The News Herald (Willoughby, OH)
For McCain, a life of courage, politics came down to 1 vote
WASHINGTON » For John McCain, a lifetime of courage, contradictions and contrarianism came down to one vote, in the middle of the night, in the twilight of his career.
The fate of President Donald Trump’s long effort to repeal Barack Obama’s health care law hung in the balance as a Senate roll call dragged on past 1 a.m. on a July night in 2017.
Then came McCain — 80 years old, recently diagnosed with brain cancer, his face still scarred from surgery, striding with purpose toward the well of the Senate.
The Arizona Republican raised his right arm, paused for dramatic effect and flashed a determined thumbs-down, drawing gasps from both sides of the aisle.
Trump’s health care bill was dead. McCain’s lifelong reputation as free thinker, never to be intimidated, was very much alive.
It was the capstone of a political career that had taken McCain from the House to the Senate to the Republican presidential nomination, but never to his ultimate goal, the White House.
McCain, who faced down his captors in a Vietnamese prison of war camp and later turned his trademark defiance into a political asset, died Saturday. He was 81.
With his irascible grin and fighter-pilot moxie, McCain won election to the House from Arizona twice and the Senate six times. But twice he was thwarted in his quest for the presidency. His upstart bid for president in 2000 took flight in New Hampshire only to be quickly flattened in South Carolina.
Eight years later, he fought back from the brink of defeat to win the GOP nomination, only to be overpowered by Democrat Obama in the general election. McCain had chosen a little-known Alaska governor as his running mate for that race, and in the process helped turn Sarah Palin into a political celebrity.
After losing to Obama in an electoral landslide, McCain returned to the Senate determined not to be defined by a failed presidential campaign in which his reputation as a maverick had faded. In the politics of the moment and in national political debate over the decades, McCain energetically advanced his ideas and punched back hard at critics — Trump not least among them.
Scion of a decorated military family, McCain embraced his role as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, pushing for aggressive U.S. military intervention overseas and eager to contribute to “defeating the forces of radical Islam that want to destroy America.”
Asked how he wanted to be remembered, McCain said simply: “That I made a major contribution to the defense of the nation.”
Taking a long look back in his valedictory memoir, “The Restless Wave,” McCain wrote of the world he inhabited: “I hate to leave it. But I don’t have a complaint. Not one. It’s been quite a ride. I’ve known great passions, seen amazing wonders, fought in a war, and helped make a peace . ... I made a small place for myself in the story of America and the history of my times.”
Throughout his decades in Congress, McCain played his role with trademark verve, at one hearing dismissing a protester by calling out, “Get out of here, you low-life scum.”
McCain stuck by the party’s 2016 presidential nominee, Trump, at times seemingly through gritted teeth — until the release a month before the election of a lewd audio in which Trump said he could kiss and grab women. Declaring that the breaking point, McCain withdrew his support and said he would write in “some good conservative Republican who’s qualified to be president.”
He had largely held his tongue earlier in the campaign when Trump questioned McCain’s status as a war hero by saying: “He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.”
McCain, with unusual restraint, said that was offensive to veterans, but “the best thing to do is put it behind us and move forward.”
But by the time McCain cast his vote against the GOP health bill, six months into Trump’s presidency, the two men were openly at odds. Trump railed against McCain publicly over the vote, and McCain remarked that he no longer listened to what Trump had to say because “there’s no point in it.”
Unafraid of contradictions, McCain himself had campaigned against Obama’s health care law, but voted against its repeal because Republicans had flouted what he called the “old way of legislating,” with full-fledged debate, amendments and committee hearings on the final bill.
In his final months, McCain did not go quietly, frequently jabbing at Trump and his policies from the remove of his Hidden Valley family retreat in Arizona. He opposed the president’s nominee for CIA director because of her past role in overseeing torture, scolded Trump for alienating U.S. allies at an international summit, labeled the administration’s zero-tolerance immigration policy “an affront to the decency of the American people” and denounced the Trump-Vladimir Putin summit in Helsinki as a “tragic mistake” in which Trump put on “one of the most disgraceful performances by an American president in memory.”
On Aug. 13, Trump signed into law a $716 billion defense policy bill named in honor of the senator. Trump signed the John S. McCain National Defense Authorization Act in a ceremony at a military base in New York — without one mention of McCain.
Over a 31-year career in the Senate, McCain became a standard-bearer for reforming campaign donations. He railed against pork-barrel spending for legislators’ pet projects and cultivated a reputation as a deficit hawk and an independent voice. He even attacked senators’ own perks of office, such as free, upclose parking spots at Washington airports.
But faced with a tough GOP challenge for his Senate seat in 2010, McCain disowned chapters in his past and turned to the right on a number of hot-button issues, including gays in the military, immigration and climate change.