Movers and Shakers

Christopher Hooks
Sep 3, 2018 · 7 min read

John McCain III, senior senator from the state of Arizona, that great crime against God and nature, has finally been sprung from this mortal coil, that lucky bastard. He dwells now in the great takeless beyond, where one day we all will go. In the last two weeks, the people of this benighted country have suffered under an unbearable deluge of storytelling and mythmaking about the different dimensions of McCain and the character he co-created with the media and his speechwriter and his fans. Some of it is very good, and some of it is very bad.

I will not add to it much, but there is one element of McCain’s story that I’d like to address for just a moment as the cycle of commemoration is concluding. His death is an opportunity for the political media to retire one of its most useless tropes, a key element of the McCain mythos, to put it in the ground with him at a time when it has long since lost its usefulness. We won’t, but a boy can dream!

McCain was an important figure in American politics because his character, his public image, was important to people — particularly, the amorphous group of D.C. People and hangers-on that had some physical proximity to him, from reporters to think tankers to staffers to America’s weapons industries. There’s no denying that. What’s strange about the McCain myth is that few people are willing to stop there, where the evidence leads us. So many people in recent weeks have stressed McCain’s titanic legacy, the many things he did in office.

It’s something that many of McCain’s most venemous haters and and most adulatory hangers-on agree on — that McCain was a Key Man in the Senate, that he got things done, that he shaped history, for better or worse. He was, in the mold of his friend Ted Kennedy, another Lion of the Senate. It’s complete rubbish. He served in Congress more than 35 years, and his record of accomplishment during that time is thoroughly average, if not underwhelming. For many years, you and I were told that McCain was a very important person to watch if you wanted to know how the Senate would move, and it was almost never true.

The things McCain is usually given credit for fall into a couple of categories. First, there’s the occasions when he had a “better” view of issues than his party did — torture, immigration, climate change. McCain’s reputation is built on loans secured with these prior positions as collateral. But none of them went anywhere, and the sum of them makes McCain look inessential, not essential.

He opposed torture, but then surrendered when it came time for Congress to fight the Bush administration on it, then secured in law provisions which kept those responsible for it from ever being prosecuted. He supported immigration reform during the Bush administration, but then flopped and became a hardliner after Obama was elected, and he needed to win re-election in Arizona. He voiced support for action on climate change and then refused to push the matter again after Obama’s election, when it became possible to do something about it. In 2009 and 2010, he had an opportunity to help make all the things he had supported for the last decade law, and he did not.

In terms of foreign policy, where McCain had a stronger voice, his involvement in prominent matters largely consists of voicing a position on something the current administration was already doing. The president conducts foreign policy, and Congress watches. McCain, however much blame he deserves for his public support of the war in Iraq, was not instrumental to it happening, nor was he in any meaningful way to “credit” for the surge, which his friends sometimes like to do, and which failed anyway. The same goes for his role in the normalization of relations with Vietnam.

If anything, McCain was a public face for an American foreign policy machine which operates largely without anyone’s individual input outside of the executive branch, and which is guided mostly by institutional groupthink and momentum. This year, after his illness sent him home, Congress named a terrifically bloated and wasteful defense appropriations bill after McCain, which seemed almost disrespectful, as memorials go — proof that what he had spent so much of his life advocating for would continue without him, almost automated.

There is one major bill — one — which carries McCain’s imprint, the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. The BCRA was well-intended, but it mainly ended up shifting money in politics from one avenue to another — even before it was largely undone by the Supreme Court in 2010. McCain didn’t do much about that. Maybe he couldn’t, or maybe he wouldn’t.

There’s also his famous, theatrical thumbs-down to the Senate’s Obamacare repeal effort last year. It was a very good and enjoyable fuck-you to Mitch McConnell — one guesses that’s a primary reason he did it—whose impact was lessened a few months later when McCain voted for the tax cut bill, which did serious damage to the Obamacare framework and violated many of the principles he had claimed to stand up for earlier. After the tax cut bill he had only one important decision left — to resign, when he could no longer vote, and allow his constituents to pick his replacement, or hold on for no reason, allowing his Trump-friendly governor to pick his replacement through 2021. He chose wrongly.

