Well, there was at least one immediate aspect to his legacy: ”Kelli Ward suggests John McCain statement on ending treatment timed to hurt her campaign”.
Dying of cancer just to spite an alt-right-winger in her primary is a pretty strong statement to make. So…that.
Stranger
Come on. I’m sure you know history well enough to name some yourself.
His lack of legacy speaks for itself.
What an idiotic statement. He was the Republican nominee for President, and lost to one of the more amazing candidacies of the last 100 years (imagine if the Democrats had nominated Hillary that year!! :eek:). Had he won that election (and he easily could have), he’d have been in position to accomplish an awful lot.
I mean, seriously.
There’s a nominee every 4 years. It isn’t special. Neither is blundering and losing.
The very smart David Roberts writes a twitter essay on McCain’s legacy. [INDENT] 2. I could tweet about McCain forever, eventually angering & alienating everyone, but instead I’ll just focus on the area I know best: climate politics. McCain’s adventures there, and the press’s reaction, are a perfect distillation of the larger McCain Dynamic.
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33. The McCain being celebrated all over the internet this weekend was the McCain of the Mind, a creature of collective imagination, a projection of something that we desperately want to exist.
There’s the politics of gesture & symbolism, which McCain mastered & our media clearly adores. Then there’s the politics of tangibly improving people’s lives, at which McCain was no better than most politicians, i.e., shitty. Our obsession with the former does us no favors.
Hm, this thread got ridiculously long. Anyway. RIP to John McCain, a very human & ultimately fairly ordinary politician with a mixed & complicated legacy. We should all reflect on why we we feel such an intense need to puff him up into more than that.
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As for real legacies, Ted Kennedy had a great deal of legislation to his name, large and small.
It does seem to me that to many liberals, decorum matters more than human lives. The world would be a better place if McCain was never born. I hope he burns in hell for the foreign policy he cheerlead that has led to the death of hundreds of thousands if not millions of people around the world. I’m glad he is dead and will no longer push for more wars such as “bomb bomb bomb Iran.” Death to civility.
Hateful hyperbole is definitely preferred over decency and civility. Certainly. Doing what one truly believes is in the best interest of the country and being devestatingly wrong is not the equivalent to murder.
How has any of our foreign policy since WWII been justifiable? Unjust wars are murder. Sorry, human lives matter even if they are not American.
I agree. But these are our opinions. There are those who truly believe (or did believe) in neocon philosophy in re to foreign policy.
That’s irrelevant. There are people who truly believe in philosophies of eugenics and ethnic cleansing for the good of their country. Wrong is wrong. Killing is killing.
Ooo. I don’t think I believe that at all. Or maybe not a lot of it.
The first sentence is just nonsense, of course. Many many people would like to do good in the world. They want to make a difference. But most find themselves distracted, misdirected and ineffectual. I’d posit that most people who want to make a difference fail to do so in any meaningful way.
As for McCain and his position. Yes, he was born to privilege. And he used it to benefit himself and others around him. But it’s not more damning that he made little difference. Most elected officials make little difference. Even ones who get presidential nominations. Who today remembers Lewis Cass or Alton Parker?
That’s true. Most do not have the ability to do more than what they do. Was McCain as limited in his abilities, and in the influence he could bring to bear, as most people? Maybe so, but it isn’t “nonsense, of course” to think otherwise.
Yes, most elected officials really are no better than the rest of us (it’s called representative democracy), with no more privilege and power behind them. But again, did McCain have such an ordinary life and ordinary power? I think his bio shows otherwise.
He was never able to articulate an agenda, any specific way he thought we could do better, any signature legislation or other accomplishment he wanted to devote his energies to. It was all about him and preserving his image of integrity and maverickiness, even when it was his turn to run for President. His campaign, like his entire career in the Senate, was simply about him and not the country he claimed to put first.
Most people can’t do better, no, but he could have. That’s damning.
McCain-Feingold is a “signature piece of legislation” if ever there was one.
Otherwise, your description of McCain can easily be applied to any Senator who ever was a Senator. Which makes it meaningless. You might as well just say “he was a Senator”.
You too are then claiming he had no more leadership power behind him than most Senators. Was that true? You’re also in the curious position of asserting that no Senator has ever accomplished anything significant (!), *while *pointing to something as an example of a Senator’s significant accomplishments.
McCain-Feingold was overridden by Citizens United, as you may know. A signature accomplishment, a legacy, is a lasting one.
No, I think you’re misinterpreting.
Not everyone has the ability to be better than they are. If McCain never rose above the inherent narcissism that being a politician could, that’s a frittering away of privilege, but it’s not damning.
Remember, too, that McCain only really became a maverick - and embraced it - when he wanted to run for President in 2000. He knew GWB had the establishment path locked down - I covered that race and it was downright weird how that developed. McCain’s only chance at the nomination was to play the maverick card and hope to get momentum. He wasn’t afraid of marketing that. However, when he went for it in 2008 he was much more the establishment candidate and played with the maverick label only when needful.
No, I didn’t say that. You made a claim about a “signature piece of legislation” and I corrected you. You are jumping all over the place with your arguments, moving the goalposts around. Don’t blame me for attacking their new locations.
Not true. That decision overturned part of M-F, but not all of it:
Not to worry, though. It’s a common mistake, and I’m happy to correct it for you.
More goal post moving and also wrong, per the correction already noted.
I understand that calling a post “nonsense” keeps you from accepting it openly after actually exploring it. No worries.
No one does. That’s kinda the definition.
That’s a mere choice of words, with no difference in meaning. It also implies, like **John **seems to, that there can be no such thing as putting country above self, no point in even trying. If that’s what you mean even in part, that’s pretty damn sad.
Yes, and that’s an illustration of how he put his own image first, perhaps even to himself.
Casting a vote to save the signature accomplishment of the man who ended his presidential ambitions had to hurt like hell. And he came in, sick as a dog, and did it anyway. He gets points for that, in my book.
This piece in the Washington Post, from July 1998, would seem to cast doubt on that analysis:
Emphasis and clarifying comment in added.
No, what I called ‘nonsense’ was the idea that all people who want to change the world can find a way to do so. You then changed to arguing that people in McCain’s position should be able to change the world. Both are demonstrably wrong, as laid out above. Hence my use of the word ‘nonsense’. You even later acknowledge that most senators never achieve anything of note. McCain is not particularly outstanding in this matter.
In my experience, many people find that they can rise above themselves and achieve things they never thought they could. Thinking that people can’t be better than their past selves seems horribly self-defeating. However, it’s not really fair to expect someone to do so. Most people go along being who they are and not exceeding that. But it’s not correct to say it can’t be done.
Am I supposed to be surprised, here? Dear lord, a politician is self-involved? I covered these guys for too long to ever see my blood pressure rise when confronted with vanity on the hill.
Even in his aviator days, though, I’m betting it was there. My ex-wife - a defense contractor - taught me this set of jokes once:
“How do you know a guy flies fighter jets for a living?”
“He’ll tell you.”
“How do you find out what kind of fighters a pilot flies?”
“He’ll tell you.”