Let the record reflect that Barack Obama made the approach to John McCain tonight.
As the two shared the Senate floor tonight for the first time since they won their party nominations, Obama stood chatting with Democrats on his side of the aisle, and McCain stood on the Republican side of the aisle.
So Obama crossed over into enemy territory.
He walked over to where McCain was chatting with Republican Sen. Mel Martinez of Florida and Independent Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman of Connecticut. And he stretched out his arm and offered his hand to McCain.
McCain shook it, but with a “go away” look that no one could miss. He tried his best not to even look at Obama.
Finally, with a tight smile, McCain managed a greeting: “Good to see you.”
Obama got the message. He shook hands with Martinez and Lieberman — both of whom greeted him more warmly — and quickly beat a retreat back to the Democratic side.
Add this to McCain’s surliness in the debate and his bitter interview with the editorial board of the Des Moines Register, and it’s pretty obvious: John McCain is a total jerkface.
He’s an asshole. Oh, he has his moments, and like all people, he’s not all black or all white, but when it comes to interpersonal skills, McCain is a bully, a jerk, the guy who thinks he’s too good to talk to a moron like you. I’d say he’s the classic stereotypical jock, but I knew too many jocks in school who were nice, decent guys, certainly nicer and more decent that McCain.
Now, McCain’s personality issues are not necessarily disqualifying. Lyndon Johnson was a horrible misanthrope who was certainly capable of leading the government. McCain being a jerk is not the end of the world. But it does argue against McCain’s main selling point: that he’s a maverick, post-partisan figure who can reach across the aisle to get things done. Instead, we see a guy who bristles when an opponent dares to reach across the aisle, who does not show a fellow senator any more respect than custom dictates; indeed, he shows quite a bit less. For a backbencher in the House, that’s to be expected — I misdoubt that Michele Bachmann and Keith Ellison don’t spend a lot of time hanging out. But for a man who is supposedly capable of dealing with friends and opponents alike to Get Things Done, McCain seems remarkably incapable of doing so.
Was that necessary?
Do you not think that political discourse in America and on the internet is not debased enough that you feel the need to resort to childish name-calling? You could easily have posted the story and just left people to draw their own conclusions. There are many reasons to dislike McCain as a potential leader and many more reasons for not supporting or agreeing with the way that his campaign team has run things. But calling him an ‘asshole’ and a ‘jerkface’ is really completely out of line.
You don’t know the guy you certainly don’t know the psychological pressure he’s under (which given the way that his campaign has been completely at odds with his apparently personality seems to be considerable) and while history may well come to speak of McCain’s personality flaws as it does of Nixon and of Bush, I really don’t think that anyone is served by you calling him an asshole.
I don’t think that’s entirely fair: McCain can work with people who are in the opposing party. What he cannot do is be polite and respectful of disagreement on what he deems to be fundamental moral issues — and to McCain, it mostly comes back to morality.
His spiel on earmarks in the debate was ludicrous because he didn’t critique earmarks for what they do to the country (which, being a tiny percentage of the federal budget, isn’t very much); he declared them a “gateway drug” that would corrupt and land politicians in prison.
His thing about campaign finance reform was similar: he wasn’t trying to maximize the ability of regular folks to influence their representatives; he just wanted to save himself (post Keating Five) and his colleagues from becoming corrupt.
Same take on the financial crisis: we need to do something about greed. Well, greed is a moral failing and the government can’t do much about those; all it can do is minimize their harm and channel them toward productive ends — “greed,” after all, can be what drives people to work 18-hour days to invent something or make it work better.
Once McCain has found his moral calling, if you disagree with him about it, you’ve marked yourself as immoral. You might think that an issue like abortion would fall into that category, so how can he buddy up with Lieberman and other pro-choice folks? But almost every politician says “abortion is bad.” The only difference is whether you think it is immoral but must remain safe, legal and rare, or if it is immoral and should be outlawed. So McCain doesn’t see a moral divide between himself and Lieberman.
In contrast, a fellow Republican who disagreed with McCain about the constitutionality of McCain-Feingold became The Enemy. George Will and other conservatives who are worried about McCain’s temperament have recounted this story.
“McCain has always refused to meet with me,” [former FEC Chairman Bradley] Smith says. “I tried to meet him once at a public hearing. He was at the table, and I went up and I said, ‘Senator,’ and I held out my hand. And he instinctively took my hand, and then he looked up and realized who it was, and he yanked his hand away and said, ‘I’m not going to shake your hand. You’re a bully and a coward, and you have no regard for the Constitution. I don’t have to talk to you. I’m not going to talk to you.’ It was right in front of a large number of people, so I don’t think he wants to talk to me.”
“He said you were a bully and a coward?”
“Uh-huh. And corrupt, too. He always calls me corrupt. And my wife says, ‘If you’re corrupt, you’re the worst corrupt person I’ve ever seen. Where are the fur coats? The watches? The cars? The fancy trips?'”
Oh, Gawker says this is what put Obama on McCain’s Haters List.
Eh.
