3-31-08, 11:30 am

“President Bush has talked about us staying in Iraq for fifty years. Make it a hundred. We’ve been in Japan for 60 years. We’ve been in South Korea for 50 years or so. That’d be fine with me as long as Americans are not being injured or wounded or killed. That’s fine with me” (John McCain, 2008)

As seen in this quote, his case for endless war in Iraq defines John McCain, the Republican presidential candidate. McCain’s campaign will try desperately to follow the script of a John Wayne movie. He will portray himself as an American hero of the war in Vietnam. McCain’s bitter battle against Bush in 2000 for the Republican nomination will be forgotten and forgiven. His “straight talk” image will be pushed relentlessly and the underlying theme will be support John McCain, the real American, who knows that as General MacArthur said, “there is no substitute for victory.”

McCain will personally avoid making direct and specific racist or sexist attacks, but the Republican media machine will do it for him, claiming the Democratic candidates represent an attack on white people and culture. The campaign will be an ugly “culture war” campaign, because that it all the Republicans after the Bush disasters have left. Whether it will work or not depends on progressives, on their ability to challenge the Republican propaganda machine to educate voters about who John McCain really is and what he really represents.

First, one should know that McCain will be 72 years old in August 2008. He was born at a US Air Base in the US-controlled Panama Canal Zone in 1936, the son of one admiral and the grandson of another. John McCain was never much of a student, both on the navy bases that he grew up on and at Annapolis where he followed his grandfather and father. He graduated sixth from the bottom of his class in 1958 a class of nearly 900. He then began a naval career and become a naval aviator, stationed on the USS Enterprise during the Cuban missile crisis, where he might have been among the pilots to launch World War III had the military leaders, who wanted an air strike against Cuba, prevailed over the civilian leaders of the Kennedy administration.

McCain had a mediocre record as pilot, but pushed hard to get a combat assignment, after the escalation of the US military intervention in Vietnam’s civil war produced great combat opportunities. He got his assignment to the USS Forrestal in late 1966, which was assigned to “Operation Rolling Thunder,” the bombing campaign against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam which eventually would see more bombs dropped in all of Vietnam than in all aerial warfare up to that time.

Of his views on the conduct of the war, John McCain would later write expressing shame and disgust at what he felt was the US restraint in Vietnam. Had he and others been allowed to hit the right targets, he claimed, the war could have been won.

But McCain wasn’t always such a hawk. On July 29, 1967, a missile from a plane parked on the deck of the Forrestal accidentally fired and struck another jet. The explosion killed 132 sailors. Some sources suggest that military investigators initially blamed McCain for the incident. A few days latter an injured McCain had his first “straight talk moment,” telling a New York Times reporter, “Now that I have seen what the bombs and the napalm did to the people on our ship, I’m not so sure that I want to drop any more of that stuff on North Vietnam.”

Of course McCain continued to do so in a war that would eventually claim an estimated three million Vietnamese lives. In October 1967, McCain’s plane was shot down during a bombing raid, and he was captured by local civilians. McCain became a celebrity POW. Pictures of him appeared in the US media. He won improved treatment from Vietnamese military authorities when his father was named commander of US Naval forces in the Pacific and in the war.

McCain was released in March 1973, two months after the Paris Peace Accords were finally signed, ending direct US involvement in the Vietnam War, and was lionized and wooed by the Republicans.

His public success was marred by private failures, however. While still married, McCain began in 1979 an affair with Cindy Hensley, a woman 17 years his junior and the daughter of a wealthy Budweiser Beer distributor in Phoenix, Arizona. Whether “moral majority” Republicans will even acknowledge this on any level in the campaign will be interesting to observe.

I have dealt with McCain’s “pre-political” career because I see it as central to understanding him and what he would do if he became president. He has always sought military prestige before anything else and has been frustrated in achieving that prestige.

After settling in Phoenix and becoming Vice President for Public Relations for his father-in-law’s Budweiser distributorship, McCain found himself cultivating and being cultivated by wealthy conservative figures bankers, newspaper publishers, and the real estate speculator, Fife Symington. With this support and a $167,000 contribution from his new wife, he beat his Republican rivals for the nomination to a safe House seat and began his Washington career.

As a member of Congress McCain backed the anti-working families policies of the Reagan administration. He supported the Republican’s hypocritical Gramm-Rudman bill that ordered devastating cuts to public education, anti-poverty and health care programs in the face of massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy who put him in Congress and massive increased spending for the military-industrial complex.

In the Reagan years, McCain was something of a “Teflon” politician. He received significant campaign contributions and support from Charles Keating, a major figure in the savings and loan scandals of the Reagan era and met a number of times with the chair of the Federal Home Loan Board to lobby against the government’s seizing Keating’s bank assets. The Senate Ethics Committee rebuked him for his actions.

