“A Congenital Hothead, A Man Of Grudges”: The Bitter Twilight Of John McCain Gives Even Republicans Pause
That one,” John McCain famously snarled in a presidential debate four years ago, referring to his opponent who was a quarter of a century younger and who had been in the Senate 3 years to McCain’s 20. It’s difficult to imagine a better revelation of the McCain psyche than that moment, but if there is one, then it came yesterday at the meeting of the Senate Armed Services Committee, convened to consider the nomination of Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. The McCain fury is something to behold, almost irresistible for how unvarnished it is in all its forms. In the instance of the 2008 debate, McCain’s dumbfounded antipathy had to do with facing an opponent he so clearly considered unworthy. In the instance of the hearing yesterday, McCain’s bitter blast was at somebody who once was among his closest friends, a former Vietnam warrior and fellow Republican of a similarly independent ilk, who supported McCain’s first run for the presidency in 2000 against George W. Bush but then appeared to abandon the Arizona senator eight years later.
If all this suggests political differences born largely of personal dynamics and their breach, it’s because for McCain the two are interchangeable. At this moment we should make the effort to remind ourselves of what’s commendable about McCain, an admiral’s son who could only live up to his father’s reputation by way of five years in a Hanoi jail, where he walked—or hobbled, given the crippling abuse he suffered at the hands of his captors—the walk of loyalty and didn’t just talk it. When offered freedom halfway through those five years, he refused to leave behind his fellow prisoners of war who had been there longer and were due their freedom first. It’s a story so formidable that 12 years ago Bush supporters resorted to suggesting McCain was a “Hanoi Candidate,” brainwashed in the manner of cinematic Manchurians. So let’s not question McCain’s courage, or a code that means as much to him as patriotism. In that initial presidential run, admiration for the man trumped what disagreements overly romantic voters like myself had when it came time to mark his name on our ballots (as I did in that year’s California primary).
In the time since, two things have happened to McCain. One was the Iraq War, the worst American foreign policy blunder of the post-World War II era, which McCain wholeheartedly supported from the beginning and about which he’s never intimated a second thought. The other was Barack Obama, electoral politics’ upstart lieutenant whose bid to become five-star general, bypassing stops along the way at captain, major and colonel, wasn’t just temerity to a man who waited his turn to be released from prison, but insubordination. Those two things converged yesterday in McCain’s prosecution of Hagel, no less sorry a spectacle on McCain’s part for the fact that Hagel handled it so unimpressively. Perhaps Hagel was startled, figuring his one-time compatriot would be tough but not vicious. If that’s the case, then he never knew McCain as well as he thought or hoped, because if he did then he would know that McCain is a man of grudges. In his memoir Faith of My Fathers, in which words like “gallantry” appear without embarrassment (and which no one has more earned the right to use), McCain himself acknowledges being the congenital hothead of legend who’s nearly come to blows with colleges. Half a century later, he recalls every altercation with every Naval Academy classmate; as a child, rage sometimes drove him to hold his breath until he blacked out. No need to indulge in untrained psychotherapy from afar to surmise that the ability to nurse such a grudge may be what gets you through half a decade of cruel incarceration.
At any rate, what happened yesterday wasn’t about Hagel at all. It wasn’t even about the Iraq War’s 2007 “surge,” which McCain is desperate to justify because he can never justify the war itself that finds Hagel moved to the right side of history while McCain remains stubbornly on the wrong. It’s about that junior senator from Illinois who crossed McCain early in some obscure backroom Senate deal no one can remember anymore, then denied McCain the presidency in no small part because Obama understood the folly of Iraq better than McCain can allow himself to. McCain’s personal honor in Hanoi was too hard won to be stained now by almost anything he does, including how he’s allowed temperament, pique and ego to steamroll the judgment and perspective that we hope all of our elected officers have, let alone presidents. But his political honor, not to mention whatever might once have recommended him to the presidency, has fallen victim to the way that Obama has gotten fatally under his skin. Even if this once-noble statesman should succeed in denying Hagel’s nomination as he denied Susan Rice’s prospects for Secretary of State (and even the most devout Hagel supporter would have to acknowledge that the Defense nominee’s performance before the Committee was often a shambles), McCain’s unrelenting obsession with the grievance that Obama has come to represent to him is the saddest legacy in memory. The very fact of Obama and all things Obamic has turned McCain into something toxic, maybe even to himself.
