Is John McCain a loose cannon and do we want a loose cannon as President? Although his opponents brought this up in the primaries, I had not thought much about it until the first debate. Then I began to wonder.
The Freeze Proposal
The key moments came when moderator Jim Lehrer asked what each candidate would do in response to the financial crisis.
LEHRER: What I’m trying to get at this is this. Excuse me if I may, senator. Trying to get at that you all — one of you is going to be the president of the United States come January. At the — in the middle of a huge financial crisis that is yet to be resolved. And what I’m trying to get at is how this is going to affect you not in very specific — small ways but in major ways and the approach to take as to the presidency.
MCCAIN: How about a spending freeze on everything but defense, veteran affairs and entitlement programs.
LEHRER: Spending freeze?
MCCAIN: I think we ought to seriously consider with the exceptions the caring of veterans national defense and several other vital issues.
LEHRER: Would you go for that?
When you read it, Lehrer’s question has about it the quality of asking McCain if he really would propose such a preposterous idea, but actually he had turned towards Obama and the question was directed at him. Would Obama favor such a policy?
Obama gave another of his excellent, but professorial answers, but neglected the opportunity to explain that his opponent was as close to being off his rocker as has any Presidential candidate in recent memory.
McCain’s answer was an eye-opening, existential moment, a peek into what kind of President McCain might make and what we saw was not reassuring. The host had asked him what he would do if in essence we were facing the equivalent of 1932. Instead of taking a deep breath and acknowledging that if things were that serious he would be cautious, would consult with people who knew more about these things than he did, would deliver the equivalent of FDR’s “fear itself” speech or any other option, without even pausing to think, McCain’s mouth got way ahead of his brain.
Even when Lehrer gave his brain a chance to catch up by asking “spending freeze” as if he, too, wondered whether McCain was on the same planet, McCain’s brain never caught up. Suddenly I began to have serious doubts about whether this man should be in the White House.
The most unnerving part of this exchange was the way McCain just shot from the lip in answer to one of the most perplexing and serious issues of our times. Nobel laureates can’t even agree on what to do about the economy, yet here was maverick John firing away. It makes you wonder what he would do in response to something like the Cuban missile crisis or the Iranian hostage crisis or 9/11. They ought to nickname the man “Ready, fire, aim McCain.”
The response was especially troubling coming from a former military man. Most ex-officers I know, especially those who have served under combat conditions are not “ready, fire, aim” types mainly because they know that kind of thinking could get people killed. That is not to say they will sit and analyze an issue to death, either. They are trained to take in all the options they have at the moment and in the time they have to choose the best one. McCain fired off his answer before Lehrer had barely finished asking his question.
Now maybe McCain has already thought about this response and maybe my web search left something to be desired, but I found no reference to the freeze on his website or anywhere else. Most of the comments on the debate took it as the first time McCain had mentioned such an idea.
Which brings us to the second disconcerting part of the proposal. These days most Presidential debates are about as well-rehearsed as a Hollywood movie. The candidates carefully go over the plot and their lines with major advisors in rehearsals that stress that time and time again you stay “on message” and keep repeating certain key phrases. These phrases are memorized and carefully scripted so as to make for succulent soundbites for the evening news.
For a candidate to fly off and propose a huge policy initiative on the order of what McCain casually threw off in that first debate is unheard of because each candidate is carefully coached to NOT be spontaneous and especially not to just throw off any major change on the order of McCain’s. Not only is it not wise debate policy it is also not Presidential. This is a man who will not pay attention to his advisors even when his campaign rides on it.
Finally is the most troubling aspect of all and that is that this man doesn’t think before he speaks. What might he throw out in some sensitive international negotiation if he is willing to do it in an important Presidential debate? Would he be as thoughtless in a press conference?
