The Crossed Pond

A letter I sent to Andrew Sullivan, based in large part on this letter from a reader he posted, as well as a conversation Rojas began here.

—————

Hi Andrew

I’m inspired to write you based on the few reader emails you’ve posted on the McCain-Paul thing.

Like a lot of folks, I have a huge amount of respect for John McCain. I was an ardent and proud supporter of his bid for the nomination in 2000, have looked to him for those rare moments of true leadership from within the Republican party, and, like you, have been floored by the diamond-in-the-rough honor and decency of his answers in the debates on a number of questions. What’s more, I think he’d make a great President, maybe the best of anybody currently running if you’re talking about who would be most effective in the day-to-day of the job.

Here’s why I won’t be voting for him.

McCain is a man of immense gravitas and integrity, as your reader notes here. Nobody, I think, doubts that for a second.

The question becomes to what extent are you voting for a man, in a cult-of-personality sense, and to what extent you’re voting for a direction, for a real change. In some lucky cases, of course, those things might coalesce, as with, arguably, Barack Obama. I don’t think that’s true of McCain, and the important question to ask is to what ends he’d use his immense credibility, and to what degree the nature of Presidential politics, or the Presidency itself, would bend that.

On torture, it’s without question that he’s way out front. But Ron Paul is equally vehement here. Does anybody question his commitment to rolling back the Bush regime of torture, extraordinary rendition, black site prisons, dumping human beings and American citizens down a black hole, warrantless wiretapping, and on and on? What’s more, Ron’s been there all along, vigorously working against all those efforts at the time. Nobody can question that Ron, of anybody running, stands as a clear message in favor of civil liberties, of freedom over security. What’s more, he’s not doing it cafeteria cart style, as is sometimes true of McCain.

Here’s a point to consider, on this score: there is nobody in America more responsible for the suspension of habeas corpus than John McCain. Not George W. Bush, not Bill Frist, not Harry Reid, not Arlen Specter. That travesty, I hate to say, belongs squarely on McCain’s shoulders. The administration was pushing for a version of the Military Commissions Act, and Democrats looked set to oppose it, and there were even rumblings that moderate Republicans would join them. In stepped John McCain, with his enormous credibility, which he then used to broker a compromise and diffuse the opposition. Almost single-handedly, because it’s John McCain, he managed to get through a “compromise” that was WORSE than the original offer, and one that, along with many other terrible things, in one pen stroke destroyed the entire basis of Western justice in America.

Nobody questioned McCain’s motives at the time. We all felt more comfortable when he stepped in. But nobody, too, can question the result. John McCain, coated those things with milk and honey and fed it to the American Congress. It would be very easy for him to undo the damage, from within the Republican caucus, by throwing his weight and his integrity in a huge way behind, say, Arlen Specter or Chris Dodd’s Restore Habeas Corpus bills (or Ron Paul’s numerous efforts on this score). It has never been beyond his power to use his immense credibility to effect real change on this issue. But he hasn’t, choosing instead to joust with rhetorical windmills while his legislative office appears curiously silent.

It was much the same problem with McCain-Feingold, a seemingly well-intentioned piece of legislation pushed through on force of personality alone that nevertheless was a huge blow to free speech and an administrative boondoggle. Same with many other encroachments on civil liberties under the Bush administration. He was right there with everybody else on the Patriot Act, warrantless wiretapping, all that. That we believe he’s better than all that is part of what makes it so hard to swallow.

Consider too Iraq. I greatly respect McCain’s criticisms of the execution of the war, when they were live. Except he curiously shut them down when it counted most, around 2004, choosing instead to effortlessly pivot to a Bush and even Rumsfeld booster, in the time when America needed his leadership most. He put partisanship over what, by his own admission, he knew to be right.

Nor has he ever been above painting opposition to the war as un-American, opponents of the war as anti-troops, and if you think a John McCain nomination would move us past the 2002 stage of things, you just haven’t been listening, or have allowed your personal respect for the man to overshadow what is a pretty clear rhetorical record. If you think the stab at Ron Paul in the Republican debate was a mere slip, and not a conscious strategy that he’s sure to deploy through the entirety of the general election and beyond, again, you’re fooling yourself. If he’s comparing a second tier primary opponent to Hitler, think of what’s in store for us if he’s in a dogfight against Barack Obama for 10 months.