By: Steve Erickson, The American Prospect, February 2, 2013
“You First, Senator”: The Question John McCain Wants To Ask, But Not Answer
Chuck Hagel was not at all supportive of the 2007 Bush/Cheney troop “surge” in Iraq, and at his confirmation hearing this morning, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) seemed to characterize it as a make-or-break issue for the former senator’s confirmation. http://youtu.be/aN5_O6TJL6c
For those who can’t watch clips online, McCain noted Hagel criticizing the surge policy at the time as the “most dangerous foreign policy blunder in this country since Vietnam.” McCain demanded to know “Were you correct in your assessment?” When Hagel deferred to “the judgment of history,” McCain continued to hammer away, demanding, “I want to know if you were right or wrong.”
Watching the exchange, it might seem as if Hagel is being evasive, or at least defensive, about a misstep on his record. But the larger context is important.
For McCain, the surge worked, ergo, anyone who questioned the policy is necessarily a fool who lacks credibility on foreign policy, national security, and the use of military power. In reality, conditions in Iraq may have improved in 2008 and 2009, but there were a variety of factors — including the Sunni Awakening, which pre-dated the surge, and a ceasefire announced by Shiite militia leader Muqtada Sadr — that contributed to the decline in violence. To argue that “surge = success” demonstrates a lack of depth.
But more important in this instance is McCain pretending to have credibility. “I want to know if you were right or wrong”? That’s not a bad question, necessarily, but I’d love to hear McCain himself try to answer it.
This guy wants to launch a fight over who was correct about the war in Iraq? Seriously?
I’m reminded of this amazing Frank Rich piece from 2009.
[McCain] made every wrong judgment call that could be made after 9/11. It’s not just that he echoed the Bush administration’s constant innuendos that Iraq collaborated with Al Qaeda’s attack on America. Or that he hyped the faulty W.M.D. evidence to the hysterical extreme of fingering Iraq for the anthrax attacks in Washington. Or that he promised we would win the Iraq war “easily.” Or that he predicted that the Sunnis and the Shiites would “probably get along” in post-Saddam Iraq because there was “not a history of clashes” between them.
What’s more mortifying still is that McCain was just as wrong about Afghanistan and Pakistan. He routinely minimized or dismissed the growing threats in both countries over the past six years, lest they draw American resources away from his pet crusade in Iraq.
Two years after 9/11 he was claiming that we could “in the long term” somehow “muddle through” in Afghanistan. (He now has the chutzpah to accuse President Obama of wanting to “muddle through” there.) Even after the insurgency accelerated in Afghanistan in 2005, McCain was still bragging about the “remarkable success” of that prematurely abandoned war. In 2007, some 15 months after the Pakistan president Pervez Musharraf signed a phony “truce” ceding territory on the Afghanistan border to terrorists, McCain gave Musharraf a thumb’s up. As a presidential candidate in the summer of 2008, McCain cared so little about Afghanistan it didn’t even merit a mention among the national security planks on his campaign Web site.
He takes no responsibility for any of this.
McCain now seems eager to have a conversation about who has credibility on Bush-era wars, even with the benefit of hindsight. It’s one of the more profound examples in recent memory of a politician lacking in self-awareness.
Indeed, as of this morning, McCain actually seems to believe it’s worse to get the surge question wrong than to get the entire war wrong.
“I want to know if you were right or wrong,” McCain said. You first, senator.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, January 31, 2013
“A Return To Baseline Crazy”: Lindsey Graham Hits Bottom, Again
Oh, that Lindsey Graham, that formerly moderate, mavericky senator from South Carolina. Only a day ago he was among eight senators who seemed to be defying the Tea Party gridlock of the last four years, joining together to back a “framework” for comprehensive immigration reform. Now he’s threatening to kill any legislation that includes protections for same-sex couples, growling to reporters, “Why don’t we just put legalized abortion in there and round it all out?”
Good one!
An irritated Sen. John McCain, who’s now spent a full 24 hours looking like someone we haven’t seen in at least six years, shot back, “We haven’t even gotten that far yet. This is thrown out by the people who think we have gotten into the details, which we haven’t.”
Um, “thrown out by the people who think we have gotten into the details”? One of those people is one of your seven Senate partners, Sen. McCain.
That’s not the only crackpot Tea Party talking point from Graham over the last day. He also claimed Secretary of State Hillary Clinton “got away with murder” on Benghazi, and threatened to put a hold on former Sen. Chuck Hagel’s nomination as defense secretary because … well, there’s no connection between Hagel and Benghazi. Graham says he’s mad that outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta hasn’t yet answered his questions about the Sept. 11 attack, so he’ll block Hagel, whom he’s already attacked as anti-Israel, which would seem to have nothing to do with Benghazi.
It seems Graham was too cowardly to stand up to his buddy McCain and block John Kerry’s nomination to replace Clinton, so he’ll target Hagel and make neocons and right-wing Tea Party Christianists happy at the same time.
