McCain’s Honor is Intact
By Alan Stewart Carl | Related entries in 2008 Election, McCain
Unless there are some very surprising results, John McCain will end the night as he started the race: the senior senator from Arizona. He will have lost his last chance to become president.
I don’t know what’s next for McCain. I hope he returns to the Senate with a revived energy, ready to be a formidable but reasonable opponent of President Obama. But I wouldn’t blame him if he retired. He watched John Kerry fade back into the slush of the senate. I’m not sure McCain has the stomach to do the same.
Whatever McCain does, you can be sure he’ll do it with honor. It’s become popular to say that McCain ran a terribly nasty campaign. No. At times he ran an unserious campaign, but the negativity was about what you’d expect from a campaign that trailed in the polls for all but a few days this Fall.
What McCain suffered from was a paucity of good ideas, not a sudden absence of honor. That’s as much the fault of his party as it was of his campaign. When you’re left with very few paths forward, you can only reach back — or throw roadblocks in front of your opponent. I do not believe any Republican could have run a stronger campaign this year or would have handled the worst elements of the party so well.
And I still believe McCain would make a good president. If things do go against script tonight, I will not be overly disappointed. I know it’s heresy for an Obama voter to say, but I still really like McCain.
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November 4th, 2008 at 8:30 am
I don’t know Alan, I can’t say who made the decisions that go against McCain’s character and run the nasty campaign that he has. But I disagree, and I think that McCain has lost his honor and integrity in the last 8 years that he had back in 2000. I also don’t think he’d make a very effective president, and I think he’d die in office and leave us with a moron to take the reigns.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:32 am
McCain lost his honor long ago. He was always a hothead, undisciplined Senator and likewise campaigner. McCain selected the low-road. He will slink back to the Senate as a man who replaced honor with personal ambition.
November 4th, 2008 at 8:33 am
You want to know McCain’s future ?
Watch the polls coming out of Arizona tonight, if McCain loses, or only wins by the skin of his teeth, then I would expect him to retire at the end of his current term rather than face a re-election battle against Arizona’s popular Democratic Governor.
If he wins by a respectable margin, he’ll probably stay in the Senate past 2010, but don’t expect him to run for President again.
Of course, there’s always the possibility that the Season 7 West Wing parallels could continue and Obama could ask McCain to be in his cabinet (for those who forget, at the end of Season 7, Matt Santos picked his Republican rival to be his Secretary of State). Unlikely ? Yea, but everything about this election has been unlikely.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:00 am
I could deal with a President McCain, but the possibility of a President Palin is just too much.
In the immortal words of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes “[Eight years] of imbeciles are enough.”
November 4th, 2008 at 9:07 am
McCain lost his honor when he was an active participant in the Keating 5 scandal. It’s as simple as that. Regardless what he has done since, it was his political character-defining moment.
November 4th, 2008 at 9:12 am
[...] McCain’s Honor is Intact [...]
November 4th, 2008 at 9:17 am
We have a different notion of honor. For months now I have seen bloggers and journalists tell me that McCain does not actually approve of the campaign he has run. Sorry, but he made the attacks, he repeatedly lied, and he make a VP pick that showed contempt for country. Putting self and party first is not honorable.
November 4th, 2008 at 10:42 am
Unserious? To say the least. And actually that may be more damning in my eyes than nastiness or dishonorability. To run anything less than a substantive, issues-based campaign in times like these is completely irresponsible. I’m with you in liking McCain, I just feel that he disqualified himself with frivolousness in a way that only GOP faithful could support with a straight face. And did you see Kerry on Meet The Press last Sunday? Losing has done nothing to impair his intelligence and articulacy. His delivery of Obama’s closing argument was a pleasant surprise. There’s plenty of life left in McCain. If he loses, and if he can get over it, he’ll be a crucial voice on the right.
November 4th, 2008 at 11:26 am
If you argue that he hasn’t lost his honor, what do you think he would have needed to do, campaign-wise, to lose it?
