Matt Welch is editor in chief of the libertarian Reason magazine and author of the provocative book “McCain: Myth of the Maverick.” Welch, a former editor at the Los Angeles Times editorial page, deconstructs the career of the Republican presidential nominee in ways journalists have largely avoided. The result is a spirited and sharp critique that challenges the widely accepted narrative of McCain’s political life.
Denver Post: What is the most glaring discrepancy between the “Maverick” John McCain and the hard-boiled Washington insider we don’t know?
Matt Welch: That he’s a “straight talker” — he’s more blunt than straight, and he mangles the truth as much as any other politician, as Americans are slowly coming to realize.
Another little-understood discrepancy is the notion that he’s any kind of “man of the people” (an actual title from one biography of him). For better and for worse, McCain is a Beltway elitist, not some salt-of-the-earth everyman, and many of his instincts and policies and friendships flow from that top-down approach. His father and grandfather were both four-star admirals in the Navy, and D.C. players when they weren’t at sea. He’s married to a billionaire heiress and his mom is a rich heiress as well.
He has “worked” in the private sector for a matter of months, total, as a P.R. guy for his father-in-law’s exclusive Budweiser distributorship in Arizona. The guy has always preferred the company of national journalists and senators — Gary Hart was a best man at his second wedding, and legendary New York Times correspondent Johnny Apple was a pal even from before McCain got shot down over Vietnam.
DP: Politicians have been creating false public perceptions about their own irreproachable independence since the beginning of time. Why has McCain been so successful in building this mythology?
Welch: Four reasons:
1) Because, like all good mythology, it’s at least somewhat true: He does have the sort of country-first, party-second approach common to many military officers who enter politics. And from around 1997-2003, he drifted pretty far off the Republican reservation on several important issues.
2) Because he has received — and consciously solicited — the most favorable national press of any Republican politician of the past 20 years.
3) Because few war records are as unimpeachable, and even guilt-inspiring (particularly to the generation of journalists who grew up hating on the Vietnam War), than being a stoic and tortured prisoner of war, which prompts reporters and actual human beings to treat him with deference.
4) Because he repeats the “maverick” and “straight talk” mantras over and over and over again, and as the great poet Prince taught us, there’s joy in repetition.
DP: McCain followed Barry Goldwater in Senate, yet his voting record reveals little Western-style libertarianism. What is McCain’s guiding political philosophy or ideology? Does he have one?
Welch: Actually, Goldwater was never really warm toward his replacement, which is something McCain, to this day in my judgment, has never properly understood. McCain’s guiding philosophy is National Greatness Conservatism — he wants to restore your faith, and my faith, in America as the singularly blessed shining city on the hill, a confident and self-aware superpower whose destiny is to keep the world safe for democracy. Anything that jeopardizes that faith, or otherwise sows public cynicism, is a legitimate target of McCain’s — and the federal government’s — considerable wrath.
DP: You often point out that McCain is a proponent of “national greatness” conservatism championed by neoconservatives. What is wrong with that idea? Aren’t we great? And hasn’t every president in recent memory been a practitioner of the idea?
Welch: We are great! And special, too! But McCain’s definition of Greatness is synonymous with a Teddy Roosevelt-style military assertiveness that requires the U.S. to spend more than half of the world’s total monies on defense, and deploy a drastically increased military all over the world, indefinitely. This, to me, is not a recipe for greatness.
DP: How do you think the general election will shake out?
Welch: I think McCain will get drubbed in November, unless A) there’s some kind significant terrorist attack on U.S. soil, or new military conflagration in a place like Iran; or B) some kind of currently unfathomable dirt is dug up on Obama. Neither seem likely. It’s just a bad, bad year for Republicans, and “Mr. Hopey” looks set to win the crucial battle for independents.
