Seemed to be a very noble soldier and a patriot in that regard but an average at best politician who very often placed party before country and whose votes didn’t match his rhetoric. Spoke at length against Trump but constantly enabled him for the sake of the GOP and opened the door for modern Tea Party/Reality Show politics with Sarah Palin – again, despite supposedly not wanting her as his running mate.
His vote against the ACA repeal was one bright moment where he actually took a principled stand. In contrast, his numerous votes supporting unqualified cabinet members and supporting McConnell’s political machinations makes that repeal vote look pretty lonely if I’m digging for good things to say.
I basically agree with this. Whenever anyone noteworthy dies, our society or at least media seems to paint an overwhelmingly positive and therefore inaccurate portrayal of the person. Personally i find this an unfortunate phenomenon and a bit disingenuous. Specific instances like McCain correcting the woman at the town hall re Obama being an Arab and specific political acts like his ACA stand do not define him. He was much more complicated, which to his credit he was quick to acknowledge. So lets not get carried away characterizing him as a saint just because he wasnt quite the devil incarnate like his colleagues.
He could have left the legacy of being the Republican who blew the whistle on Trump and finally said “STOP this nonsense!”, during those confirmation hearings…he had the chance for a “have you no sense of decency” moment. He had the pulpit for it. He had nothing to lose and only respect and admiration to gain. But he chose not to do that. And since he made that choice, I have no choice but to choose to remember him as being a bitch.
Criticizing McCain for picking Palin is like criticizing a quarterback for throwing a Hail Mary that gets picked off in the end zone. The play, by definition, is desperate and unlikely to succeed, but it’s done because the alternative is certain defeat.
I was not a fan and have been retching at the hagiography (which started a year ago) but…I actually don’t think the Palin choice was as bad as it seems in retrospect. It was definitely bad that he chose Sarah Palin on a moment’s notice without doing any vetting to see if she was up to the job, but that would have been bad even if she’d turned into a mushy moderate, and I don’t think she really went full wackobird until after she was chosen and the attention went to her head. She’d go to rallies and let herself get egged on by the wingnut claque. Thankfully she went away and that doesn’t happen any…oh.
Palin was a bad choice but I give her a bit of credit because she may still be around on TV and rallies she has enough sense not to run for another office , at least so far. But maybe she is just not running to make a lot more money.
I admire McCain for his naval service. I wonder why he was a maverick though since he rarely voted against his party. I guess these days only voting 90% with your party is a maverick.
In general, laws are only brought to the vote if the Senate Majority Leader already has the votes in the bag, and what makes something go into the bag is generally the assent of the necessary problem children. Being at the edge of the party gives you the potential to wield a lot of influence in what the law becomes, if you’re willing to use that power. Susan Collins, for example, could wield a fairly sizable amount of power - particularly at the moment - but at the end of the day she’s a bit of a pushover.
McCain used that power. He created law and influenced what the law would be. He voted for 90% of Republican law because 90% of it was written with him in mind.
The laws that will now be passed without him in the Senate will be things that he wouldn’t have voted for had he been there, because his moderating influence won’t be written into them. The law will be more rightward than it would have been.
I disagreed with many, probably most of McCain’s views. However, I always appreciated some of his positions. He spoke out strongly against the use of torture by the US (the shameful and euphemistically named “enhanced interrogation techniques”). As someone who had experienced torture himself, he was a powerful moral force in that argument. He was also a significant figure in campaign finance reform, something the country needs more of. McCain engaged in some genuine bipartisan efforts. Could he have done more in that regard? Well, certainly. But that doesn’t detract from the positive work he accomplished.
Political figures like McCain are, alas, thin on the ground these days. When Trump publicly disparaged McCain’s heroism and suffered no real injury to his campaign, I knew we had entered a new and very troubling and dangerous political landscape. I feel quite nostalgic for decent conservative voices like McCain, a far cry from the “bombastic loudmouths” of today.
If elections were self contained and afterward everyone just went home, this might be true. Instead, this is more like the quarterback pulling out a gun and firing at the crowd because he didn’t want to lose. Giving Palin credibility and a national platform helped rapidly diminish our politics ever since and we’re still paying the price even as Palin has become largely forgotten.
Some of McCain’s highlight reel really only looks surprising when compared to other Republicans. Being against torturing other human beings or telling a woman “Hey, maybe try being a little less racist” should be a baseline for humanity, not something you laud someone for. That we’re amazed McCain did these things speaks worse for the GOP than it really speaks well of McCain.
I substantially agree with this. Ultimately, his legacy—like Colin Powell’s—will be that in some very clutch situations where his actions could have made a difference, he failed to stand up and cry halt, instead going along with a Republican president.
That’s not to say that he didn’t accomplish some amazing things. But it means that when his country needed him most, he failed to take action. That will be his legacy.
A complicated man and a complicated legacy. He did a lot of good things and some things I think were not so good. I get the sense he was a fundamentally decent but far from perfect person, and sometimes bowed to political pressure or the will of his party, and sometimes resisted it. He was a lot better a person and in office than most in his party in the last 20 years or so.
In the 2000 campaign he got screwed out of the Nom by Rove’s extremely dirty campaigning. If he had won the nom, I would’ve voted for him. By 2008 he had stopped being the John McCain I admired and wanted the Presidency so much he cowtowed to the worst forces in the Republican party and accepted Palin and stopped fighting the religious right aspects of the party.
