One obituary essay on McCain that really manages to talk about him in a nuanced but critical way without being hagiographic or churlish is Charlie Pierce's John McCain Was a Flawed Politician I Never Stopped Admiring Esquire Politics Blog 08/26/2018.
I understand that the death of prominent political leaders produces don't-speak-ill-of-the-dead kind of evaluation and obituary hagiography. And those are part of the broader pattern of funeral, buriel, and mourning routines and rituals. That's a tradition that dates back to before the time of homo sapiens. And it's very normal in those traditions to show respect for the dead in part by remembering them in terms of very broad human qualities like Devotion, Love, Courage, Loyalty, Diligence, Faith, and so on.
The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855) wrote that caring acts remembering the dead is the only truly unselfish human activity, because the departed being memorialized can't reciprocate in any way.
When I first encountered that quote, I was impressed by it. And thought it sounded straightforwardly true. Until I thought about it a little bit.
Because funeral rites and other rituals remembering the dead are very much social activities, even those that may be carried out alone, like visiting graves. They and the language that emerges around them are part of social and individual life and they serve various functional purposes, even straightforwardly selfish ones. Guilt over one's relation to the departed could be selfish motivation for indulging in such rituals.
So can more pragmatic cupidity. An estranged family member may show up to a funeral in hope of getting some advantage in the distribution of the departed's assets. (This doesn't imply, of course, that people should be sloppy or irrresposible in guarding their own legitimate interests in such situations.)
When it comes to major political figures like McCain, selfish interests inevitably come into play. And especially for someone like McCain who was active political figure with a national and international audience up until the end of his life, people in politics will inevitably tailor their rememberences to be consistent with their own political outlooks.
In the case of US Democrats and Republicans, it seems to me that such moments bring out one of the worst instincts of Democratic politicians, i.e., to try to identify themselves in some way with Republicans by praising someone like McCain uncritally in this period. While the Republicans are pretty unapologetic about using such occasions to their partisan advantage. And that matters in the real world of politics.
The fact that McCain specified that he wanted George W. Bush and Barack Obama to deliver eulogies at his funeral has political implications. Democrats of course are deligted that the request is a slap at the sitting President, such as he is. But the mutual effect of those two speeches will be different. One will be a Republican praising a Republican. Do I even need to mention that Bush's will not be the more eloquent or memorable of the two? Obama, on the other hand, will praise the virtues of moderation and bipartisanship. And then the talking heads even on the "liberal" MSNBC will advise the Democrats to follow his advice by surrendering to Republicans. Which way too many of them are inclined to do anyway!
Here's an example from 2009, an NBC/AP story on the passing of Ted Kennedy, Without Kennedy, no Senate Dealmaker 08/27/2009, dated two days after Ted Kennedy's death on August 25:
No one is irreplaceable in the Senate, a popular saying goes. But Sen. John McCain, a Republican, called Kennedy just that in a statement Wednesday. McCain, last year his party's presidential nominee, was even clearer during the weekend.McCain at the time was working hard with the other Republicans to defeat the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), which because McCain and the Republicans failed to do so, was able to bring health insurance to millions of Americans who had previously not been able to afford it. Expanding health care coverage had been one of Kennedy's signature issues throughout his Senate career. And here Kennedy wasn't even in the ground yet and McCain was using his memory to encourage Democrats to surrender on health care.
"He had a way of sitting down with the parties at a table and making the right concessions, which really are the essence of successful negotiations," McCain said in a weekend television talk show.
"It's huge that he's absent," McCain added.
One of the major "maverick-y" things he's now credited with doing, siding with the Demcorats in key votes last year against repealing Obamacare, was scarcely a bold stand on principle, as Jordan Weissmann explains in John McCain’s Complicated, Inscrutable Legacy on Obamacare Slate 08/26/2018. Those votes probably had something to do with constituent pressure. (Sarah Jaffe, John McCain’s Constituents Are Revolting Against His Attempt to Take Away Their Healthcare In These Times 07/27/2017) But that's fine. If a politician does something constructive that his constituents support, that's a good thing.
A major step in making McCain a national political figure was his speech to the Republican National Convention in 1988, the text is here from his Senate website (video John McCain at the 1988 Republican National Convention, which cuts off shortly before the end):
We have a duty to provide this nation with the strongest and most reliable defense establishment on earth. We can be satisfied with nothing less. Before you believe the rhetoric or the liberal left that your defense dollars have been wasted, conduct a little test.
