The McCain Tragedy
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought;
And enterprises of great pith and moment,
With this regard, their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
- Hamlet
Webster’s defines a tragic hero as “a literary character who makes an error of judgment or has a fatal flaw that, combined with fate and external forces, brings on a tragedy.” A tragic hero is therefore essentially a good person whose flaws overshadow all that is good about him.
If Hamlet’s tragic flaw was his inability to act, perhaps McCain’s is the exact opposite: his over-eagerness to act. He once told Esquire, “I get attacked every day because I’m working with Ted Kennedy. How can I work with Kennedy? Because I want to get something done.”
The fact that he acts has, for the most part, been McCain’s greatest strength. His long and distinguished career in the Senate has been marked by bipartisan bills he helped write, like the ill-fated McCain-Kennedy Immigration Reform, and compromises he masterminded, like the Gang of 14 incident. He is someone who, when he identifies a problem, would clearly rather do something about it than do nothing.
In The New York Times, Adam Clymer wrote, “Mr. McCain is an impatient man — perhaps because he lost five years of his life as a prisoner of war in North Vietnam — in an institution that worships delay and rewards endurance.”
One of McCain’s greatest accomplishments was the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2001, otherwise known as McCain-Feingold. Although the exact effects of the bill are still disputed, it did effectively ban soft-money in presidential politics. This was no small feat — in 2000, Democrats and Republicans received a combined total of $630 million in soft money.
But for all of McCain’s achievements, one event threatens to overshadow everything: the decision to invade Iraq and the eventual troop surge. This was somewhat ironic, given that the Iraq war was the brainchild of Neoconservatives like Paul Wolfowitz and Dick Cheney. McCain is neither a Neocon nor a lifelong war hawk — he opposed Reagan’s plan to keep troops in Lebanon.
At some point after the Beirut attacks but before the war in Kosovo, McCain, for reasons that remain a mystery, became an interventionist. Justin Raimondo wrote in The American Conservative, “To hear McCain tell it, there is apparently no crisis anywhere in the world that cannot be resolved by the presence of U.S. armed forces.” Perhaps he found inaction in Lebanon distasteful, and decided he preferred action.
Unlike many Vietnam veterans, he seems to think that the mistake was pulling out of Vietnam, and not going in. In a 2003 speech on Iraq, he said, “We lost in Vietnam because we lost the will to fight, because we did not understand the nature of the war we were fighting, and because we limited the tools at our disposal.” He makes no mention of the idea that the war was unwinnable or unjust.
McCain was one of the earliest and loudest advocates of the 2007 troop surge. He practically staked his entire political career on it. It’s as if Hamlet, struck with grief after the death of his father, decided to kill the next person he saw.
Tragic heroes are often undone by an action they’ve taken. Under most circumstances, McCain would be an impossibly hard to beat general election candidate: a war-hero, independent-minded, fiscally conservative, socially moderate candidate. But this election cycle is shaping up to be about bigger issues. McCain himself has said that he will only be elected president if he can convince voters that U.S. policy in Iraq has been successful. This seems like a long shot: a recent Gallup poll said that 59% of Americans believe the U.S.-led invasion was a mistake. About the same percentage favor setting a timetable for withdrawal.
McCain may also come undone by another past action of his: campaign finance reform. If anyone owes thanks to McCain for this bill, it’s Barack Obama. He’s been able to raise an unprecedented amount of money — $55 million in the month or February alone, mostly from donations under $100. If he gets the nomination, he will surely out-raise and out-spend John McCain by a huge margin. McCain could have really used a couple hundred million in soft money right about now.
– Hillel Aron
