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FRUSTRATING SUPPORT FOR MCCAIN UPDATE. I'm afraid we may have to make �Liberals for McCain� a regular Tapped feature, a la Ezra's Gorewatch. Jonathan Chait and Jacob Weisberg pioneered this trend, then Nicco Mele of EchoDitto joined the chorus, and today so did Richard Cohen in The Washington Post. Their rationales vary -- in fact, they conflict. Chait and Weisberg pursue the "he doesn't really mean all those rightwing votes he casts" argument, while Cohen uses a logic more like Mele's: He's a man of principle, and though I disagree with him and X on Y, he'd make a great president. Here's Cohen:
[W]hile the Democrats are awash in potential presidential candidates, they have nobody who even remotely approaches McCain's stature. I say this not because I agree with McCain across the board -- not on abortion, for sure, and not on Iraq, and not with his bellicose statements regarding North Korea -- but because he embodies a quality for which the country yearns: integrity. He is a man of his word.I cringe every time I see a liberal engage in this thinking. As Matt has convincingly argued before, "integrity," in the sense of standing on principle, is the most overrated virtue in politics. It doesn't matter whether a politician is secretly pro-choice or anti-choice; what matters is how he or she votes. McCain's record on reproductive freedom is reprehensible. This defense of McCain also contradicts the Weisberg/Chait argument, which is that he doesn't really mean half of what he says or does. That McCain seems to somehow get everyone to see what they want to see in him is more than a bit maddening to those of us who, while we appreciate the issues on which he is better than most Republicans (as Cohen points out, he is currently leading the fight against torture), do not want to see another right-wing president.
--Ben Adler
