McCain, Republicans, Health & Politics

I’ve been doing this awhile. Covering these stories. Some of these same people. I’ve worked through some dizzying times, but it’s been awhile at least, since there’s been anything quite like this. Here’s just 48 hours. The second health care bill is dead. Trump says he won’t own this. He’ll just let Obamacare fail, even though, despite rising premiums that have more to do with rising health care costs and less to do with Obamacare, it isn’t failing at all.
Then, maybe being warned it won’t fail, or maybe looking at some internal polling, Trump completely changes his tune. He won‘t go for repealing Obamacare and just letting it fail. That was so Tuesday. Now, he’s demanding no one leave Washington until they have 50 Republican votes for something. With Trump it has never been about what that something is. He just wants it to be something that doesn’t have Obama’s name on it.
Then less than three hours after that complete switcheroo comes the awful news about John McCain. I’m hoping for the best. We all are, but as crappy cancers go, this is pretty damn crappy. It came late in the day after a good friend and colleague of mine, less than half McCain’s age, told me his cancer has been declared incurable and that he will likely be gone before the end of the year. Another friend’s wife died this week, so I’m in no mood to make a funny meme out of this. I hope I wouldn’t anyway, but in this race for the moral bottom Trump has been leading us on, and the feeling that you have to fight fire with fire, I know friends will be tempted, but…just don’t.
The political part of the story — which I’ll come back to — is that McCain’s illness means that Trump and the GOP, for now anyway, will not get their 50 votes for any health care rewrite. That’s over for now, anyway, though if McCain’s vote were needed I’m sure he’d show up somehow. I do have a horrible feeling that Trump, who denigrated McCain’s heroism in surviving as a POW under the worst conditions imaginable and many that were not, is probably more offended that McCain’s cancer wrecked his last hurrah on health care two-and-a-half hours after it began, than he is sympathetic to the plight of McCain and his family.
Glioblastoma sucks. It’s aggressive and invasive and they can’t begin his chemo and radiation until he is recovered from the surgery that removed the tumor along with that blood clot which was the only reason they even found it. The good news is that he is in remarkably good shape for someone who is 80. The bad news is average life expectancy for this type of cancer is 14 months. 10% make it five years, which would actually mean McCain would have had a better than average life span, which when you consider he was an abominably-treated POW for five-and-a-half years, and that he was in solitary for two of those years, is amazing in and of itself.
Add to that when his plane was shot down, he broke both his arms and a leg ejecting from his Skyhawk, then nearly drowning when his parachute landed him in a lake. The North Vietnamese pulled him out, but then crushed his shoulder and stabbed him with a bayonet. I know this story has been told before and you’ll hear it many other places today, but it’s important for context: at one point the North Vietnamese, realizing they had the son of an admiral, offered to release him, ahead of other captured prisoners, but McCain refused.
For that he was tortured. Repeatedly. He was beaten three times a week. Donald Trump, in one of the most loathsome things he ever said about anyone, and that’s quite a contest, said of what McCain endured, I like people who weren’t captured. For a man who flies in private jets in friendly skies far away from combat, it was a gutless thing to say. Whatever you think about McCain’s political views, most of us would have lasted five minutes instead of five-and-a-half years.
I’ve covered him a long time. At times I have found him the most congenial possible interview. When he feels like opening up, there isn’t better company in Washington DC. When he’s pissed off, you may end up a target of wrath he’s actually feeling about someone else. He used to be described as a maverick because he had a tell-it-like-it-is, or at least a tell-it-like-he-believed-it-to-be, way about him that was refreshing, and if I speak of that in the past tense, it isn’t because this is a eulogy, because, it isn’t, and I’m hoping that is far down the road, but what has happened to his party, made that maverick fade.
The man who once said: “War is wretched beyond description, and only a fool or a fraud could sentimentalize its cruel reality,” within a year had also said: “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.” Sometimes it’s hard to reconcile all these John McCains.
