Now that the election cycle has ended:

[reverend_kate]

Aside from the obvious (we actually have this awesome guy for our president? You mean we get to keep him?), there's a couple things I'm happy about:

- The (possible?) return of John McCain, senior Senator from Arizona. The campaign was messy and ugly at the end, and it's easy to forget McCain's track record. He has consistently demonstrated himself

Comments

[nyuanshin]

I can go along with most of that. Except McCain being a good guy -- I don't get the love for him among Democrats, since he's every bit as cavalier about, say, freedom of speech as any book-banning Republican and would institute a draft if he could. I really don't think the fact that he sits uncomfortably in his own party should blind anybody to that kind of stuff.

[nyuanshin]

(In any case, I stand by my creeping dementia conjecture and suspect he'll bow out in 2012.)

[dcjaywalk]

McCain's certainly been erratic during the Shrub administration, but I would attribute this to the level of pressure that has been placed on him... eventually he just cracked, and went from maverick to meek party-line senator. I think it's really indicative of the state of the country that his own chosen political party managed to do what three years of torture in Hanoi could not.

I think the Obama victory could be exactly what John McCain needed to get the Straight Talk Express going again, because the pressure to go along with the radical right is now off. He isn't going to run for president again, not at his age, but we really could use the old McCain in the Senate.

[nyuanshin]

This is pretty much the usual line from Dems who want to like McCain, but it doesn't really have much basis in his biography and character. I highly recommend Matt Welch's book McCain: The Myth of a Maverick if you want a sympathetic but unflinchingly critical attempt to understand what the man is really about.

[reverend_kate]

Oh, there's no doubt he's a spoiled, temperamental egomaniac. The point I'm trying to make is that he has really gone out of the way create accord with the spoiled, temperamental egomaniacs on the other side of the aisle, and that's worth something, I think.

if you've ever read R. A. Wilson's Illuminatus trilogy, you might recall how he described the leaders of both the US and communist Russia using the exact same words: "He was a slightly overweight middle aged man who genuinely loved children and dogs."

Power hungriness, greed and superstition are present in all officials in some quantities. But I think most people in our representative republic are genuinely driven by a desire to Do The Right Thing (even if they are horribly misguided in their principles). I think there are very few truly hardboiled evil motherfuckers at work for us, and those are more likely to be spooks, not senators.

[dcjaywalk]

And I'd add that incompetence is far more common than evil, even around CIA circles. George Tenet, anyone? ;-P

Most politicians are spoiled, temperamental egomaniacs.

I think it's fair to say we saw two candidates who were actually interested in deciding the election through civil and open debate, even if some of their supporters went over the top (both sides did some of this, though the Republicans more egregiously). Palin's rhetoric was disturbing, but at the very same time the McCain campaign was up in arms over her "going rogue." I don't agree with McCain's politics, but I appreciate that he is willing to discuss his positions in a reasonable and civil manner, and make compromises.

Also, I think McCain is one of the very few actual conservative Republicans out there. On the political compass, most of the rhetoric coming from the GOP resembles fascism more than it does conservatism to me. I can stomach conservatives. I can't stomach fascists.

[nyuanshin]

See, this is exactly the kind of blissfully fact-free image of him that I'm talking about: if you look at what he says and endorses, McCain is closer to being an earnest fascist than George W. Bush is. Certainly there's no disputing that he's more militaristic. Labeling him a "conservative" doesn't provide predictive power: when you try to place him on the tired liberal/conservative axis he looks like he's all over the place, but his actions as a whole make a lot more sense when you understand that his polestar is National Greatness. It's all there in his books and speeches -- he's forever saying stuff like "glory belongs to the act of being constant to something greater than yourself", by which he usually means national service. I could go on. His books are littered with illuminating tidbits like that. Bush brings too much God into government; McCain cuts out the middleman by replacing one with the other.

[nyuanshin]

Sure. My beef is more with his notions about what the right thing is, which I find fairly repulsive for reasons I would have thought West Coast Democrats would identify with. Hence the perplexity: I keep hearing Walter Sobchak in my head saying "at least it's an ethos".