Rhymes With Cars & Girls

It’s dawning on me that I’m going to have to start paying a bit more attention to John McCain, given that he’s almost certainly going to get my vote for the Presidency in November (despite the fact that I find him creepy and in some ways kinda despise him).

It seems almost universally agreed that the key to understanding and unraveling the creepy fiery fireplug that is John McCain has got something or another to do with “honor”. The only question is what does “honor” mean to John McCain, or as an explanation for John McCain. This old piece seems to come pretty close to the truth of the matter, and yet it leaves so many things unexplained. Like, how can a man who claims to be so obsessed with “honor” not see that in nurturing his “maverick” (i.e. traitorous) role within his political party, he was behaving in a way that was the opposite of honorable? Does he, in fact, think that “honor” is merely about endlessly insisting how honorable he is?

Today I caught this on Youtube:

Which, of course, I knew was coming. I didn’t get the whole way through but the one McCain quote/incident that really struck me, which I had forgotten about, was the bizarre one that went like this:

Now, my friends, I’ll offer anybody here $50 an hour if you’ll go pick lettuce in Yuma this season and pick for the whole season. So — OK? Sign up. OK.

You sign up. You sign up, and you’ll be there for the whole season, the whole season. OK? Not just one day. Because you can’t do it, my friend.

This, of course, embodies a truly idiotic economic argument. It is, quite simply, the argument of an economic illiterate.

So that’s when it hit me, why McCain seems like such a paradox to me. I’d been missing a key factor in the McCain conundrum. Yes he is honorable, but he is also downright stupid. The man is a dummy. This is the only thing that makes sense. On issues like this, he falls for some dumb-ass argument or another, probably that some trusted friend has told him (honor is all about trusting in friends), and then sticks with it against all logic and reason. And this explains his bitterness and vehemence too: after all, if you argue against McCain’s dumb-ass lettuce-Yuma argument, that’s like you’re dissing McCain’s friend Joe Bloe (or whoever told him the argument), and DAMMIT, Joe Bloe is a veteran and an honorable man, &c.! So McCain ain’t having that.

It is in that sense that McCain is “honorable”. And indeed, there’s something to be said for that sort of personal loyalty. In fact, by figuring out that John McCain is stupid, I’ve actually increased my estimation of him a notch or so. But maybe that’s just me, because that’s the weird way I think.

Okay, there’s no “maybes” about it. It’s just me.

Matthew Yglesias links to this interesting take on John McCain:

On domestic issues, McCain’s problem is not that his views are too far from the public’s. It’s that he simply doesn’t care about any of the issues on the table. … McCain doesn’t actually seem to care about any political “issues” at all. He is moved by honor and country, and this has driven him to be passionately active on a few domestic fronts, but for different reasons than those that motivate just about every other politician. … And he has not found a way to understand, say, health care in terms of honor, honesty, or character.

My first reaction to reading this astute take was that it improved my opinion of John McCain somewhat.

My second reaction is that it confirmed my view of McCain as a tragic figure: someone in over his head, groping for a purpose to justify himself. McCain has decided upon “honor” as his driving force. The problem is that he does not understand what it is.

Conservatives have big problems with John McCain, and lefties are often puzzled as to why. Isn’t McCain on the “right” in all the important issues - abortion, war, abortion?

Well yes, but as Levin here points out, McCain’s position on “issues” is less heartfelt than it is symptomatic of his unique interpretation of “honor”.

What lefties miss is that many conservatives actually do care about honor, if only subconsciously, or at least behind closed doors. It’s not just a campaign pitch, as Matthew thinks. And a lot of conservatives’ gripe against McCain is that he has behaved very dishonorably.

McCain is the “maverick Republican”. Everyone knows that. What this means in practice is: he opposes Republicans on high-profile issues. He joins with the left and goes out of his way to criticize and embarrass other Republicans. Maybe McCain is right to do this. Maybe these are courageous and sincere stands he takes (though I have my doubts). And maybe on this or that issue the Republicans are simply wrong and deserve to be opposed.

Nevertheless, for McCain to have made himself into the “maverick” is not honorable. It is precisely the opposite of honorable.

So here McCain is, having staked his political future on how “honorable” he is, having invested all his energy into cultivating the notion that “honor” is what drives him - and tragically, he simply lacks the aptitude for understanding what is and is not honorable. Thus, not surprisingly, many conservatives do not hold him in high esteem - in other words, they do not honor him. And he wonders why, and Matthew Yglesias wonders why…they do not understand….

This is because they do not understand.