In early July, in what appeared to be a flip-flop from his previous positions, John told George Stephanopoulos that a tax increase (payroll tax increase) wasn’t off the table if it became necessary to shore up Social Security.  When questioned about this comment on Fox News, Tucker Bounds said, essentially, that John McCain doesn’t speak for the McCain campaign.  We all laughed at it at the absurdity of this statement.  John Harwood of the New York Times said on Countdown with Keith Olbermann that it was more likely that the campaign didn’t speak for John McCain.  Harwood asserted that McCain was a maverick (remember most mainstream media-types were still on the tire swing then) and he was going to do and say whatever he wanted.  Clearly, one of those statements was true – they weren’t on the same page.  I believe, though, that we are now seeing the difficulty (for McCain and his supporters) that this has created.  You’ve got a lot of people, none of whom are on the same page, throwing things against the wall to see what sticks.  This week someone tacitly threw racism into the mix and lo and behold it stuck, but not to Obama, to the McCain campaign and its supporters.   

Now, don’t get me wrong, I think John McCain is an ass.  He’s a very angry man.  A doctor friend of mine who works for the VA believes he probably suffers (and I don’t use that term lightly) from untreated post-traumatic stress disorder.  I think he’s a misogynist, too.  But, I find it hard to believe that John McCain is okay with the tenor of his campaign rallies during the past week.   I saw something on his face yesterday – and you know John McCain’s face NEVER lies even when his lips do – when he addressed the crazy lady who looked like she lived with 300 cats and called Obama an “Arab.”  To me, it looked like embarrassment.  Shame about where this campaign has gone – what it has snowballed into as he has lost control.  Sarah Palin HAS energized the base – the foundation of the Republican party – by doing what she’s always done, speaking in generalities about things that sound good to everyone, but don’t have a lot of substance to them.  But what the handlers have done with her is dangerous, they’ve given her script after script and sound byte after sound byte and she has run with them full-throttle giving no thought to what they mean.  That base that she’s energized has come into focus for John McCain and I think he recognized just who that is.  It’s the angriest, most frightened, most hateful, and most ignorant element in this country.  THOSE are the people cheering him on.  Can you imagine what it must feel like to be John McCain and realize that the people you appeal to aren’t the cream of the crop, but the bottom of the barrel?  That’s harsh, I know, and judgmental, but wallowing in ignorance ISN’T something we want to encourage.  It’s bad enough that his supporters think Barack Obama is Muslim and that he’s a terrorist. They holler these things out at the rallies with pride and venom in their voices.  Isn’t the anger and hatred that is being, at best, condoned and, at worst, incited at McCain/Palin rallies the same behavior we saw from Germans in the 1930s?  I’m not comfortable calling Sarah Palin a racist or anyone else in the McCain campaign for that matter.  But they know that there are people who will never vote for Barack Obama because he’s black, because he’s Muslim, because he isn’t named Joe Smith and they’re exploiting that.  They’re manipulating people’s fears and anxieties about someone they don’t feel like they know, they’re casting him as the reason for their suffering, and they’re driving a wedge deep into an already present divide. 

I saw reflected in John McCain’s face yesterday, a cognitive dissonance between what he believes and what he allows the people around him to characterize as his belief. What it looks like to an objective observer is that John McCain doesn’t know who he is or what he believes.  He turned over his entire campaign to lobbyists.  He let them tell him who he could and couldn’t pick to be his running mate.  You’ll never convince me that a misogynist like John McCain would have EVER picked Sarah Palin – but his managers saw a forceful, yet malleable tool in her so there she is.  They tell him what to say, what to think, and when to do either of those things and if he screws up, they go on TV and tell the whole world that he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.  I don’t mean to make a victim out of this guy.  He is the one who relinquished control of this campaign, but I don’t think anyone is looking out for John McCain the man.   

I was mesmerized by the fantastic article that came out this week in Rolling Stone Magazine.  It drew a very troubling picture of John McCain the military man and the public servant.  There is definitely evidence of erratic behavior that dates back decades. But there was a sadness to his story, as well.  This is a man who was born under two very long shadows and has spent his entire life trying to crawl out from beneath them.  Whether he lacked the intelligence to do so or was simply too lazy… well, there are certainly arguments for both.  He has, though, demonstrated tenacity and guile, and the combination of those two qualities has gotten him quite far by most standards. But at what expense?  Everything he’s achieved, he’s done so dubiously.  He used his family name to get into Annapolis, to get plumb assignments on choice aircraft carriers, to get into War College.  He used questionable connections with lobbyists and his marriage into another wealthy family to get him into Congress, and possibly to get him the Republican nomination for President.  He’s never accomplished anything on his own merit or through legitimate hard work – or if he has, like, say, campaign reform legislation, he’s ultimately undermined it.  This isn’t a guy who should be president; this is a guy who should be in therapy – intensive, in-patient therapy.   He’s the textbook result of a child who’s been given everything they want, but nothing they need.  He’s never been allowed to try something and fail – to absorb that into his persona and ultimately grow from it.  But while I’m sad for the young man and what he was denied, when he entered adulthood, he became complicit in staffing out his own destiny.

So there he stands on a stage in front of an angry mob shouting racial epithets at members of the media and advocating violence against Barack Obama.  He’s got to know that we’re just days, hours, moments away from one of those yahoos letting the n-word fly and when we get to that point – well, I shudder to think what we’ve become.  And I can’t believe that John McCain wants to be president of what we will have become.  He wants to put a stop to it, now – but I think he’s a day late and a dollar short – not short of will, but of influence.  This campaign – hell, his whole life – has become a runaway train with McCain at the caboose and about 1000 cars worth of crazy, angry people between him and the conductor(s), who wouldn’t have it any other way. 

So who is the real John McCain?  Until he figures it out for himself, the world may never know.