Arik McCain
Matt Yglesias has written a bunch of posts over the past few months asking the rhetorical question: why do so many people think McCain might be a pragmatic realist in office when his recent record is of being the neocon’s neocon and the hawk’s hawk?
This article by John Judis from a couple of years ago is probably a better-than-average representative of the kind of view of McCain that Yglesias finds maddening. Judis seems pretty sure that, somewhere in there, lurks the old McCain, the one who was cautious about foreign entanglements and the use of American military power, and that it is a reasonable possibility that this McCain is the one that will emerge should he win the Presidency, rather than the McCain of “bomb, bomb Iran” and the 100-year Iraqi war.
I think Judis does a reasonably good job of explaining why someone like him might feel that way about Senator McCain. The only thing I want to add is an analogy.
When Ariel Sharon was running his first successful campaign for Prime Minister of Israel, the assumption on the Israeli left – and in most of the world – was that if elected he would ruthlessly crush the Palestinian uprising, but that he would also be intransigent on the question of the disposition of the territories. Sharon was, after all, the father of the settlements, a man who took a provocative walk on the Temple Mount that, depending on your interpretation of the events, provided the spark or the excuse for that uprising, a man who had said (even after being elected) that “the fate of Netzarim is the fate of Tel Aviv.”
But what Sharon said shortly after being elected was: things look different from the Prime Minister’s seat. Previously, he had been the leader of a faction, and then the leader of a party. He was pushing a program, whether from the inside or the outside, but the buck stopped somewhere else. Now, the buck stopped with him. The world looked different. As Prime Minister, Sharon no longer thought primarily in terms of pushing his agenda; his first priority was uniting the country. And, of course, Sharon is the Israeli Prime Minister who unequivocally committed Israel to the idea of a two-state solution, and who unilaterally pulled out all the settlers and Israeli troops from Gaza.
Sharon certainly did not govern Israel from the left. But he governed from a very different place on the Israeli spectrum than many of his opponents and supporters expected he would when he was campaigning. And both his opponents and his supporters came to recognize that fact, sooner or later.
I think those who anticipate or hope for a more measured and realistic President McCain than the Senator McCain we’ve seen are anticipating or hoping for a similar transformation. That he will sit in the Oval Office and, as if by the descent of some Presidential charism, his priorities will change. More important than his sense of honor, personal or national, will be his sense of responsibility – above all, a sense of responsibility for whether Americans think of themselves as united in their fate and in their purpose. And that this sense of responsibility will lead to very different policies than a look at Senator McCain’s recent foreign policy record would indicate.
That’s a fairly audacious hope, given how McCain has positioned himself over the past decade. But, as the example of Arik Sharon indicates, it’s not an entirely vain one.
So this post basically expresses your “gut feeling” that a McCain presidency will be a lot more sober and responsible than his rhetoric suggests? I sympathize with this perspective because he does come off as a rather decent guy with a few really admirable qualities. But other than a somewhat forced Sharon analogy, what else suggests that McCain hasn’t irrevocably committed himself to an aggressive vision of US hegemony?
Judis ends his piece with a pretty telling caveat: “ . . . if McCain were to reevaluate his positions on the Middle East, he might make a very effective president.” Is there any indication he is on the brink of systematically reevaluating his views on Iraq? Or is this just wishful thinking from a few political observers who admire the man’s personal qualities?
— Will · Apr 10, 06:41 PM · #
Will: I actually don’t have a gut feeling on this one. I’m trying to tease out what people who do have that gut feeling may be thinking. It’s not plausible that McCain is hiding his true views about Iraq, and I state pretty clearly that McCain has not given any indication of a rethinking. So people who are hoping for a different McCain must believe that election to the Presidency is what would trigger a change in perspective – that, indeed, is the point of the Sharon analogy that you thought was forced. As for the likelihood of this scenario coming to pass, I think “audacious hope” falls somewhere between “wishful thinking” and “reasonable hope based on ambiguous evidence” and that’s about where I think this notion about what kind of President McCain would be falls: not a lot of evidence to support it, but that doesn’t mean the notion is completely off-the-wall.
— Noah Millman · Apr 10, 07:42 PM · #
Thanks for the response. I think this raises an interesting question for a society whose politics have become so intensely personalized. A lot of conservatives and libertarians find a figure like Obama immensely attractive. Many have gone on to argue that his pragmatic style implies a degree of political moderation that’s never had a chance to surface in an intensely ideological primary. I seem to remember one article that hailed Obama as a new breed of “Libertarian Democrat.” Judis, on the other hand, is hardly the only liberal with a soft spot for McCain. Given the fact that candidates do send conflicting signals and we rarely agree with all of their stated positions, do you think these intuitive judgments are appropriate when choosing a president? Do you think either candidate’s character merits such consideration?
— Will · Apr 10, 09:39 PM · #
I would have to classify this path for a future President McCain as wishful thinking. Not impossible, as the Sharon example makes clear, and if he’s actually elected I’ll be wishing very hard, but the distinction between the parties on foreign policy is perfectly clear, and to the extent that your voting decision is based on foreign policy there’s no point in trying to obscure the difference – this isn’t one of those fence straddling, nudge and wink situations. McCain stands for extensive military operations in the middle east into the indefinite future, and a heavy reliance on military solutions to other foreign policy problems.
— Peter · Apr 10, 11:39 PM · #
As an admirer of both statesmen, this analogy strikes a pretty powerful chord with me. I do wonder if there shouldn’t be a question mark in the title of your post, though, because there’s no guarantee that McCain will end up into a kind of Arik (even though I think he’s more likely to do so than anybody else).
— PEG · Apr 11, 08:53 AM · #
Obviously this kind of argument by analogy is pretty weak, which in your own way you acknowledge. But as long as we are playing the analogy game, I think we need to consider a meaningful difference between the men. Whatever one thinks of Sharon, he was certainly very knowledgeable about the real facts on the ground. McCain, it is increasingly apparent, is not. I think that a real knowledge of the dynamics of the conflict would be a necessary (though not sufficient) condition for the kind of transformation in office that you hope for.
— LarryM · Apr 11, 02:17 PM · #