What you and your readers missed in that debate that struck me the most though was his answer, unsolicited, on Vietnam. It amounted to “We would have won Vietnam if it hadn’t been for all the damn anti-war Americans”. What a startling, frightening thing to have our potential commander in chief, at this point, believe and absolutely take to heart. It is apparently American voters, not American commanders or civilian leadership, that lose us wars, and the parallel between that and the current conflict in Iraq could not have been more clear, or intentional, on his part.

Make no mistake, John McCain will be tied to a permanent occupation of Iraq in a way that nobody but George W. Bush is. If the Republicans nominate or if America elects John McCain for President, anything but “full speed ahead” is, simply put, entirely struck from the list of options, yanked entirely off the table. Because some appreciate his too-little-too-late rightness on the surge, we would essentially be voting for not just a continuation of Bush policy, but a massive expansion of it, a marriage to it. Again, withdraw, even the consideration of it, is 100% off the table as an option if McCain is President, and even bringing it up is grounds for cheap ad hominems about your commitment to our soldiers and our country.

Forgive me, but the amount of fatigue I have with that is beyond words.

Another point is McCain is the opposite of “Goodbye to All That”. He’s still fighting Vietnam, taking potshots at Woodstock, reveling in bashing all the damn hippies of the 60s and 70s and their analogues today. He’s as mired in the Baby Boomer battleground as anybody. Go re-listen to his convention speech in 2004 if you want more examples of that.

Finally, as I alluded to before, where has McCain been when we needed him? Where was he in 2004? I’m not saying he should have stabbed Bush in the back, but he needn’t have thrown his immense weight behind what even he had conceded, months earlier, was a failing administration. To extend that into the future, is there any doubt that if Rudy Giuliani is the nominee running against Barack Obama, that McCain will once again throw his immense integrity and credibility and time and energy towards getting Giuliani elected?

Look, no candidate is perfect, but McCain is far, far closer to it than most. He’s easily my second choice, and there is no third choice. I would be proud, in many ways, were he my President.

But at the end of the day, I’m tired, Andrew, of the direction of the GOP. McCain deserves all the credit in the world for his heroics on torture, but voting for him is still a vote to continue down the road the GOP is currently on. Continue with a terrorist-slash-liberal hating pro-war do-or-die attitude, continue to stay mired in a generational war with no more relevance, continue to confuse war-support with patriotism, continue to put partisanship above ideology, continue to suck up to Christianists and to suck back your principles when they conflict with that, continue to divide to conquer.

Ron Paul is the only candidate running within the GOP that offers a clear, no-mistaking-it rejection of all that. He’s the only candidate in the Republican primary you can vote for if you’re interested in voting for a real conservatism of hope. He’s the only way to register your disgust with the direction the party, in part under McCain’s leadership, has gone. What’s more, he’s the only way to register a hope for a new direction, for a restoration of what’s important in America. He, too, has unmistakable integrity. He is, by anyone’s admission, a kind, decent, honorable man, who to his immense credit (and not McCain’s), has refused to cowtow and lower himself to ad hominems even when he’s getting it from all sides, and has refused at every turn to compromise his principles for the sake of political expediency (even when, as some of us supporters occasionally grumble, we might like him to).

Would Ron Paul make the best President? How likely is he to ever actually be a factor?

I don’t know. I don’t care.

I do know that I have very little voice left in this party. I have no more worries about electability or partisan concerns, not with how much ideology has already been thrown under the bus for those ends, to the point where what’s left is hardly recognizable. So when I speak, I want to make sure that I’m voting for a real change, that I’m voting to register in a clear voice my disgust and my desire for a new, old direction. To that end, though I like John McCain a lot, I’ll vote for Ron Paul. And my conscience, believe you me, will be totally clean.

Brad Porter