The Gospel of John
Why We Should Not Write Off John McCain
McCain needs to change tactics.
For one, he needs to stop
pretending he’s a conservative because nobody’s buying that. Oh,
wait, the black community believes it, so they’re not voting for
him. But conservatives know their own. They know, the day after
McCain is sworn in, his White House won’t be measurably
different from an Obama White House. Both men will move to the
center. Only McCain is so much sharper than Bush, the hard-right
fat cats won’t be getting quite so much free lunch. Or, at the
very least, McCain will impose a toll booth along the way.
McCain is, frankly, not dumb enough, not disconnected enough
from the facts to earn these guys’ robust support. They don’t
trust him. They have good reason not to.
Which is why McCain should talk to us. He should roll the dice,
spend some money, and talk to us. without the Obama kiss-ass and
without the mea culpa— really talk to us as if we were actually
thoughtful grown-ups. He should make Barack Obama earn our vote.
He should challenge us to know, I mean really know, where Obama
stands on the issues, to know what we are voting for. He should
talk about his conservative views but stop pretending to be a
conservative because he comes across as disingenuous. He should
stop, immediately, all ads that repeat Obama’s campaign slogan.
I mean, what drugs are these people on?
He should go after the black vote. He should force Obama to
spend money protecting his flank. He should find some way to
become the reasonable, knowable, trustworthy Straight Talk
Express guy from 2000. He should show us his heart as much as
he’s showing us his strength.
Writing us off is every bit as insulting as taking us for
granted. We didn’t acquit OJ because we thought he was innocent.
We acquitted OJ because that’s the law. We are intelligent
people, reasonable people. And we’d give McCain a fairer shot
than a lot of whites are giving Obama. Which is no guarantee
that McCain will find much support here, but reasonable efforts
to be reasonable would cast him in a different light that should
help him across the board.
He should go after moderate Republicans, liberal Republicans
(rumor has it they exist), independents, conservative Democrats
and Hillary-ocrats who were voting for her because she was a
woman and/or because they were on the fence about supporting a
black guy. McCain 2000 was about hope, about new ideas. McCain’s
chief strength in 2008 is his race. Absent that, the fire of the
2000 presidential candidate simply isn’t there. He’s like Ali
fighting Larry Holmes or Bobby Brown trying to make a new CD. We
liked him. We really, really liked him. But the McCain I was
prepared to vote for is long gone. This impatient, cranky guy
with no perceptible message who is trying to win over
closed-minded right-wingers and evangelical double-chins—groups
McCain 2000 would not have crossed the street to spit on—is a
total stranger to me. I am ghastly disappointed by the McCain
campaign thus far. It’s not too late for him, but, from my
chair, the only way McCain wins is to run a mirror of Obama’s
campaign, which would surely cause him to change positions on
things (and get called a “flip-flopper,” a term I never truly
understood: what’s so bad about changing your mind? Sticking
with a position you no longer believe in seems terribly immature
to me). He’d surely lose most conservative support, which would
now make this a campaign about two mavericks ready to make real
change in Washington. And the white guy would win. If McCain was
running the same campaign as Obama, the white guy would win.
Instead, McCain seems to be running Bob Dole’s campaign, with
the Chrysler chevron over his name and the military star to make
a not-so-subtle point about Obama. He’s running negative ads
cloaked in family-friendly sound bites and he is stupidly
reinforcing his opponent’s main theme while making even
conservatives uneasy about the negative spin. This is a campaign
run by monkeys, which is a shame considering this is a very good
man who would make a very good president. Barack Obama could
have several chances to come back and run again, but for John
McCain, at age 72, this is the last hurrah.
If McCain wins this thing,
he’ll win by default. He’ll win
because he’s the white guy, which is absolutely the wrong reason
to ever elect somebody president. But that’s the reality: Barack
Obama has to run a 24/7 campaign extolling his virtues and
promoting his ideas and policies. All John McCain really needs
to do is be white. This election is really not about much else.
All that money, all that running around, all those speeches all
boil down to one thing: is America ready to elect a black man
president. The central issue of this campaign is not Iraq, not
the economy, not high gas prices. The central theme of this
campaign is Barack Obama. Or, more precisely, Don’t Vote For The
Black Kid. For Obama to be elected, he has to overcome that
stigma, taking votes away that John McCain earned simply by
breathing and standing erect. It remains to be seen if John
McCain can win, but I am quite sure this election is Barack
Obama’s to lose.
