On why the many houses matter. The point that Publius makes is not academic – many of John McCain’s character flaws can be traced to a near-lifetime of being sheltered behind vast wealth. Take his gambling habit.
“Enjoying craps opens up a window on a central thread constant in John’s life,” says John Weaver, McCain’s former chief strategist, who followed him to many a casino. “Taking a chance, playing against the odds.” Aides say McCain tends to play for a few thousand dollars at a time and avoids taking markers, or loans, from the casinos, which he has helped regulate in Congress.
Casino games are an unwinnable stupid tax, especially the games of chance that McCain compulsively favors. The only people who can afford to throw ‘a few thousand dollars at a time’ into a guaranteed losing game are either sheltered rich, or self-destructive addicts on a last bender before homelessness. McCain has been conditioned by life to believe that he can do whatever he wants because a bottomless pile of family money will shield him from consequences.
McCain’s public life reveals the same dynamic at play. He flies into uncontrollable rages at things that most of us consider normal (e.g., a Republican colleague criticizes a policy position). On foreign policy, supposedly the Republican candidate’s strong suit, McCain’s approach weirdly parallels his private weakness. It isn’t by accident that he attracted a coterie of neocon dregs with whom he surrounds himself. Beginning with Randy Scheunemann and running down the list, most of these guys disgraced themselves so badly in Iraq that they aren’t even welcome in many Republican circles any more. They’re reckless gamblers, creative destruction, roll the dice and see what happens types. If you disagree or god forbid, criticize their fragile egos then you’re a fucking Jew-hater terrorist who should be locked up until every American enemy has been killed.
Take a look at the guy in office right now. People who knew me in 2000 ask how I knew that the Bush administration would go bad in such an extreme way. The answer is Harken Energy, and any other thing that George Bush’s lesser son tried and failed to do until he hooked up with a decent pack of advisers for his Texas gubernatorial bid. Like most children with overindulgent, wealthy mothers George W. doesn’t take care of his toys.
John McCain may have once lived like a normal person, but by now he’s spent most of his adult life sheltered behind a bubble of vast wealth. In that way he resembles President Bubble Boy more than almost any office holder in DC. Some months ago I worked out how many things I need to cut back now that I’m paying for Honda Fit. Now I’m worried that the Sharp Edge and the excellent Turkish restaurant around the block will go under before the wife and I see it again. When do you suppose was the last time McCain had to think like that?
It is a late Sunday afternoon in April, and I am sitting in a condominium in Coronado, California, taking in the view of the gorgeous San Diego Bay with Cindy McCain. She closed on the place just two weeks earlier, and the only things unpacked so far are the family photos that dot almost every surface. It’s her family’s second condo in the building. “I like the ocean, and the kids love it here, and I love that,” she tells me, curled up on a nondescript couch that looks like it might have come with the apartment. “When I bought the first one, my husband, who is not a beach person, said, ‘Oh, this is such a waste of money; the kids will never go.’ Then it got to the point where they used it so much I couldn’t get in the place. So I bought another one.”
Remember that a war has to go incredibly, catastrophically bad for those in McCain’s social stratum to feel any pain. It isn’t class warfare to point out that extreme privilege breeds a mindset that isn’t compatible with good government. It’s simply an observation that anybody who works with adolescents can tell you: when indulgent parents take away consequences, kids often go feral. Four more years of that is something that I can do without.
Equal Opportunity Cynic
But voting for idiot children of privilege because they say they’re men of the people has gone so well! I don’t see what you’re worried about, John.
Ripley
I don’t know – he certainly seems to have great discipline when it comes to supporting the Bush administration.
Delia
Actually, I like your piece better than Publius’, Tim. There are examples of the offspring of the extremely rich turning out to have a social conscience. FDR and Bobby Kennedy come most forcefully to mind. But John McCain ain’t one of them. And his pattern of spoiled-brathood predates his second marriage. We all know about his abysmal performance in school and the four wrecked planes. He was the son and grandson of admirals and the rules were made for other people. Finding an heiress to marry was an act of free will that allowed him to continue on this same path that we’ve witnessed in Bush.
Equal Opportunity Cynic
Err, Tim. The Pittsburgh footnote threw me. If you start posting drunk and cheering for WVU, I’m going to be worried.
Phoenix Woman
John McCain has NEVER lived like a normal person.
Remember, he’s the Fortunate Son and Grandson of Navy admirals, and his father’s family owned a 2000-acre plantation, with over fifty slaves, in antebellum Mississippi. (2000 acres, in pre-tractor days, was a BIG plantation.)
That’s why I’ve taken to calling him Silver Spoon McCain.
