There are several things that make it extremely difficult to assess the character of someone else, especially when that person is running for high public office. Their personalities may change over time; different circumstances may allow us to see things about them we hadn't noticed before; they may have deliberately projected a false image of themselves; the acuteness of our perception and the accuracy of our judgment may improve.
All of these factors have clearly played into the radical reassessments of Sen. John McCain by Elizabeth Drew and many other commentators between the 2000 Republican presidential primaries and the current presidential campaign.
In preparation for writing her 2002 hagiography "Citizen McCain," the prizewinning journalist Elizabeth Drew was given unique access to the senator and his inner circle of advisors.
Looking back from the perspective of 2008, she now writes, "I admired John McCain as a man of principle and honor. He had become emblematic of someone who spoke his mind, voted his conscience, and demonstrated courage in bucking his own party and fighting for what he believed in. He gained a well-deserved reputation as a maverick. He was seen as taking principled positions on such issues as tax equity (opposing the newly elected Bush's tax cut), fighting political corruption, and, later, taking on the Bush administration on torture. He came off as a man of decency. He took political risks."
But today Drew is willing to admit that she did not pay sufficient critical attention to her own earlier doubts and to McCain's confession of his political motives, which he repeats in his 2002 memoir, "Worth the Fighting For": "I didn't decide to run for president to start a national crusade for the political reforms I believed in or to run a campaign as if it were some grand act of patriotism. In truth, I wanted to be president because it had become my ambition to be president. ... In truth, I'd had the ambition for a long time."
That admission suggests his motives were cynically opportunistic all along. Now she and hundreds of thousands of others see him very differently. Drew puts it this way: "McCain's recent conduct of his campaign -- his willingness to lie repeatedly (including in his acceptance speech) and to play Russian roulette with the vice-presidency, in order to fulfill his long-held ambition -- has reinforced my earlier, and growing, sense that John McCain is not a principled man. In fact, it's not clear who he is."
In 2006, McCain supported a compromise with the Bush administration on trials of Guantanamo detainees, abandoning his former principled position, yielding too much to the administration and accepting provisions he had originally opposed. The new bill limited the rights of detainees in military trials, stripped habeas corpus rights and loosened restrictions on the administration's use of torture.
Even though the Supreme Court later declared these measures unconstitutional, Drew says that McCain's caving in to this "compromise" was for her "further evidence that the former free-spirited, supposedly principled, maverick was morphing into just another panderer -- to Bush and the Republican Party's conservative base."
This is a brave and remarkable reassessment, given Drew's having gone out so unreservedly in support of McCain in the first edition of her book. Indeed, she was still coming to his defense against the tactics of Karl Rove in her 2004 New York Review pamphlet, "Fear and Loathing in George W. Bush's Washington." Drew's fundamental point of view was that in comparison to George W. Bush, McCain was pristine. The Bush context of new millennium, neocon politics colored her perception, as she now candidly admits.
During the last two weeks, Drew's revised assessment of McCain has been seconded by Tim Dickinson ("Make-Believe Maverick" in "Rolling Stone," Oct. 16) in a thorough demythologizing of McCain's military career. Dickinson is more blunt than Drew in seeing McCain as a "Navy Brat," trying unsuccessfully to exceed his father's modest accomplishments and to rival those of his distinguished grandfather.
He writes, "McCain was not only a lousy student, he had his father's taste for drink and a darkly misogynistic streak. The summer after his sophomore year, cruising with a friend near Arlington, McCain tried to pick up a pair of young women. When they laughed at him, he cursed them so vilely that he was hauled into court on a profanity charge."
He also is reported by Dickinson to have been a lousy pilot (far worse than Bush) who crashed plane after plane. After several reports of interviews with McCain's fellow POWs in Vietnam and later friends and colleagues who knew him well, Tomlinson concludes with this quotation from Richard Clarke, the former counterterrorism czar under President Bush: "I'm sure John McCain loves his country. But loving your country and lying to the American people are apparently not inconsistent in his view."
McCain has obsessively asked rhetorically at his rallies, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" Perhaps that mechanistic question simply projects onto his running mate a more profound question of his, "Who is the real John McCain?" He might not know himself.
n Michael Payne writes and lectures on literature and critical theory. He can be reached at payne@bucknell.edu.
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Hard to know who politicians really are
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