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The Left Has Sold Americans on Single Payer. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=38755"><span class="small">Eric Levitz, New York Magazine</span></a>
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Sunday, 26 August 2018 13:00 |
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Levitz writes: "The American people want big government to get its hands on their health care."
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. (photo: J. Pat Carter/WP/Getty Images)
The Left Has Sold Americans on Single Payer.
By Eric Levitz, New York Magazine
26 August 18
 he American people want big government to get its hands on their health care. Over the past two years, polls have consistently found overwhelming opposition to cutting federal health-care spending and broad, bipartisan support for increasing it. A majority of Republican voters believe that Paul Ryan should leave Medicaid and Medicare alone — while Uncle Sam should “ensure access to good health care.”
The ideological debate over whether every American is entitled to basic medical care, regardless of their ability to pay for it, is over. The Affordable Care Act succeeded in cementing the idea of health care as a right — while the law’s failure to arrest the steady growth in premiums and out-of-pocket costs has fueled public demand for further government intervention to secure that right.
On Thursday, Reuters-Ipsos released a poll that shows (what I believe to be) an unprecedented level of support for Medicare for All, the American left’s brand-name for a single-payer, national health-insurance plan. The survey found a whopping 70 percent support for the proposal, with 84.5 percent of Democrats — and 51 percent of Republicans — voicing their approval.
For the moment, this poll is an outlier (Medicare for All tends to poll well, but not this well). And there’s reason to think that the aberrantly high level of support it shows for socialized health insurance is a reflection of how nondescript the wording of Reuters’ question was; voters were asked whether they would support “a policy of Medicare for All,” but were not provided with any concrete definition of what that policy would entail.
By contrast, a March survey from the Kaiser Family Foundation asked voters “Do you favor or oppose having a national health plan, or Medicare for All, in which all Americans would get their insurance from a single government plan?” and found “only” 59 percent of respondents expressing support. Meanwhile, when Kaiser defined Medicare for All as a national health-insurance plan that is “open to anyone who wants it but people who currently have other coverage could keep what they have,” 75 percent of respondents endorsed the proposal — including 64 percent of Republican voters.
Previous polling from Kaiser has also suggested that both support for and opposition to single-payer are quite malleable. In June 2017, the pollster found 55 percent of voters approving of a single government health-insurance plan. But when Kaiser presented those who initially expressed support with right-wing counterarguments, 20 percent of respondents switched to opposing it; on the other hand, when those who initially opposed the idea were exposed to left-wing, pro-single-payer talking points, 17 percent came around to Bernie Sanders’s point of view.
Regardless, nearly 60 percent initial support is pretty darn good for a reform as radical as the elimination of the private health-insurance industry. And Kaiser’s surveys suggest that the policy has been (slowly but surely) gaining support over time.
These results — combined with the broader data showing a widespread consensus in favor of expanded government involvement in health care — suggest that the conventional wisdom (among mainstream commentators and Democratic consultants) has greatly overestimated the political risks of campaigning on Medicare for All, while underestimating the potential rewards.
But the politics of campaigning on single payer — and the politics of actually implementing it — are two very different things. And data showing broad support for Medicare for All in polls that provide voters with no specific information about the proposal’s implications for their tax bills, tell us less about the policy’s viability as a governing agenda than many progressives wish to believe. Once single-payer champions began trying to put taxpayer money where their mouths were in Colorado and Vermont, they proved unable to retain public’s support in the face of well-funded opposition. Even in deep blue California, a recent poll found that 53 percent of likely voters back single payer at first blush — but only 41 percent still do once they’re informed that the policy would require new taxes.
To win the fight at the federal level, single-payer advocates will need to weather a blitzkrieg of opposition messaging from every corner of the (profoundly deep-pocketed) health-care industry, and overcome the resistance of at least some risk-averse, ideologically moderate red-state Democrats in the Senate. Doing that will likely require mobilizing a massive, grassroots movement — and coming up with better, more specific answers for the policy’s skeptics.