JoyceH
Oh, please, media, the next numbers question for McCain –
“How many servants does your family employ?”
Because according to Politico and according to McCain’s tax returns, the family’s budget for ‘household employees’ in 2007 was $273,000.
jake
Would it be Class Warfare(TM)* to point out that John McCainiac (R-Hanoi Hilton) is a raving, unprincipled, irascible, scum-sucking asshole who just happens to be so rich that he can’t keep track of his houses?
*If these fucktards start babbling about a War Against Class Warfare I’m going to bed and not getting up until Election Day
wasabi gasp
John McCain is the Veruca Salt of presidential candidates.
Ed Marshall
Remember, he’s the Fortunate Son
No, he’s not. He’s a bunch of fucked up things, but that’s not him. That or there is a meaning for the term that predates the CCR song. Eisenhauer II was the fortunate son and the whole point of it was that he was a navy brat who was given a sinecure position to keep his ass away from action. I’m willing to say what McCain did in Vietnam was stupid but it wasn’t the same at all.
Conservatively Liberal
Yup, he needed something to feed his habit so he dumped his wife (who could do nothing for him financially) and married the rich woman he had been having an affair with. No self-restraint, no control at all. In his mind it would solve all of his problems (lack of mega-cash and a crippled wife).
Good analysis Tim. The right is trying to sell us on another “President Bubble Boy”, but this is their new and improved model.
This new model was a POW! Didja know that?! That makes everything he did wrong magically better! As president, when he accidentally nukes Iran he can claim that being a POW absolves him of any guilt in the matter. Just think, a president who can get away with anything because he was a former POW! All of our problems will simply go away because his magical POW touch on the presidency will absolve America of ever making any mistakes!
Win win all around! ! !
Davis X. Machina
There was a class war. And we lost. What’s left is just a class mopping-up action against a few guerilla holdouts in the hills.
DannyNoonan
And there’s the rub: McCain’s economic policies show a disconnect with the working class. Just like his life is disconnected from the working class.
D. Mason
You have got to be kidding. I am all for holding McCain responsible for every tiny fuck-up he or his surrogates make. Pin him to the wall on being a man of privilege – living off his ultra rich trophy wife and getting by on his family name. Talking about shit that happened before he was a glimmer in his mommas eye is pretty pathetic.
Notorious P.A.T.
Just what we need.
Thank you, America, for giving this idiot no less than 45% of our votes.
Phoenix Woman
D. Mason and Ed Marshall — the point is this: McCain didn’t come from “jes’ plain folks.”
His family has been of the elite even before his grandfather and father became admirals, and well before he married Cindy McCain. He has never “lived like a normal person” — no normal person would be allowed to crash five jets yet still keep his wings. Hell, no normal person could have become a Navy pilot after graduating 894th out of 899 at Annapolis. Daddy the admiral smoothed his path every step of the way.
Karmakin
I think the article kinda sorta touches on it, but misses a larger point. That said, this is inside ball..so it’s a lot more complicated than it needs to be. The Obama campaign pushing “Out of Touch” is good enough for me. It’s the gist of it.
But to be more precise, McCain lacks any sort of micro view. I’m sure his experience at seeing the big picture as a whole is there…but he has NO experience at a practical level. None. Zero. Zilch.
I’ll put it bluntly. Each of Obama’s years as a community organizer…that is..someone who works and lives in the trenches, are worth 20 of McCain’s years in terms of experience. Full stop. Unless you understand the micro…no matter how much you think you don’t NEED to, your policy and ideas are going to be a shambles.
And that’s why this truly is a campaign killer. It is. It’s this seasons “I voted for it before I voted against it”. And look at the response. They had to blow their powder…and it’s probably going to do absolutely nothing. But it’s gone gone gone. And undoubtedly, Obama is going to get a big bounce from the convention…
No, I think that the GOP, at this point know they’re fucked but good.
wasabi gasp
McCain can try to work the angle: The more houses I have, the more Americans I can employ to take care of them.
There’s gotta be a way to make that a catchy campaign slogan.
Maybe something like:
Vote for McCain. Then Mow My Lawn.
Ed Marshall
Just to expand a bit on why on John McCain as “Fortunate Son” is wrong.
I heart me some Chuck Yaeger. Read “The Right Stuff” sometime. Chuck Yaeger’s politics are totally crazy. He was a big Duncan Hunter fan and probably hates McCain’s guts for a bunch of reasons I wouldn’t find attractive centering around immigration.
