As Sen. John McCain's campaign races toward the Republican nomination, Dan Sweeney doesn't hold back.
By Dan Sweeney
A primary campaign is an incredibly fast-paced sport. Today's sleek sports car doing 120 in the fast lane is tomorrow's fiery wreckage moved off to the shoulder. As I write this, after the weekend primaries in Louisiana, Washington, Nebraska, Kansas and the U.S. Virgin Islands, but before Feb. 12's so-called Chesapeake Primary (Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.), the Democratic nomination is still anyone's game. But things are looking better and better for Sen. Barack Obama, in terms of both fundraising and friendly primaries and caucuses throughout February. Indeed, by the time you read this, Obama might be ahead in total delegates if he does as I and most political junkies expect him to and sweeps the Chesapeake Primary. As of this writing, Sen.Hillary Clinton boasts the lead when superdelegates are taken into account, but superdelegates — congressmen, Democratic National Committee members and other party bigwigs — can change their minds at a moment's notice and will do so if either Obamaor Clinton starts to pull ahead substantially. No one wants to miss the train as it leaves the station.
Whatever happens in the next few weeks, the Republican nomination is already a done deal. Sen. John McCain will be the Republican nominee, and there is nothing anyone can do about it, regardless of Gov. Mike Huckabee's weekend wins in Louisiana and Kansas. Even as I turned in my first draft of these ramblings, word came down that Gov. Mitt Romney's campaign was the latest ball of twisted metal to go flying off the road. But he was right to suspend his campaign; McCain had more than twice the delegates of Romney, his nearest competitor, and more than three-fifths of the delegates he needs for the nomination. The Arizona senator could come in second place in every other state primary and still become the nominee. It's all over but the crying. And let me tell you, ace, the sobbing can already be heard in many quarters.
This primary season has seen the Republican Party break into its three big sects: fiscal conservatives, social conservatives and national-security conservatives, as they call them on the cable news shows — or, as I call them, greedy, crazy and paranoid. But McCain pulled in enough of the greedheads and the swirly-eyed Jesus freaks while holding on to his own Strangelovian base that Romney and Huckabee couldn't offer much of a fight. And with his occasional refusal to keep with Republican Party tradition and march in lockstep with his colleagues, McCain has become a loathed figure to many in the conservative movement.
And so it has come to this. The Republican nominee for president is a dour old hack who has giddily sung about bombing Iran and is comfortable with keeping American troops in Iraq for a thousand years. A man who admitted to having a serious rage problem to Fox News' Brian Kilmeade, and in his previous presidential campaign in 2000, said of the Vietnamese, "I hated the gooks. I will hate them as long as I live." He later claimed he was speaking only of his prison guards while he was a POW in the Vietnam War. No one believed him.
Even McCain's stirring, humanizing tale of spending five years in a Vietnamese hellhole has been derided by his critics on the right. When McCain came to the defense of Sen. John Kerry's war record as it was being slimed in the 2004 presidential campaign, far-right crackpot and World Net Daily founder Joseph Farah wrote, "While serving as a POW, McCain was one of the captives who agreed to be used for propaganda purposes by the enemy. In fact, some argue that an interview he gave to a communist publication — detailing an accident aboard his ship, problems with low morale among U.S. servicemen, the chain of command in the U.S. Navy and other pertinent information — went far beyond mere propaganda and crossed the line into disclosing military intelligence secrets."
Granted, people like Farah brand anyone who disagrees with them or comes out against their horseshit "traitors," and Farah is both wrong and stupid. But it does go to show the way many people on the lunatic fringe view McCain's legacy — so much so, in fact, that McCain will have to rely on his oft-lauded maverick status to win the election by drawing independents to the fold. If the Democratic nominee is Hillary Clinton, he may even have a prayer of winning, as those same conservatives who nominally loathe the Arizona senator also hate the Clintons with the sort of deep, searing malice that McCain holds for the Vietnamese and will thus show up to vote for McCain if only to deny Clinton the keys to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. Between that and the fact that Obama could steal much of the independent vote from McCain, if Obama gets the nomination, he'll crush the old man from the Grand Canyon State. But Clinton vs. McCain? That one is anybody's game.
Send death threats to Dan Sweeney at dfsweeney@citylinkmagazine.com.
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