All of this is a pretty thin resume for somebody who served in Congress more than 35 years. This isn’t to say McCain was a bad or lazy Senator — he was an average one. He was “in many respects an unexceptional politician, unexceptional even in his hypocrisies and his cynicism,” as Patrick Blanchfield writes in The Baffler. The question is why you and I were told for some two decades that McCain was a vibrant and productive senator, a person you simply had to watch.

Much of that is because of the strength is character and the affection people had for it, even when it failed them. But there’s another reason. The myth of the Key Man, the doer, is embedded into the structure of political journalism. The Key Man — or Susan Collins, these days — keeps you on your toes. The actions of the Key Man can’t be prophesied or foretold. The Key Man is his own man. He makes deals. He stands up for what he thinks is right. The way he wields power is inscrutable, and he may have skeletons in his closet, but it often comes out well in the end. (The Key Man is not a member of Congressional leadership, which really does have power. He obtains power through gravitas and cunning.)

This archetype has stuck around because there really was this sort of person walking around D.C., once, if we are to believe historical accounts of Congress. There were big egos and big personalities in an ideologically complex legislative body, eloquent figures who wined and dined and made fragile alliances got important stuff done. Ted Kennedy, to whom McCain has recently been compared, did quite a bit of that stuff. People want to believe in it. A lot of political journalists, if they had their preference, would rather be living in either The West Wing — high-minded, precious — or Robert Caro books, awash in unseemly intrigue and dark machinations changing history in extraordinary ways. The character of McCain was able to scratch both of those itches, and he’d remember your name, too, which sealed the deal.

But the time of the Key Man has passed — nothing that belongs to it exists anymore. Congress is broken and as ideologically polarized as the Eastern Front. Very few members of Congress would be felt by their absence if replaced by a bog-standard average member of their own party. Everyone’s a backbencher, basically. For much of the last few decades, even McCain was.

The yearning for a time when people made deals and surprised each other is perfectly understandable to me. What is going on now cannot go on forever if the country is to function. But we’re doing the public an extraordinary disservice by pretending that these people individually matter very much — not to mention feeding them and their egos to the point of overstuffing them.

The search is on, in certain quarters, for the New McCain. One of the would-be new Key Men is Jeff Flake. Happily, the media seems to be buying his bullshit a lot less than they might be expected to, but there’s still quite a bit of it out there. Recently, This American Life followed Flake in his attempt to seize control of the legislative process and push some immigration measures through. You can imagine the pitch process: Flake isn’t coming back, he’s got nothing to lose, and he’s got his principles. Maybe he’ll do something exciting. We all want to see something exciting, because everything now is so predictable, so drab.

Instead, TAL got an hour of audio of Flake failing to understand the concept of leverage, expressing fear about what it would mean to go out on a limb, and getting repeatedly played by his own leadership. Bless them, it’s wonderful, and it’ll be a necessary time capsule for any future historian studying this period. He clearly has no idea what he’s doing.

Flake, who keeps giving speeches of the kind that made people love McCain decades earlier, has taken to saying that the Trump era will be finite because “the fever will break eventually. It has to.” Pathetic, you might say, a surrender to events. Flake has no agency, no will, no ability to change anything, in his own understanding. He’s in an oversized suit and the water is holding him down, water flowing underground. The nation has an upset tummy and we’re going to rest on the couch until it has passed.

But he’s not wrong to suspect he doesn’t really matter. Only institutions, first and foremost the institution of the party, matters now. It’s been that way for some time, really. It just seems to be the case that the closer you are to it, the harder time you have of seeing it.

From McCain’s last open letter
From McCain’s 2010 campaign