| McSame | 
| | McSame |
| | McSame |
| It's a truism that the GOP is going down in flames, and only John McCain can save them even a little bit, because he's not seen as a typical Republican. We all know that's bull, of course. But it does account for why he's not 20 points behind in the polls. In rather typical manner, Salon just recently published "How will Barack Obama get to 270?" by Paul Maslin, with the sub-head, "This November, a Democratic victory will probably hinge on the Electoral College votes of a handful of swing states. Howard Dean's pollster examines 17 fall battlegrounds, one by one."
But I don't think it will last. I think the blow-up around Bush's Knesset speech, and McSame's failed tag-team attempt is the shape of things to come. The reason is simple, really: McSame was a neocon darling long before Bush was. He was their man in 2000, before Bush beat him out. He's not a true neocon, not a Straussian. He's an old-fashioned imperialist with a hot temper. But that's easily close enough for politics, and easily just as bad. And since he knows (or cares) jack shit about the economy, he is, inevitably, going to rebrand himself as the uber-Bush--because that's exactly what he is.
I wrote about this all before, back in early February, largely just presenting a transcript of a Democracy Now interview with Matt Welch, author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. But it's newly relevant, so I'm going to shamelessly raid my old diary and add a few sharp observations on the flip.
The point now is not so much the need to connect McCain to Bush's foreign policy--but the virtually inevitable success of doing so. |
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My Feb 7th diary, The REAL John McCain--The "Bush Doctrine" Is Actually McCain's started off like this:
| Rather than being a maverick who's close to the middle of the political spectrum, McCain's maverick tendencies often take him to extremes--expecially on issues of war and more war.
The day before Tsunami Tuesday, Democracy Now! interviewed Reason Magazine editor Matt Welch, author of McCain: The Myth of a Maverick. The whole interview--available here w/transcript--is illuminating and important, but most significant that it highlights how the "Bush Doctrine" of endless war is acutally McCain's doctrine, and that he was running on it in 2000, before Bush crushed him in South Carolina. Extended quote on the flip, but here's the juiciest part:
MATT WELCH: The basic McCain strategy- you know in 1999 McCain advocated this policy of rogue-state rollback which is basically preemptive war three and a half years before Bush ever thought of it.
AMY GOODMAN: He threatened North Korea with extinction.
MATT WELCH: He threatened North Korea with extinction, and he elucidated this doctrine by which- wherever there is an authoritarian dictator, we support the insurgents. And, if we support the insurgent and the dictator cracks down, then we have to defend the insurgents with US force. And any time we make a threat and someone calls our bluff, we also have to use US force. It is incredibly interventionist militaristic approach towards foreign policy that he has had all along. That's the reason why neoconservatives have flocked to his cause and championed it over the years.
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In short, the alliegence to a super-hawk foreign policy is not something that McSame is going to change. But given how unpopular Bush's war has become, it's something he will spin, and spin hard. And this will cause increasing problems with the "straight talk" narrative-whether the press wants to notice it or not. This is why Barack Obama is 100% correct to be welcoming a foreign policy debate with McCain. The more you hear about McCain's actual foreign policy views, the farther they diverge from the American public's. It took almost 30 years--including the intentionally limited gulf War I and 9/11 to get the American public to forget Vietnam, and willingly embrace limitless interventionism again. We are not up for more of the same.
Beneath the fold, the transcript launched into a brief history of the Bush/McSame relationship:
AMY GOODMAN: Can you talk about his relationship with the president- with George Bush?
MATT WELCH: It's an interesting and tortured one, you know? McCain was- not only was he running against Bush, but he was running against Bush very much as an insurgent in 2000. The Republican establishment had coalesced around Bush, and McCain and his backers- largely who are neoconservatives and surrounded the Weekly Standard Magazine, in particular, Bill Kristol and David Brooks. They were speaking a language of Teddy Roosevelt and third parties, this is an insurgency and maybe the Republican party will get blown up in the process. It was a very kind of high wire and thrilling act, and one reason why a lot of people glommed onto it. They saw that he was standing up and having daily "sister soldier" moments with the right. He was calling Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson agents of intolerance and these kind of things. So he ran this sort of very insurgent campaign, playing star wars music, you know? And George Bush was Darth Vader and McCain was Luke Skywalker. And then Bush croaked him in South Carolina in a pretty vicious campaign. I don't know if it was any more vicious than your standard vicious campaign- but then McCain went and sulked basically for a year and a half.
