Another issue that exists only in the minds of the punditry:
The one certainty of the 2008 campaign, it might have seemed, was that Sen. John McCain would be acknowledged all around as a war hero for his service in Vietnam—but apparently not. Politico’s Josh Kraushaar notes that former Gen. Wesley Clark, now supporting Sen. Barack Obama, questioned McCain’s hero status in a Sunday appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation.” Clark asserted: “I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”
That leads Kraushaar’s Politico colleague, Ben Smith, to take a deeper look at the left’s growing willingness to question McCain’s hero status. “The highest voltage third rail of this presidential campaign may not be race, sex, or age, but Senator John McCain’s military service,” Smith writes.
Naturally, Barack Obama is going to distance himself from attacks on John McCain’s military service. And, to a large degree, after seeing the Swift-Boating of John Kerry, Democrats are sensitive to unfair attacks on military service. But we’re also sensitive to double standards and hypocrisy on this issue. John McCain’s military record, outside of his time as a captive, is filled with behavioral problems, poor grades, crashed planes, etc. For the most part I think Democrats are willing to give John McCain a pass on this sordid history in deference to his years of suffering in Hanoi. But the problem is that we have to deal with commentary like this from the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen:
McCain is a known commodity. It’s not just that he’s been around a long time and staked out positions antithetical to those of his Republican base. It’s also — and more important — that we know his bottom line. As his North Vietnamese captors found out, there is only so far he will go, and then his pride or his sense of honor takes over. This — not just his candor and nonstop verbosity on the Straight Talk Express — is what commends him to so many journalists.
Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don’t know what they are. Nothing so far in his life approaches McCain’s decision to refuse repatriation as a POW so as to deny his jailors a propaganda coup. In fact, there is scant evidence the Illinois senator takes positions that challenge his base or otherwise threaten him politically. That’s why his reversal on campaign financing and his transparently false justification of it matter more than similar acts by McCain.
You can see how Cohen grants McCain a magic shield that protects him against all charges of inconsistency or hypocrisy. McCain was courageous in captivity so nothing he does now can be anything but courageous and consistent. Richard Cohen probably doesn’t realize it, but it is coverage like he is providing that gives rise to comments like the one Wesley Clark made.
“I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.”
Of course, Cohen would argue that it isn’t the getting shot down that matters. It’s the fact that McCain refused an early release so that another prisoner could go home before he did. Maybe doing something like that qualifies you to be president. I think it was no more than what protocol demanded from John McCain, but at least he followed protocol. We could use a president that follows protocol. But even if we admire McCain’s courage in captivity, it should not give him a magic shield against charges of hypocrisy. It doesn’t make him a known quantity who is incapable of political cowardice and pandering.
If you don’t set up such a ridiculous double standard, people won’t feel the need to attack the double standard by questioning the validity of its premises. I don’t think John McCain’s military service carries much voltage outside of the underpants of the Beltway punditocracy.
No Magic shield for McCain there’s more on Youtube to sink him without reaching for his POW years:
and he tells Fox R v. Wade –
It should be overturned;
There are lots of people who were taken prisoner in that war and in every war who taken prisoner. Many of them behaved with bravery and honor; many did not. Even of those who did, it does not follow at all that they have the characteristics needed to make a good President of the United States. I don’t see any way to make that correlation. If there were, any of those who had been determined to have behaved honorably in captivity would be just as qualified as John McCain.
This is one of the more absurd lines of argumentation that I’ve run across, but it’s become one of those memes that the right doesn’t want questioned. It’s like calling deep fried potatoes “freedom fries.” If you question it, they say you’re not patriotic. End of debate.
I just ran into someone in the elevator that gave me the chills. She was a beautiful young woman, off to the gym, her face glowing with that youthful health, a bright smile on her face.
She shook her head and said she just saw a news story that people at Abu Graib were suing the US for torture. “If they didn’t want to be tortured, they shouldn’t have become terrorists.” I was so shocked. I said well first, not all of them were probably terrorists and suggested she imagine if she had been arrested by mistake. She blew it off. “I trust the guys on the ground, she said as she walked off.”
It was too late when I realized, it was the guys on the ground who blew the whistle on torture there.
It was sad to see someone who “looked” so “nice” and find an ignorant, cold heart within.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the gym is recent years and I wouldn’t recommend it as a place to find deep thinkers on foreign policy problems.
I’d guess that 99% of the press corps hasn’t served in the military, so they are easily awed by someone who has, especially if he got shot down in a jet fighter and invites them to sell bar-b-ques at one of the many houses he got when he married a beer baronessa.
Robert Timberg deals extensively and I think fairly with McCain’s time as a POW. McCain was offered an early release, probably for propaganda purposes, and refused as was expected of him. Among themselves the POWs kept careful account of seniority and time in captivity. Not one of them would have accepted early release before another who had done more time. McCain did what he was honor bound to do. No more, no less.
Well, the real issue here — and the real reason Obama shouldn’t have caved (again) — is that it makes it much tougher to pick Clark, one of Obama’s best possible choices IMHO, as VP.
I’m not sure why people think Clark is a good choice for VP, I don’t. It’s not that he doesn’t have value to the incoming administration, but VP is a different story.
I joined WesPAC after the 2004 election, mostly in sympathy to friend who worked on the Kerry campaign, but I wasn’t at all pleased to see who Clark thought were good candidates for Democratic races when he issued his endorsement list in 2007. The list contained some Democrats I’d consider working against, and I’ve had strong reservations about Clark’s political judgment since. Moreover, Clark’s political activism in the Democratic party is quite recent, he doesn’t show a history of concern for progressive causes, so his political beliefs have been criticized as stemming more from expedience than a deep-seated belief in progressive ideals.