Single-payer advocates do have a go-to response to tax concerns: “Don’t worry, all middle-class Americans will save more on health insurance than they’ll lose to the IRS.” But this argument lost the day in Colorado and Vermont; and, when applied to the most popular single-payer plans on the left today (i.e. Bernie Sanders’s), the claim probably isn’t true. As the health-care policy wonk (and single-payer supporter) Jon Walker recently explained:
[U]nderlying the whole message are some economic assumptions that can be tough for people to believe. The biggest is that, by ending a company’s need to provide health insurance, companies would raise their employees’ wages by how much they had previously been paying in premiums. Even if that is true for many people over the long term, it will not be true for everyone, particularly in the short term…For instance, a company may choose to withhold these wages from employees who aren’t as valuable as they once were. There are also struggling companies that will do anything to cut costs they think the can get away with, even if it just delays the inevitable. This big benefit/tax transition would give those companies an opportunity to try to hide a pay cut while trying to stay afloat. Similarly, any federal single-payer bill that effectively takes over Medicaid and pays for it with a new federal tax would free up states’ current Medicaid spending. To make sure everyone is roughly as well-off, states would need to use the savings for a broad income tax cut which mirrors current premium spending. The federal government can’t make states do this, and since many states don’t have an income tax, it would be difficult even if they tried. Some states might use the savings to only cut taxes for the rich or to plug long-term budget holes, hoping voters will blame the federal government when they don’t “feel” the promised tax relief.
There are several different ways that progressives could mitigate the tax issue through policy design. The simplest of these would be to simply make single-payer much cheaper for taxpayers, by mandating drastic reductions in payment rates for pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and hospitals (something existing plans have largely sought to avoid). As Walker notes, specialist physicians in the U.S. make roughly three times what similar doctors earn in Sweden, and twice what those take home in France or the United Kingdom; and the average annual salary among American physicians has grown by nearly $100,000 in just last seven years. Our hospitals and drugmakers are similarly (if not more gratuitously) overpaid by international standards.
Given that the health-care industry’s interest groups are bound to loudly oppose any single-payer plan, regardless of its provisions on provider payments, it would probably make more political sense to force big pay cuts on providers than to force giant tax hikes on the entire middle class. And this would also make more policy sense, from both a technocratic and progressive perspective: Having the world’s most well-compensated hospitals, doctors, and drug companies means having a health-care system that regressively redistributes income from working-class Americans to affluent health-care professionals to a greater extent than any other nation’s. (To be sure, any plan to impose a massive pay cut on American doctors would need to address the exorbitant costs of our medical schools, and also make it easier for foreign doctors to immigrate to the U.S., to ensure that slashing provider salaries doesn’t exacerbate the present shortage of primary-care doctors in our country.).
If progressives would rather avoid inflicting austerity on doctors and hospitals (i.e., the health-care industry’s most popular special interests), there are other approaches they could take to overcoming the political obstacles inherent to passing single payer, some of which Walker has outlined.
But all viable strategies will proceed from the recognition that getting Congress onboard with Medicare for All legislation will be far more difficult than getting voters onboard with Medicare for All as an abstract concept has proven to be.
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John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Rise of Reality TV Politics |
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Sunday, 26 August 2018 12:58 |
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McGann writes: "The party of Donald Trump began almost 10 years ago to the day, when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin to join his ticket."
Republican presidential candidate John McCain and his vice presidential candidate, Sarah Palin, attend a campaign rally at Giant Center in Hershey, Pennsylvania, on October 28, 2008. (photo: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)
John McCain, Sarah Palin, and the Rise of Reality TV Politics
By Laura McGann, Vox
26 August 18
McCain empowered a demagogue who put the Republican Party on the path to Donald Trump.
he party of Donald Trump began almost 10 years ago to the day, when John McCain tapped Sarah Palin to join his ticket.
It’s one of the most important moments of McCain’s career. He proved willing to empower a demagogue when he thought doing so would improve his political fortunes, exactly the sin so many of his colleagues in the Republican Party have committed since Trump won their party’s nomination.
“She’s not from these parts and she’s not from Washington, but when you get to know her, you’re going to be as impressed as I am,” McCain said when he announced his decision. “She’s got the grit, integrity, the good sense and fierce devotion to the common good that is exactly what we need in Washington today.”
Palin’s big moment in front of a national audience was at the Republican National Convention. Her big opener was to ask the crowd: “What’s the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull?” Her answer: “Lipstick.”
