If I were a Republican in Nevada today, I would cast my vote, without a tremble in my hand, for Arizona’s Senator John McCain to represent my party in the 2008 presidential election. I would.
Even despite his faults and shortcomings, as evinced during his brief visit to Las Vegas last Saturday, May 5. It wouldn’t matter to me his stance on staying in Iraq, unpopular in both the national and local sense, or on supporting the use of Yucca Mountain as a depository for waste material, wildly unpopular here in Las Vegas. Nor would it matter much to me that his political enemies have accused him of flip-flopping on abortion, among other issues, or that he has caught a bad rap in the last month for an insensitive joke he made about dropping bombs on Iran. It really wouldn’t.
For in my time observing politics and its avatars, an individual candidate’s stances on issues are worth no more than the paper his party’s speechwriter wrote them on. In fact, tell me the party of the candidate and the time of his campaign and chances are I can tell you his stances without even knowing him by name. Politics, I think we all know by now, deprives a man of his individuality.
Which is why flip-flopping is apparent in any candidate, if you look hard enough. And, on the other hand, I’m glad it is, for, as Emerson said, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.”
I for one was glad to hear the response to the joke about bombs and Iran McCain gave here in Nevada when reporters pressed him, because, in the PC world of presidential campaigns, composed of egg shells, it was something that should be said on a regular basis: “Lighten up and get a life,” he said.
But that’s beside the point. An experienced and erudite politician can manage to say all the right things, remain on the right side of the fence at all times and never offend anyone, and that would tell me nothing about the individual, whether or not he’s good for the job. Only character can do that.
And so that’s all that interests me: character. Solid, inimitable and trustworthy. A person either has it or doesn’t, and no speechwriter, regardless of his or her talents, can fake it for someone.
I’m talking here about the kind of character required not only to have survived the crash of your aircraft in enemy territory during the Vietnam War, suffered without surrendering their beatings and torture, and bore the unfathomable misery of five and a half years in a savage prison, but also to have opted for yourself five of those years when you were given the chance to leave after six months and didn’t so that your brothers who had arrived there first could.
That, as an American, is the type of character I’d look for when voting for a man to lead my country: not just the fortitude to endure dire circumstances but the courage and resolve to prevail through them, in spite of them. That is, to come back from the dead, as McCain did during the Vietnam War, a time for America which shares several affinities with our situation today.
Whether for the same reasons as mine or not, the majority of Republican voters in Nevada agree with me at this point. According to an AP report from May 6, the day after McCain’s visit to Las Vegas, he held a slim lead over his four major opponents, Rudy Giuliani among them (though Giuliani does maintain a 10-point edge nationally).
If I were a Democrat in Nevada today, I’d hope McCain didn’t get the nod.