I can almost hear the fingernails scraping the chalkboard as the Rep’s scramble to protect McCain’s ownership of the war hero meme. There’s alot of vets out there who suffered as POW’s and I have a hunch they’d be the first to say it bought them the right to come to the table but didn’t give them one iota of foreign policy creds.
It’s about time that somebody called b.s. on McCain’s “war hero” fairy tale. I don’t see him in any way as any kind of hero, much less a war hero. He got shot down and had crashed at least four other jets before that, so he obviously wasn’t a very good pilot. He was a POW, but that in no way makes him a hero. He turned down early release, but if he wouldn’t have his family would have likely disowned him. Once he got back to the States he wasn’t promoted as he should have been, meaning that the Navy had serious misgivings about him. Nobody in Washington likes him, most notably his republican colleagues. And now, he’s flip-flopped on just about every position that he’s ever held. John McCain is NOT a hero.
Well, that is simply not true. I hold McCain in very low regard, but this is a losing issue for Obama, and he looks bad by putting surrogates out there, and then abandoning them when the tactic fails.
At this moment in the campaign, do we really want to be arguing about the validity of McCain’s military service? Aren’t there some actual issues (which are all trending in Democrats favor) with which we can bash McCain, other than his signature (and accurate) claim to hero status?
This is an epic fail for the Obama campaign, they should get off of this stupid idea, and fast.
Wow – anyone who thinks someone on the Obama campaign told Wesley Clark what to say has never worked on a presidential campaign.
The reason you send people out as surrogates is because you believe you WON’T have to tell them what to say. You don’t send anyone you don’t trust.
But I would not blame Obama or the campaign for anything a surrogate said. The surrogates are just people, speaking their mind. Some are more media savvy than others, sadly.
Btw – I agree with everything Clark said, if not, maybe, the way he said it.
So why do you think that he’s a hero? I can understand why Joe Sixpack thinks that he’s a hero, but why would a progressive think that?
Why do I think John McCain is a hero?
Ok, shot down carrying out a bombing mission (please spare me the “terror from the skies” crap. This is a political campaign. If you actually think someone in the Democratic Party is going to argue at this point in the general election campaign that the Viet Nam war was “immoral” or “illegal”, you are mistaken).
Secondly, he was tortured for years (his captors took great pleasure in beating his arms, which were broken when he crashed) offered release, and would not take it until his comrades were also released. You don’t have to be a right-winger to have respect for someone who not only survived that experience, but continued in public service, and that certainly impresses this ultra-liberal. I think he’s a terrible candidate, and a profoundly wrong choice for the country, but he’s a hero.
No amount of parsing about “he was a bad pilot, a poor student at Annapolis, and quit his wife because she wasn’t pretty anymore after her car accident” is going to change that fact. This is a big lose for Obama, and I hope the campaign has enough sense to get off this track and on to some more important issues, like the economy, on which McCain is absolutely terrible.
I was both heartened and disappointed by Clark’s comments. I don’t want to see a blowback effect on military heroism but I do want to see military service distinguished from foreign policy experience & judgment — Clark could’ve made that point in a more effective manner.
McCain’s military service deserves some respect, but I’m not willing to go all the way down the road into the war hero myth — by which I mean the way we, as a society, lionize military service.
In many respects a military service background is a very poor preparation for conducting foreign affairs. The ‘military action as a first resort’ philosophy has been tried recently, with catastrophic results. And for all McCain’s talk about learning from his experience of war, there’s little evidence that he actually has. Using the military to conduct foreign policy is what’s wrong with our foreign policy. We can’t continue to operate like a teenage boy bent on revenge if we want to solve our foreign policy problems. War is the problem, not the solution.
I’m more than willing to criticize McCain for failing to understand what a prudent foreign policy is, and I’m not questioning his patriotism — of course. McCain doesn’t show himself as particularly well informed on foreign affairs, and his qualification to lead should be questioned because of this. Hearing foreign policy judgment conflated with experience gained from being captured in war only aggravates me, and I’m not willing to give McCain a free pass on the issue solely because he was a POW.
I’ve known of John McCain since my own days in the military in the 1970’s.
He was known, back then, as a guy who was not too bright & not too able, who advanced because of who’s son he was, not who he was.
That doesn’t mean he wasn’t/isn’t a (relatively) decent guy in his own right, but he’s wasn’t (& isn’t) the kind of guy I’d want to be President.
Of course, the most able/celebrated pilot of that era, Randy “Duke” Cunningham, is doing 6-8 in Federal prison on corruption charges – military experience is not necessarily the best indicator of character you can use.
You must look at a person’s history of actions – McCain’s loss of aircraft is as good a metaphor for his character & ability as was George Bush’s AWOL Air National Guard (non-)Service.
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His father John S. “Junior” McCain was commander of U.S. forces in Europe later becoming commander of American forces in Vietnam while McCain III was being held prisoner of war. McCain III’s grandfather John S. McCain, Sr. commanded naval aviation at the Battle of Okinawa in 1945.
During his relative short stunt on flight status, McCain III lost five U.S. Navy aircraft, four in accidents and one in combat.
For 23 combat missions (an estimated 20 hours over enemy territory), the U.S. Navy awarded McCain a Silver Star, a Legion of Merit for Valor, a Distinguished Flying Cross, three Bronze Stars, two Commendation medals plus two Purple Hearts and a dozen service medals.
Missing Service Personnel Act or The McCain Bill
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."Particularly if the title of the post has the current date in it. Because tomorrow will have yet another nonsense issue to distract us, if we don’t keep track and help one another stay alert.