McCain a hero in war and in the Senate chamber
If you were up at 1:30 a.m. on Friday morning and watched the moment John McCain strode into the Senate chamber, turned to the speaker and gave him the universal thumbs down gesture, and your heart did not skip a beat, get a new heart.
Here was a man, at a hinge moment in recent American democracy, who in defiance of his rapidly declining health, his party and his president, got out of his treatment bed, onto a plane and returned to Washington to one more time demonstrate his staggering courage and fortitude.
A few days earlier, he had been diagnosed with what may be terminal brain cancer, a few days later on his first return to the Senate, he cast the vote allowing his colleagues to debate Trumpcare, after warning them in ringing oratory that they had better use this chance to do better in proposing a new health-care system, or he would be back and he would stop them in their tracks. They didn’t and he did.
With his customary swagger, sense of theatre and the moment, he then put a knife in any GOP hope of killing Obamacare. It was a jaw-dropping moment in American politics. Being less theatrical culturally, with a political system that rarely vests such power in an individual politician, we don’t get many of those in Canadian politics.
Like every political triumph, the back story and layers underneath the performance are almost as fascinating at the event itself. McCain, ironically, did Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell a favour. Now he and his colleagues will not have to defend a suicidal gambit to kick millions of their voters out of the health-care system, while being able to claim to their clown leader that they had “done everything they could” to deliver his impossible bill.
He gave cover to senators like his friend, South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham, and Nevada Sen. Dean Heller, each facing attacks from the right at home, to safely vote yes. And he put the ball back in adult hands to attempt to find an across-the-aisle compromise, in, as he put it in a delightful put-down of McConnell and President Donald Trump, “in the regular order of this place,” meaning hearings with experts, committee consideration and open amendments.
Along with the other Trump disasters this week — most staggeringly, the arrival of The Sopranos in D.C. in the person of the obscene Mr. Mooch (White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci) — McCain may have not only ended eight years of GOP attacks on Obamacare single-handedly, he may have accelerated the end of the Trump presidency itself.
If the White House could not get a death sentence for something as previously unifying as the GOP’s hatred of Obamacare through Congress, how will he ever do tax reform, an infinitely more complex and challenging legislative hill to climb? With neither fear, nor popular- ity on his side the answer is clear: he won’t. Nor NAFTA, nor infrastructure, nor his biggest fairy tale, the wall.
When McCain, the former war hero and U.S. navy pilot, dropped his bomb on the White House, he probably helped some of his colleagues to begin to grow a political spine, while breaking the nerve of the court jesters serving the clown king. He may even have launched a process of rehabilitation in the U.S. Congress itself, since no action on Obamacare as it swoons is not an option and any treatment will require at least some hands across the aisle.
In a delightful historical coda, McCain’s dramatic intervention was a bookend to one delivered by Sen. Edward Kennedy. Also facing the end of his life from rapidly metastasizing cancer, he had been pushed out of the Obamacare political fight as the risk of infection from even appearing in public was too high. But at the critical moment, Ted Kennedy rose from his bed and marched into the Senate chamber and broke the tie that delivered Obamacare. Then he went home to die.
These two formidable political warriors — one a lifelong liberal, one a very conservative Republican and devoted friends — would be impressive heroes in the best of times. At this dark moment in American history, John McCain’s courage is as transformative and heart-raising as the sight of the lights of an oncoming lifeboat to a drowning man; the recognition that however bleak the odds, never give up.
Even in politics, sometimes a hero does arrive.
Sen. John McCain may have not only ended eight years of GOP attacks on Obamacare, he may have accelerated the end of the Trump presidency itself