Remembering John McCain

Sedonaback Saturday had intended to bring you a Back-to-School edition, but that will have to wait for another day. Instead, I've selected a handful of cartoons I've drawn about Arizona Republican John S. McCain III over the years. 

Due to the nature of political cartooning, these are not all flattering. The form does not lend itself well to flattery, and McCain was a complex, sometimes contradictory character. In these first two, however, he joined with freshman Senator from Wisconsin, Democrat Russ Feingold, in a valiant effort to combat the overbearing influence of corporate and Political Action Committee "soft money" in politics.

McCain came to the issue having been singed in the Keating Five scandal, involving favors for a Savings and Loan which ultimately failed during the S&L crisis of the late 1980's. A Senate Ethics Committee investigation cleared McCain of any criminal wrong-doing, but he would admit, "The appearance of it was wrong. It's a wrong appearance when a group of senators appear in a meeting with a group of regulators, because it conveys the impression of undue and improper influence. And it was the wrong thing to do."

McCain-Feingold was a tough sell on Capitol Hill. A version of the bill eventually passed in 2002, but was overturned by the Supreme Court's infamous Citizens United ruling in 2010. But it is only one example of how John McCain, holding true to his conservative principles, would reach across the aisle to even the most liberal of Democrats to achieve a common goal.

In 1999, with McCain-Feingold yet to become law, McCain announced his first run for the presidency. Differentiating himself from the rest of the Republican field, he was receptive to interests of the LGBT Log Cabin Republicans, securing their endorsement early on.

Indeed, he was willing to speak up on behalf of LGBT members of his party, notably former Congressman Jim Kolbe. But on issues of interest to LGBT voters generally, there was little difference between him and the other front runners.

He hadn't changed his position on gays in the military by the time he announced his second run for the White House eight years later. If anything, he tacked even more closely to religious right orthodoxy on LGBT issues.

But McCain was not a follower of the scorched earth policy that has come into vogue with Newt Gingrich, the Tea Party, and the Corrupt Trump Administration. In addition to leading the fight for campaign finance reform with Russ Feingold, he worked with John Kerry on normalizing relations with Vietnam, and with Ted Kennedy and later the bipartisan "Gang of Eight" in a vain attempt to reform our immigration system. He seriously considered naming Independent Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate in 2008.

The clip of him correcting a woman at one of his campaign rallies who said she would never trust Barack Obama because "he's an Arab" — McCain called him a "decent family man, citizen, that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues" — has been viewed and debated on TV and social media many times this week. He also defended 2004 Democratic presidential nominee and fellow Vietnam veteran John Kerry against the scurrilous "Swift Boat" attack ads.

“I deplore this kind of politics,” McCain said. “I think the ad is dishonest and dishonorable. As it is, none of these individuals served on the boat [Kerry] commanded. Many of his crew have testified to his courage under fire. I think John Kerry served honorably in Vietnam. I think George Bush served honorably in the Texas Air National Guard during the Vietnam War.”

But anyone who claims he was anything other than a loyal Republican is full of crap. He voted for every GOP tax cut, for Dubya's war in Iraq, to remove Bill Clinton from office, and for 83% of the Trump Agenda. His 2010 campaign ads even called for posting the U.S. military along the Mexican border and "build[ing] the damn fence."

McCain had lost the 2000 nomination to George W. Bush in part due to a Karl Rove push-poll asking South Carolina voters "Would you be more or less likely to vote for John McCain…if you knew he had fathered an illegitimate black child?" (He hadn't.) He was deeply offended by the libelous attack. His literal embrace of Bush at the 2008 convention may have dented his reputation for being a "maverick," but it is indicative of the brand of loyalty, surpassing personal grievance, he believed in.

Perhaps it takes being a maverick to display that kind of loyalty any more. His fellow Republicans seemed to be more thrilled with his selection of Sarah Palin as running mate than they were with having him at the head of the ticket. The gravitational pull within the GOP then and now has been toward the doggedly anti-intellectual, semi-literate, vituperative and even fact-free style she epitomized.

You hadn't heard him once say a critical word of Mrs. Palin in the ten years since (although in his final memoir, he regretted not having stuck with the idea of running with Lieberman). The style of Republicanism currently in vogue is not the future he saw for this country in his farewell message:

"We weaken our greatness when we confuse our patriotism with tribal rivalries that have sown resentment and hatred and violence in all the corners of the globe. We weaken it when we hide behind walls, rather than tear them down, when we doubt the power of ideals rather than trust them to be the great force for change that they have always been.
"We are three-hundred-and-twenty-five million opinionated, vociferous individuals. We argue and compete and sometimes even vilify each other in our raucous public debates. But we have always had so much more in common with each other than in disagreement. If only we remember that and give each other the benefit of the presumption that we all love our country we will get through these challenging times. We will come through them stronger than before. We always do. ...
"Do not despair of our present difficulties but believe always in the promise and greatness of America, because nothing is inevitable here. Americans never quit. We never surrender. We never hide from history.
"We make history."