Brian Cooney: The McCain Myth

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION
by Brian Cooney

One of the few consistencies in McCain's political career has been his ability to manipulate the press into portraying him as a courageous and principled maverick. He endured years of prison and torture during the Vietnam War. For that we all owe him respect.

However, he has built a myth around his war experience -- that it changed him from a lazy and reckless youth into an honorable and wise statesman. But his post-Vietnam record and his campaign for the presidency reveal the very opposite: a ruthless and impulsive man who will say or do anything for political advantage.

McCain has been caught flipping on Social Security. He was an avid supporter of Bush's failed privatization plan. As presented in the 2006 budget proposal, this plan would set aside $700 billion (sound familiar?) in Social Security tax revenues over seven years to pay for private investment accounts. Privatization has been a failure in Britain and in many Latin American countries. But it would give Wall Street fat cats billions in transaction fees.

Now Wall Street has been exposed as a den of incompetence and greed, and the international financial market is reeling. Voters are asking themselves what would have happened to their Social Security accounts if they had been invested in a crashing stock market. So it's no surprise that McCain now denies he supported privatization. At a town hall meeting in New Hampshire this June, McCain stated: "I am not for quote 'privatization of Social Security.' I never have been, never will be." Yet, on April 16, McCain's economic advisor Carly Fiorina said on Bill Bennett's radio show that McCain "supports private accounts as one of the ways to reform the system."

In 2001, Senator McCain voted against Bush's tax cuts, saying "I cannot in good conscience support a tax cut in which so many of the benefits go to the most fortunate among us at the expense of middle-class Americans who need tax relief." He voted against them again in 2003 for the same reason.

Now that candidate McCain is trying to please the Republican base, he wants to make Bush's tax cuts permanent. Doing this would cost $1.6 trillion from 2009 to 2018, according to the Tax Policy Center. And, of course, most of that amount would again go to the wealthiest of Americans who have been feeding at the Bush trough for the last seven years.

Tim Dickinson has written a lengthy and revealing article ("Make-Believe Maverick") about John McCain in the current issue of Rolling Stone. According to Dickinson, when the supposedly transformed John McCain returned from Vietnam in 1973, he was shocked by the physical change in his wife from a car accident she had in 1969. A former model, Carol McCain was now five inches shorter and walked with crutches. After a string of adulteries, he finally settled into an affair with wealthy heiress Cindy Lou Hensley in 1979. He divorced Carol the next year, and promptly married Cindy. Her great wealth and Arizona connections would be the springboard for McCain's political career.

When we hear McCain ranting against corruption in Congress, we should remember that he adopted this crusade as a way of salvaging his reputation after his involvement in the "Keating Five." In 1987, he and four other senators twice met with regulators to pressure them to delay their investigation of Charles Keating, a wealthy Arizona supporter of McCain. When Keating's savings and loan bank finally collapsed as a result of his crooked dealings, it cost taxpayers $3.4 billion and wiped out the savings of 20,000 depositors.

McCain now finds himself seriously behind in the polls. After eight years of an anything-goes, anti-regulatory Republican administration, our economy is in deep trouble. The Bush presidency will certainly rank as one of the worst in American history. McCain has had to run against his own president and party. His campaign has admitted that they will lose unless they can shift the national conversation away from the economy.

Their biggest attempt to change the subject was the choice of Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate. Perky, feisty, attractive, fertile mother, and a gun-toting moose hunter from a state famous for rugged individualism, she was an icon of right-wing femininity. The GOP finally had its WMD -- its Woman of Mass Distraction. Unfortunately, she has demonstrated a wide and deep ignorance of the world. Her expertise seems limited to obtaining huge earmarks for Alaska.

McCain's latest act of desperation is to smear Obama as a friend of "terrorists," based on his association with William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground 40 years ago. Ayers and Obama were both on the boards of two charitable organizations (along with many Republicans) in Chicago from 1995-2001. We are now hearing at McCain and Palin rallies shouts of "terrorist" and "kill him [Obama]."

My reaction to these scenes is like that of Frank Schaeffer, who worked for McCain's primary campaign in 2000: McCain should "stop stirring up the lunatic fringe of haters, or risk suffering the judgment of history and the loathing of the American people -- forever."   

A BUZZFLASH READER CONTRIBUTION

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