McCain: Great Guy Who Just Happens to be Wrong

Joe Conason, the fact-driven New York Observer/Salon writer who collaborated on The Hunting of the President, has a superb article in Salon on the situation facing John McCain – and facing Democrats vis-à-vis the formidable Citizen McCain. In a nutshell, he has either watched or orchestrated the downfall or diminishment of his most ardent enemies – DeLay, Reed, Rove, Norquist – but still may have to come to terms with the far right to assure the nomination. He has been brilliant in positioning himself as a centrist despite strong conservative views on many issues – sound familiar? -- and here’s betting the Republican Party, even most of the right wing, will find a way to embrace him in 2008.

Mr. McCain must be off the charts on a bipartisan likeability index, so Democrats would be wise, to say the least, to avoid the personal side of bringing Mr. McCain down to true size. Indeed, even the slightest efforts in that direction would be incredibly stupid. McCain is so Teflon-coated against any personal attacks that Republican dirty-tricksters and Swift-Boaters may well try to fabricate phony Democratic nastiness to create blow-back -- especially if it ever gets close. So besides simply eschewing such an approach, it would be a good idea now to make a big deal out it: how the Democratic Party is bound and determined to avoid such tactics in the 2008 election if McCain is nominated – and to warn the press about Swift-Boaters trying to make it look otherwise.

My Lord, is it possible we could finally have a Presidential campaign that focuses on real issues? But the country needs liberal solutions right now to stop the relentless growth of income and wealth inequality under Reagan, Bush I and the current Bush. (There was an all-too-brief respite on the income side during the Clinton years.) We also desperately need to restore the freedoms that were so hard to achieve over 200-plus years, and return to a carefully-wrought foreign policy that recognizes the difference between leading the world and forcing it to bend to our will. So we better get to work now, showing that, as great and admirable and decent a guy as he is, no matter how heroic he may genuinely be, John McCain simply has the wrong ideas for getting us back moving in the right direction. Somehow, some way, we need to get the country thinking in the big picture -- that, yes, policy really matters.