John McCain: The Man Who Never Was

I have commented on John McCain - recent nemesis to LGBT Americans due to his opposition to DADT repeal - on a number of occasions and basically posed the question of WTF happened to the man. I and many others once respected the man and supported him in his 2000 bid for the GOP nomination for president. Ten years later, I could not stand the man and his pick of Sarah Palin, a cunning cretin, sealed the deal where even holding my nose I could not have voted for the man. Is the 2010 John McCain the result of senility, obscene political cynicism, or did we simply never know the real McCain? An article in the November issue of Vanity Fair suggests that the latter may be the correct answer with McCain showing his willingness to sell his soul to remain in office. Sometimes it is better to fade from the scene with dignity and honor. Sadly, that is not the route that McCain has followed. Here are some article highlights:
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Desperate to keep his Senate seat, John McCain repudiated his record, his principles, and even his maverick reputation, entrenching himself as the anti-Obama. Which raises the issue of whether the leader so many Americans admired—and so many journalists covered—ever truly existed.
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[I]t fell to Hayworth, a glib galoot who was twice informally ranked among the dumbest members of Congress during his 12 years in the House, to deliver the dead-on zinger that summed up where McCain has found himself in this strange and angry political season, struggling not to win the presidency but simply to hold on to the job which defines him, and which is all he has left. “It’s really sad to see John McCain, who should be revered as a statesman, basically reduced to a political shape-shifter,” Hayworth said.
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McCain would go on to trounce Hayworth in the August primary, by 24 points, but not before turning himself into an off-putting, almost unrecognizable political creature. . . . . McCain not only sold his soul, he went through a small fortune, spending $20 million to blow Hayworth out of the water. And far from seeing Hayworth’s challenge as a depressing indignity, McCain seemed to enjoy the opportunity.
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The prevailing question about John McCain this year is: What happened? What happened to that other John McCain, the refreshingly unpredictable figure who stood apart from his colleagues and seemed to promise something better than politics as usual? The question may miss the point. It’s quite possible that nothing at all has changed about John McCain, a ruthless and self-centered survivor who endured five and a half years in captivity in North Vietnam, and who once told Torie Clarke that his favorite animal was the rat, because it is cunning and eats well. It’s possible to see McCain’s entire career as the story of a man who has lived in the moment, who has never stood for any overriding philosophy in any consistent way, and who has been willing to do all that it takes to get whatever it is he wants. He himself said, in the thick of his battle with Hayworth, “I’ve always done whatever’s necessary to win.” Maybe the rest of us just misunderstood.
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As his daughter Meghan recently wrote, he has always been more of a craps guy than a strategic poker player. He has never been a party leader, like his old friend Bob Dole, of Kansas, or a wise elder, like his colleague Dick Lugar, of Indiana, or a Republican moderate, like Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe, of Maine. He flies solo, first, last, and always, and his paramount cause has always been his own. That is the bracing reality of John McCain. It is the tragedy, too.
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[T]here is no doubt that being John McCain 2010 is a colossal comedown for a man who was described just three years ago by The Almanac of American Politics as “the closest thing our politics has to a national hero.”
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His choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate was, of course, the apogee of his hotheaded, cold-blooded self-protectiveness. Denied his own first choice, his friend Joe Lieberman, the Independent-Democrat from Connecticut, he opted instead for the only candidate his advisers thought stood a chance of reinforcing his much-dimmed reputation as a maverick. But in doing so he chose a person so manifestly unqualified for the presidency as to make him look like little more than a hack.
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McCain and his wife, Cindy, have been living essentially separate lives for years. She has spent most of her time in Arizona while he has spent the workweek in a Virginia condominium where, he once told me, he sometimes went months at a time without ever entering the living room, simply coming home to the kitchen and bedroom late at night and leaving again early the next morning.
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The real McCain will be lost to history. He’s got years ahead of him, but he is lost to history. The narrative is the narrative, completely untrue and unfair, but he is the old guy who ran a derogatory campaign and can’t remember how many houses he had.” Yes, you can make that argument—that the grand sweep of history, in all its majesty and indifference, will leave behind a false version of John McCain. But you can also make another argument, and it’s the one John McCain himself has been making powerfully by his behavior and example. It is that history has revealed the real McCain at last.