November 4th, 2008 at 12:18 pm
There were too many appeals to racism, xenophobia, Christianist supremacy, and out-and-out bigotry in McCain’s campaign–and no substantial protest of such from McCain himself for me to blame it solely upon on the supporters and fellow-travelers–for me to credit the man with any sort of honor. And no, I don’t count “He’s not an Arab; he’s a good man, a family man” as substantial protest of his supporter’s bigotry. With that sentence he supported the popular bigoted notion that Arab = Terrorist, a notion the strength of which his campaign has depended upon from the start. Why did it take Colin Powell to say “The really right answer is that there’s nothing wrong with being an Arab or a Muslim”? Where was McCain’s so-called honor that he didn’t say that himself? No, he knew that bigotry against Arabs and Muslims was one of the strongest things going for him.
What’s more, McCain hired for his campaign the very people responsible for the nasty smear engine that destroyed him in 2000. That’s not honorable. The honorable person responds to bullying by rising above the bullies, not by learning how to be one.
I cast my vote for Obama because Obama’s campaign better represents the United States of America I want to live in. McCain’s represents the first mile along the path towards my worst nightmare of what it could become.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:09 pm
Yikes! Put down the crack pipe….I mean it, just walk away.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:23 pm
I see. It’s not enough to disagree with your opponent. You must see him as your worst nightmare. And even showing the man the respect he deserves is smoking a crack pipe. Sad.
November 4th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
Come on, Alan. We all saw the same campaign. McCain let guilt-by-association smears stand in for issues and failed to rein in his running mate as she ran around the countryside calling the opposing party anti-American. The view from the middle is pretty squalid, so I can only imagine how it looks from the left. Honestly, if John had spent the last two months giving us something substantive to disagree with this wouldn’t even be a topic. You want people to respect the man in spite of his campaign. That’s a pretty tall order and I’m not sure why you’re surprised at the response. I don’t expect this is the death knell for this type of campaign — too many uneducated types of all political persuausions are responsive — but the responses in this thread hint at the fact that for a lot of us it is utterly transparent and we will not be swayed by it. If Sen. McCain is half the man you’re lauding he’ll secretly appreciate that.
November 4th, 2008 at 3:14 pm
I think McCain pronounced his own legacy on SNL: “The Sad Grandpa”. We won’t hate him, or dismiss him. We’ll just kind of pat him on the head and give him jello.
November 4th, 2008 at 3:41 pm
blackout: I’m not surprised at the response. I figured the post wouldn’t be popular.
But I didn’t write it to convince anyone of anything. I wrote it because I admire the man and wanted to say so. I think a lot of what people call “nasty” and “dishonorable” about his campaign is selective memory and selective interpretation. I don’t think he was any more negative than is typical for the underdog in American politics.
No, he didn’t live up to his own lofty goals for a completly clean campaign, but he still kept his head above water. As the man opposing the first African American candidate in our history, McCain could have intensified racial strife. He didn’t (even if occassionally his fringe supporters did). In fact, I’d say his record was better than Bill Clinton’s this campaign.
But I understand not everyone shares that opinion. That’s o.k. But I don’t think it’s smoking a crack pipe to still have respect for the guy.
November 4th, 2008 at 3:59 pm
I was giving you the benefit of the doubt. I think it is pretty obvious he lost his honor in this campaign.
As Bob Dole said:
You know it, I know it, the American people know it.
November 4th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
Fair enough, Alan, and I agree that simply blowing him a blogger kiss is hardly evidence of a crack habit. People say the strangest things. I will say that if we’re going to index his campaign against past iterations then I also agree that his wasn’t more or less nasty than the last couple. It’s just that for those of us who entered this with an open mind it was extremely disheartening to witness his self-immolation. He decided at some point that he had to turn his back on an issues-based campaign to *win* and he overtly ceded the high ground in the process. I don’t think there’s anything selective about that interpretation and I think it’s a damned shame.