I greatly admire the man that should have gone against Gore in 2000, he lost a lot of my respect in the next 8 years.
It’s difficult for me to see how someone can voluntarily choose to remain in a Vietnamese torture prison for years yet choose Palin and not vote more independently of his party even as an 80-year old with terminal cancer.
I guess he figured being in the GOP was the best way to increase US military capability but when it comes to the US, which spends more than all potential adversaries combined, just how much more will be enough?
As Jophiel notes, a lot of his apparent decency was just that, being basically decent. It’s like one of those optical illusions where a medium grey shape looks bright when it’s surrounded by much darker shapes. He sounded really inspiring when he talked about the GOP being the party of Lincoln but it doesn’t augur well that he felt he had to say it.
I feel like I can mostly quote myself on this one, from another thread:
I also am under no obligation to pretend that anyone in my opposition is a good person. The entire republican party is, at this point, morally complicit in the disaster that is the Trump administration. McCain is no different. There is no such thing as a good congressional republican. Full stop. The best member of the NDP is still awful; the best communist in the DDR is still awful, the best member of Pol Pot’s cabinet is still a genocidal bastard simply because they’re in Pol Pot’s cabinet. If they weren’t at the very least complicit, they would not be a member of that organization.
What makes McCain better than Tom Cotton, or John Thune, or Mike Lee? He’s just another republican. At the end of his life, he didn’t stand up against the awful nominees of the Trump administration. He didn’t even speak out against Trump promoting John Bolton to the NSC, even though John Bolton’s main schtick these days is pushing for war with Iran - in other words, he’s gunning for a repeat on what McCain considers one of the greatest failures of his career.
McCain is, at best, a slightly above average Republican. Would it be nice if every republican was like him? Sure - maybe then the party wouldn’t be quite as batshit insane. But he doesn’t get props for that. Not when he’s merely one of the least bad republicans, and is unwilling to either demand change from the party or leave. As BigT put it, when you’re a member of a morally/intellectually bankrupt organization, you have three choices: you either work to reform it from within, you leave, or you admit that you are equally morally/intellectually bankrupt.
Even if McCain was the best republican in the senate (that’d be Susan Collins, for those keeping track), he still would be worse than the worst democrat currently serving (AFAICT Joe Manchin) - There was never any question whether or not Joe Manchin would vote to repeal Obamacare. Like any other long-serving republican civil servant who hasn’t spoken out against Trump, his legacy is irrevocably tarred by kowtowing to Trump and refusing to have a goddamn spine.
McCain ascended in politics owing to his celebrity as a war hero, and he often took principled stands on issues like campaign finance reform, regulating the banking system, and racial intolerance, but his voting record is spotty at best. He was well-regarded by other senators, perhaps more so by those in the opposing party, for being pragmatic and respectful even in disagreement, which is a rare thing in the era of Mitch McConnell and Paul Ryan. He would buck the Republican Party when he didn’t agree with the party line and publically condemned Trump, but he also selected Sarah Palin (I believe under pressure to get support from conservatives) as his vice presidential running mate which is one of the most risible decisions even in comparison to Bush selecting Dan Quayle. His personal life showed a messy lack of ethics, but then few politicians in the modern era can claim much better, and while he was defiant on issues like ACA repeal he capitulated to the Trump Administration on others for seemingly no reason.
He stands out for being one of the few remaining moderate Republicans in federal office (likely the only one in the Senate besides Lisa Murkowski) rather than the Atticus Finch-esque legacy that many are now trying to ascribe to him, but at least he defied his party sometimes in an era where utter compliance is expected. But we like hero worship and concoct sterling legacies by shining tin until the oxide layer is gone, so McCain the Maverick is the patron saint of the day, to be forgotten in a week as the Republican Party continues to dismantle basic institutions of democracy.
It’s possible to be a war hero and still be a deplorable human being. I just can’t find myself to feel any sadness for the death of McCain. His warmongering played a part in the death of hundreds of thousands of people in a pointless war in the middle east. I mourn McCain’s life not his death.
I absolutely will criticize a quarterback for throwing a Hail Mary pass that gets picked up… if he throws it right after halftime when his team is down by 3. You’re getting the cause and effect, or at least the timeline, mixed up: His plummet in the polls came right after he picked Palin, not before.
McCain’s number one priority, as a politician, was being viewed as a maverick. Not actually being one: That would have meant voting against a heck of a lot more of Trump’s agenda. That’s why his speeches were so different from his votes, because people pay more attention to speeches than to votes. And he put that appearance at a higher priority than even being thought of as a good man.
John McCain was a steadfast Republican in an era when being a Republican entailed a significant amount of irresponsibility, bigotry, corruption and willful ignorance. History will be less interested in the undeniable bravery he showed in declining early release from prison, and focus more on his central roles in all the disastrous decisions his party inflicted on the country. Honestly, his reputation as a maverick feels like a weird throwback to the 90s and it’s disappointing to see so many liberals are still buying into that myth.
McCain was 71 when running against a 48 year old Obama. He accepted, with some pressure, Palin as a running mate since the VP traditionally tries to balance the ticket and appeal to different demographics. It was probably thought Palin would appeal to the young, the rural, women and people who prefer politicians to be well-groomed rather than well-informed. Appealing to the batsh** crazy was probably not so well anticipated.
Certainly McCain made many mistakes and could have done much more. But who can claim otherwise? Yes, hagiography can be overdone but even though I disagree with many of McCain’s views I wish there were more politicians like him.