I picked out an old photo of John McCain to run here. It's from the period when I kinda admired him…a period when he actually was a "maverick" at times, bucking his party more than once every two-or-so years. You can probably chart the disintegration of bi-partisanship and country-over-party in these United States by tracking how it disappeared from John McCain's repertoire. It was pretty much gone by the time he made his last serious run at the presidency and tried to turn himself into what he thought he had to be to nail the Republican nomination.
I vividly recall the last time he was on with Jon Stewart. They'd had a good relationship before then — at least good by the standards of ten-minute TV appearances. McCain was going to go after his party's nomination with all he had and Stewart seemed to know, during the exchange if not before, that it was their last on-camera chat.
In one of McCain's maverick moments years earlier, he'd denounced Reverend Jerry Falwell was an "agent of intolerance." Now that he was seeking the G.O.P. nod, McCain retracted and distanced himself from that remark. He even agreed to deliver the commencement address at Falwell's Liberty University that year, which meant buddy-buddy pics and bonding with the former Agent of Intolerance. He was on his way to that event when he went on Stewart's show and the following was said…
STEWART: I feel like it's a condoning of Falwell's kind of crazymaking to some extent to have you go down there, and it strikes me as something you wouldn't normally do. Am I wrong about that?
McCAIN: Jon, I've spoken at a lot of schools. I've spoken to schools whose specific policies I may disagree with — Ivy League schools don't allow military recruiters. I don't agree with that. I'm going there to speak to the students at his invitation, and I can assure you that the message will be the same that I give everywhere.
STEWART: You don't think that it helps to sort of reassert Falwell as the voice for a certain group of people, say Evangelicals or the Christian Right? Isn't it the kind of thing that maybe if you don't go there, it helps to keep marginalizing guys like that, or do I misunderstand politics? No? Maybe I misunderstand things.
McCAIN: Jon, I try to, as I said —
STEWART: Why do I feel like I'm about to get grounded?
McCAIN: Listen, I love coming on your show. Young people all over America watch it. I love to travel around the country and speak at colleges and universities. Look, they're all parts of the Republican Party. I respect them. I may disagree and I'm sure that I've had disagreements with them. I 'm not going to change —
STEWART: You're not freaking out on us? Are you freaking out on us? Because if you're freaking out and you're going into the crazy base world…are you going into crazy base world?
McCAIN: I'm afraid so.
STEWART: All right, sir. You know we have great regard for you here and I hope you know what you're doing there. I trust that you do. When you see Falwell, do you feel nervous, do you have vomit in the back of your throat? What does it feel like?
McCAIN: No, but I'll give him your love.
I don't know how you read that but I read it as McCain saying, in effect, "I want to be president so badly, I'll even do what I know to be morally wrong." He probably thought the same way when he picked Sarah Palin and when he said certain things on the campaign trail that I don't think he'd have said if he wasn't trying to follow his party to the Barack-Bashing Right.
Honest. I admired this guy at one point, partly for his war heroism — and yes, I know some part of the legend are in dispute. I admired him even more for a lot of speeches and his reaching out to Vietnam War protesters after the war to try and heal some of the fractures. I'm thinking a lot about that kind of thing tonight. He was a good man…sometimes.