The McCain Rage

You can’t blame our presidential candidates for feeling blindsided. For months now, in response to the demand for Ser. Disc. of the Subst. Iss., Gore, Bill Bradley, Steve Forbes, George Bush, Gary Bauer and the rest have been issuing highly detailed position papers and giving lengthy, showcase speeches weighted down with the arcana of tax reform, health care coverage, education funding, and America’s role in the world. And it turns out that what the chattering class really wanted to talk about was . . . clothes.

And temper tantrums. It would be nice to report that all the talk about his temper got John McCain really, really ticked off. But once again the former POW-turned-senator-turned presidential candidate defied conventional expectations. He seemed to be amused.

Rolling down a dismal New Hampshire two-lane in a rented van last week, a staffer handed McCain a fresh column from the New York Daily News’s Lars-Erik Nelson, one of the senator’s thousands of media idolaters. Nelson described an encounter several years ago between McCain and Chuck Grassley, the Republican senator from Iowa.

McCain scanned the first few sentences of the column and started giggling. “That’s a true story,” he said. “We were on that special POW/MIA commission together, and Grassley hardly came to any of the meetings. But suddenly everybody started listening to this guy Garwood.” Bobby Garwood was a former POW widely discredited as a turncoat and opportunist. “I tried to tell them, ‘You can’t believe this guy, he’s done this and this and this.’ But Grassley keeps shoving this piece of paper under my nose, saying, ‘Garwood says this, Garwood says that.’ And finally I got angry and I said ‘You know, I used to think your problem was that you don’t listen. But that’s not it. Your problem is you’re a fucking jerk.'”

McCain giggled again. “I shouldn’t have said it, but, you know, what the hell. Chuck and I are fine. We’re friends.” In the United States Senate, the world’s greatest deliberative body of prima donnas, friends is a term of art, meaning “Our staffs are willing to do business with each other.” (By contrast, good friends means “We are on speaking terms”; he’s an old, dear friend means “We actually are friends.”) According to these definitions, most of McCain’s Senate colleagues are just good friends. But he has made enough genuine enemies, both in and out of the Senate, to have turned the story of his temperament into his campaign’s first difficulty.

Among his enemies is his hometown paper, the Arizona Republic, which published an editorial on Halloween questioning “whether McCain has the temperament . . . we want in the next president of the United States.” The editorial was reprinted two days later in the Union Leader, New Hampshire’s largest newspaper, and as McCain crossed the state last week, fielding questions in half-a-dozen “town hall meetings,” he was asked about it repeatedly.

“Thank you for your question,” he said at a meeting in Hampton. “I was just exploding about that this morning.” He went on to detail his feud with the Republic, which he says dates from a crude cartoon the paper published about his wife’s addiction to painkillers, and then closed with a stirring confession of virtue. “Look, I am a passionate person,” he said. “I feel passionately about injustice. I have an acute sense of right and wrong. I get angry sometimes. I get angry when I see Congress pouring money into weapons systems the Pentagon doesn’t even want while 12,000 brave men and women in our military are on food stamps. I get angry when . . . ” And so on.

This carefully fashioned answer is vintage McCain, a blend of charming self-deprecation and grating sanctimony. And it works. Now is the McCain moment in New Hampshire. With the primary still three months away, his town hall meetings draw enthusiastic crowds of two- to three hundred. At the end of the sessions, after an inevitable standing ovation, dozens of fans line up cradling copies of his book, Faith of My Fathers, now at number five on the New York Times bestseller list. More astonishing — and more alarming for George Bush — a statewide poll last week put McCain within eight points of the front-runner, 38 percent to 30 percent. A few months ago McCain was in single digits in the polls, and he has only now begun airing TV ads.

McCain is bringing to New Hampshire the same persona that has for 15 years rendered the Washington press corps gaga with admiration and affection. (The press still loves him, by the way, and it’s not hard to see why. The attention he lavishes on reporters is unprecedented for a Washington poobah. When I traveled with him last week he took to introducing me to his audiences — identifying me variously as a prisoner from a work-release program, a card-carrying member of the Communist party, and a freelance reporter for Hustler magazine.) In place of the standard stump speech that most candidates offer up, he makes a few minutes of remarks and then takes questions for an hour or more — a bit of implied flattery perfectly fitted to the pampered voters of New Hampshire, and a marked contrast to the question-averse front-runner.

From event to event the questions are remarkably uniform. Medicare, the price of prescription drugs, gun control, military spending, education, Social Security — having survived more than 50 town hall meetings in the last three months, McCain has prefabricated a brief response for most of the issues that arise in a happy and prosperous state. Some of these responses are innovative, if questionable. Unlike Bush, he has not assembled a shadow government of policy wonks, choosing instead to rely on his Senate staff to generate positions. On the issue of prescription drug prices, for example, which are far higher here than in any other developed country: “I kept getting asked all these questions about it, so I went back to our guys and said, ‘Hey, we’ve got to come up with something here.’ So we kicked around some things for a couple of hours.” What they came up with is a plan for the government to provide money to old people who can’t afford the drugs — a simple, straightforward, and possibly bankrupting solution. He booms the idea at every meeting, though he says, “We haven’t costed it out.”