A more charitable interpretation: McCain is basically a decent guy who has decided that he can never become president (and wrest control of his own beloved party from Karl Rove cronyism) without stooping to adopting many of the practices he hates. So he made the Faustian bargain with the devil – and now all evidence suggests the devil is not living up to its side of the bargain.
If you were in the position of having to do things you find odious and defend things you don’t believe, all the while facing electoral doom, you’d get a little testy, too.
For what it’s worth, studies of whistle-blowers suggest that they tend to be really prickly people, too. Maybe only people with that personality can resist pressures to conform; or maybe pressures to conform cause resisters to develop that personality.
Either way, I’m inclined to cut McCain some slack. Call me a crazy dreamer, but I retain hope that when the election is over McCain will once again answer the call of duty, reforming the Republican Party and in ushering in a new era of collegiality in Washington.
If we can’t call McCain names, can we do that with Palin?
Palin speaking to Biden: “I have great respect for your family also and the honor that you show our military. Barack Obama though, another story there.”
Can we finally admit that the Republicans are questioning Obama’s patriotism?
Also:
1) She started with fear about the economy, and ended with fear about losing our freedom (to whom was unclear). Maybe that’s working for undecided voters, but I found it depressing and decidedly un-Reagan-like.
2) She has latched onto McCain’s theory that all of our problems are due to moral failings that the government must correct. Not institutional failings, not bad incentives (for lenders who could offload bad credit risks into securities) or lack of accountability (for credit rating agencies that issue poorly-researched ratings and say they have no responsibility, they’re just stating an opinion). No, it’s greed and corruption, and apparently McCain/ Palin can make Wall Streeters into angels, just like McCain-Feingold was mysteriously going to do for politicians.
“If we can’t call McCain names, can we do that with Palin?”
No. You address the substance of what they say. If they want to call you names and make ridiculous arguments then the only reaction is to let them do it and to relentlessly point out why they are wrong.
The personalisation of politics is not a good thing and has been fairly disastrous for the Democrats over the last 10 years. Once you get sucked down into “he’s this type of person” discussions then you are playing on Republican turf. So not only are you failing intellectually, you’re also quite likely to fail on a pragmatic level too.
1) I was joking. Note that I didn’t actually call Palin names, but instead pointed out that she clearly was trying to call Obama one.
The personalisation of politics is not a good thing and has been fairly disastrous for the Democrats over the last 10 years. Once you get sucked down into “he’s this type of person” discussions then you are playing on Republican turf. So not only are you failing intellectually, you’re also quite likely to fail on a pragmatic level too.
2) I disagree with the implication that Democrats of the past decade have all been worse on a personal level than Republicans.
I didn’t mean that they were worse in terms of character, only that they are less skilled at character assassination and moral out-rage than the Republicans, largely because the naturally liberal tend not to think in those terms and so don’t get to set the moral agenda.
For example, if Obama had a child who had had a child out of wedlock then the Republican party would happily proclaim that as a sound basis for not voting for him (“Senator Obama allowed his daughter to have a child out of wedlock. Is that the kind of leadership and wisdom we want for this country?” etc).
You can’t win that kind of contest against people who are as inconsistent and hypocritical as they are prone to outrage. Therefore the best thing to do is to rise above it, and that includes name-calling.
Do you genuinely not see the difference between “McCain is an asshole” and “McCain has a black baby” in terms of insults?
I didn’t think “McCain has a black baby” was an insult in itself. As the SNL skit had it, Obama has TWO black daughters! The insult is the implication that McCain had cheated on his wife. And in the minds of racists, there was additional insult in the idea he had committed miscegenation as well as adultery. “McCain has a black baby” is a claimed statement of fact, and if untrue and said about a private citizen could be grounds for a defamation suit. “McCain is an asshole” is opinion and wholly protected from liability. It’s also an overt, inherent, in-itself insult. There is no set of facts in which “X is an asshole” isn’t an insult to X.
“I didn’t think “McCain has a black baby” was an insult in itself. ”
Exactly.
Mr. M is playing a game of condensation. He’s saying that it’s problematic to call someone an “asshole” in the same way that it’s problematic to create insults out of things which should not be insults — for instance, “McCain has a black baby” (MISCEGENATION IS BAD) or “Obama is Muslim” (BEING MUSLIM IS BAD).
That’s a silly argument.
“LEEEAVE SIDNEY ALONNNEEE!”
Bollocks. After reading this exhaustive profile of McCain by Tim Dickinson, I’m inclined to believe that “asshole” is far too kind.
I suppose Rolling Stone is doing the work for Obama that McCain’s campaign has to do itself. Dickinson’s article at least has the virtue of including basic elements of facts, quotes from sources, etc. However, someone needs to tell Matt Taibbi that he is not the reincarnation of Hunter S. Thompson. I read “Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72,” and “Mad Dog Palin” is no “Fear and Loathing.” There is nothing edgy or gonzo about insulting someone for having five children.
Gotta love this bit from Dickinson: ‘He cites as his “biggest” legislative victory of that era a 1989 bill that abolished catastrophic health insurance for seniors, a move he still cheers as the first-ever repeal of a federal entitlement program.’
So maybe Palin did know that the Reagan quote was talking about how Medicare would take away our freedoms. Well, what do you expect from a coupla mavericks?