Her showdown with Joe Biden at the first vice presidential debate was the most anticipated moment of the campaign. The debate began with a handshake between the two candidates and Palin asking Biden, “Hey, can I call you Joe?” It went downhill from there. She stumbled through or garbled talking points on basic policy questions, weaving in half a dozen references to “maverick” and “a team of mavericks.” The event drew 70 million viewers — the largest audience for a vice presidential debate in history. She dazzled conservatives.
National Review editor Rich Lowry described her as “so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing, [sending] little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America.”
Palin’s run solidified the Republican Party’s comfort with a candidate who would say absurdities. When Katie Couric wanted to know what newspapers she read, Palin answered, “Um, all of them, any of them that have been in front of me over all these years.”
Even though McCain and Palin were bested by Barack Obama and Joe Biden, Palin inspired a slew of copycats, unleashing a political style and a values system that animated the Tea Party movement and laid the groundwork for a Trump presidency.
McCain, who passed away at age 81, is remembered as a maverick, a man who crossed the aisle and built relationships with Democrats. But he also betrayed his own values hoping to win a presidential election, and sent the Republican Party down the path to Trump.
McCain sacrificed his values to win
McCain’s campaign was in free fall at the end of August 2008. He needed a Hail Mary, as many in the media put it at the time.
He seemed interested in tapping his close friend Sen. Joe Lieberman, a moderate Democrat, though a foreign policy hawk, who ran with Al Gore in 2000. Lieberman endorsed McCain over Obama. He wasn’t exactly a figure who’d excite ... anyone.
Palin, on the other hand, was a charismatic figure who campaign manager Steve Schmidt thought might appeal to women and to the party’s base. She was the governor of Alaska and had been the mayor of her small town, Wasilla. She’d also been called a “maverick” for confronting corruption in the state legislature, an identity that meshed well with McCain’s own.
Pretty quickly, though, Palin’s shortcomings started to show. She flubbed basic questions in interviews. Like: Why did you think Roe v. Wade was a bad decision? (Abortion was a central theme of Palin’s politics.)
McCain’s decision to pick her was called into question right away. How did McCain miss the signs that maybe she wasn’t up to the job?
In 2008, I flew to Wasilla, Alaska, the day after Palin was tapped. I headed to the city clerk’s office to pick up copies of meeting minutes from when she was mayor. I assumed the McCain campaign had done the same, but no. As I wrote at the time:
I just got off the phone with the very helpful city clerk at the Wasilla City Clerk’s office, Kristie Smithers, who is pulling some documents for me from when Gov. Sarah Palin was mayor. I told her I appreciated her help, since I’m sure she’s been bombarded with requests these last few weeks. The clerk’s office keeps all City Council meeting agendas, minutes, legislation, ordinances, etc. She chuckled. Then she told me that I’m the first person who has asked her office for anything.
McCain was prepared to put Palin a “heartbeat away from the presidency” without even checking if she could do the job. Instead, he picked her because she seemed like a good play to the base.
Conservatives had long dallied in race baiting, like the the push poll credited with dooming McCain in the 2000 presidential primary in South Carolina. Voters were asked if they minded that McCain had a black daughter. (One of McCain’s daughters, Meghan McCain, is white; the other, Bridget McCain, was adopted from Bangladesh.)
While McCain was credited with cutting off a woman at a rally who seemed to be saying something offensive about Barack Obama’s background, his running mate was on stages accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists.”
Palin was playing straight into the hands of conspiracy theorists who doubted Obama’s citizenship. She participated in painting him as “other” — someone who couldn’t be a patriotic American.
Palin unleashed reality politics
McCain and Palin lost, but after the election, Palin stayed in the limelight for a time. She got a deal with Fox News and traveled the country, endorsing and stumping for Tea Party candidates.
Schmidt, who had pushed McCain to select Palin, was depicted in the HBO version of the reported story of the 2008 campaign, Game Change, as racked with guilt for his role in the decision.
“This wasn’t a campaign, it was a bad reality show,” he says.
Palin herself went on to sign an actual deal for a reality TV show.
Over the next few years, Palin began to fade, but she was replaced by a small army of candidates who picked up her mantle. More and more, campaigning became about resentment and identity — us versus them. The white base of the Republican Party was energized and took back the House in 2010.
McCain made friends with politicians across the aisle, from Joe Biden to Hillary Clinton to Joe Lieberman. He was beloved by the press for many years for his cordial, friendly style. He loved to talk about himself as a straight shooter (his campaign bus was “the Straight Talk Express”).
