I've long been fascinated with Sen. John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee to succeed George W. Bush as president of the United States. He has, in years past, cut a figure as "a different kind of Republican" -- independent, even maverick, bipartisan, partnering on legislation with everyone from right-wing colleagues to Democratic liberal lion Sen. Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts.
Many Americans recall that McCain spent five years as a POW in Vietnam, demonstrating bravery and endurance. It's also on record that he considered lending himself to the 2004 Democratic ticket as the vice-presidential running mate of Sen. John Kerry.
Against extremely long odds, McCain emerged this spring as "the last candidate standing" in a drawn out and knock-down GOP primary where former New York Mayor Rudi Giuliani had started out as a 20-point favorite and ended up dead last, and where former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney's $500 million-plus personal fortune could not buy him the nomination.
I remember clearly, however, how McCain's temper cost him the nomination in his 2000 duel with Bush. It was in a tirade in Michigan during the primary season when McCain blasted evangelical figures Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as being off course and obstructionist.
The cost to McCain among the social conservative portion of the GOP base was immediate and without hope of any restitution. The Arizonan's numbers plummeted, Bush's surged, and the rest, as they say, is history.
Now at age 72 and with a medical record that includes melanoma, the deadliest form of skin cancer, McCain finds himself readying for a Republican nominating convention in St. Paul, Minn., where not all hands will welcome him with open arms and full-throated hurrahs.
The neoconservative fringe who have backed the Bush-Cheney gambit to "lock down" the oil and attempt to enact U.S. hegemony in the Middle East via an implacable military and political presence are suspicious of McCain's bona fides. So are the fiscal conservatives in the party, who are fed up to the teeth with Bush's economic ineptitude and the red ink splashed all over the American economy.
By his own admission, foreign policy, not economics, is McCain's strong suit.
In recent months, however, the Arizona senator has thrice referred to "Czechoslovakia" as if it still existed, and managed to invent a "Pakistani-Iraq" border, which is also nonexistent. Aides also had to hasten to correct him when he "misspoke" and railed against "Iran's support of al-Qaida." The Iranians are Shias and al-Qaida draws from Sunnis, the ethnic group of executed strongman Saddam Hussein. McCain apologized for the error, but the fluke was substantial and troubling.
At this point, the McCain campaign may be tempted to rely for a margin of victory upon prejudice and ignorance on the part of segments of the American electorate, those unwilling to vote for an African American for president and those who still believe -- despite all evidence to the contrary -- that Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic candidate, is a Muslim or will be "too Islamic friendly."
The John McCain of this year's presidential election is not the "straight shooting" and "independent Republican" of yesteryear. Not even close.
John Patrick Grace is a book editor and publisher. He lives in Huntington.
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