How Well Do We Know McCain?

One of the widely accepted media narratives of the 2008 Presidential campaign is that John McCain is the "straight talking Maverick" who is a seasoned foreign policy expert while Barack Obama is relatively unknown. While Obama's youth and thin resume lend credence to the latter perception, political commentators are beginning to question McCain's popular image.

Frank Rich critiqued this narrative in Sunday's column in The New York Times.

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers. With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

Rich goes on to describe how McCain actually supported the Bush administration's conduct of the war in Iraq, failed to criticize its handling of Katrina recovery until April 2008, and courted fundamentalist preachers John Hagee and Rod Parsley. Despite a well-publicized purge of active lobbyists from his campaign, most of his current advisors and fund-raisers have a history of lobbying ties to the scandal-plagued mortgage industry, Ahmad Chalabi, Blackwater and the government of Georgia.

David Ignatius writes in The Washington Post that while McCain loves the sarcastic and attention-getting quip in speeches, there may be unintended consequences to this reckless habit.

McCain likes zingers. We've all seen that mischievous look, just before he shoots a quip or sarcastic one-liner at GOP rivals such as former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney. It's one of his appealing qualities, but in this case it worries me. Zingers don't make good foreign policy. They embolden friends and provoke adversaries -- and in the Georgia crisis, that has proved to be a deadly combination.

Let's put aside the fact that McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has in fact been a lobbyist for Georgia. In his own feisty comments in recent months, McCain encouraged Georgians to believe America would back them up in a crisis. That expectation was naive, and it was wrong to encourage it. It was especially wrong to give a volatile leader such as Saakashvili what he evidently imagined was an American blank check.

Jack Cafferty of CNN is even more blunt in today's column.

It occurs to me that John McCain is as intellectually shallow as our current president. When asked (in Saturday's Saddleback Civil Forum) what his Christian faith means to him, his answer was a one-liner. "It means I'm saved and forgiven." Great scholars have wrestled with the meaning of faith for centuries. McCain then retold a story we've all heard a hundred times about a guard in Vietnam drawing a cross in the sand...One after another, McCain's answers were shallow, simplistic, and trite. He showed the same intellectual curiosity that George Bush has -- virtually none.

I am sick and tired of the president of the United States embarrassing me. The world we live in is too complex to entrust it to someone else whose idea of intellectual curiosity and grasp of foreign policy issues is to tell us he can look into Vladimir Putin's eyes and see into his soul. George Bush's record as a student, military man, businessman and leader of the free world is one of constant failure...Yet Bush goes bumbling along, grinning and spewing moronic one-liners, as though nobody understands what a colossal failure he has been. I fear to the depth of my being that John McCain is just like him.

--Ballard Burgher