CAMPAIGN OUTSIDER If McCain were a Democrat ...
By Muhammad Cohen
After well over a year of campaigning by both candidates and dozens of debates,
there aren't any surprises left along the road to the White House.
Vice presidential choices won't change the game. The job itself isn't worth a
pitcher of warm spit, according to one VP, and hardly anyone votes based on the
number two person on the ticket. Count on both John McCain and Barack Obama to
pick mainstream figures, and the "surprise" of putting a woman or minority on
either ticket would be no surprise at all.
What we're all wondering is how the Republicans and their unaffiliated
political hatchet groups will go after Obama. It may be despicable, but it's
the way the Republicans and the right do
business in America today. McCain says he wants a clean campaign, and he may
run one. But allies in 527 groups - named for the statute that allows these
so-called independent groups to operate - such as Swift Boat Veterans for
Truth, can be relied on to push the campaign into the gutter. McCain himself,
from lobbyists running his anti-lobbyist campaign to his claims of being an
environmentalist while getting a zero rating from the League of Conservation
Voters, has proven himself quite capable of saying one thing and doing another.
Easy target
You know the right will go after Obama, you say you don't like and won't fall
for it, but, like me, you're dying to see how they'll do it. Obama's campaign
has already set up a website, www.stopthesmears.com to deal with the slime it
rightly expects. There are so many avenues open to attack: Obama is liberal,
elitist, black, with a colorful cast of characters in his past and present. How
subtly or explicitly will anti-Obama forces play the race card? To what extent
will Reverend Jeremiah "God damn America" Wright's fiery sermons feature?
What's the right way to frame Obama's foreign, Muslim father for maximum
negative impact on his son who didn't wear a flag pin? Will "typical white
person" be the tagline for this campaign, the way Willie Horton is for 1988?
Will the lasting image be that New Yorker cover featuring his "terrorist fist
jab" with gun toting "baby mama" Michelle Obama (or an equally fanciful
doctored photo of Obama embracing Louis Farrakhan), or his empty seat on key
votes stretching back to the Illinois legislature?
When it comes to smears, as Don Vito Corleone said, "It's not personal, it's
business." If John McCain was the Democratic nominee, rather than the
Republican candidate, the right would bury him, too. They wouldn't bother with
his flip-flops on President George W Bush's tax cuts or the minor differences
that have cooled evangelicals and other far rightists on McCain, they'd go for
big targets at the heart of McCain's image and message.
Start with McCain's Vietnam-era service. A gung-ho navy flier, McCain was shot
down over North Vietnam in 1967 and held captive for five-and-half years. As a
prisoner of war (POW), McCain heroically resisted his captors. He was refused
medical treatment for his severe wounds and tortured, leaving him handicapped
to this day. He refused an offer of early release, fearing the propaganda value
while his father commanded US Pacific forces.
During a 1968 Christmas Eve church service in Hanoi before international media,
McCain showed his middle finger, recounted his torture, and yelled obscenities.
He returned home in 1973 on crutches with his once-dark hair white at age 36.
McCain was anointed Vietnam War POW number one and retains that rank. His
military decorations include the Silver Star, Legion of Merit and the
Distinguished Flying Cross.
Hanoi John
But McCain also broke under torture. His captors refractured his bones, bound
him in what are now known as "stress positions" by Bush administration
overseers of torture, and beat him. After a failed suicide attempt, McCain
signed and taped a confession of his war crimes. That would be enough for
rightists to pounce on his war record far more effectively than General Wesley
Clark did.
"When he faced the biggest challenge of his life, John McCain failed himself
and his country," the commercial would say. "A navy flier, John McCain made one
mistake: getting shot down. He made a bigger mistake when he gave his captors
more than his name, rank and serial number. McCain cracked. He confessed to war
crimes, slandering US fighting forces and our nation in a propaganda film made
to order for the North Vietnamese communists."
Then they'd trot out a Vietnam-era veteran (or a guy who looks the part) to
say, "I was a prisoner of war in Vietnam, but I didn't betray my country and my
comrades in arms the way John McCain did. America's enemies may want a traitor
and a coward as our next president but I sure don't. So I won't vote for John
McCain."
Too much? Look at what the right did to Democratic nominee John Kerry in 2004,
who won a Silver Star and Bronze Star for his Vietnam service. Karl Rove
bragged, "When we get finished, people won't know which side he fought on in
Vietnam," and it worked. The attacks on Kerry succeeded in part because his
opposition to the war after his service raised questions. Attacks work best in
areas of existing doubt, and it's not unreasonable for the conflicting ideas of
war hero and POW to make voters a fuzzy about McCain's military service.
Character issues
Similarly, Republicans would find plenty of scope to question Democrat McCain's
personal integrity and morality, despite his refusal of early release and other
special treatment as a POW. There's McCain's admitted philandering while
married to his first wife. That marriage broke up after McCain met Cindy
Hensley, who was young, rich and offered McCain a base to launch the political
career he was already contemplating. How convenient.
They'd probably replay some of McCain's profane rants from the senate floor and
his "Bomb Iran" ditty to suggest he's temperamentally unfit for the presidency.
They'd use those clips to also suggest lingering psychological damage from
McCain's brutalization in captivity.
Democrats are trying to make political points with McCain's pretensions as a
reformer while stocking his campaign with the very K Street lobbyists he
supposedly loathes. But the Republicans would go for real meat with McCain's
involvement in the most expensive political scandal in US history, and his
failure to learn from it.
Costly friendship
McCain was one of the Keating Five senators who intervened with federal
regulators on behalf of Lincoln Savings and Loan head Charles Keating Jr, a
six-figure campaign contributor and, in McCain's case, a business partner with
his wife and father-in-law. The late 1980s-early 1990s savings and loan crisis
cost US taxpayers more than US$100 billion. Keating was convicted of fraud and
more, and the Senate Ethics Committee "rebuked" McCain. To make amends, McCain
became an advocate of campaign finance reform from 1994, co-sponsoring the
Bipartisan Campaign Reform act that became law in 2002.
While talking the talk on reform, Republican opposition would say McCain didn't
walk the walk. McCain chaired Texas Republican senator Phil Gramm's short-lived
1996 presidential campaign that remains a monument to Washington money
politics. Gramm was known as the senator from Enron, and his wife Wendy Lee
Gramm headed the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, approving many of
Enron's products before joining the company's board of directors, supervising
one of the biggest corporate frauds in US history. McCain enlisted Gramm as his
campaign's chief economic adviser until Gramm called voters "whiners" in an
interview.
When he became chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee in 1997, overseeing
all forms of business regulation, McCain took contributions from the very
businesspeople he was regulating. According to the New York Times, McCain also
fell back into his old habits of riding on corporate pals' planes and
addressing federal regulators on their behalf. If Republicans were running
against McCain, they'd label him a gold-plated, brazen hypocrite.
There's no point in debating whether these kinds of smears are fair or whether
they work: they're not fair, and despite what everyone says, they work with
voters. Here's the other big question left in campaign 2008: why aren't
Democrats making these very points about McCain?
Former broadcast news producer Muhammad Cohen told America’s story to the
world as a US diplomat and is author of Hong Kong On Air (www.hongkongonair.com),
a novel set during the 1997 handover about television news, love, betrayal,
high finance and cheap lingerie.
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