Most of his prefab answers, however, serve to underscore the unremarked secret of John McCain, which is that, stripped of a few complications such as his support for tobacco legislation and especially campaign finance reform, he is a remarkably conventional and cautious politician, of the sub genus Conservative Republican. And like all conventional politicians, he is expert at fudging his positions to the point of incoherence.

On gun control, he announces himself a “strong supporter of the Second Amendment to the Constitution” while simultaneously supporting “whatever further constitutional measures we can have to keep guns away from those who shouldn’t have them.” He admits to being “proudly pro-life,” while saying that “everyone — pro-life or pro-choice — has the same goal, which is to eliminate abortion.” This will be news, of course, to Kate Michelman and the National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League, but so far the point is palatable to garden-variety pro-choicers in New Hampshire. He promises to rebuild the armed forces and cut the military budget by at least $ 6 billion.

McCain criticizes the Clinton administration for not being tough enough on China but thinks its “ruthless dictators” should be admitted to the World Trade Organization. He wants to de-fund the Department of Education down to 10 percent of its current funding, paying out the rest of the money directly to the states “with no strings attached”; he would meanwhile attach “incentives” to encourage the states to test and fire incompetent teachers, adopt merit pay, enforce standards, and institute school-choice vouchers. “Incentives” are apparently different from “strings.” At every stop last week he bemoaned the growing disparity in incomes. “My friends, that is wrong. We must do something to correct that disparity.” And that something would be? “We need to take a hard look at it. Make some tough choices.”

His precise positions are further obscured by his passionate advocacy of campaign finance reform. Over the last several weeks the issue has become the centerpiece of his candidacy, and it reaps applause by the bushel from New Hampshire audiences. He calls it a “gateway” issue — the primary problem which, once resolved, will open the way to solving others. The influence of “special interests” has become for McCain a kind of unified field theory to explain all the ills of modern government. On issue after issue, he returns to the need for getting “Big Money” out of politics.

“Do I favor a flat tax?” he asked rhetorically last week. “Of course, I favor a flat tax. I think everybody should be able to fill out their tax form on a postcard: one or two or three rates, a few deductions for home mortgage, charitable deductions.

“But it’s not going to happen unless we get rid of those people who make those six- and seven-figure contributions. The tax code is 44,000 pages long. And it got that way because the special interests rule in Washington, and your interests are submerged. We fix that and we can have a flat tax.”

The same political miracle would occur, says McCain, in health care. “You and I tonight,” he told an enthusiastic audience in Amherst, “we could sit down around this table and figure out a patients’ bill of rights in a couple of hours. But it’s not going to happen in Washington. It’s not going to happen because the trial lawyers bought out the Democrats and the HMOs have the Republicans.

“Who rules in Washington? Who rules? It’s the special interests who rule in Washington.”

There are ironies here, not the least of which is that campaign finance reform gives McCain a reputation as a courageous plain-talker even as it relieves him of the need to take specific positions on, say, tax reform or health care reform. Another is that the McCain moment has arrived because the other mainstream challengers to Bush — Lamar Alexander, Elizabeth Dole, and Dan Quayle — were unable to raise the money necessary to run a strong campaign. McCain, meanwhile, has raised more than $ 10 million, much of it from industries he oversees as chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee. At a town hall meeting last week, a college student read a two-page statement challenging him on the point. McCain’s reaction was characteristic. He handed the kid a microphone and asked him to re-read the statement — “I don’t think they could hear you in the back.”

After campaign finance reform, McCain’s message tends to trail off. McCain tells audiences the success of his campaign will rest on his ability to “articulate my vision for America,” in the manner of FDR, John Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan. That vision is indeed hard to articulate. Once money has been drained from politics, he says, Americans will be called to “a cause greater than their self-interest.”

“People say there are no great causes left in America,” he said. “I say, wherever there’s a hungry child, there’s a great cause. Wherever there’s a senior citizen without shelter, there’s a great cause.” And beyond these acts of individual kindness, there is always public service, which McCain terms “the noblest calling” — though this might sound odd coming from a public servant who is trying to convince his audience that the government is a sewer.

Opponents of campaign finance reform argue, of course, that political conflicts are at bottom the consequence of genuine ideological differences, to which the “special interests” have, predictably enough, attached their Big Money. Resolving these differences is called politics. But McCain offers his audiences a vision of politics drained not only of money but of politics, too, in which differences disappear in the universal willingness “to get the job done,” to use a favorite phrase. It is a fantasy of Perot-like dimensions, and it may indeed be suited for these wan, de-ideologized days of Late Clintonism. In that case, the McCain moment will last longer than anyone now expects.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.