He put this reputation on the line for Palin. She used it to gain credibility and a foothold in the national debate.
After being diagnosed with cancer, McCain still defended Palin’s performance but said he regretted not picking Lieberman as his running mate.
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RSN: Trumputin's Mob Masters Own the White House, but for How Long? |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=6004"><span class="small">Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Sunday, 26 August 2018 11:51 |
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Wasserman writes: "The Mueller Wave of crony convictions and confessions has barely begun."
Special Council and former FBI director Robert S. Mueller III. (photo: AP)
Trumputin's Mob Masters Own the White House, but for How Long?
By Harvey Wasserman, Reader Supported News
26 August 18
he Mueller Wave of crony convictions and confessions has barely begun.
But one thing is clear: the term “collusion” vastly understates Trump’s oneness with Vladimir Putin and the Russian Mob.
Collusion implies two independent parties working together.
Trump is not separate from Putin. Trump is Putin’s employee. His debtor. His servant. His baby mama. Or, in CIA terms, Putin’s asset. Since the 1980s.
The tsunami of proof ranges from Craig Unger’s remarkable new House of Trump, House of Putin to David Cay Johnston’s It’s Even Worse Than You Think and much more. (For a full hour of Unger’s narrative, hear this week’s “Green Power & Wellness Show.”)
Here is some of it:
Trump inherited a huge fortune from his mob-connected father (Trump’s mob-connected grandfather ran a brothel in the California gold country).
Donald was apparently born void of business ability. According to Unger, Trump’s massive over-expansion into Atlantic City in the 1990s left him $4 billion in debt, replete with six bankruptcies.
As no legitimate sources would fund him, Trump turned to the Russian mob, then looting the natural resources of a massive landmass. That epic cash flow enhanced its regular lines of extortion, prostitution, gambling, etc.
Hundreds of billions of dollars in flight capital sought access to the Western banking system. But to get it, the Russian mobsters and oligarchs needed to launder their money. They turned to Trump and his real estate-based cash washing machine. They also began cultivating him as a political asset.
Unger says more than 1300 real estate transactions ensued that, according to BuzzFeed, averaged $1.2 million per unit and “had the characteristics of money-laundering deals.” Buyers with hard money used shell corporations that were barely scrutinized, if at all. In a single legendary deal, one oligarch allegedly plunked down $6 million in cash for five condos.
Trump Tower, at 721 Fifth Avenue, became a dormitory/nerve center for the Russian underworld. Trump’s “comeback” was fueled with rubles they wanted hidden. Having stiffed a legion of creditors, Trump himself went from being dead broke to doing big business with scads of cash.
With the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of Vladimir Putin, the Russian mob became a de facto agency of the Russian government, and vice versa. With Putin at the top, Russia was (and is now) “a mafia state.” Says Unger: “In Moscow there’s no Wall Street, no Goldman Sachs. If you have any financial inclination, you go to work for the mob. That’s where the money is.”
With his roots in the old KGB, Putin transferred the new FSB secret police into a wing of the mafia. Its minions soon filled as many as a third of the roughly 300 units at Trump Tower (calculations are difficult because Trump regularly lies about how big his buildings really are). In the 1990s, when the FBI went looking for a renegade Russian mobster, that’s where they found him. “If anybody should not have a security clearance,” says Unger, “it’s Donald Trump.”
“We’ve been attacked three times,” Unger adds. “Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and now this. After Pearl Harbor and 9/11 they didn’t take over the White House.”
Much of the mob’s cash flow comes from Ukraine, which depends on Russia’s gas, which is sold at below-market prices to insider oligarchs. There, Paul Manafort installed a pro-Putin regime (since overthrown). Unger estimates the annual skim at about $750 million. During one of the earlier, very deadly coups, a Manafort daughter famously tweeted that “Dad has blood on his hands.”
Other Trump associates share similar roots. According to the NY Daily News, the grandfather of White House flunky Kellyanne Conway allegedly was Jimmy “The Brute” DiNatale, described by law enforcement authorities as a “significant criminal associate” of Philadelphia mobster Nicodemo “Little Nicky” Scarfo.
To keep Donald in line, Vlady may or may not have incriminating sex tapes to hold over Donald’s private parts. But they would pale before a real accounting of the Trumputin money trail.