As control of the GOP fell to more dogmatic forces where a primary was a bigger danger to an incumbent in some places than the November election, McCain changed. I understand the political reality of it. If he did not run further to the right, he’d be run out of office. As a politician fighting for survival, it was, as I say, completely understandable, but it has still been more disappointing for McCain than it might be for other Washington hands. I didn‘t want him to be THAT guy who could withstand torture, but not the thought of not being a United States senator anymore.
Some people are OK with retirement. Barry Goldwater, the Arizona senator who had McCain’s seat before him, retired and was happy speaking of history, commenting on politics, loving his family, and attending his collection of kachinas. It also let him stay a maverick, and when his party became not just conservative, which he approved, but controlling and autocratic, which he did not, he spoke out. I wanted that kind of graceful time for McCain. His doing what he could to stay a senator, which he did successfully, has been painful to watch at times.
But here we are, and here are the political ramifications. McCain is home. He is said to be feeling well. He could even come back to Washington where the doctors at George Washington University Hospital can give him treatment every bit as good as the Mayo Clinic in Phoenix.
And I think McCain will be around for more votes than you think, especially if his vote will be the deciding one. In June 1964 when an important cloture vote came on the civil rights act, there was fear that it would fail by a vote. As the votes were made, they came to the name of Senator Clair Engle, a California Democrat who had undergone two brain operations for brain cancer, and had not been in the senate for months. As his name was read, he was wheeled into the Senate with a triumphant grin on his face. He could not speak, but he lifted his arm, pointed to his eye and nodded, indicating aye..a yes vote for ending the debate. The Civil Rights Act passed just days later. Engle, just 52, lived a little more than a month after that.
I don’t tell that story to say McCain is anywhere near that stage. He is not, thankfully. I tell it to remind us that men and women of courage do things most people do not. As long as he is a United States senator, if there is a big vote that needs John McCain, I have little doubt he’ll be there for it. As a liberal, I may not like the vote, but anyone counting him out is foolish in the extreme.
For now, even though I sadly know better, I can only hope that what little humanity there is to a political party that would strip tens of millions of Americans of the care that McCain can rightfully count on, might think about looking into the eyes of a man they know so well, and so personally, and think again about denying Americans not so lucky to be in Congress, the kind of health plan they get, 80% of which is paid for by you and me.
As for McCain, he said he’s been through worse, and in his case, he actually has. He may even feel fighting for his life at 80, beats the hell out of fighting for his life at 31 when he was shot down after almost dying just weeks before in the fire aboard the USS Forrestal, a fire that killed 134 others and left 161 injured.
President Obama said: John McCain is an American hero & one of the bravest fighters I’ve ever known. Cancer doesn’t know what it’s up against. Give it hell, John.
President Trump who when McCain was first hospitalized called him a crusty presence in Washington said he should get well soon.
Whatever. Right now, politics is on hold. Or I hope it is. Wishful thinking, I know, but I’m doing more of that than ever these days..
Finally a note; Donald Trump said if he had known Jeff Sessions would recuse himself from the Russian investigation he never would have picked him. He then made it clear he thinks Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein is a liberal because how many conservative Republicans there are in Baltimore. Weirdly, I can answer that because my longtime friend whose wife just passed this week, was the Republican candidate for mayor in Baltimore. NO, he did not win, but I could ask how many conservative Republicans are there in New York city, especially those who in the past have supported the Clintons? Makes as much sense, but if that’s a reason for claiming Rosenstein is a phony, then Trump, by his kinda sorta logic, is suspect as well. As for regretting Sessions because he properly took steps to make sure no one doubted the integrity of a Justice Department investigation, it shows Trump still thinks his cabinet is there to serve him personally and not the people of the united states. Donald, you have your own lawyer. Lots of them. They’ll tell you the last thing you should be doing is talking about the investigation to anyone other than them, especially the NY Times, but you’ve never been one to take advice, have you?
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