He has never been any kind of social conservative activist. Up until the late stages of the 2008 Presidential campaign he remained a moderate Republican. He has always respected the views of the military leadership. Yet he is now the face of the opposition to the repeal of DADT.
Today he listened to the testimony of almost all of the highest ranking members of the military, and stood up to defy them (waith a lot of factually inaccurate information.) This policy is a dead man walking, but McCain seems willing to fight it to the end.
All of his earlier positions on DADT were that he’d follow the lead of military leadership but now he is vocally opposed to their advice. Why is he doing this? His wife is against it, as is his daughter. He will never gain the favor of the Tea Partiers, that much is clear. He is also dead as far as any higher office goes. He will be 80 when he next comes up for election.
He spent $21M fending off an attack from the right wing of the Arizona Republican Party. Sure he’s hip with the maverickyness, but he’s still a politician, and he heard the voters loud and clear. I’d suggest he’s shoring up his defenses against any future right-wing insurgency. Yeah, he’ll be 80 next time around, but how old was Strom Thurmond when he finally cashed in his chips?
If we give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe McCain understands that he is on the way out and so is championing some fading issues to ‘take them with him’ in a bit of political theater.
McCain is the Lieberman of the GOP. He likes to get his face on the news. It does not matter that he is saying really stupid things and being a complete horses ass and even the right isn’t buying it. Even if he doesn’t know what an idiot he looks like, he is getting face time. In D.C. that makes him important.
He’s a former Navy aviator, from an old Navy family, and on a gut level reflects the institutional conservatism (as opposed to political conservatism, with which there is of course some overlap) and traditionalism of the military. I think he’s just deeply squicked out at the thought of his beloved Navy, to say nothing of the other branches of the armed forces, being infected with Teh Gay.
I’d hoped and even assumed he would come off it once elections were over and his job was secure until he’s 80, but nope.
I remember in 2001 when he gave a eulogy for Mark Bingham (openly gay passenger involved in the crash landing takeback of Flight 93) and shook hands with Bingham’s former partner and praised his bravery and his heroism and his patriotism.
I suppose he decided to leave out “But thank God I didn’t have to shower with the great queen” in interest of time.
Who really made me wonder “what up with that” was Frau McCain when she made that PSA lamenting that gays can’t openly serve in the military, then backtracked and said “but I support my husband’s policy”. Woman, wtf did you think you were talking about?
Daily Show segment for anybody who hasn’t seen it with clips of McCain’s Winnegago goalposts.
I think it’s a combination of having to move far to the right to fend of a challenger in the Republican primary and wanting to stick it to Obama. I think a lot of McCain’s “maverick” reputation he became known for (stuff like campaign finance reform and voting against Bush’s tax cuts) was him wanting to go against the GOP basically out of spite for the way Bush’s campaign and his party treated him in the 2000 primary. Likewise, I think McCain wants to spite Obama for beating him in 2008.
The Republicans have hated McCain as bad as we (the Dems) hated Lieberman since before 2000. But we only nominated our turd for VP. The Reps are so screwed up that the last man standing at the end of their primary process was the one guy they all agreed that they truly hated.
As much as Obama eschews fighting in favor of bipartisanship, at least he is no Lieberman.
He’s still trying to keep the wool pulled over the fool’s eyes that put him back in office again. After all, he had to spend all that money trying to make himself look like a conservative - why turn around and waste it so soon after the election. He’ll wait until at least April before showing his true RINO self again.
McCain, no doubt, served with numerous gay men while in the Navy. Men whom everyone around them “knew” to be gay. If he had had a problem with gay men serving in the military before then, I would think serving in combat with homosexual men would have altered that view somewhat. Maybe so, maybe not.
D.C. is the ultimate echo chamber. You stay there long enough you start forgetting whats its like to think for yourself and just start parroting the party line you’ve been hearing for the last 20 years. Even if that party line isn’t necessarily analogous to your own political viewpoint. Happens to a lot of people; politicians and plebeians alike.
Its kinda sad. He’s really pissed away the main things he became known for during his decades in the Senate. He’s pretty much turned his back on his own campaign finance law. He’s gone from championing cap-and-trade to borderline Global Warming denial. He was one of the few Republicans willing to vote against the deficit funded Bush Tax Cuts, but now refuses to help strike a deal that doesn’t involve extending those tax cuts in their entirety. And so far as I can tell, all he’s gotten for turning his back on his own legacy is to ensure his own re-election to the senate so that he can spend his late 70’s listening to Harry Reid and Mitch McConnel argue live instead of on C-Span back in AZ.
Doubly sad since if he’d actually set himself up as a moderate senator and brought along Lindsey Graham, Liebermann and the ladies from Maine to help pass through at least those legislative items he agreed with the new Administration on, he probably could’ve basically written his own legislation and been almost as powerful as if he’d won the Presidency himself.
It’s more like the other way round. McCain’s rep was established before the 2000 campaign (the Washington Post was attaching the term “maverick” to his name in stories as early as 1993), and that inspired or enabled much of the Bush attack. He was working on campaign finance reform before he ran for President.
He is an attention whore and whatever other people favor, he opposes, more as a reflex action than a reasoned one. Plus, he is a very petty and vindictive person who really should retire and STFU.
Yes, he has. Maybe not an “activist” in that’s not his primary appeal, and he tends to use more measured rhetoric than a lot of social-issue politicians, but he’s always been a down-the-line social conservative.
Elindil’s Heir is, I think, entirely correct about his motivations. He’s a navy guy, and a guy of his generation. He can’t wrap his head around it, and he’s probably stunned that the report came out the way it did. The “trust the pentagon” rhetoric was sincere … but also because he never imagined they’d say what they’re saying.
I think a lot of it is that he’s no longer the ‘go to’ guy on the news. For 20 years, McCain would always be in demand for the Sunday morning news shows. Now, with Fox, Palin, and the rest of the tea partiers, he’s no longer in demand or even relevant in contemporary politics. He’s as welcome as John Kerry is. Plus, he’s not even the face of Arizona any longer with Jan Brewer/Russell Pearce being more relevant these days.