Within the Margin

Every now and again, the “old” John McCain comes back.

I wasn’t politically-engaged enough in 2000 to have much of a sense at the time of what his primary campaign for the Republican presidential nomination focused upon, but the first George W. Bush presidential term that followed provided occasional glimpses into what might have been. McCain’s hawkishness provided useful (or damaging, from my perspective) cover to assuage moderates that the administration’s prosecution of the war on terror was appropriate, but on domestic policy he offered support for significant and successful campaign finance reform (since eviscerated by the Supreme Court’s de facto conservative majority) as well as legislation to combat climate change. In those days, he also tended to be a reasonable voice on immigration reform, as was President Bush. McCain was a lot of Democrats’ favorite Republican: by no means right on all the issues, but good on a few of them and with enough charisma and credibility to be a useful bridge to bipartisanship from time to time.

By 2008, that was fading. Lessons having been learned from eight years before, he had to run a bit more to his right in order to secure the nomination against the challenges posed by Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee. The general election campaign against Barack Obama was not stridently ideological until he made the astounding decision to place future Tea Party heroine Sarah Palin on the ticket. But his tone was decidedly changed from the earlier McCain. Vexed that his experience was being trumped by Obama’s reformist sensibilities and frankly modern message, McCain struggled to conceal his affront as the race slipped away. It took him a while to recover: Obama’s first term was marked by a snarling, partisan McCain who now struggled to find common cause across the aisle, and who focused his 2010 Senate primary campaign on immigration in the face of a challenger who attempted to out-conservative him on the issue. The “complete the dang fence” ad is not exactly the McCain-as-statesman image pushed by the mainstream media from 2000 onward.

But one common thread throughout McCain’s tenure is his opposition to torture (or its charming euphemism, “enhanced interrogation techniques”) and his willingness to note both the ineffectiveness and immorality of such approaches. Americans raised on “24” have been led to believe that bad guys will crack under pressure and tell you where the other bad guys or what they’re up to, and our American heroes then use that information to save the day. As McCain and various scientific researchers point out, the information gleaned from these techniques is often worthless: the things people say under extreme physical and psychological duress are often junk, uttered only to make the torture stop. Beyond that, one would rather have the moral high ground in fighting a war, and treating

This was something McCain had to do continually during the 2008 Republican primary debates, as he shared the stage with seven, eight, nine candidates who all proudly asserted they would continue the Bush administration’s torture regime. One of my more surreal experiences of that campaign was watching a war hero explain to a bunch of people with no military or intelligence experience that he knew a little something about this issue and could tell them how a torture victim actually responds.

Now, in the aftermath of the release of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s report on the use of torture, McCain is again in the position of bucking most of his party and offering an impassioned defense of the report’s release – as well as decrying the moral and indeed strategic cost of American use of torture. These are ultra-partisan times, and I don’t want to give a senator too much credit for just doing what’s right. But there’s always room for the statesman version of John McCain to challenge past practices and hopefully ensure that America lives up to its values going forward.

p.s. – in the interest of recognizing when my local Congressman gets something right, U.S. Representative Chris Gibson offered similar thoughts to McCain on Wednesday: “I’m talking as a guy who has front line experience. You’re never going to get any reliable information through any other means than through persuasion,” said Gibson, who served in the Army for more than two decades. “If you put somebody under torture, they’re going to tell you anything you want to hear to have it stop. It’s not reliable. I’m telling you from both a values perspective and a pragmatic perspective, what you want to do with a prisoner or a detainee is to have them be in the space where they see it’s in their best interest to share information.”