For one whose single rhetorical flourish is the gratingly incessant appellation “My friends”, John McCain has very few left. The roll call shrinks by the day as his bamboozled campaign grows nastier, and if the decline maintains its trajectory this year’s Friends of McCain Thanksgiving Dinner in Arizona will be held, in homage to his naval career, in a solo canoe. By then, even the Clintons will have baled out because, barring a malevolent miracle, Barack Obama will be president-elect, and Sen. McCain’s value to them as Oval Office seat-warmer until 2012 will have gone the way of Lehman Brothers. Even his wife, Cindy, can barely tolerate his presence, judging by the body language at the end of Tuesday’s debate in St. Louis. As they gingerly embraced, you sensed her wondering whether seven houses will provide a sufficient cordon sanitaire from each other’s company come Nov. 5.
This debate was a riot of paradox, being at once both turgid and captivating, meaningless and hugely significant. As an aural event, it was tedious. Obama was much the more lucid, especially on health care and foreign policy regarding Pakistan, but McCain held his own on the economy (or about as well as any candidate advocating $300 billion in tax breaks for large corporations and their CEOs could expect to do at this point in US fiscal history).
It was visually that this debate really mattered and, while it is too soon to divine public reaction from the polls, one suspects it went a fair way to securing Obama the White House in the absence of monstrous scandal: Barack and Britney caught in flagrante delicto at an Osama Bin Laden fund-raiser perhaps; Michelle giving O.J. Simpson the Black Power salute on visiting day at the penitentiary; Russia unilaterally reviving the Warsaw Pact; or the detonation of a radioactive device on Pennsylvania Avenue.
The clinching image, I think, was the rear overhead shot, as he made staccato movements across the stage that highlighted the large circle of hairlessness on his head. No bald man has won a general election in Britain or the US in the television age (Dwight Eisenhower was the last Anglo-American victor back in 1956) and this one is now a very long shot to buck the trend.
So much for this one, and on to “that one”... the most memorable moment of the debate season thus far. Flailing about idiotically in the quest to portray Obama as the Bush-Cheney cheerleader in contrast to his maverick self, Sen. McCain mentioned an energy bill that emerged from the White House. “You know who voted for it? You might never know,” he said, and then, without turning to face Obama, he flipped an arm in the younger man’s direction. “That one,” he added, lest any doubt remain.
We could argue until Doomsday whether “that one” was a rung or two down the offensiveness ladder from “uppity”. My feeling is that it falls into that vast category of “things white people don’t think are remotely racist but wouldn’t say in a million years about other white people.” Certainly, you can’t imagine McCain using it of Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden.
Everything about his debate demeanor bespeaks a man struggling mightily to subjugate his rage that, after all he gave up in the Hanoi Hilton — his freedom, health and, as seems increasingly evident, a portion of his sanity — this smarty liberal from Chicago swans along, not yet out of his congressional diapers, to steal the prize to which he believes his sacrifice entitles him.
So while Obama vaguely but empathetically seeks to assuage the terrors of Americans about their financial future, McCain seeks sanctuary in the distant past. He unleashes the increasingly gruesome Sarah Palin, Alaska’s very own Cretina D’Evil, to raise Obama’s extremely tenuous links to William Ayers, a Weatherman four decades ago, and the only people listening are the rednecks at her rallies whose shouts of “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” she is content to let pass without rebuke. McCain’s flirtation with revisiting Tony Rezko, the bent Chicago property developer from whom Obama bought a chunk of land in a deal he long ago called “boneheaded”, seems set to become a full-blown affair, meanwhile, and it can’t be long before his surrogates dredge up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Like many failing generals, McCain is waging not the present war but the last one in which Field Marshal Rove defeated John Kerry. He wants to shrink a truly Goliathan election into another Lilliputian one, a tactic as misconceived as making the race about mature and dependable character when it is so obvious that the only grown-up in the room is Obama.
It is the tragic hero’s traditional fate to be brought down by a central flaw he cannot see in himself. The peculiar tragedy of McCain, a hero himself as his pandering to veterans ever reminds us, is that he well knows he is squandering his long-husbanded capital of personal decency with the sort of wild profligacy that created the economic catastrophe that should cost him the election. His entire sense of purpose and self-worth is founded on a romantic notion, bred in the bone of this son and grandson of admirals, of noble service to his country.
This loss of his honor may prove more excruciating than losing the White House to a man that a year ago John McCain would never have dreamt of dismissing, with such vinegary condescension, as “That One”.