Here’s what Graham actually said to Fox’s Greta von Susteren about Clinton Monday night. “I haven’t forgotten about Benghazi. Hillary Clinton got away with murder, in my view.” Now, let’s give him the benefit of the doubt and assume he’s using “got away with murder” figuratively, rather than saying Clinton murdered Ambassador Chris Stevens or the three other Americans who died in Benghazi last fall.
You can never be sure, though, since wingnuts have accused Clinton and her husband of murder before, from vicious theories disputing the suicide of Vince Foster to Rev. Jerry Falwell’s “Clinton Chronicles,” which accused the president of responsibility for “countless” murders. Even if Graham is just talking overexcitedly about last week’s hearings, he can count on the lunatic fringe of his target Tea Party base hearing the charge that the outgoing secretary of state “got away with murder” any way they like. And applauding.
It would seem that Graham’s short stint as one of eight “reasonable” senators had to be immediately followed by his return to crazy, in order to keep away the potential Tea Party primary challenge he fears most next year. As recently as the summer of 2010 he cooperated with Robert Draper’s admiring New York Times magazine profile, “Lindsey Graham, This Year’s Maverick,” in which Graham boasted of his unpopularity with the rising Tea Party and promised to continue to back legislation that would attract “Democrats and Republicans alike.” But that was barely a year into a new Senate term. Now, barely a year before his next campaign, Graham has ramped up the extremism, with a nasty crusade to block Susan Rice from the secretary of state’s job as well as regular insults to President Obama on politics and policy. (He told him to “man up” during the fiscal cliff negotiations.) The former moderate who once warned about the danger of not raising the debt ceiling openly brayed that his party should take it hostage again in January, then caved.
It’s a shame Graham’s moment of sanity on immigration reform didn’t last – but it was also predictable. Even during his maverick phase in 2010 he had a hissy fit when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid briefly prioritized immigration reform before climate change legislation Graham was set to co-sponsor with John Kerry and Joe Lieberman. Even after Reid relented and put the climate change bill first, Graham refused to rejoin as co-sponsor. Look for him to play a similarly unreliable role on immigration reform, whether or not it contains protections for same-sex couples.
By: Joan Walsh, Editor at Large, Salon, January 29, 2013
“The New Politics Of Immigration”: Opportunist Republicans “Leading From Behind”
Think back to the battle over health-care reform. Can you imagine that Republicans, upon hearing that President Obama was about to offer his own proposals, would want to rush ahead of him to put their own marker down — and take positions close to his?
That’s the comparison to keep in mind to understand the extraordinary transformation of Beltway politics on immigration reform. Until Obama was reelected, party competition translated into Republican efforts to block virtually everything the president wanted to accomplish. On immigration, at least, the parties are now competing to share credit for doing something big. It’s wonderful to behold.
Republicans who always held views on immigration similar to the president’s — notably Sen. John McCain — are now free to say so. Other Republicans who thought a hard line on the issue was a political winner have been forced by the electoral facts to change their minds. Democrats, aware of how important Latino votes are to their party’s future, are determined to get immigration reform done. Nothing is certain in Washington, especially in the Republican-led House of Representatives, but the odds that we will finally fix a broken immigration system are very high.
The behind-the-scenes wrangling over the choreography of this week’s twin immigration announcements — by a bipartisan group of senators and by the president in a speech in Nevada — shows how strong the bias toward action has become.
We’ve become so accustomed to the politics of obstruction that we forget there is still such a thing as legislative craftsmanship. Monday’s unveiling by eight senators of their ideas for reform was months in the making as Sens. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) worked closely with their colleagues to prepare for this moment.
But Obama felt compelled to make clear early on that immigration reform was one of his highest priorities. The Senate negotiators worried that if Obama got out front with positions more progressive than theirs, particularly on a speedier path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, he could foil their efforts to reach accord.
This fear reflected the GOP’s Obama-can’t-win response to whatever he does. Until now, Republicans criticized him for not taking “leadership” in pushing for immigration reform. But as soon as he was ready to speak out, the GOP switched direction, warning that his leadership was the last thing they wanted — and could get in the way of a compromise. Thus did House Speaker John Boehner use a spokesman to instruct Obama to be “careful not to drag the debate to the left and ultimately disrupt the difficult work that is ahead in the House and Senate.”
As it happened, by letting it be known that he planned to give an immigration speech, Obama sped up the timetable of the Senate group, said a House Democrat active on the issue, and even encouraged a small collection of House Republicans eager for reform to let it be known that they, too, were working toward compromise. Obama sought to thread the political needle by laying out his principles while holding off on proposing a bill of his own. He would send up legislation only “if Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion.” A relieved Schumer, using words almost never heard in Washington, declared that the president “is handling this perfectly.”
