McCain: Honorable Opponent, Bad VP

18 May, 2004

Speculation is flying again about the possibility that John Kerry could select John McCain as his running mate. I've always had a little trouble understanding why so many people like this ticket outside of its "interesting plot twist" quality. It's a prima facie bad idea because of the "John-John problem." More seriously, I wrote a column a while back covering some real reasons the pick would be a bad idea.

One theory that occurs to me is that McCain is an honorable opponent. He may be pro-life and pro-business, but he doesn't pursue those goals with the kind of underhanded deviousness we've come to expect from the Bush administration and its Congressional allies. He's a straight talker with an apparently genuine (for a politician) commitment to fair and responsible governmental procedure. He doesn't go in for the worst smears that his colleagues make (like impugning Kerry's Vietnam record). And he gets "free thinker" credentials for breaking with the party ideology on a few issues, like campaign finance reform and climate change.

But we on the left have invested a lot in attacking not just Bush's substantive goals, but also his methods and personal integrity. He didn't just make the wrong decision about war, he lied to gain public support, went against the will of the UN, and planned the occupation incompetently. These criticisms are often justified and important. But they also make it harder to comprehend the idea of an honorable opponent. If Bush needed such shameless subterfuge to get his way, how could any rational person be a Republican?

This may be why the idea of a Kerry-McCain ticket is so appealing to the liberal hawks, people like Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum whose partisanship overshadows their ideological disagreements. Someone like myself or Atrios is far enough to the left that we can see that, whatever McCain's personal integrity, he favors policies that we strongly disagree with. But people like Yglesias and Drum seem to be wondering "if he's not corrupt and incompetent, what's he doing in the 'bad guys' column?"

Stentor Danielson