Trump’s entire economic being depends on Putin’s rubles. He could bankrupt Trump with just one nyet.
The Russian people are not our enemy. Nor, technically, is the Russian government. We are grateful for not being in a shooting or nuclear war with them.
But with Trump in the White House kissing Putin’s ring in the Kremlin, we’re being colonized by Russia’s mobster oligarchs working in sync with our own corporate oligarchs.
It’s mostly about oil and gas, with coal and nukes as critical diversions away from what the Russo-American oligarchy fears most: renewable energy.
But the Russians did not steal America’s elections in Florida 2000 and Ohio 2004. That was the Bush Family, with deep CIA roots, guided by Karl Rove, linked to the House of Saud.
The Russians did not flip the US Congress and 1000 public offices from the Democrats to the GOP from 2008-2016. That was the Koch Brothers’ hugely funded GOP attack team. They stripped the voter rolls, flipped electronic voting machines, bought judges, stole the government … and are poised to do it again in 2018.
The Corporate Democrats continue to say and do nothing about a totally corrupted electoral system. Even this week, in a highly dubious Congressional race “won” by the GOP in central Ohio, the Dems have failed to even speak with election protection expert Bob Fitrakis and the seasoned team of local activists all too familiar with how these critical seats are stolen.
In 2016, Hillary Clinton bought the Democratic Party by paying its $20 million debt. She put it on an allowance and took the nomination. She trashed Bernie Sanders and the young social democrats who could have put her in the White House. She’s still said nothing about the utter theft of a presidential race she won by three million votes. Unless the party is radically changed, it will be deja vu in 2018 and 2020.
The Corporate Democrats’ contempt for Trump’s “deplorables” is exceeded only by its fear of the grassroots left. Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, and their ilk have opposed social and regulatory policies that date to the New Deal. They’re clearly more comfortable with Trump in the White House than Bernie Sanders.
But the Russians came at 2016 from another angle. Backing their Manchurian Mobster, they toyed with social media, faked the news. With the GOP regulars, they hacked voter registration rolls, databases, electronic tabulators and more in at least 21 states. They laundered money through the National Rifle Association and Mitch McConnell. They rebooted Dick Nixon’s “Dirty Trickster” playbook (previously perfected by Rove and Dick Cheney) and put their own made man in the White House.
His mission:
- Boost oil and gas prices to hand-funnel cash to the Russo-American fossil fuel kleptocracy;
- Shred environmental regulations to monetize the destruction of human and planetary health;
- Destroy Western trade and state relationships for Russian benefit;
- Gut military alliances to exalt Putin’s global standing;
- Flood the internet with trolls, bots, phishers, hackers, liars, manipulators, Foxists, etc. to trash grassroots democracy worldwide;
- Enthrone a deranged criminal psycho/sociopath to distract the media and public from all of the above.
None of this rises to the level of a “philosophy.” It’s all about the venal theft of public resources for the private profit of a power/greed-crazed few.
For American corporatists like the Kochs and so many others, Trump’s insane tweet-storms hide the further looting of our air, water, food supply, tax code, educational system, public housing, natural resources, pipeline proliferation, etc. Our Social Security and Medicare funds are next in line to feed ever-more military madness. Likewise obscene handouts to coal and nuke burners (while assaulting renewables with taxes, tariffs and more). In short: Trump has escalated Robber Baron rape from Reagan to the ridiculous.
For Trump’s mobster masters, the bonanza extends to pipelines through Ukraine (like the ones through the Dakotas), mass slaughter in Syria and Yemen, Europe flooded with refugees, an enhanced drug trade, global destabilization, Putinic enshrinement, and more.
The common denominator is always private profit at public expense.
And the ultimate enablers are always the Corporate Democrats. These Weimar Wimps are astute at just one thing: caving to the far right.
Next up is that fifth Supreme Court seat for the corporate thugs. Are you ready for the Dems to crumble yet again?
Team Schumer/Pelosi is always ready to assault social democracy and those who bring it. Their endless fundraising emails howl at Trump’s antics but never push a humanist vision that might impinge on corporate profits. They’re still unwilling to speak the truth of Trump’s mafia roots to the power of the corporatocracy.
But we are not them. And the supremely arrogant Donald may have crossed too many lines.
