The shambles that the Republican Party has been making of itself so far in this century is personified in the curmudgeon that Senator John McCain has become during the Obama presidency. The statesman and military hero that he was before he lost the 2008 run for president has been overcast by an increasingly mean-spirited hatchet-man ready to chop away at any nominee facing Senate confirmation to join the White House team or the Supreme Court.
His performance threatening any consideration the president might give UN Ambassador Susan Rice as the next secretary of state was abysmal. It boomeranged because it showcased Rice’s star quality and eminent qualifications to lead American diplomacy, which she will continue to do leading the American delegation to the United Nations. His opposition served her well because it heightened her presence on the world stage.
His growing appetite for sour grapes has been still more heavily focused by his strident opposition to President Obama’s nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel to lead the Pentagon. Since Hagel and McCain are both Republican members of the world’s most exclusive club — the United States Senate, past and present — the senior senator from Arizona is looking more and more like a very sore loser. Both are veterans of the Vietnam War, and if he is confirmed, Hagel would become the first secretary of defense to have served as a noncommissioned warrior.
McCain’s lack of civility in dealing with Rice became more glaring still in committee hearings on the Hagel confirmation. It’s a televised record that may be shown in history and political science classes for years to come, when teachers are giving lessons on the importance of civility and conciliation in the exercise of representative government and the paralysis of it when they are lacking.
The hostility with which McCain pounded his Republican and veteran brother could only leave McCain shrinking in stature, looking still larger as a sore loser. Worse still, it leaves this once-esteemed hero unable to grasp his self-inflicted fall from grace, a fall that leaves him on the wrong side of history.
His attack, which had the flavor of an old man kicking his neighbor’s dog, targeted a view that Hagel voiced during the Iraq War speaking against the mid-war troop surge and the folly of playing peacemaker among tribes whose ongoing war with each other was older than the Roman Empire. It was a war Americans saw little need for, and they liked even less when they learned Bush-Cheney had used false claims of weapons of mass destruction in Hussein’s hands as the excuse for staging it. They tarnished the high esteem Americans felt for General Powell when they sent him to the United Nations to trumpet those claims. Fortunately, the general, then the secretary of state, is being remembered as the one giant from the Bush-Cheney cabinet.
Sadly, as he turns increasingly hawkish in his vendetta against the incumbent who erased his dreams of the presidency — that he appears to think was owed him — McCain goes on shrinking as a hero and statesman. It appears too that his string of political setbacks now finds him thinking of them as “personal.” He showed in the Hagel confirmation that his opposition was very personal. How can he be forgiven for his support of the grievous Iraq War and the needless troop surge when he goes on insisting that two wrongs make a right? Will history remember him not as hero but as the senator fond of believing two wrongs make it right? That gallery of fame is already overflowing.
Frank Mensel — February 2013