Will the old John McCain please stand up

by Lisa Van Dusen | 10/18/08

I miss John McCain. While this new creature of the same Republican brain trust McCain's pretending to run against huffed and puffed his way through the final presidential debate Wednesday night, the most powerful unseen presence at the table, other than Joe the Plumber, was the ghost of the old John McCain.

Watching McCain in full sarcastic, button- pushing, low-minded high dudgeon Wednesday night, it was hard not to be hit by a wave of nostalgia for the guy a lot of us wished had won the Republican nomination if not the White House in 2000: The one who seemed to have, all hotheadedness aside, a rare sense of perspective on the fact that some things are more important than winning an election and there are certainly worse things in life than losing one.

The old John McCain was the one who, in the 2000 South Carolina primary, had his reputation trashed in so many ridiculous smear sheets stuck under so many windshield wipers by the Bush campaign, but rose above and got over it.

Since his bewildering choice of Sarah Palin as running mate, the subsequent economic meltdown and his own slide in the polls, McCain has been acting in ways that make you think that not only did he not get over it, but that he's using the same tactics deployed by the same thinkers who deployed them against him as a way of exorcising his bitterness.

In all three presidential debates, there's been a gap between the immediate post-game analysis by pundits and the polling among debate watchers. People such as me who've seen campaigns from the front of the plane, the back of the plane or both tend to think McCain has done better than the public does. We're used to judging politicians' performances by a set of rules rendered obsolete by a player who refuses to play by them.

Based on the old rules, McCain looked like he did well in the final debate because he "landed more punches" on taxes, on separating himself from George Bush, on Bill Ayres the washed-up terrorist and by milking Joe the plumber. So why did voters think Obama, who could have engaged but didn't, beat Mc- Cain 58-31 in the CNN poll and 53-22 in the CBS poll?

Maybe they've made up their minds about which rules they prefer and now everything McCain does, from his running mate's terrorist talk to his broader embrace of the same tactics that won his predecessor the 2000 nomination over his own dead candidacy, only reinforces that judgment.

The media goodwill toward McCain in previous campaigns was based on the fact that reporters, like so many people, respect his record as a national hero and cannot begin to fathom what it must be like to spend five years in captivity. Anyone able to live through that starts out with a much higher integrity threshold and the benefit of the doubt that comes with it.

McCain built on that in his books, including Why Courage Matters and Character is Destiny, a compilation of true stories aimed at children that a lot of us slipped onto our kids' bedside tables.

"The most important thing I have learned, from my parents, from teachers, from my faith, from many good people I have been blessed to know, and from the lives of people whose stories we have included in this book," McCain wrote, "is to want what they had, integrity, and to feel the sting of my conscience when I have risked it for some selfish reason."

In a 2005 review, the Washington Post's E. J. Dionne wrote, "That is the central theme of this book. And if it turns out to be the theme of McCain's political career -- if his conscience really does have the capacity to be stung -- he will be remembered in a volume like this some day, whether he becomes president or not." Here's hoping.