McCain as metaphor
John McCain should take heart. His presidential campaign may be imploding, and his presence on the national stage may be as endangered as a thinking man at a Christian Coalition convention, but his woes are also assuming the shape of large metaphors -- instructive metaphors for generations to come.
First, straight from the sizzling pages of yesterday's New York Times on McCain's self-demolition, consider these qualities attributed exclusively to the senator's campaign: "internal feuding ... critical political miscalculations and management shortfalls ... agitated and humiliated ... overspending ... mockery from opponents ... fundamental strategic decisions that so far have proven flawed ... trading blame throughout the day."
Don't feel so bad, Senator. For these workaday properties so microcosmically represented in your campaign merely reflect the larger contours of the modern Republican Party.
Feuding, mismanagement, finger pointing, overspending, fundamentally flawed strategic decisions and mockery such as this now overshadow the party's once-famed discipline and almost scientific approach to shameless demagoguery.
Your bare and bleached bones may be on humiliating display today, Senator, but in the years to come, students of conservatism in 21st-century crisis can narrow their study to just your campaign's utter disarray, and thereby gain insight into the bigger picture of all that went wrong within, and came to characterize, the GOP at large.
From your example they'll also be able to get a quick read on how your party similarly responded to its contemporaneous plight. As you recently put it: "I'd describe the campaign as going well. I'm very happy with it."
That's the ticket. Stiff upper lip and all that -- as you and your party sink lower and perhaps fixedly into a swamp of organizational discombobulation and ideological desertion.
And there's another metaphor you may someday embody, Senator: that of the stupendously dimwitted notion vended not infrequently by the commentariat class that voters will actually cheer a pol who takes devoutly firm but unpopular stands, as you did on immigration and the war.
The naked folly of this insanely delusional balderdash will, someday, and likely soon, be forever entombed, where it has always belonged. And the political world will have you to thank, Senator. To say that a pol has "McCained an issue" will be to say that, for suicidal reasons unclear, that politician braved the multitudes' scorn and repudiation by actually saying what he believes -- thinking thoughtful honesty right or wrong, rather than an echo chamber of received and comfortable prejudices, is what they wanted.
In short, the "McCaining" of an issue will be that of the paradoxically unthoughtful.
And there was one other item in the NYT piece -- a seemingly small, insignificant item -- that had nothing to do with your campaign difficulties per se, Senator, but spoke loudly and metaphorically on the general state of GOP integrity. To wit, the story noted that one of your fallen, senior adviser John Weaver, had only three weeks ago let loose of "a rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village" to move down to Washington, and further down career-wise.
Gently floating in that clipped quotation is the repeatedly ratified truism that free markets are imperative for others, but the best of rugged-individualist Republicans will lunge for self-serving statism any day.
We salute you, Senator. For all this -- for all the mismanagement, all the miscalculations, all the mislaid plans and, above all, for all the instructive metaphors -- we indeed salute you.
