The presidential campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., has been sinking in the polls faster than the Titanic.
The metaphor is particularly accurate given that just a few months ago, the McCain boat was considered unsinkable. It dwarfed the other candidates in the field - the mainstream media were already talking of "inevitability." Bookies were giving him favorable odds, and fellow Republicans were lining up behind him with endorsements. Politicians only endorse fellow politicians who they believe are going places - once a train gets rolling, everyone wants on for the ride.
The recent disappointing disclosures of McCain's fundraising totals - placing him sixth in the presidential pack behind Democratic Sens. Hillary Clinton, D-N.Y., Barack Obama, D-Ill., and former Sen. John Edwards and Republicans former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani - have only cemented the fate of a faltering campaign. Now that "the unsinkable" is clearly sinking, look for the passengers onboard - fellow Republican politicians - to start jumping ship.
The interesting question is: What was McCain's iceberg?
When he ran in 2000 as a maverick campaigning against the Republican establishment and called for the GOP to free itself from "agents of intolerance" such as apartheid-supporter and "Moral Majority" founder the Rev. Jerry Falwell, many independent-minded Republicans (and Republican-minded independents) fell in love with him instantly.
We all know the outcome of that campaign. McCain, who wanted to restore some semblance of principle to the party of small government that had throughout the Culture Wars transformed into the party of government surveillance, won a surprise upset victory in the New Hampshire primary, calling into question the "inevitability" of a man named (most luckily) George W. Bush.
The Bush campaign took on McCain in the South, accusing him of fathering an illegitimate, interracial child, referring to the daughter McCain and his wife had adopted from the impoverished nation of Bangladesh.
In the end, enough narrow-minded voters believed in the Bush attacks on McCain - Enough to give us the narrow-minded presidency we have today.
That is when the story turns from troubling to tragic. Faced with the prospect of never winning his party's nomination because he could not appeal to Republicans the way Bush had, McCain decided to become Bush. He flip-flopped on every issue. He praised Jerry Falwell at Falwell's Liberty University in Virginia, where the "agents of intolerance" he once decried indoctrinate the nation's youth. He embraced every position he had disagreed with and kowtowed to his party establishment in order to become a Bush Republican and win the endorsement of a president whose campaign once insulted his wife and daughter. Interested readers should go online to YouTube, and look up the aptly named spectacle of self-contradiction - "McCain vs. McCain."
It is never a pretty sight to see a politician contorting himself to win an election, to see the moment when a man's ambition causes him to discard his principles. But this is a particulary painful spectacle when the politician in question is John McCain. McCain, the man whose name once meant "maverick," who was willing to stand up for what he believed in even when it went against his party line. McCain, the son of a Navy admiral, who once endured years of solitary confinement in North Vietnam because he refused to be released earlier than his fellow POWs.
The John McCain of today wants the presidency so badly and was so scarred by his defeat in 2000, he is convinced he must become a typical Bush Republican to win the presidency. By trying to become something he is not, McCain has only become what voters despise - a flip-flopper.
Ironically, had he stuck to his principles, he might have become the successor to Bush. Republican voters are currently telling pollsters that Giuliani is the new GOP frontrunner, despite the fact that he disagrees with Republicans on a series of important issues - including abortion.
Giuliani is willing to defend his positions and for this reason comes across as genuine. Apparently, Republicans like a principled moderate better than a fake conservative.
Let us not forget either that John McCain has been almost as ardent a supporter of the Iraq war than Bush himself.
Chief of its many flaws, the current executive has been dragged down by its foreign policy, which has always bordered on the delusional. I secretly believe that most Republicans know this is the case but are unwilling to abandon their president and his war because they are so heavily invested in both. The Republican Party, more desperately than even America as a whole, needs a leader who can lead it out of its Iraqi quagmire.
The old John McCain - the principled maverick - may have been the man to lead his party out of such a mess, and reconnect it to the American people. The John McCain of today, who champions the "troop surge" as a quick fix to Iraq's ethnic problems, is stating openly to voters that his presidency would be a continuation - or, indeed, an escalation - of Bush in foreign policy.
Just last week, McCain was in Baghdad claiming that victory in Iraq was around the corner. Historians have a phrase for that kind of thinking - it's called "bunker mentality."
Allow the idea of four or eight more years of self-delusion in Iraq to sink in for a moment. Even assuming that McCain stopped his flip-flopping once in the Oval Office, even assuming that all his self-contradictions were just an act he was putting on to get elected, his presidency would still mean another four years of Bush's foreign policy.
It is for that reason that John McCain will not have my vote, nor should he win the trust of any independent voter.
Michal Zapendowski '07 cried when he threw away his collection of John McCain figurines.