A Bad Idea
Not only did the freeze proposal reveal something about McCain’s character, it also revealed something about his values. Only the military would not be subject to a freeze; everything else would. Think of whatever it is you believe is important whether Social Security (imagine trying to freeze Social Security benefits–there’s at least one campaign ad in that one alone) or Medicare or other important programs such as heating oil assistance for those who can’t afford it or food stamps or fixing those bridges that threaten to fall into the river like that one in Minnesota or making sure our air, water and food don’t kill us.
Essentially McCain sees all these as unnecessary or capable of being sacrificed in the name of solving the economic melt-down. In his freeze proposal John McCain appeared to be a person who did not SEE any people or the consequences for people. He gave no thought to what this freeze might mean to the average American. He could not even for a moment put himself in the place of you or me or the person down the street, but seemed to only be able to think in abstractions. Yes, he gave a genuinely heartfelt response about the bracelet he was wearing, but people did not enter into this shot-from-the-lip answer.
McCain’s Loose Cannon History
This could be written off as an isolated incident but it is far from it. In fact it has been brought up so many time that if you enter “McCain and loo..” into Google, it automatically suggests “McCain loose cannon” as an alternative then spews out 143,000 potential sources to investigate. These sources range from blogs and people you have never heard of to the players in the mainstream media and McCain’s primary opponents, particularly Mitt Romney (is it possible Mitt said no to a possible VP spot because of this?).
Among the mainstream media none other than the conservative National Review raised the question
Quite aside from age, there is all too much evidence already that John McCain is not the kind of man who has given in-depth thought to many of the serious issues on which he shoots from the hip, which some people equate with “straight talk.” The media have dubbed him a “maverick,” which is another way of spinning the fact that he is headstrong and unreliable. Senator McCain’s teaming up with Senator Ted Kennedy on immigration, and with equally left-wing Senator Russ Feingold to violate the First Amendment in the name of “campaign-finance reform,” are classic examples of a loose cannon. Senator McCain is not a bad man. He has some admirable qualities. But there are plenty of good people who would be dangerous in a job for which they are not suited.
This is the leading conservative journal in the country saying John McCain is not suited to be President not some crazy liberal blogger. Conservative commentator and Hoover Institute fellow Thomas Sowell wrote in January:
John McCain trails the pack in the temperament department, with his volatile, arrogant, and abrasive know-it-all attitude. His track record in the Senate is full of the betrayals of Republican supporters that have been the party’s biggest failing over the years and its Achilles heel politically.
Then there is this article by Andrew Ferguson in the conservative Weekly Standard
There’s no indication that McCain has ever thought his economic positions through this far. In economics, as in much else, he appears to operate on instinct. What’s unsettling is that you can never predict who the next bad guy will be. No consistent economic principles can be extracted from McCain’s grab bag of policy positions, and no amount of textbook baloney about the free market, deregulation, and limited government will deter him from bringing his malefactors to justice.
Why Republicans Dislike McCain
It is his loose cannon actions that caused members of his own party to write articles like the above during last year’s primaries. Behind them is not just the belief that McCain’s sin is that he went against the party line; it is that this man cannot be trusted and that you cannot trust what he will do next.
The attitude that comes through the GOP criticisms of McCain is that even those who know him best, even those members of his own party that should be sympathetic to him have no idea what sudden change he might make. There is the sense in these criticisms that John McCain does not consult with people when he decides to make one of these shifts. They are as spontaneous and unexpected as his remark about the freeze during the debate. We have already had too many years of this kind of leadership and we don’t need more of it.
Why Democrats and Independents Should Fear McCain
A President whose own party does not trust him and who has a tendency to behave like a loose cannon should inspire fear among Democrats and Independents. This uncertain and interconnected world where the next crisis may come from somewhere we least expected is not a place for loose cannons.
Remember the famous Hillary Clinton ad about answering the red phone in the middle of the night? Do you want John McCain answering that phone, a President, who especially at that hour, might blurt out anything.
