Dear John

Dear Senator McCain:

Hey, it's me.  You may remember when we spoke in 1990 in Washington, D.C. during the big protest march against the first Gulf War. My hair was a lot longer then than now -- blame in on grunge* (an era named after a genre of particularly dynamic pop music.)  

You and I didn't exactly have a conversation that day in Washington: I just yelled something like "US Out Of Iraq!" at you while you were getting in your car and you yelled something back that sounded like "you kids get off of my lawn!"

I've written you a few times since then but you never respond to my questions, so I'm hoping someone close to you will print this letter out (from the Internet -- it's a computer thing) and pass it along to you.

Honestly, I want to say how compelling I find your personal story to be.  I know everyone, even your opponents, consistently thank you for your service, and at this point their gratitude may seem perfunctory, or even disingenuous.  

But I sincerely respect your commitment to God and country.  I was moved when I heard about your capture and imprisonment in Vietnam, especially the "cross in the sand" story.  Suggestions by lefty bloggers that the story was plagiarized because it could not be verified seem to be false -- although as a person of some faith myself, I've never understood how a self-professed Christian would support a war of choice, anymore than how a peace-loving Muslim could make jihad.  (Nor have I read a version of the Constitution that necessitates proselytizing the American way in places other than America, but I've already shot off my mouth about Armageddon here, so I'll leave that debate for another letter.)

As a prisoner of war, your captors did everything they could to break you.  My heart goes out to you for all of this.  They shot and stabbed and beat you, kept you in solitary confinement, forced you to make false confessions, and kept you tied up.  It turned your hair white.  They scarred you, and I know you are still physically incapacitated by their torture. Few can imagine the physical pain and mental anguish you went through at the hands of your captors, all for your country and your flag.  

You showed true grit when you honored the code of conduct that called for each prisoner to be let go in the order he was captured and refused an offer of early release, even when I'm sure all you wanted to do was get the heck out of Dodge.  As you said years later, "I really didn't love America until I was deprived of her company."

You are a war hero, and as such your return to your former prison camp known as the Hanoi Hilton in 2000 was transcendent.  I hope your post-war successes and strength of character will inspire other veterans who, like you, sustained injuries in combat that will incapacitate them for the rest of their lives.  Because when you ended a military career marked by loyalty and courage, you began a political career shot through with candor and wit.  Even one of your Vietnamese captors -- your former enemy -- endorsed you for president.

Oh, re the president thing:  sorry to break this to you, but in the interest of straight talk, you are not going to win.

I'm not just saying this because I support your opponent.  It's just that I've done the math.  The confluence of electoral college and poll numbers with your politics do not point in a favorable direction for your bid.  True, Obama may only squeak past you in the popular vote, like Kennedy did past Nixon.  But it's pretty clear that you have missed your destined rendez-vous with the American presidency  -- which is a drag, because by all rights you really should have won in 2000.

I'm not saying I would have been excited about the prospect of a McCain presidency then, but of course 20/20 hindsight shows that we all would have fared better with you as president than with the non-com-poop we've elected twice now.  

True, maybe Crazy Cheney would have gotten to you; maybe your Big Oil contributors would have encouraged you to wage a war for oil.  I mean, you have voted to put US troops in harm's way nearly every time you've had the opportunity.  (When you say you're well-versed in foreign policy, you really mean war, right?) 

But had you been in the Oval Office in 2001, you may have had the clarity to have recognized that, as a practical matter, 9/11 represented a failure in airport security more than anything else, and truly overhauled that system instead of just giving the old TSA guards new vests.  

Moreover, you might have harnessed international outrage after those attacks to locate and defeat the then-diminutive terrorist threat.  With the right advisors -- and a maverick like you surely would have had a bipartisan cabinet of the best and brightest, not the Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts who wound up running us into what your guys in Vietnam called "the shit" --  you might have successfully leveraged the good will extended to us from the rest of the free world, strong-armed Pakistan and Afghanistan into giving up bin-Laden and at least scared Saddam Hussein into submission.  (Had Saddam run and hidden, he likely would have been found anyway, sharing a spider-hole and hair products with Radovan Karadžić.) 

Had you been our 43rd president, Sen. McCain, I really doubt you would fallen for this wacky Iraq conspiracy.  I think you would have sought counsel from people like Colin Powell, who advised against the Bush war.  Remember his Pottery Barn analogy about Iraq -- "you break it, you bought it"?  It was a good call!  You know that soldiers are defenders, not ambassadors; that, in the face of an enemy they have sought to vanquish,  you can't expect young kids to build bridges. (That's the Army Corps of Engineers' job, and often they suck at it.)  

No disrespect to the troops -- everyone agrees that it's a small minority of US troops who torture prisoners, purposefully kill innocents or throw puppies in the air. But let's face it, winning hearts and minds should not be expected to be part of an infantrymen's job description.  You and Powell know this.  And like any great military leader, Powell maintained that violence is only to be used a last resort, not as a strategic, pre-emptive choice.  Powell's brilliant military career was irreparably sullied in one day, when he unwittingly lied to the entire world about WMDs in his address to the UN. No wonder Colin split the administration to write a book.  But even in his tell-all, he didn't tell all.  Because he's like you John:  a good soldier.  