It wouldn’t be a totally narrow vein to his dislike of McCain though is his entire Vietnam narrative. The media and the conservosphere admire him for physical courage. They admire what they don’t have, or don’t have any idea if they do have. Those folks have never been in a physical fight, would shit their pants if the occasion arose, and sort of know it and defer to the guy that actually did something that could get them killed.
Yaeger who has had his ass on the line, would not me impressed in the *slightest* by what McCain did, and would think he was simultaneously a damn fool for hanging his ass out the way he did and think he did a half-ass job as a POW. The man isn’t a coward, he’s an arrogant asshole who doesn’t think things through and all things considered I’d rather have a coward than that sort of idiot with access to the football.
zuzu's petals
Sorry, tough and Air Force don’t go in the same sentence.
(from another thread)
/snark
D. Mason
I don’t disagree with you on any particular point and would like to remind you that this is still unrelated to a slave owning ancestor. It’s a petty way to make a point that can be made in a relevant, sensible fashion. If you’re not talking about that then you’re not talking about what I was saying.
Ed Marshall
the point is this: McCain didn’t come from “jes’ plain folks.”
I’m not concern trolling, I don’t give a damn what people say about John McCain. He’s not plain folks. He’s from an elite military family, but that could have kept him out of Vietnam and he had something to prove and it didn’t. I think whatever he wanted to prove he failed at miserably, and isn’t horribly admirable. It’s just blog comments and who reads those, but I sort of wish he was a Bush. It would give me a sense of some sort of self-preservation in the before-hand sense rather than the “Oh, shit, I fucked up” pragmatism he displayed as a POW.
GSD
McCain has been living in a Cone of Financial Decadence.
Let the good times roll.
-GSD
zuzu's petals
Great post, but I do disagree on one point. McCain has a son in Iraq, so he’s pretty much in a position to feel a lot of pain.
CMcC
Damn. Phoenix Woman beat me a point I wanted to add to the original post.
Which makes McSame more like Dubya than we have realized. McCain comes from military aristocracy, like Dubya comes from political/economic aristocracy. Both were privileged fuck-ups, in an academic as well as general behavioral sense, whose family connections got them into (and kept them in) educational institutions and military positions otherwise unavailable to young men with records like their’s.
Both were miserable failures in terms of the standards set by their fathers. Both want to use the Presidency as a way to surpass their old man.
And both have an all purpose, get-out-of-jail card: for Bush, it was his born-again/stop-drinking experience; for McCain, it was being a POW.
Martin
But remember, American’s can’t do that kind of work for $50/hr ($100K per year). Not won’t – can’t.
No shit. For $50/hr, I’d fucking pick lettuce and retire 6 years sooner.
Marshall
John Eisenhower was in the Army in World War II. Dwight Eisenhower’s Generals were worried about the possible effect on the father’s psyche if the son were to be killed that they didn’t allow John to go into combat, which he resented. My understanding is that DD Eisenhower had nothing directly to do with it.
I had never heard that this had any connection with the term “Fortunate Son.”
TenguPhule
Fuckstain McCain, he gets off on baiting people poorer then he is.
Jim Pharo
Oh. And here I thought that John Kerry would have been a good President.
You have to understand that we are by and large ruled by multi-millionaires, and just about always have been. The difference is that some are fucktards, and some are not. The key, of course, is to support those that are not fucktards.
You can see a similar dynamic at work in big corporations, which are mostly led by multi-millionaires. Every once in a while, through in IPO or merger or something, a company will suddenly turn a few hundred, or even a few thousand, working stiffs into millionaires more or less over night. Time and again you see the same thing: many, even most, just take the money and are never heard from again. But a few stay around even though they are already rich. Some do it for ego, some for lust for power, a few probably because they care about the company. It’s these last few people that we need in government.
The idea that we will not have leaders who come from extreme privilege is a) never going to happen, and b) probably not a great idea in any case.
slightly_peeved
Fixed.
Grumpy Code Monkey
Then Get Off My Damn Lawn!
jbd
Jim Pharo, I don’t think Tim’s point is that rich people cannot make good leaders. I think his point is that people who’ve had unearned wealth all their lives, whose major life achievements can be traced to family connections, don’t make good leaders. W, for example, has never really achieved anything that was not engineered by family connections; his main business skill was driving companies into bankruptcy and then being rescued by family cronies. Something similar seems to be true about McCain–and John Kerry might be in the same bucket as well. It’s possible to be born rich and then still achieve great things on your own, but that doesn’t describe Bush, McCain, or for that matter Kerry.
By the way, I think very, very few people really liked Kerry or genuinely claimed he would be a good president; many (like me) just thought he would be less of a total disaster than the incumbent.