There will be much posturing over the next several months. By going slightly to the progressive side of the senators, Obama may ease the way for Republicans to strike a deal since they will be able to claim they stayed to the president’s right. Conservative supporters of reform, such as Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida, will keep saying critical things about the president to preserve their credibility with the right. And if Boehner is interested in reform, he, too, must play a delicate game of distancing himself from Obama to persuade his most conservative colleagues to acquiesce to a vote on a bill.
But make no mistake: This is immigration reform’s time. It was poignant to hear McCain state plainly and eloquently what he has always felt. “We have been too content for too long,” he said, “to allow individuals to mow our lawn, serve our food, clean our homes and even watch our children, while not affording them any of the benefits that make our country so great.” Thanks to an election, those words are no longer politically incorrect inside John McCain’s party.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, January 30, 2013
“The Moment Of Truth”: Is Immigration Reform The End Of The Line For GOP-Tea Party Alliance?
As Republican elected officials—hoping to save their political party from going the way of the dinosaur—race to grab as much credit as possible for a newly minted immigration reform effort designed to create a pathway to citizenship for some 11 million people illegally in the United States, the moment of truth for the GOP-Tea Party alliance may now be at hand.
And make no mistake…it’s going to get ugly.
While the immigration plan proposed on Monday by a bipartisan panel of eight U.S. Senators would create what the group is calling a “tough but fair path to citizenship for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States that is contingent upon securing our borders and tracking whether legal immigrants have left the country when required”, it seems unlikely that Tea Party backed Members in the House of Representatives can support any such plan without being viewed as having sold out the most basic of Tea Party principles. As a result, any action in the Senate to approve such a reform effort is likely to kick off an inter-party war in the House that will make the battles inside the GOP caucus over the fiscal cliff, debt ceiling and tax increases for the 1 percent appear, by comparison, to be a walk in the park on Sunday.
The problem is as simple as it is glaring.
A willingness on the part of Tea Party supported elected officials to abide a policy that could lead to 11 million illegals achieving American citizenship or green card status would be seen as the ultimate betrayal of the principles that give the Tea Party movement its strength—not to mention its financial support. Thus, a Tea Party backed politician who votes for any immigration reform bill will be seen to have sold out the movement in favor of the preservation of the Republican Party— an action that would be anathema to many loyal Tea Partiers.
As Matt Maggio writes in the Greensborough TEA Party Examiner:
“Another reason why the Tea Party will shift its focus to immigration now is that – with this year’s election now over – many of those in “traditional” Republican circles who had seen the Tea Party as a helpful parallel force for their goals are now out of active involvement. As such, the Tea Party’s own grassroots main issues – illegal aliens, taxes, Obamacare, and bailouts – are what will matter in the movement, not the Republican Party’s goals.”
The issue also presents a political ‘Sophie’s Choice’ for members of the GOP Congressional caucus who come to Washington without the strong backing of the Tea Party and choose not to overtly identify with the group. Despite their non-reliance on espousing Tea Party principles in their rhetoric and Congressional voting records, these elected officials will, nevertheless, be forced to choose between continuing a policy that has alienated the Hispanic community (fast becoming the most important voting block in the nation as proven by the 2012 presidential race) and will lead to political irrelevancy for their party, or get behind the GOP survival effort and face the inevitable electoral nightmare for Republican elected officials everywhere—a Tea Party backed primary challenge.
Talk about a Catch-22 with no way out.
While the Republican members of the group of eight—including Senators Marco Rubio of Florida, John McCain of Arizona, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, and Jeff Flake of Arizona—have sought to appease the most extreme wing of their party by including language that would prevent much in the way of forward movement for illegal immigrants until a committee to be formed of Southwestern state leaders first approve the satisfactory completion of new efforts to secure the border, it is highly unlikely that this language contained in the bipartisan framework will pass muster with enough Senate Democrats to allow such a provision to make it into a final Senate bill.
After all, it is these very Southwestern elected officials—including Governor Jan Brewer of Arizona—who have made a career out of doing everything in their power to block illegal immigration and, as a result, are likely to never give the “thumbs up” that would be required to allow the process of legalizing immigrants to begin.
This means that any bill to make it out of the Senate would likely create a less restrictive opportunity for legalization, putting increased pressure of those House Republicans who want to vote for the legislation in the effort to please Hispanics and preserve their political party’s future.
At the end of what will surely be a hard-fought process, the odds are that the nation will get some sort of new immigration policy that will allow both political parties to claim a measure of credit. But the odds are equally good that the inevitable battle supreme that will play out inside the House Republican caucus will drive the final wedge between mainstream Congressional Republicans and their Tea Party flank—splitting off the extremist from the GOP caucus once and for all.
You can read the full text of the “Bipartisan Framework For Comprehensive Immigration Reform” here.
By: Rick Ungar, Op-Ed Contributor, Forbes, January 28, 2013
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