but in general he was the enemy of the corporate oligarchy that ran the Republican Party; not sometimes, but almost always. He was an accidental president, and the old guard always hated him. He was remarkably forward-looking, foreseeing the need for government to offset the massive power of wealth and industrialism in favor of the people. He built a great Navy, but also mediated peace — winning the Nobel Peace Prize. He was a genuine conservationist with millions of acres of national parks and forests to prove it. He was a giant of the Progressive Movement. As McKinley had been a 19th century man, TR, taking office in 1901, was in every way a man of the new age. He was 42 when he became president.
This ought to be a teaching moment, where Americans would learn about TR and realize that McCain and today’s GOP have nothing in common with him. Republicans always try to play the TR card — George W. Bush also said he would be a TR Republican. Bush, in his destructiveness and obliviousness, is sui generis, maybe a mix of Warren Harding and the Democrat James Buchanan. McCain partly hearkens back to the Republican presidents of the late 19th century, who solidified the oligarchy’s grip on government power — except none of them wanted constant war and world empire (even McKinley tried to avoid war with Spain). TR was not a conservative. He loathed them.
Which brings us to the central point: We don’t need a backward-looking, road-blocking president, however funny the press things him, however smashing Cindy looks, however much he plays to our fears and prejudices. TR would take about a day to get up to speed in the "bully" 21st century, quickly dominating YouTube, while rebuilding our military, making peace, busting the new trusts and taking on global warming. But we don’t have him. President-elect McCain has no learning curve. To have funded it would have been "pork," don’t you see?
At some point the media will have to take note of the gaps in McCain’s “grasp” of foreign policy. Flubs are one thing but McCain shows almost no depth of understanding about ANY aspect of America’s soft power or its capacity for genuine leadership. Rather, it’s as if the one arrow in his quiver is nuclear-tipped.
Bellicosity usually sells in the Daddy Party but the cost is skyrocketing. Our ability to project military power comes at the price of genuine democracy at home and its creative energy. If America seems to be in a late-empire phase, McCain perfectly personifies its values and myopia.
A younger McCain might have surprised us with counterintuitive initiatives. But his vaunted maverick persona is thin and getting thinner. He doesn’t have Nixon’s brilliance and he certainly doesn’t have JFK’s charisma. What he does have is a reputation for ad hoc policy shifts as new realities emerge. The problem is that he’s more reactive in this capacity that leading.
A McCain presidency would likely more be chaotic than creative. It would reflect McCain himself – crusty, temperamental, impatient. Certainly, this country and the world would welcome a change from the Bush/Cheney darkness. McCain’s problem with the “base” would ensure a schizophrenic presidency, initiating progress in one area while throwing red meat at the wingnuts in another.
In the end, McCain probably won’t get the chance. People buy the spin that he’s presidential but the storm clouds are more here at home than abroad. McCain’s own Phil Gramminess is a fatal flaw when people see their neighbors’ houses going into foreclosure. It may not be 1929 but it’s scary enough.
The only way to evaluate whether someone would make a good Commander in Chief is to define the qualifications first. So far as I can see, there are two basic categories:
(1) Persons with extensive, high-level military command experience;
(2) Persons with a sophisticated grasp of geopolitical realities and excellent strategic judgment.
Of these, the second is easily the most important, since the office of the President of the United States is far broader in its scope and requirements than the task of CIC, and U.S. presidents have traditionally been civilians, not career military officers.
Since it is the latter who should actually prosecute a war, what is really needed in a CIC is someone with the ability to seek, take, and incorporate the advice of his military command staff, while formulating defense policies that are wise and in the best interests of the United States — not just abstractly, but concretely within the context of contemporary events.
This is especially important because the U.S. Congress has for many decades abdicated its responsibility as the constitutionally authorized declarer of war, allowing the Executive to arrogate this right in practice.
Remarkably, given all the media hype, McCain seems to possess neither type of qualification.