Unlike you, Powell never ran for president, although many encouraged him to do so.  Unlike you, he said he never had the fire in the belly that a presidential run required.  But you did, John -- and you ran, lots of times.  You had a reputation as a maverick, for breaking from your party and voting your conscience.  Ultimately, it was the Lewinsky affair that put a Republican in the White House, and you were next in line for the gig.  Wha hoppen?

Some say it was the much-ballyhooed "Karl Rove Handbook" that kept you from taking office in 2000.  Unlike Powell, Rove has yet to publish said handbook, but he did help usher in the politics of radical stupidity we now know now as neo-conservatism.  First Rove defeated Al Gore by impugning him for being the second in command during a time of peace and prosperity.  Four years later, he picked off John Kerry, a war hero, by branding him a flip-flopper for condemning the Vietnam War after Kerry fought in it.  

Were Rove's cronies responsible for stirring up bigotry in the racist Republican base by insinuating that your adopted Bangaldeshi daughter was your child, fathered out of wedlock?  ... Who portrayed you as "not conservative enough" because you voted for campaign finance reform, immigration, trial lawyer issues, for federal intervention in health and education and Clinton-appointed Supreme Court Justices Breyer and Ginsburg?  In 2000, Rove & Co. defeated you, the heir apparent, to win the GOP nom for Bush's boy.  And that's why it's such a drag to see you borrowing campaign strategy from the KR Handbook, as ghostwritten by your guy Steve Schmidt, to prop up your losing campaign.   

Like when you, the son of a Navy admiral who married a millionaire and own multiples homes, tried to paint this middle-class, mixed-race wunderkind who leapt from obscurity as an "elitist." 

Or when you accused him of not visiting wounded troops overseas because the press wouldn't come -- an outright fabrication.

Or used a promotional giveaway tire gauge to represent "The Obama Energy Plan," only to recant a few days later when economists informed the public that it could save a billion gallons of fuel in a year by simply regulating its tire pressure.

These are just a few examples of the politics of nothing, coming from a man of real substance.  

We've both done some dumb things in the past, John:   I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000; you voted against a national holiday to honor Rev. Martin Luther King.  I was photographed making out with a tree while drunk; you were photographed making out with George Bush while sober.   I trusted a bad art director and authorized a stupid album cover, you trusted bad intelligence reports and authorized the war.  

But in a career just bursting with blunders, your own most recent strategic boner is the most easily avoided and thus the dumbest:  that Paris and Britney attack ad.  Was it a silly joke from one of your top dogs, like when your economic advisor Phil Gramm called the newly-homeless "whiners, " or your self-professed ignorance of the Internet that caused to play that newfangled game called Viral Video? 

Did you not realize that all Paris had to do was put on shoes (she was already in a swimsuit) and read from a cue-card to Swift-Boat your whole agenda?

I don't like the ageist arguments against you any more than the racist attacks against your opponent.  You're younger than my mom and dad, who are both sharp as knives.  But when you roped Paris into your silly attack ad and La Vagin Rasé hit right back, calling you a "wrinkly, white-haired dude,"  she not only delivered what the kids call a smackdown, she reinforced what everyone but you and Lindsey Graham seem to sense already:  your presidential moment has passed.  

Sure, you've got more experience in politics.  But look where your experience has taken us!  And look where we're headed:  

Voters recognize that your economic policies are Bush Part III, and that doesn't appeal to most of us.  You've even refused to distance yourself from his tax cuts for the rich.

You pay lip service to a green future, but you've failed to vote for any renewable energy bids in the last year.  And not just because you're on the campaign trail -- once you didn't refused to even leave your Senate office to vote for wind and solar.  is this because of the $1.33 million you've received from Big Oil?  

And when you keep talking about "victory" in Iraq, just like you spoke of victory in Vietnam while the US was leaving Saigon, you sound a little batty.  I get it:  you're a good soldier.  You don't want the battle to have been waged for naught. But most people recognize that this war was a bad idea based upon a lie, so that "victory-at-all-costs" speech you like to give sounds as insane now as it must have in the 70s.

Yours is not the face America wants to present to the rest of the world, and it's not because of the wrinkles.  Even the troops don't want another military guy, which is why they've donated so much more to Obama's campaign than your own.  

So please John, run the dignified campaign you promised you would.  Don't do whatever it takes to win, because you're not going to.  And if you run a campaign based on crap, you will have sold out both your own legacy and the trust of people like me who believed you, even if they didn't like your politics -- like when recovering alcoholic Eric Clapton did the beer commercial.  

Be that old maverick they used to love and fear on both sides of the aisle.  You can still have a long career in politics.  They love you in Arizona.  You can be the Ted Kennedy of the Southwestern right!  (The old Keating 5 scandal can be your Chappaquiddick.)  You can still jet back from Phoenix on the wife's plane to shoot down pork.  You can still hang out in the Congressional cloakroom and cuss.  You can still bullshit with the press and kick reporters' asses.

And you can take long lunches with Ron Paul to give him advice for his inevitable run against President Obama in 2012.