Opinion: He’s a maverick, not a Ford

McCain [was] asked how debate over the immigration bill was playing politically. ‘In the short term, it probably galvanizes our base,’ he said. ‘In the long term, if you alienate the Hispanics, you’ll pay a heavy price.’ Then he added, unable to help himself, ‘By the way, I think the fence is least effective. But I’ll build the goddamned fence if they want it.’

‘Yes, he’s a social conservative, but his heart isn’t in this stuff,’ one former aide told me, referring to McCain’s instinctual unwillingness to impose on others his personal views about issues such as religion, sexuality, and abortion. ‘But he has to pretend [that it is], and he’s not a good enough actor to pull it off. He just can’t fake it well enough.’

One of McCain’s aides tells me that two years ago, campaigning with McCain, George W. Bush asked him if the senator would like to work out with him. Told that McCain did not, could not, really ‘work out,’ Bush replied, ‘What do you mean?’

What do we do now? His own short-term prescription -- more troops to stabilize the country, if that is even possible -- has little public support. ‘The Iraq situation looks like we’re in a quagmire,’ one man [at a campaign stop] in Milwaukee says. Another adds, ‘It seems to be tipping.’ A third asks, ‘What should the president be doing differently?’ McCain is subdued. Like the rest of official Washington, he has been waiting for the recommendations of the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan commission on Iraq led by former secretary of state James Baker and former representative Lee Hamilton. He hopes the commission will point the way to some promising new direction, and he knows that, whatever the wise men say, he must refine his own approach to the war. But his remarks this morning are uninspired, even vapid. ‘The next few months will be critical,’ he tells the businessmen, his critical faculties not as acute as they had been with me just a month earlier, in private, when he said, ‘A lot of people tell me that the next four months or so are critical ... but I’d like to say that, two years ago, everyone said the next six months would be critical.’ Finally, a questioner lays it all on the line: ‘The war’s the big issue,’ he says, adding, ‘Some kind of disengagement -- it’s going to have to happen. It’s a big issue for you, for our party, in 24 months. It’s not that long a time.’ McCain replies, ‘I do believe this issue isn’t going to be around in 2008. I think it’s going to either tip into civil war....’ He breaks off, as if not wanting to rehearse the handful of other unattractive possibilities. ‘Listen,’ he says, ‘I believe in prayer. I pray every night.’ And that’s where he leaves his discussion of the war this morning: at the kneeling rail. On the way to our next stop, McCain tells me, ‘It’s just so hard for me to contemplate failure that I can’t make the next step.’ A week after the November elections, I went to have another conversation with McCain, in his Senate office. I pressed him on the war. He maintained that deploying more American troops was ‘the only viable option,’ but added, ‘There are no good options from where we are today.’ He went on: ‘My difference with these people who are saying, ‘Threaten the Iraqis with leaving and then they’ll do more’ -- that assumes that they can or will do more. And there’s no way that you’re going to have any kind of stability without security. Political progress cannot take place unless you have the fundamental elements of a security situation. So, do I know it would be a tremendous strain on the army and Marine Corps? Absolutely. But I saw the kind of impact of a broken army, a defeated army and Marine Corps, after Vietnam. And I’d much rather have ‘em take a strain and have some success than be defeated.’