AS THE ELECTION APPROACHES, I've begun to take McCain and Palin more seriously.
I don't know why I didn't before. Perhaps I was too blinded by Obama's message of hope, and my own political instincts, to stop, and really listen to what they were saying.
But now I have, and I must say I am amazed.
Sometimes you are so deep in the details of the discussion that the obvious eludes you.
The obvious, in this case, has to do with two fundamental messages of the Palin/McCain campaign, and implications I had completely missed until now.
First: The central message they have been pushing, since the beginning, is that they are both mavericks: people who go out on their own, who are not constrained by the status quo. Who will bring about change because they don't follow the crowd.
And suddenly, at this late date, I find myself asking three questions:
- Isn't that exactly what we all hated about George W. Bush? Isn't "maverick", in this context, just a synonym for "cowboy" as in "cowboy diplomacy"?
We hated when Bush refused to play by the international conventions, started attacking other countries preemptively, not going through the usual channels, refusing to negotiate.
And we hated where the U.S. ended up because of it.
McCain brags that he wasn't very popular in Congress. But isn't one of our problems, as a nation, that Bush has, precisely because of his maverick attitudes, made the U.S. so very unpopular in the world?
Why is McCain bragging about this trait? - Isn't it obvious that neither Palin or McCain really like mavericks?
Recently, one of McCain's problems is that Palin is turning out to be a "rogue" candidate. But isn't "rogue" just a nasty term for "maverick"? Isn't a rogue just a maverick you don't approve of?
Palin, on the other hand, has said she fired commissioner Walt Monegan because he had become a "rogue commissioner", by which she meant that he had his own ideas about how to do his job well, and pursued them.
In other words, he was a "maverick".
I just wonder about the character of people who think a trait is good when it's their trait, but think it's bad when anyone else has it. - Which also makes me wonder whether, under either McCain or Palin, whether the rules and conventions of our government will be respected any better than they were under Bush. Will the constitution be considered just a piece of paper, that a rogue—sorry, I meant "maverick"—president can ignore?
Will the U.S. become a "maverick" nation? One of those "rogue" nations that Bush kept talking about, that don't respect international law, or the interests of other nations—that attack other countries whenever they want, without regard to world opinion?
Who, in short, don't play well with others?
Second: The McCain campaign has also pushed, from the beginning, two criticisms of Barack Obama.
- They have criticized him for being willing to work on the same boards as Bill Ayers.
From their point of view, it doesn't matter that Ayers is now a respected professor, that he is well respected in his current life for his contributions, or that at least one of the boards was basically a project of Republicans.
If I understand them correctly, the point is, simply, that if Obama doesn't agree with Ayers point of view on activism, he should have refused to work with him on education reform. - They have criticized him for saying that he would meet with other nation "without pre-conditions"—that is, that he would not make giving into our negotiating demands a precondition to talking at all, as the Bush administration has done.
Does anything about those two criticisms strike you as similar—and directly opposed to another McCain campaign theme?
Right. McCain has, from the beginning, tried to sell his ability to reach out to the other side, to work with people he disagrees with, to bring the country together.
And yet, on two separate occasions, when Obama exhibits this very same trait, the ability to work with people he doesn't agree with, McCain sees it as a weakness.
Doesn't it make you wonder whether he'll be capable of really doing it himself? Bush sold himself as a man who could work with the other side, until he got elected, and then all he did was stonewall.
So McCain appears, according to his own campaign, to be a man who cannot be trusted to play well with others.
A "maverick" who will not feel bound by the rules and conventions of the game, but who will think of anyone who doesn't play by his rules as a rogue: whether it's Congress, the Supreme Court, or another country.
A person who sees the ability to work with people or nations you disagree with as a damning weakness.
He looks more like Bush every day.