By now most everyone is familiar with McCain’s biography, at
least the part about his record of service in Vietnam. The
Wikipedia summary: McCain graduated from the United States Naval
Academy in 1958 and became a naval aviator, flying ground-attack
aircraft from aircraft carriers. During the Vietnam War, he
nearly lost his life in the 1967 USS Forrestal fire. Later that
year while on a bombing mission over North Vietnam, he was shot
down, badly injured, and captured as a prisoner of war by the
North Vietnamese. He was held from 1967 to 1973, experiencing
episodes of torture and refusing an out-of-sequence early
repatriation offer; his war wounds would leave him with lifelong
physical limitations.
He retired from the Navy as a captain in 1981 and, moving to
Arizona, entered politics. He was elected to the U.S. House of
Representatives in 1982. After serving two terms, he was elected
to the U.S. Senate in 1986, where he was caught up in the
Keating Five Scandal, accused of corruption along with four
Democratic senators, likely as retribution for McCain's crossing
the political aisle (McCain was later exonerated of any
wrongdoing). McCain bounced back from the scandal, winning
re-election easily in 1992, 1998, and 2004. While generally
adhering to conservative principles, McCain has gained a media
reputation as a "maverick" for disagreeing with his party on
several key issues. Surviving the Keating Five political
influence scandal of the 1980s, he made campaign finance reform
one of his signature concerns, which eventually led to the
passage of the McCain-Feingold Act in 2002. He is also known for
his work towards restoring diplomatic relations with Vietnam in
the 1990s, and for his belief that the war in Iraq should be
fought to a successful conclusion in the 2000s. McCain has
chaired the powerful Senate Commerce Committee, and has been a
leader in seeking to rein in both pork barrel spending as well
as Senate filibusters of judicial nominations.
McCain lost the Republican nomination in the 2000 presidential
election to George W. Bush. He ran again for the Republican
presidential nomination in 2008, and gained enough delegates to
become the party's presumptive nominee in March 2008.
Kumbya: They would never allow her to pastor.
I’ve rarely met a black person
who wasn’t a political science
major or academic who’d heard of McCain-Feingold or the Keating
Five or who had much sense of who John McCain was beyond the
fact he’s a well-off white Republican. A handful were at least
aware of his record as a war hero, but he was a hero of a war
that was terribly unpopular, one which disproportionately
exploited the poor and minorities. His is a strong bio, but it’s
not one that clicks easily with the African American community.
Perhaps if Barack Obama were the fourth or perhaps the fifth
African American to be nominated for president, we’d give McCain
a fairer shake. But McCain is running against history in the
making. Most of us would be turning cartwheels if Barack Obama
had been named as Hillary Clinton’s running mate. That he
overtook Clinton and won the nomination is, frankly, astounding.
Pundits like to say Obama had the African American vote from the
very beginning, but these pundits don’t know our community very
well. Obama had to earn our trust and earn our votes. It is an
insult to our community to suggest we’re all a bunch of
lemmings; most of us didn’t get on board with Obama until he
started winning, until the bandwagon started rolling. There is a
fair amount of lemming behavior now, of course, with blacks
supporting the first national black nominee, but it was not so
from the beginning.
We are, however, wrong about McCain for the most part, but
that’s McCain’s fault: he’s not talking to us. Every nominee
moves to the center, attempting to be everything to everyone and
promising everyone the world. But McCain’s gaffe about leaving
troops in Iraq for 100 years—which he still has not
satisfactorily moved beyond—hurts him in communities
disproportionately impacted by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan,
communities in which the military is the only viable career path
for poor families. Intellectually, I understood what he
meant—that the U.S. should maintain a military presence in the
region—and I don’t entirely disagree. The Middle East is a mess.
But Iraq is not south Korea or even Japan. Leaving a force in an
unstable region made all the more hostile toward Americans since
George W. Bush’s ill-conceived, phony war, effectively places
our troops permanently in harm’s way. I know a lot of military
people. Being assigned to Korea is dull, boring duty. But the
kind of force John McCain blithely speculated about would be a
duty station on a roulette wheel in hell: a place from which
young people would not know that they’d ever return. Thus, it
wasn’t the idea itself that likely offended poor people and
minorities, but the little smile, the little smirk, the
disconnect from the human toll such a force would exact on our
families that offended us.
McCain also comes across a bit out of touch, like suggesting
Iran was training all Qaeda. Iran is largely a nation of Shiite
Muslims, all Qaeda is a Sunni Muslim sect: they hate each other.