In his early career, McCain spent his time as a naval pilot, neither familiar with ground operations nor occupying a command position (of any breadth or major importance) in the Navy. As a pilot, his view of war was, in the main, a comparatively remote one.
After being shot-down, he spent years as a prisoner of the Vietnamese where he lost touch entirely with military operations. It should be pointed out, with respect but firmly, that being shot down, interned, and tortured is not a qualification for military leadership in general or for the position of Commander In Chief in particular.
After the Vietnam War, he did attend the National War College. However, he was then assigned command of a training squadron in Florida. Regardless of his success in managing to instill discipline and morale into this unit, it can scarcely be said that supervision of a domestic-based, squadron level unit constitutes special qualification for advanced military leadership positions. He occupied this post for less than two years.
McCain then served as the Navy’s liaison to the U.S. Senate, offering constituent services, acting as a go-between among legislators, the military, and lobbyists, and organizing overseas entertainment junkets. He was never given a major command, and retired with the naval rank of Captain, which he obtained while working in the liaison office. (In the Navy, Captain is a senior officer grade equivalent to the rank of Colonel in the Army, Marines, and Air Force.)
So much for military leadership experience.
Mr. Talton has already pointed out, with admirable clarity, McCain’s failings in the second category. I would, however, like to append a few remarks which bear directly on this issue.
One would have hoped that McCain’s POW experience would have sensitized him to the realities of war and made him highly circumspect when considering the use of military force and the deployment of U.S. troops. And though it is true that his views on torture are intelligently in opposition to those of the Bush administration, and his attitude towards veterans rights and care seems likewise laudable, he doesn’t appear particularly reluctant to put U.S. soldiers in harm’s way. His attitude seems to be that he’s paid his dues, and that as military men they should be willing to do the same.
More importantly, McCain may be suffering from a kind of “loser’s syndrome” in which every foreign war, as a surrogate for Vietnam, represents a chance to redeem the United States (and therefore in some indirect fashion to justify his own terrible suffering) — if it can be decisively won. His views on Vietnam seem to indicate that he believes that war was winnable, if only the United States had prosecuted the war more aggressively and persistently.
This, by extention, is the attitude brought to every subsequent conflict, even (or especially) those involving a protracted guerrilla insurgency and U.S. occupation in a country whose citizens (by and large) regard our army as unwanted foreign meddlers, occupiers, or even oppressors.
To sum up, McCain has no qualifying military leadership experience for the position of Commander in Chief; his grasp of geopolitical realities is vague and confused; his strategic assessments are skewed by neo-conservative dogma and by personal needs from a past which haunts him to this day; despite his lack of experience, he’s ready to tell his military staff how to prosecute the war rather than taking their advice; and his legendary temper may not be what is wanted in the supreme military commander of all U.S. forces and weapons systems.
So, if the U.S. public really is tired of the Bush administration’s war policies, McCain would make about the worst possible choice for CIC since his own tenure would represent (at least) four more years of much the same thing.
Note: McCain’s boosters routinely claim that he was behind the “surge” strategy implemented by General Petraeus, but apparently this represents more confusion on their part, since the point of the surge was the redeployment of troops away from fortified bases and into “small, local groups closely partnered with Iraqi military and police units, with each unit permanently assigned to an area and working its ‘beat’ “. The additional troops were necessary to permit these thinly spread forces to operate on a block-by-block basis in Baghdad.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/2007/01/dont-confuse-the-surge-with-th/
McCain’s early calls for “more troops”, on the other hand, were simply an expression of his personal military dogma and, so far as I know, did not at the time suggest doing anything with these additional troops than was already being done. He didn’t argue for a shift to the unconventional operations of what has come to be known as the “surge”, but simply advocated pouring more troops in. (And why anyone would expect an ex-naval pilot to be an expert on ground-based counter-insurgency operations, I’m sure I don’t know.) How McCain later represented his earlier remarks is another story.