Is McCain a Standup Guy?

Okay Hillary is a woman, Barack is a person of color and McCain is an older white man. Stupid misogynistic jokes continue to make the rounds. Rather more unpleasant racial innuendoes surface on Cable TV channels purporting to be respectable news outlets. But McCain's people jump on anything that seems to suggest their candidate is, well, a little long in the tooth. Will truth be the hallmark of his campaign and will he be a standup guy and disavow the shameful rhetoric employed by some of his supporters?

At his recent town meeting, he misspoke when he quoted Obama in San Francisco, as disparaging people who cling to certain beliefs and "the Constitution". By now everyone who is paying the least bit of attention, knows Obama made no mention of the Constitution in San Francisco even though he took plenty of heat for what he actually did say. Unless it was simply another blunder, suggesting Obama doesn't respect the Constitution may have been just a back-door attempt to question his patriotism.

This is a tricky gambit for McCain since the Bush administration has been rather off-handed about constitutional parameters. Claims of executive privilege have far exceeded anything stated or implied in that document which does, however, explicitly state that religion is never to be a criterion for holding office. Yet the Bush presidency, particularly its Justice Department, engaged in hiring practices that favored advocates of a particular religious persuasion. And in the early post-invasion days in Iraq, neophyte hirelings with little or no experience were sent to work on various projects having first affirmed their conservative religious convictions.

There seems to be an unwritten rule though that no-one may question the McCain military-service mystique and his long tenure in the Senate. General Wesley Clark has acknowledged McCain's heroism in war and as a POW in Viet Nam but observed that he has never commanded troops in the field or formulated military policy. Clark will probably be criticized for daring to say such things, but serving in the military, no matter how heroically, and doing a stint in the White House are two forms of national service that aren't necessarily two sides of the same coin.

And what is to be made of his comment that bringing the troops home from Iraq isn't the issue; it's about U. S. casualties. As is often the case when pols say unfortunate things, McCain complains his remarks were taken out of context. But there really isn't any missing context because McCain has made the point repeatedly that keeping troops in other countries, e.g. Japan, Germany, Korea, has worked out just fine so what's the big deal if we do the same thing in Iraq? The problem: Iraq is in no way comparable to countries that had signed off in treaty negotiations and were not in any case beset with the ethnic and religious divisions and civil disorder that still roil Iraq.

Equally problematic is the enormous cost of our Iraqi occupation - - the large troop deployments and the giant embassy being built there, to say nothing of the huge Blackwater Security contingent on duty to protect contractors and visiting dignitaries. McCain miscalculated the number of combat troops downward by about ten thousand. In any case what is the post-surge strategy? When will sufficient stability allow a reasonable drawdown to begin? If thousands of troops were deployed in our inner cities, gang activity would probably be significantly reduced, but what would ultimately change the lives of the gang members if those troops did not maintain a permanent presence or resolve core problems in the community? Who's developing the afterward to this story?

McCain's gaffes may have less to with his age than his general lack of awareness, but his age and the issues involved are fair game nonetheless. It is inexcusable, however, for Fox News to shill for McCain by taking aim at Michelle Obama, calling her "Obama's baby mama", street talk most often used to describe the unwed mother of a man's child, and putting out the nonsense about a possible "terrorist fist jab" between her and Barack.

It would say a lot about McCain's integrity and sense of decency if he were to denounce Fox News for its disrespectful and racially infused comments, because if his best strategy for advancing his presidential hopes lies in stretching the truth and countenancing negative attacks against Obama he really doesn't have much of a message.