Senator John McCain likes to says he is as old as dirt and has more scars than Frankenstein. It was exactly that kind of charming, self-deprecation that made him such a big hit with the press in 2000; that, and the fact that he was trying to stop a dynastic juggernaut.
But with his money drying up, his campaign in disarray, and his political manhood held in escrow to the war in Iraq, McCain has never looked older or more scarred. He seems a man trapped in an old idea of himself. He has rehired the fundraiser who got fired after the disappointing fundraising results of the first quarter, and in a random, rambling wreck of a week, he went to the floor to compare the efforts to end the war in Iraq to Cambodia in 1970.
Even against the backdrop of all the oddball moments the recent war debate has produced, this one seemed especially surreal. "I've seen this movie before," he thundered. "...There was an argument on the floor of the Senate about withdrawal. There was an argument that prohibited the United States from being involved in Cambodia. Three million people were slaughtered -- one of the great acts of genocide in modern history."
McCain had my attention. He continued, "It's very worthwhile to review the debate that went on about Cambodia and Vietnam."
Well, no, it is not. Not unless you're desperate for irrelevant comparisons. It seems to me that we indiscriminately bombed the living daylights out of Cambodia, destroyed all the bivouacked Vietcong infrastructure and at the same time destabilized the country, which led to the horror movie that came next. The way to have prevented that would have been a huge occupation of another country in Southeast Asia. In recent months, McCain the myth has just stopped making sense. Then this week, McCain the man did the same when he lamented that losing the war in Iraq would do more lasting damage on the U.S. military than if they were allowed to continue fighting under extraordinarily unfavorable conditions.
"The fact is when you lose a war, the consequences of failure are far more severe on the military than the strain that is put on them when they are fighting," he said. "It is a fact. It is a fact of military history." The military historian is no logician: No one wants to stop the war because we are winning. (In fairness, there are those who say, we done what we want to do, that we done all we can, we should call that victory and come home.) It is precisely because we are strained and losing that we want it over with. The only thing less attractive than losing is the pointlessness of not knowing what victory looks like. It is now clear that victory for the president and McCain simply means not quitting. But we all know how that movie ends.
While the war in increasingly unpopular, it is not McCain's support for the war that seems to represent his deepest troubles. It is that he seems irrationally invested in it. You get the sense that it is not about the war but about him. When McCain's GOP colleague from South Carolina, Lindsay Graham, defends the war, you wonder if he's getting information the rest of us have not seen; he is very convincing that he's convinced. Wrong, but convincing. Clearly a scary combination.
There was, for a while, a refreshing air of daring with John McCain, a sense that he was willing to live out loud because he was living on re-gifted time. Living so close to death for five years in a POW camp will heighten one's appreciation for life.
It is sad, and a little surprising, to see McCain flame out. He was fun for a while, but in the end, that's really all it was. He was a fun grouch who made some members of his own party and other members of the Senate squirm. Who could deny the fun in that?
But now, with his presidential aspirations in shambles and his immigration bill in the dust, McCain's old grouchiness has returned, probably because he is completely over-invested in a war that no one thinks can be won, and which he thinks he can't change his mind about.
"We've made mistakes," he told New Hampshire Public Radio Friday about his financially struggling campaign. "We didn't use the money in the most effective way."
Amen, and ditto on the war.