To someone like me who has written for several years about the need for the Democratic Party to recover its lost moral compass, it is interesting that the essence of this election has come down to nothing to do with economic or foreign policy, but quite simply to something as basic as leadership styles. After the debate, I knew that John McCain was not merely someone for whom I would never cast my ballot, but that I truly feared what he might do to the United States.
A Dossier of Loose Cannonisms
In researching this piece it was important to know if the debate was just an isolated incident or part of a log standing pattern. What I found was that the loose cannon has been firing away for quite some time. During the campaign there was his weird statement about Fidel Castro:
“Fidel Castro announced that he would not remain as president — whatever that means,” McCain said in Indianapolis. “And I hope that he has the opportunity to meet Karl Marx very soon.
His strange comments about Iraq, Iran, Sunnis, Shiites and the Middle East have become legendary
As a member of a senatorial delegation visiting Iraq this year, he erroneously accused Iran of aiding al Qaeda and suffered the embarrassment of an on-camera correction by his friend and fellow hawk, Sen. Joe Lieberman, that Tehran was aiding “Shiite extremists,” not the Sunni zealots of al Qaeda. Yet, during a Senate hearing a few weeks later, McCain committed a similar gaffe. He asked Gen. David Petraeus to confirm that al Qaeda was far more than “an obscure sect of the Shiites,” and then, apparently catching himself, added, “or Sunnis or anybody else.”
And then there was the bizarre incident of his singing, “bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” to the tune of the Beach Boy’s “Barbara Ann.”
During the primaries, the Mitt Romney campaign issued a “Top Ten” list of McCain loose cannon moments including:
“Senators are not used to having their intelligence or integrity challenged by another senator. ‘Are you calling me stupid?’ Sen. Chuck Grassley once inquired during a debate with McCain over the fate of the Vietnam MIAs, according to a source who was present. ‘No,’ replied McCain, ‘I’m calling you a f—ing jerk!
I invite readers to submit list of their own McCain loose cannon moments.
A Maverick is A Cow
Here’s a bit of history for you: the term maverick actually comes from a real person, not a television series. That person was one Samuel Maverick, a Texas Rancher who refused to brand his cattle. A famous and controversial figure in Texas history, Maverick was the one who carried William Barrett Travis’ plea for reinforcements at the Alamo to the Texas independence convention. He even spent time as a POW in Mexico where his intransigence put him in solitary confinement.
After Texas officially became part of the United States Maverick became one of Texas’ largest landowners, at one point commanding close to 70,000 acres. This was when his refusal to brand his cattle became a source of some irritation to his fellow ranchers since it enabled Maverick to claim that any cow he found without a brand must be his.
This has produced two interesting dictionary definitions for maverick. According to Webster a maverick is:
1: an unbranded range animal; especially a motherless calf
2: an independent individual who does not go along with a group or party.
The link between the two is Samuel Maverick, who refused to play by the rules by not branding his cattle.
McCain wears the term “maverick” with a bit of a swagger instead of the humor James garner used to bring to his role as the title character of the old TV Western. In the old West, a grown unbranded steer was usually so wild or so mangy no one wanted or dared to brand it. Mingling with the herd could only cause trouble and perhaps insert some unwanted genes into the bloodlines. There is in this a similarity to the human maverick. Webster puts the emphasis on the individual as someone who refuses to go along with the group, but the other side of it is that the group has no interest in them, otherwise they would be part of the group.
John McCain’s touting he is a maverick is telling in that it says he will not be part of a group, but go his own way. Yet politics is the art of putting groups together, or bringing people together.
Perhaps the quintessential maverick President was Andrew Johnson. Historian James Ford Rhodes’ description of Johnson might apply to McCain:
Johnson acted in accordance with his nature. He had intellectual force but it worked in a groove. Obstinate rather than firm, it undoubtedly seemed to him that following counsel and making concessions were a display of weakness. (Rhodes, History of the United States from the Compromise of 1850, p. 589.)
We all know what happened to Andrew Johnson. We do not need a repeat of that in these troubling days.
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