In the interest of journalistic fairness, I thought it only proper, after offering a couple of posts on Obama, to cast a light on McCain. Rolling Stone's resident angry political commentator, Matt Taibbi, has had a couple of incisive articles this summer profiling the GOP's presidential candidate in his usual, expletive-filled, sardonic style. In Full Metal McCain, Taibbi traces McCain's tragic transformation from free-thinking, rational human to pre-programmed, robo-conservative:
Only a few months ago, I was constantly running into Republicans at McCain events who had profound concerns about the Arizona senator's "liberal" record. But these days I'm hard-pressed to find anyone on the trail who even remembers that McCain once supported Roe v. Wade, and opposed the Bush tax cuts, and compared the tortures at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo to the techniques of the Spanish Inquisition, and even heretically claimed that Mexican immigrants were "God's children too." When I ask Mary Morvant, a pro-life Christian, why she's supporting McCain given his record on abortion, she gives a typical answer: "I'm much more concerned about Obama."McCain enters the general election in the form of a man who has jettisoned the last traces of his dangerous unorthodoxy just in time to be plausible in the role of the torchbearing leader of the anti-Obama mob, waving the flag and chanting, "One of us! One of us!" all the way through to November. He now favors making the Bush tax cuts permanent, he's unblinkingly pro-life every time he remembers to mention abortion, and he's given up bitching about torture. With his newfound opposition to his own attempts to reform immigration policy and campaign finance, McCain is perhaps the first candidate in history to stump against two bills bearing his own name.
The more interesting article, though, explores the one area in which McCain has held onto his humanity---religion. In Without a Prayer, Taibbi suggests that McCain's inability to swallow whole the prevailing brand of Christianity that has served as the marketing vehicle for neo-conservatism over the past decade may remain both his only salutary quality and his Achilles' heel come November. McCain's inability to shed this last vestige of pious individualism, however, has not been for lack of effort. It is true that he attempted to court the Christian Right immediately after Mike Huckabee left the race, but after a few awkward first dates, Taibbi reports, McCain has been unwilling to go all the way:
Originally baptized an Episcopalian, McCain claims that he's been attending this Southern Baptist church for some 15 years, despite the fact that his 2007 congressional biography lists his faith as Episcopalian. But in a touching display of his apparent unwillingness to do absolutely anything to get elected, McCain still hasn't been baptized in his new church - he's not born-again, in other words. Dude is holding out for some reason. Like he's afraid to lie to God. A politician, afraid to lie!
Taibbi goes on to suggest that McCain's one remaining conviction (his lack of religious conviction) may prove to be the very thing that causes his arch-conservative costume to unravel. The same-old Republican agenda decoupled from the pseudo-religious rhetoric required to legitimate it means that voters might finally see the wizard behind the machine---a troubling prospect for "the archpriests of supply-side economics." Taibbi writes:
The real problem here might be that McCain's stubborn refusal to pull a full-court Huckabee on the God front has coincided with (a) an impending economic catastrophe and (b) statements by one of his closest advisers, Phil Gramm, to the effect that America is in a "mental recession" and is a "nation of whiners." As a result, McCain now has the daunting task of somehow keeping voters in economically hard-hit evangelical regions mesmerized by Bible-thumping...despite the fact that he only started going to church regularly a month ago.... If he doesn't, who knows - people might actually start voting according to their economic interests, which would be disastrous for a Republican Party that has duped America's white underclass for decades, thanks to Christian conservatism.
Thus, McCain's (almost) honest secularism may be at least one ray of hope remaining for those interested in a campaign about the issues.
