Sure, I’ll admit it: I fell asleep during Senator McCain’s speech last night.
I mean I tried, I really did. I would pause the TiVo, get up and check e-mail, grab a drink, then sit back down, and a couple minutes later there I’d be, nodding off again. Pause, stand, calisthenics, acupuncture, walking across hot coals, sit, and sleep.
Which doesn’t mean it was a bad speech; but if he wanted to contrast his style with Obama’s, he definitely accomplished his goal.
Still. I heard enough to get a decent impression of what he was on about, plus of course there has been plenty of summarization and analysis since then. So with the Republican National Convention now over (and the hundreds arrested soon to be released, we hope), a few thoughts.
Almost without exception, every speech I heard was obsessed with the notion of character, specifically John McCain’s character. We heard the Hanoi Hilton story every single time; we heard the line “I’d rather lose an election than a war” every single time, including from McCain himself. McCain, everyone insisted, has been tested in ways few other Americans have ever been tested, and he stood his ground, passed that most horrific of tests without blinking.
(By the way, the New York Times had a startling portrait of Senator McCain on yesterday’s front page, which you should be able to find here.)
The Republicans love to do this, they love to make elections entirely about character. “McCain has already been tested, we know he has the character to be President.” But eight years ago, that election too was about character, according to the Republicans: “George W. Bush is a man of upright moral character who will restore dignity to the White House.”
And you know, I am still favorably impressed with President Bush’s upright moral character. (Sure he lied us into a war and has an unfortunate fondness for torture and other outright betrayals of civil rights; but as a family man he’s terrrrrific!) But in the end, Mr. Bush was incompetent, and we have all suffered the innumerable consequences of his incompetence. Now Bill Clinton, he definitely suffered (and suffers) some character flaws--but you can't really say that he was incompetent. The results of his stewardship of the nation are too plain.
So I just can’t bring myself to care too much about McCain’s candidacy if he bases his qualifications on his character. Certainly I admire his character, enormously--I don’t for a second imagine that I’d have measured up half as well under those conditions in Hanoi. But competence does matter, and judgment. Now you can’t win an election purely on competence, as Michael Dukakis proved years ago. But judgment matters too, and about the only time any Republicans spoke about McCain’s judgment was when they talked about the surge.
(I have a question about the surge. Is there any possibility that the insurgents, and the rebels, and the Sunni thises and Shi’a thatses, have realized that if they just lie low for a while, the Americans will go away and then they can fight it out unimpaired? I mean, that’s what I would do.)
But here’s the thing. “I would rather lose an election than a war.” Upright, forthright, unbendable, unbowed John McCain. But I would submit that the selection of the person who will be, as the phrase has it, a heartbeat away from the presidency, that matters just as much as the war question. Particularly when you’ve got a 72 year old candidate who’s been through hell and back, and has this recurring cancer problem.
And when he made that selection, reports agree that he really wanted either Joe Lieberman or Tom Ridge. Both of whom are experienced men with qualifications up the wahoo, and while I have political issues with both, I don’t doubt their essential fitness to do the job. If the question of who might succeed the President bears any weight, either of those would have been admirable choices. Plus they were the two closest to McCain’s heart, the guys he really truly wanted for the job.
But neither of them was acceptable to the hardcore right-wingers who have recently succeeded in shaping a rather frightening party platform (a PDF is available here), and so McCain went with Governor Palin, whose fitness to be President I am not alone in doubting. In short: when tested on a crucial question, McCain went with the political choice rather than stand his ground.
As I say. The Republicans have made this character argument before, George W. Bush being their most recent example, and now they’re following exactly the same playbook all over again. It was also fascinating to watch on Tuesday, when President Bush spoke and was roundly praised and applauded; then only a short while later, other speakers got up to talk about how things have been going badly for the last eight years and how McCain will set the ship right again, and the delegates applauded and cheered that, too. And have you seen Lieberman’s 2006 speech in fulsome praise of, yes, Barack Obama?
To hell with character. Give me somebody who can do the damn job, paired with a running mate who can also do the job. Is it so much to ask?
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