As long as Trump serves his don Putin while the Corporate Democrats wallow in fake opposition, there’ll be plenty of cover for the Russo-American kleptocracy to rape and pillage our dying planet.
But Nature does bat last. Let’s make sure She swings real soon.
Harvey “Sluggo” Wasserman’s Life & Death Spiral of US History: From Deganawidah to the Trumpocalypse will soon be published via Solartopia.org. His “California Solartopia” show airs at KPFK-Pacifica in Los Angeles. “Green Power & Wellness” is at prn.fm.
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FOCUS: John McCain Was a Flawed Politician I Never Stopped Admiring |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=11104"><span class="small">Charles Pierce, Esquire</span></a>
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Sunday, 26 August 2018 10:37 |
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Pierce writes: "Once upon a time, John McCain called me a great American. I was flattered, but not fooled."
John McCain. (photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)
John McCain Was a Flawed Politician I Never Stopped Admiring
By Charles Pierce, Esquire
26 August 18
For the loyalty he inspired among people, for his unquestioned physical courage, and for his instinctive response to the call of the better angels.
 nce upon a time, John McCain called me a great American. I was flattered, but not fooled. This was the kind of thing that got him a political lifetime of glorious press coverage. In my life among the political fauna, I have been schmoozed by experts. (In Massachusetts, there always is a knife somewhere in the folds of the flummery.) I had come to a TV studio outside of Boston to interview McCain for a profile I was doing of Senator Ted Kennedy on the occasion of the latter's 30th anniversary in the Senate. I met him and he called me a great American. But that wasn't the thing I remember best. What I remember best is that, when he called me a great American, he was talking to my son. That made all the difference.
And now he has passed at 81, nine years to the day that Kennedy passed, and a victim of the same vicious form of a vicious disease. This is history rhyming in deep, mournful harmony. Two flawed men, sons of difficult fathers, each badly broken in different ways, who came to be friends, and who believed in serving their country, albeit from different angles and with different English on the way they came through its life. But two politicians, most of all.
For John McCain was as much a politician as any Kennedy ever was. It has been fashionable for a while now to place McCain somehow above politics; the "maverick" thing was based on a sparse list of examples. There was the campaign finance law that he championed with Russ Feingold, a law that lies now in ruins because of judges for whom John McCain loyally voted. He campaigned vigorously to give the president a line-item veto until a Supreme Court led by William Rehnquist explained forcefully that such a measure was hilariously unconstitutional. He thoroughly supported Reagan's adventurism in Central America, was a protege of Henry Kissinger, got snagged in the Keating 5 corruption and became a campaign-finance reformer only after skating on that episode more cleanly than the other four miscreants, one of whom was John Glenn. He was a reliable Republican vote on every nomination and every policy that evidenced the Republican Party's slow slide into madness and chaos and he was unable and not a talented enough politician to stop it.
Take him all in all, he was a politician and, as such, a fairly run of the mill one. He has nothing like Ted Kennedy's legislative record. He did not dominate the chamber like a Johnson, or a Taft, or a Vandenberg. He did not stake out a single issue—except, perhaps, American interventionism everywhere. Where he differed from his party—on immigration, on torture, and most laudably, on climate change—he did so without noticeable effect. The party got worse on immigration and climate change, and it elected a president* who was positively giddy on the stump about torturing people.
When he agreed with his party, which was almost all the time, he did so wholeheartedly and with enthusiasm. And his party got more extreme until it was downright mad and there was nothing John McCain could do to stop it. In 2008, Mitt Romney embarrassed himself by arguing with John McCain about the efficacy of torture. In 2016, Donald Trump mocked McCain's imprisonment in North Vietnam and, except for McCain's loyal constituency in the media, it was little more than a speed bump. By the time a Republican president he could really oppose came along, nobody was listening to John McCain any more and then he got sick. But I remember one day in February of 2000 when John McCain actually was everything John McCain was supposed to be.