John McCain earned a reputation in the Republican Party as something of a liberal when he backed normalizing relations with Vietnam, opposed earmark spending that benefited his party colleagues, supported bi-partisan campaign finance reform, and even hinted that the Republican Party’s xenophobic driven anti-immigrant policies were wrong. In 2000, he ran for president on a slogan of the “straight talk express.” But with his return to presidential politics, the straight talk express has run off the road and John McCain is driving into the far-right arms of his party.

He has never shied from advocating war. In the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, he echoed the administration, and in his rhetoric at times out-Bushed Bush. Even before Bush was prepared to launch his misleading public relations campaign to win support for invading Iraq, McCain paved the way. Iraq, he said as early as November 2001, had “weapons of mass destruction” and there was no doubt about it. Iraq represented a “clear and present danger” to the United States, and there was no doubt about it. He also helped mislead people into believing that somehow Iraq was behind the September 11th terrorist attacks.

Subsequently, McCain, ever the rebel fighting authority, began to criticize Donald Rumsfeld’s direction of the Defense Department in its handling of the Iraq occupation. But there was no real criticism of the invasion or any interest in withdrawing US forces and rethinking the policy. And there never has been. Indeed, John McCain was embarrassed tremendously in mid-2007 when he claimed the “surge” had made Iraq safe, but then was seen being escorted wearing a flak vest through a Baghdad market by hundreds of heavily armed soldiers and bodyguards.

McCain actively supported Bush’s re-election in 2004 and spoke at the Republican convention hailing his “leadership” in the “war against terrorism.” He also subsequently presented himself as opposing the use of torture at Guantanamo and other US prison camps, citing his personal experience. But in the Senate in 2006, he helped craft the Military Commissions Act which eliminated habeas corpus rights for foreign nationals living in the US, established secret trials for detainees in US prison camps, and provided immunity to US intelligence officers who had used torture methods he supposedly found so despicable.

He wants to be the president who privatizes Social Security and is an active opponent of any public national health care program. In fact, his plan for making health care affordable is little more than a tax hike for working families and a huge giveaway to wealth insurance corporations. McCain supports gutting public schools by providing taxpayer-funded vouchers for private, religious schools. He favors the death penalty, the elimination of anti-poverty programs, and racist “mandatory sentencing” laws that have exponentially expanded the US prison population.

McCain recently told reporters that he knows little about economics. But when it comes to free trade deals like NAFTA, he is for them. Traveling to Ohio, whose manufacturing economy has been all but destroyed by free trade deals like NAFTA, McCain told voters that he no plan to offer them to reverse the situation. In fact, he said, “Have jobs been lost? Yes, and jobs are going to be lost.”

McCain has also since his election to the Senate supported every rightwing Republican nominee for the Supreme Court, beginning with the unsuccessful Robert Bork nomination, and the successful nominations of Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Roberts. He curried favor with the far right of the Republican Party in February by reiterating a pledge to nominate candidates to the federal judiciary who are approved by the religious and extremist elements in the party. This is especially crucial in relation to the issue of a women’s right to choose to have a safe and legal abortion. McCain has always opposed reproductive rights in principle but, until recently, has said that he did not think that Roe v. Wade should be overturned. In 2007 he explicitly said it should be overturned in an obvious appeal to rightwing religionists, implying that he would appoint new Supreme Court justices who would overturn it.

McCain’s tepid opposition to the Bush tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 ended with his approval of the Bush tax cuts in 2005. Today, he is committed to their being made permanent.

McCain has also been involved in raising millions of dollars for Republican candidates and in making contributions of his own to Republican organizations in excess of one million dollars. In spite of the McCain-Feingold Act, his great claim to establishment fame across the political spectrum, he has also been taking funds from the sort of interests that he has long decried. The number of lobbyists in Washington began to grow tremendously during McCain’s Reagan administration. The party and policies that McCain supports makes government payoffs to business and business payoffs to government and politicians the rule, regardless of window dressing like the McCain-Feingold Act, which is as effective in really restricting money in politics as the Volstead Act was in enforcing prohibition.

John McCain, however positive he may appear to some because he is not George W. Bush, but on the central issue of Iraq, McCain is committed to an extended occupation. Whatever criticisms he lobbed gently at the Bush administration in the early years of the war have faded. Now, McCain is a staunch supporter of endless war and the latest tactic in Bush’s grab bag of military strategies, the “surge.”

The “surge” would be as I see it a precursor to the likely foreign policy of a McCain administration, more militarism for the sake of building up the military side of the military industrial complex. As a president, he might on questions of war and peace turn out to be even worse than Bush, hard as that is to conceive.

The 2008 election will be a defining moment in American history. In that election, John McCain will carry the banner of Barry Goldwater, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, and most of all, George W. Bush representing domestic policies that as Franklin Roosevelt once said, to provide “relief for the greedy, not for needy” and foreign policies that, as the historian Charles Beard once said, seek “perpetual war for perpetual peace.” That is what we see, and if we do not defeat him and his party, that is what we will get.

--Norman Markowitz is a contributing editor of Political Affairs.