McCain’s Political Style
Joining in this debate on campaigning and honor with Ross and James a little late, I want to go back a few months to the time when Obama had just wrapped up the nomination to recall Obama’s numerous shifts and flips on various issues, including the violation of his campaign pledge to accept public financing. While McCain was not alone in ridiculing Obama on his changed public financing position, McCain did express his disappointment about Obama breaking his word. I suppose the true cynic would regard this, like all of McCain’s invocations of honor and integrity, to be just another maneuver in McCain’s never-ending pursuit of more obnoxious moral posturing, but it gets at something fundamental about how McCain has sought to present himself.
McCain exploits the concept of honor and frames every disagreement in terms of honor and dishonor, so it is particularly revealing that he is willing to launch dishonest and dishonorable attacks, because this drives home how much his concept of honor is intertwined with his own visceral reactions to opponents and with his self-interest. Contrary to the conventional pundit interpretation that McCain has “sold his soul” and abandoned his once-honorable former self, the thing to understand about McCain’s lies in this campaign is that he invests these misrepresentations with his utter contempt for his opponents. From McCain’s perspective, this infusion of contempt seems to transform shoddy, baseless attacks that disgrace him into indictments of the other politicians (e.g., Romney wants to surrender in Iraq, Obama would rather lose a war than lose an election). If McCain thinks he is always honorable, resistance to him and his ideas must ultimately be villainous and vicious, and we have seen him deploy his perverse, solipsistic ends-justify-the-means concept of honor against Romney and now against Obama. McCain’s admirers have largely missed this either because they happened to agree with McCain on policy or because they have mistaken his language of honor and principle to refer to the meanings that they attach to these terms.
In any public confrontation that McCain has, he strives to show that he has kept faith with the public and his opponents have betrayed the public trust. This isn’t because McCain is actually some devoted servant of the public interest, but because he has an irrepressible self-righteous streak that he thinks permits him to impugn the integrity of anyone who gets on his nerves or gets in his way. Hence it was not enough for him to find fault with action or inaction by the SEC–Chris Cox must have betrayed the public trust. Because McCain’s views are visceral, not intellectual, and he is not interested in policy detail, everything is a morality play, and it goes without saying that he thinks he is the hero.
As he said countless times during the primaries, he was not interested in winning “in the worst way,” and there were things that he was not going to compromise in the process. This was one reason why many misguided people believed that an Obama v. McCain election would be a high-minded, respect-filled affair, and it is why many of his former admirers have begun lamenting the “changed” McCain. Because both were basing their candidacies on biography and character to such a great degree, I was sure that the campaign would get quite nasty, and so it has. The important thing about McCain’s lying about Obama and his positions, which he has been doing on and off for months, is not that it marks some great break with a previously honorable campaign style, but that it reveals the completely opportunistic approach to campaigning–and policymaking, for that matter–that McCain has embraced his entire career.
Update: It seems that Chait and I have come to much the same conclusion independently.
McCain set himself up for all of this. When you profess to be the straight talker, then it is hard to complain when the press holds you to that standard.
‘including the violation of his campaign pledge to accept public financing. ‘
Correct me if I’m wrong but Obama said he would public funding if the republican candidate agreed to also. McCain didn’t, right?
Well, rawshark, Obama pledged to work with the GOP nominee to enable both of them to do public financing. McCain did take public financing, but indicated that he wasn’t going to curb the third party attack ads (as in, Swift Boaters and 527s, not Greens or Libertarians).
So, I think you can argue that Obama didn’t work as hard as he could have to come to an agreement, but it’s not a transparent flip-flop like, say, McCain on immigration or tax cuts, or Obama on FISA.
I will again make the point that Obama has much more detailed and developed policy proposals than McCain, who is running 100% on Honor Patriotism Glory biography.
As Josh Marshall put it a while back, McCain is always certain that he is right, and that only the corrupt and self-interested oppose him. The problem is, there’s no way to predict what he’ll think next month, as what he thinks now doesn’t have much to do with what he thought last month.
rawshark,
McCain did accept public funding. He can not raise any money for himself from the GOP convention through election day, although he can raise money for a “hybrid fund” essentially a joint partnership between his campaign and the RNC. There is not a huge amount of difference, though he will not to have to spend much in the way of face time between now and Nov. doing fundraisers. The $84 he has received in federal funds is probably pretty close to his upper limit in fund-raising potential anyway.
I will again make the point that Obama could have dissertation-length policy papers and that wouldn’t be why 90-95% of his supporters back him. Biography and character (including his judgement) are central to Obama’s candidacy, perhaps second only to McCain’s virtually substance-free campaign.
‘So, I think you can argue ‘
I see your point but just to make clear I’m not arguing anything. I’m on a fact finding mission. I don’t know much at all about campaign financing.
‘I will again make the point that Obama could have dissertation-length policy papers and that wouldn’t be why 90-95% of his supporters back him. ‘
I think the percentages are a touch high but I mostly agree. In my case I’m a registered republican voting for the letter D as president. Normally I just reach for the lever with an R near it but lately I’ve come to the conclusion that’s really stupid. I also want to keep free market supply siders out of the oval for a spell. Regulated supply siding I can handle, it’s the removing of the oversight or just the appointment of blind mice to head regulatory agencies that I need a break from. Um…I mean from which I need a break. No more Michael Browns either.
Obama could have dissertation-length policy papers and that wouldn’t be why 90-95% of his supporters back him.
Accepting that for the sake of argument, I wonder if it says more about Obama’s appeal, the way the media covers politics, or the intelligence of the electorate.
It’s certainly true that many Obama supporters, like most voters altogether, don’t have a full grasp of all his policy positions. The issue of character, however, tends to fill in many of those blanks, in the sense that most of Obama’s supporters have a sense that he has the intelligence, the judgment, the prudence, and the openness to come to generally right conclusions about most policy issues. THe issue of trust here is what really counts, and it is why many Obama supporters are very enthusiastic about him. Voters can’t all be policy wonks, they have to develop a sense of trust in the candidate to work through the issues and come to intelligent, workable solutions that will bring about positive outcomes. In Obama, they see someone with the right character and qualities to work through these issues for them, because most voters simply can’t do that, even if Obama did write thorough policy papers. The general take on Obama is that he really does know how to listen to and make use of expert opinion and research, rather than simply imposing his own ideas onto everything in the political landscape, and it is this quality that gives people a sense of “hope”. It isn’t a blind hope, in that it’s based on an assessment of his character, but it’s not a highly informed hope based on extensive analysis of his policy positions, at least not for 90% of his supporters.
It’s worth saying that in some sense the same applies to McCain’s supporters, except that they think the Presidency requires a different kind of character to come to the right decisions. It’s not the kind of character I approve of, however, which becomes evident, I think, in both the way he approaches decision-making and the actual decisions he comes to.