There was a lot of talk, we forget about it now, but there was a lot of talk in 2001 especially of- is McCain going to defect and go to the Democratic Party? He got very interested in campaign finance, which is largely a democratic initiative. He became much more interested in global warming and regulatory issues, which are more traditionally democratic. And you know there were plenty of articles about both him and the Weekly Standard people and neoconservatives in general in late 2001, before September 11th, saying "Hey look, you know, they're basically going to be Democrats this time next year." Well, September 11th changed all that.
The notion of not just McCain, but the whole neocon crowd becoming Democrats must surely seem insane at this point. Sure, the vast majority of neocon roots come from one-time Democrats-particularly the Scoop Jackson crowd-if not Trotskyites. But that was a loooong time ago. And though Joe Lieberman surely held out some hope that they'd find a friendly home, that remark is probably best understood as yet another indicator of how totally unhinged from reality the neocons really are...and have always been.
However, it does cast a very interesting light on how McSame has worked to rebuild his GOP/party-line conservative credentials, and it helps explain the importance to him of the younger wave of Word of Faith ministers like Hagee and Parsley, whose religious zealotry is a lot more tightly focused on holy war with Islam.
The transcript continues:
The basic McCain strategy- you know in 1999 McCain advocated this policy of rogue-state rollback which is basically preemptive war three and a half years before Bush ever thought of it.
AMY GOODMAN: He threatened North Korea with extinction.
MATT WELCH: He threatened North Korea with extinction, and he elucidated this doctrine by which- wherever there is an authoritarian dictator, we support the insurgents. And, if we support the insurgent and the dictator cracks down, then we have to defend the insurgents with US force. And any time we make a threat and someone calls our bluff, we also have to use US force. It is incredibly interventionist militaristic approach towards foreign policy that he has had all along. That's the reason why neoconservatives have flocked to his cause and championed it over the years.
That's why the neocons love him!
Welch continues, describing the post 9/11 Bush/McSame rapproachmant:
So, after September 11th, Bush started to embrace those ideas. That kind of policy structure grafted onto Bush and so it was natural that McCain and Bush would become closer over that time. And then- starting around 2004 and 2005, when McCain started eyeing the presidency in 2008, he began this long, slow suck-up to the right, particularly social conservatives, and also to Bush because he wanted to be the sort of front runner of the Republican establishment.
What he doesn't talk about is the special relationship with the Word of Faith, deeply anti-Muslim crowd. I can only imagine that we'll have a chance to expose them again, as McCain's foreign policy bullying comes in for increasing scrutiny.
And why would that happen?
AMY GOODMAN: Explain what happened around this period when, well, John McCain started singing.
MATT WELCH: You know
AMY GOODMAN: We'll go to the song.
MATT WELCH: -Are you playing the song now?
AMY GOODMAN: Yes.
SEN. JOHN McCAIN: You know that old Beach Boys song "Bomb Iran?" [laughter] "Bomb, bomb, bomb- anyway. [laughter]
AMY GOODMAN: What about that, Matt Welch?
MATT WELCH: That was I believe last February or March or something like that, mid January. Look, this is his idea of humor. He does have a kind of blunt and ribald occasionally awful sense of humor. But it speaks also to his policy ideas. Whenever he talks about Vladimir Putin, who is no friend of mine certainly, but when he talks about him on the campaign trail, he says, "I look into his eyes and I see three letters-K.G.B." He is constantly rattling sabers in the general direction of everybody. Of China, Russia, certainly of North Korea. At any given time, he considers this or that dictator or authoritarian or kind of mean guy to be the transcendent issue that we must focus on this very moment. It is the only sort of lever or- the only sort of grade that he knows to approach the world's problems, which is "identify evil everywhere and get in evil's face".
No doubt there is a segment of the American public for which this has a strong appeal. But there's also no doubt that this segment is well below 40%. Especially when you throw McSame's abandonment of verterans into the mix.
As Welch makes clear, this is something deeply ingrained in who McSame is. It's not something he can turn off, not something he can control. Try as he might, the campaign is going to head in this direction sooner or later. And Obama's quick responses--finally showing us what John Kerry promised in 2004--seem to be moving us toward seeing it sooner, rather than later.
To which I can only say, "Bring it on!" |
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