He had just been good and horribly ratfcked in the South Carolina primary, a loss that pretty much handed the Republican nomination to George W. Bush, and which sent history spinning off in a terrible direction that looks like a merry-go-round compared to what we're living through now. There were whisper campaigns about the daughter his family had adopted from Bangladesh—the oldest and most poisonous card in the deck, especially in the home office of American sedition. There were whisper campaigns over the telephone conversations from some of America's most famous TV preachers—especially the odious Pat Robertson. There were dozens of loaded "push polls." The entire Atwater-Rove arsenal was turned on him. Rumors were spread about McCain's captivity, his mental stability, and his wife, but it kept coming back to his daughter, Bridget, who was dark enough for the bigots. Then, McCain made a critical gaffe. He remarked that the Confederate flag, which still flew near the state capitol in Columbia, was "a symbol of racism and slavery." And he lost.
Nine days later, in Virginia Beach, McCain gave one of the finest speeches I've ever heard a politician give, even though I didn't agree with a great deal of it. Crafted by Mark Salter, McCain's longtime amanuensis and a supremely gifted writer, the speech gave McCain a chance to define the religious crazies and the dark forces of ratfckery right out of his party. (One of the things that is eternally to McCain's credit is that he commanded the loyalty of some good and decent people like Salter, and the political operative John Weaver.) He did it as well as any politician could have.
I recognize and celebrate that our country is founded upon Judeo-Christian values, and I have pledged my life to defend America and all her values, the values that have made us the noblest experiment in history. But public—but political intolerance by any political party is neither a Judeo-Christian nor an American value. The political tactics of division and slander are not our values. They are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country. Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.
Yes, I see the rather preposterous false equivalence there; Louis Farrakhan had nothing to do with "the Left" in the context of that election whereas Pat Robertson had just shown enough influence on "the Right" to help torpedo McCain's campaign. Nevertheless, it took all kinds of gumption at that point for a Republican to lump Farrakhan and Robertson and Falwell together. That was a maverick move. At that moment, I thought he might be the guy who wrenches his political party back toward something resembling sanity and then, he didn't.
He was a loyal foot soldier for President George W. Bush, the man on whose behalf his child had been slandered. (That's the first thing I thought of in 2016, when Ted Cruz climbed on the Trump train despite the fact that the engineer had slimed his wife and his father.) Once the attacks of 9/11 happened, McCain was all in for adventurism in the Middle East, occasionally opining that we weren't making the rubble bounce high enough. (He got an anti-torture amendment passed that Bush then emasculated with an infamous signing statement.) He was gearing up for another presidential run and here's where John McCain the politician is most clearly defined. More than anything else, by 2006, John McCain wanted to be president more than anyone else I've ever seen.
South Carolina was forgotten, as were those agents of intolerance. He gave a commencement speech at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University. He gave an embarrassing interview to the late Tim Russert where he walked back all those brave words Salter had written for him in 2000. Worse than that, it took him far too long to reject the endorsement of John Hagee, a know-nothing crazoid from Texas. He opined that, perhaps, we should teach intelligent design in the schools as well as evolution. By the time the Republican convention of 2008 rolled around, there was little left of the 2000 John McCain except the ambition that had always burned in him.
Then he picked Sarah Palin to run with him and that was the ballgame, at least for me. I had come to like him during the time we'd spent together when I was doing a profile in 1999 as he was warming up for his first presidential run. He was destined, always, to disappoint me politically but that was only because we didn't agree on anything. The choice of Palin was where I climbed completely off the tire swing. Only someone dangerously blinded by ambition would consider putting her that close to the national command authority. He had lost his way entirely. Anybody who wants to be president badly enough that he'd pick a half-bright human parka as his running mate never should be elected to that office.
I never stopped liking the man, though. I make no apologies for that. I never stopped admiring him for the good things about him—the loyalty he inspired among people, his unquestioned physical courage, his instinctive response to the call of the better angels to which, tragically, he never found the will fully to surrender himself or his ambition.
The last day I was with him in Arizona, we went to the Superstition Mountains. He was taping an A&E special on the Lost Dutchman mine. He was standing on a flat rock, looking up into the shattered peaks, his arms at that awkward angle that you get if your captors hang you up by them from the wall of your cell, and they're never quite right again. I stood on my own flat rock and watched him, and that is how I will remember John McCain in this time of his passing. I liked the way he looked at the mountains.
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ashing Neil Simon has been almost de rigueur for highbrow critics since the playwright had his first hits in the early sixties. But now that he’s 82 [Editor’s note: this story was originally published in 2009] and in iffy health, and a major revival of two of his most celebrated works—the first and third parts of the Brighton Beach trilogy, 
