John McCains Final Act Is War Against Trump
Last night, accepting an award from the National Constitution Center, John McCain denounced the Trump administration’s ideology in terms that sounded harsh, and that upon reflection were even harsher. Without naming Trump, but without needing to, the Arizona senator dismissed “some half-baked, spurious nationalism cooked up by people who would rather find scapegoats than solve problems,” likening it to “any other tired dogma of the past that Americans consigned to the ash heap of history.” Here McCain was comparing the worldview of a president of his own party to communism and fascism — a rebuke even deeper, in a way, than Senator Corker comparing him to a doddering half-wit. Corker attacked Trump’s competence. McCain attacked his intentions.
When he thumbs-downed the Republican health-care plan three months ago, McCain shocked the news media and members of both parties. He had previously displayed barely any interest in the issue at hand, and for more than a decade served as a largely reliable partisan vote that belied his reputation as a “maverick.” Indeed, the maverick legend had grown so stale that many people, especially liberals, dismissed it as nothing but a legend. But McCain is making it perfectly clear that, in the final chapter of his political career, he has gone into opposition again.
If you formed your first impression of McCain during his presidential campaign, you probably see him as an orthodox Republican who deemed Sarah Palin fit for the presidency and voted with his party nearly every time. But the McCain story goes further back. McCain began his career as an orthodox Republican. Having been embarrassed by a campaign-finance scandal, McCain embraced the singular heresy of crusading for campaign finance reform. When he ran for president in 2000, McCain gained traction with the electorate by opposing George W. Bush’s plan to give tax cuts to the rich, bringing the wrath of the party Establishment down on his head.
The aftermath of that episode left McCain completely, if temporarily, unmoored from party doctrine. Not only did he vote against both the 2001 and 2003 Bush tax cuts, but McCain joined the Democrats on every major domestic dispute of the Bush era: a patients bill of rights, auto-emission standards, reimportation of prescription drugs, closing the gun-show loophole, forcing disclosure of executive compensation, federalizing airport security, and requiring the regulation of greenhouse-gas emissions. McCain was identifying himself as a “Theodore Roosevelt Republican” — a pointed contrast to the staunchly pro-business cast of the Bush-era party — and came within a hair of leaving the GOP altogether and caucusing with Democrats as an independent.
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