Saddam Hussein hated all Qaeda, all Qaeda would have beheaded
Saddam Hussein in the center of Baghdad had they gotten their
hands on him. There was no, zero, cooperation between these
factions. McCain not knowing the price of a gallon of
gas—fumbling the question of when he last pumped his own gas,
and his cloying kidney punches to Obama—which come across as
phony because McCain really isn't the below-the-belt type, so
when he does it he looks like a jackass—all of this stuff
polarizes the distance between himself and Obama’s key
constituency. It’s a constituency McCain could actually put a
dent in. No, there’s no way he could ever win the black vote,
steal it from Obama, but McCain really isn’t a bad guy. I’m not
sure what this strategy is, to make him look like the typical
rich white guy Republican. Those guys certainly write the
checks, but this election will be about Latinos. It’ll be about
the West, about Colorado and New Mexico, Montana and places
Republicans take for granted. Barack Obama’s 50-state strategy
has him spending money and forcing McCain to defend his flank.
McCain cannot employ that same strategy because, the only way
for him to appeal to Obama’s flank is for him to drop the
pretense of being Barry Goldwater. John McCain is a very
intelligent man. From all reports, a compassionate man, a guy
with genuine conservative values, but someone willing to meet
you in the middle to get things done. He’s got a big heart, a
side of him he seems hell bent to hide from everyone as he
stomps around like Jack Palance doing one-armed push-ups at the
Oscars. But, it is precisely that compassion, that heart, that
could be his most powerful weapon against Barack Obama. But
McCain would have to choose: to win this thing, he’ll have to
roll the dice, jettisoning the old farts he’s trying so hard to
romance, and give Obama a run for his money with independents
and women, both groups McCain 2000 had a strong edge with. He
simply cannot beat Obama by running Bob Dole’s campaign.
Suspending HIs Campaign: McCain with North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan.
Our Christian Duty
There’s a school of thought out there that suggests McCain deserves the support of Christians because he is anti-abortion while Obama is pro-choice. The evangelicals will surely come out of the woodwork with armfuls of pamphlets telling us why it is our Christian duty to support the candidate who best represents our values, to vote our values at the polling booth. This is the same lousy argument conservative evangelicals have used for years to rally the faithful to support candidates who pander to and manipulate them with specious promises about abortion, gay rights and stem-cell research. Abortion, gay rights and stem-cell research were the tent poles of George W. Bush’s brilliant 2004 re-election campaign. I say brilliant because it was: a campaign so ingenious that it actually managed to get a president who wrecked our economy and plunged us into an unprovoked and fruitless war re-elected. They did this, largely, by changing the story from the wrecked economy and epic loss of life in Iraq to abortion, gay rights and stem-cell research. And white evangelicals bought it, while black Christians largely stayed home (John Kerry wasn’t speaking to us much more than John McCain is; he just counted our votes—big mistake).
Don’t let Church Folk—white or black—tell you who to vote for.
Don’t let me, or this ministry, tell you who to vote for. Think.
Make up your own mind about things. Beloved, a president cannot
raise taxes. A president cannot lower taxes. A president cannot
ban abortion or gay marriage. No matter what Focus On The Family
tells you: at the end of the day, it really doesn’t matter that
McCain is pro-life or Obama pro-choice. Neither man can make any
difference in those issues in and of himself. Oh, he can veto
bills and propose legislation, but what the GOP (and white
evangelicals) are counting on is for the American people to
become so caught up in the horse race that we forget how the
American system of government works. No matter who takes the
oath of office in January, it is unlikely that Roe v. Wade will
be overturned. Regardless of your position on whichever issue,
presidents don’t make laws. Congress makes laws. McCain can have
an ingenious tax plan (he doesn’t), but it’s just that: a plan.
All he can do is propose it. The House and the Senate will write
the actual bill, and McCain will have to play let’s-make-a-deal
with those guys to get the plan done. In eight years, George W.
Bush hasn’t had much affect on abortion, gay rights or stem-cell
research. He has, however, wrecked our economy, sent us caroming
toward a second Great Depression, de-stabilized the Middle East,
and is personally responsible for the deaths of tens of
thousands of people. Please remember that when you get that
mailer talking about your “moral” responsibility. These
Jesus-loving folk voted in this incompetent, intellectually
disengaged, inarticulate, stubborn, utter embarrassment of a
president in the name of Jesus, as if Jesus Christ would ever
approve of George W. Bush's decisions. This man who causes
people to die. I wish Jerry Falwell were still alive to explain
the morality of that.
At the end of the day, it simply doesn’t matter if Obama is
pro-life or pro-choice. A president’s job is not to be either,
and a president has little influence on those issues. Beyond
that, I think—whether it is Senator McCain or Senator Obama—our
duty, as Christians, is to vote our hope rather than our fear.
To not let James Dobson or anybody else scare us into backing
another immoral and ridiculous, unqualified individual on the
basis of religious moral objection. We should listen, really
listen, and pray, and decide which candidate best embodies those
hopes, those aspirations.
But, in order to do that, they both need to be speaking to us.
Christopher J. Priest
20 July 2008
editor@praisenet.org
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