Go out to the nearest military base or one of your navy ships. Ask the chief petty officers. Ask the master sergeants what they think of the Reagan-Bush defense program. First they will recall the 1970's when, under Jimmy Carter, we had guns that couldn’t shoot, planes that couldn’t fly, and ships that couldn’t leave port because of the lack of spare parts and trained personnel. They will recall families of enlisted men on food stamps.
Then, they will tell you that today we have never had more highly qualified and motivated men and women serving in our military. And they are ready to defend our interests throughout the world - just as they did in our successful strike on Khadafy terrorism in Libya, which Michael Dukakis opposed; the rescue mission in Grenada, which Michael Dukakis did not support; and in our defense of the Persian Gulf which Michael Dukakis opposed -- where there is now peace. ...
It is dishonorable for this nation to sell Central America down the river to communism. The Sandinistas, displaying their contempt for the church, the press, and every standard, of decency have crushed basic human rights and have violated the promises and commitments made in 1979, and of the Arias peace plan they signed last year.
Just as shameful is the conduct of the Speaker of the House, that best selling author Jim Wright, who thinks he is Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. Now it is time to give the freedom fighters the support and the where-with-all to bring justice and freedom to Nicaragua. Now it’s time to stop the spread of communist subversion in Central America. And it is absolutely the time to stop the flow of Soviet and Cuban weapons into the Western Hemisphere.
Under Ronald Reagan and George Bush, America has gone from a whipping boy and laughing stock of the world to a nation that inspires respect from our allies and restraint form our adversaries.
Much of the speech is devoted to the Republican theme that Democratic Presidential candidate Michael Dukakis dishonored the American flag and the Pledge of Allegiance, the kind of frivolous demogoguery that today's Republicans are practicing against professional football players who kneel in protest against police needlessly murdering young black men.
That speech was unfortunately a good preview of his future political career on the national stage. It's closing lines were, "Ronald Reagan, George Bush, Republicans. Duty, Honor, Country." John McCain was already equating patriotism and supporting the Republican Party. It's an ugly legacy. Here are artiles on various aspects of it:
- Jesse Byrnes, Jimmy Carter: McCain a 'warmonger' The Hill 11/21/2014. (Carter expressed conventional condolences after McCain's death.)
- Matt Yglesias, The Militarist The American Prospect 04/18/2008
- Cliff Schecter, The great McCain train wreck Guardian 09/29/2008
- David Smith, John McCain opened Pandora’s box – Sarah Palin came out, but Trump was right behind her Guardian 08/26/2018
- Cliff Schecter, John McCain’s White Supremacist Problem Huffpost 04/28/2008, updated 05/25/2011
- C.W. Nevius et al, McCain Criticized for Slur/He says he'll keep using term for ex-captors in Vietnam San Francisco Chronicle 02/18/2000
And he may not actually have been such a nice guy, as Cenk Uygar reported 10 years ago,
Does McCain Have A Temper? TYT 04/09/2008:
McCain And His Temper TYT 04/21/2008:
McCain is being credited in the tributes for opposing torture. But he "then ended up voting for legislation that has helped make torture legal, at least in the eyes of the president." The President in that case being George W. Bush. Who McCain requested to give a eulogy at his funeral. (Robert Scheer, The Contradictions of John McCain Truthdig 08/26/2018)
Even his famous defence of Obama during the 2008 Presidential campaign against a dingy question from a woman in his audience really isn't all it was cracked up to be. (Jane Kim, Arab or Decent? Columbia Journalism Review 10/14/2008)
McCain had plenty of virtues. But he applied them mostly to destructive political causes. His political legacy very prominently includes, yes, warmongering and unleashing Sarah Palin onto the national political scene. As Charlie Pierce puts it:
By the time the Republican convention of 2008 rolled around, there was little left of the 2000 John McCain except the ambition that had always burned in him.Paul Krugman writes this week (Why It Can Happen Here New York Times 08/27/2018), "the reality [is] that the modern G.O.P. feels no allegiance to democratic ideals; it will do whatever it thinks it can get away with to entrench its power." McCain leadership in the Republican Party was a significant part of what took the party down that path, most dramatically by his choice of Sarah Palin.
Then he picked Sarah Palin to run with him and that was the ballgame, at least for me. I had come to like him during the time we'd spent together when I was doing a profile in 1999 as he was warming up for his first presidential run. He was destined, always, to disappoint me politically but that was only because we didn't agree on anything. The choice of Palin was where I climbed completely off the tire swing. Only someone dangerously blinded by ambition would consider putting her that close to the national command authority. He had lost his way entirely. Anybody who wants to be president badly enough that he'd pick a half-bright human parka as his running mate never should be elected to that office.
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