Centerfield

McCain's Gadfly

We all know that there's a core of GOP folks who think they ARE the base, and who think that John McCain is a sad excuse for a true republican. No surprise there. These critics seem to have been tuned out to some extent, as McCain is collecting endorsements and acting like the campaign has become a victory tour.

But there's another critic out there. Matt Welch is something of a self-styled small-L libertarian and internationalist who seems committed to gadflying from a different angle, in How Johnny Got His Groove Back

If John McCain bounces from his victory in Florida this week to a nomination-clinching Super-Duper Tuesday in California and the 23 Dwarves, there are three main categories of humans he'll have to thank for the biggest worst-to-first primary performance since George McGovern's in 1972. They are: his pratfalling competitors, his gullible independent supporters and his always-willing enablers in the media.

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Here's the funny thing about independent voters: They still love John McCain, think he's a straight talker. No matter how many times he claims to run a positive-only campaign on the same day he releases an attack ad; no matter how many ways he violates the spirit of his own campaign-finance legislation (do yourself a favor and Google "The Reform Institute"); no matter how unconvincingly he stammers his way through wanting to make permanent the same tax cuts he eviscerated in 2001 and 2003; no matter how inaccurately he slimes Romney and others for insufficient support of "our troops"; no matter how many immigration bills bearing his name he now opposes; and no matter how many times he confesses to manipulative, ambition-driven lies in his own damned books, independents still come out for their maverick — 42 percent of them in open-primary South Carolina, and 39 percent in New Hampshire.

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As a direct result of his long media honeymoon, much of what we think we know about McCain is wrong. Exit-poll numbers out of the early states showed that McCain was doing especially well among primary voters who were antiwar. The numbers say something disturbing about our capacity to believe that independent antiwar voters are seriously considering a man who championed pre-emptive war three years before it ever occurred to George W. Bush, who personally told me that the U.S. share of defense spending — more than one-half of the world's total — was much too small, and who has demonstrated repeatedly these past weeks that he doesn't understand why any American would question the deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq 100 years from now. After more than seven years of increasingly unpopular war, Americans look poised to nominate the most explicitly pro-interventionist presidential candidate since Teddy Roosevelt. Don't say you weren't warned.

Welch is so convinced and irritated that McCain is not what he sells himself as that he has gone to the trouble to write a book on it: McCain: The Myth of a Maverick, And as editor of Reason, he wrote An Open Letter to Editorial Page Editors suggesting they all need to review his record more closely for the gap between fact and well-honed myth:

I bring you all here on this Michigan primary day to make one last plea on behalf of the dwindling number of us who read or care about newspaper editorials. Before passing on your McEnthusiasms to the Copy Desk, please remember your canonical journalistic responsibility not to make shit up or pass along easily debunkable falsehoods. Particularly when the subject of your affection has provided copious evidence to the contrary of your claims.

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Considering that McCain in New Hampshire this month railed against "negative ads" while running them, and then bragged in his victory speech that he "always told you the truth," it seems timelier than ever to double-check, rather than rubber-stamp, the new front-runner's honesty. Particularly since his voluminous writings are filled with warnings like: "the worst decisions I have made, not just in politics but over the course of my entire life, have been those I made to seek an advantage primarily or solely for myself."

And so on. Anyway, we've heard the conservative McCain critics ad nauseum. Welch's criticism is different, that maybe McCain is not so much the maverick and straight-shooter he sells himself as. Check it out.