McCain's Last Stand

On the trail, McCain looks equally pathetic -- slow-moving, soft-spoken and physically frail. With his lecturing tone and corny jokes ("Governor Schwarzenegger and I have many similar attributes"), he recalls the moralizing granddad who's not a bad egg overall but who embarrasses the fuck out of you by waiting till your late thirties to give you the birds-and-the-bees speech. Unable to summon up his bipartisan appeal of old, McCain now preaches exclusively to the converted, stumping at one lonely VFW outpost after another in sleepy kudzu towns like Anderson, Sumter, Aiken and Lexington. His crowds are predominantly septuagenarian war vets hunched over mean portions of colorless barbecue, their canes propped up against their cafeteria tables and their ceremonial Army caps proudly tilted on their bald heads as they listen for some hint that someone, somewhere in this country gone to hell still understands their sacrifice.

It is as if McCain has decided to spend his final days with his own. His stump speech has been reduced to ten minutes of Poconos jokes ("I sleep like a baby -- sleep two hours, wake up and cry, sleep two hours, wake up and cry...") followed by ten more minutes of hugging old soldiers and ending with ten minutes of worn-out, Hannity-esque talking points about Iraq, which he makes no attempt to distinguish from WWII or Vietnam.

If McCain has a serious and compelling reason to continue to tie his political fate to the disastrous occupation of Iraq, he doesn't disclose it at these stops; instead, he wearily jacks off these crowds of frightened old vets with early-Bush-era rhetorical relics like "if we just get out of there, they will follow us home" and halfhearted swipes at standard-issue "anti-war" villains like MoveOn.org and The New York Times. Then he hugs a few more uniforms and bolts.

The pre-South Carolina McCain of 2000 was viewed as a candidate who could talk to the whole country, a man of decidedly conservative views who could "cross the aisle" and "work with the other side." But the McCain of 2008 is as good as dead to the seventy-odd percent of the country that wants the troops home. So in his waning days he contents himself with trading in the quack syllogistic reasoning of pop conservatism. There's the always popular Because Terrorists Are Bad, We Must Fight Them in Iraq, Where They Weren't (if suicide bombers kill Iraqi kids, "what are they willing to do to our children?"). There's the still more popular When Liberals Defame Soldiers, Soldiers Die in Iraq (on MoveOn's criticism of Gen. Petraeus: "I don't think there's a place in this country for impugning the integrity and honor of those who serve"). And there's the greatest of all pro-war sophisms, the brilliant We Invaded Iraq Because Someone Kind of Like the Iraqis Attacked Us First ("The enemies we face there harbor the same depraved indifference to human life as those who killed 3,000 innocent Americans").

By now there isn't anyone left "across the aisle" who'd even think about buying this shit, but that's OK, because McCain is no longer talking to "everybody." The comments from McCain supporters after his appearances make it clear who this candidate is embracing during his last days in the foxhole. Rusty Houser likes McCain's stance on the war; when I ask him why we are in Iraq in the first place, he tells me, "To get rid of Al Qaeda." When I point out that Bush himself has admitted there was no connection between Iraq and Al Qaeda, Houser shrugs. Bush, he assures me, "doesn't always let people know what he knows."

Another McCain supporter named Johnny Mack who is pushing "No Surrender" petitions at a VFW appearance in Anderson says he didn't know that there was no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq before the war, but that doesn't matter, because "I'm just a dumb country boy" who nonetheless knows of "secret reasons" for the war from his time running nightclubs in the Midwest, where he learned "things I can't disclose."

A third supporter, Lynn Fowler, says she agrees with McCain's assessment that we need to fight the terrorists in Iraq because otherwise they will come here. "I never understood that one," I say. "If the terrorists want to fight us here, how are we stopping them from coming by going to Iraq? Are we tying up the air-traffic controllers or something?"

She frowns. "They are here," she says. "They're all around us! They have prayer mats in schools! In New York, there are taxi drivers who won't let you in their cab if you're carrying alcohol!"

"Yeah, they're already here," agrees a guy in an Air Force T-shirt. "All over the place."

I look around at the empty state highway. "Everywhere? If they're all over, why aren't they attacking?"

Rusty has an answer for that one. "They're passing information from this country to that country," he says.

"Yeah," Air Force guy says. "Information about the relatives of our soldiers."