John McCain: Noun, verb, POW
A special comment from Our Man In Canary Wharf, Nick Wealthall:
According to the McCain campaign, the key qualities separating him from Barack Obama are his experience and foreign policy expertise. They say that’s what you need to be President – their man has it, our man doesn’t.
John McCain’s start point as a Presidential candidate – and to most of his paragraphs – is that he’s a war hero who sacrificed for his country. He spent more than five years in a prisoner of war camp, enduring torture and repeated beatings. He also refused early release unless all the men captured before him were release. He is – without question – a bona fide war hero.
Just to be clear: I’m not a war hero. In fact, I’m a basically a coward. In the event of war, I’m first in line to claim I’m part of some invented religion that means I have to be right at the back holding the coats. If I was ever imprisoned or interrogated, I would give up everything they wanted to know. Actually, I’d give up everything I knew about everything, period – state secrets, my secrets, my shopping lists… I’d just really like them to let me get back to my continental duvet.
Not only that, but if I was allowed to leave early from a hellhole like that… well, I’d be sprinting. Is it just me, or does not leaving actually seem a bit insane? I guess that’s why I’ll never be a war hero, or indeed on the verge of becoming President.
One quick question though – and maybe I’m confused on this one – but what has being a prisoner of war got to do with running the world’s largest economy and looking after its 270 million people?
Apparently the argument is that it’s given him the character needed and proved his toughness and so forth (repeat ad nauseam with stars and stripes flowing). The thing is: I’ve been a politics groupie, and one thing that has always flummoxed me is the question of character. I don’t understand what cheating on your wife has to do with deciding how to apportion a multi-billion dollar budget – never have, never will. Actually, if our personal judgement had anything to do with our abilities to make judgments at work, most of us would be screwed.
Surely it’s not what you’ve done but your ability to make judgments that qualify you for office? For McCain, that experience hasn’t made him be able to:
a) tell Sunnis from Shias – he’s confused Al-Qaida as Shiites ‘receiving help from Iran’ several times in recent months; or
b) know which countries currently exist and which don’t – he’s referred to Czechoslovakia, a country which hasn’t existed since 1993, on three occasions in the campaign; or
c) even, unbelievably, where countries actually are – “I’m afraid it’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq/Pakistan border” (there is no such border).
McCain continually makes these errors and continually says almost nothing new, revelatory or helpful for those of us living outside the country he sacrificed for. It’s almost as if he’s excused on account of ‘all he’s been through’. Now, that’s fine when your 90-year-old Gran uses the ‘N’ word – never mind Nan, she’s from a different era and she’s on her way out anyways, and so forth – but this man wants to lead the free world, not invite us round for tea and digestives.
McCain is neither infirmed and in need of being excused nor is he a foreign policy expert. In fact, he’s an insular, nasty, ‘America-first, screw the rest of the world’, ignorant man who would change almost nothing about the States’ interaction with the rest of the world
The Democrats and Obama’s team need to shoot the elephant in the room. Surviving being locked away in a POW camp maybe a braver thing than any of us will do in our lifetimes – but it has absolutely nothing to do with being the President in 2008, and they should say so.
Tags: experience, John McCain, pow