McCain Strain. - "Citizen McCain" - book review

National Review, June 3, 2002 by Richard Lowry

Citizen McCain, by Elizabeth Drew (Simon & Schuster, 256 pp., $23)

Whatever else you think of John McCain, he is not an uninteresting political figure -- except, that is, in the hands of Elizabeth Drew in this short hagiography. Drew, of course, is a veteran and much-honored political journalist, but she has produced a book that reads like a long, rejected New Yorker article. She spent months in and out of McCain's office during the 2001 fight over campaign-finance reform and chronicles here the utterly forgettable legislative minutiae, relieved only by periodic gushing pronouncements about McCain's virtue, courage, and kindness to small children and puppies.

By page one, we learn that the country might have collapsed into a pool of quivering goo if it hadn't been for McCain's leadership in the wake of September 11. "During this time," Drew writes, "he defined the situation, rallied the public's morale, and soothed it when it became fearful." Granted, McCain's instincts on the war are nearly flawless and he had some fine Hardball appearances in the weeks after the attacks. I suspect, however, that the fearful nation would have survived even if Citizen McCain hadn't had so many radio and TV bookings. This lack of proportion characterizes most of Drew's judgments in this book, which is why she manages to create a toxic mix -- dullness, without the sobriety.

ThThere are two large themes that are interesting about McCain. One is how the senator's rich personal history -- including being the (in his early career at least) underperforming son and grandson of Navy admirals -- shaped his ambition and his view of politics (this side of McCain is wonderfully captured in his campaign book, Faith of My Fathers). The other is his ideological transformation over the last two years, which has been lamentable from a traditional conservative perspective, but is still an exhilarating object lesson in the power of ideas. It was the logic of his position on a fairly marginal issue, campaign-finance reform, that knocked him from his ideological moorings, and started his inexorable transformation from a reliable conservative vote to the Republican with whom Democrats most like to co-sponsor bills.

These two themes intertwine in the idea of honor. McCain's lodestar as a politician has never been a particular philosophical commitment, but his own patriotic service to country, his honor. Hence, his strong, shamed reaction to getting dragged into the Keating affair and his general distaste for the grubby compromises of partisan politics, both of which have helped make him a campaign-finance reformer. In the 2000 primary campaign, the issue of campaign finance became a powerful symbol of his honor -- of his cussed willingness to go it alone and tell the truth -- and then, accidentally almost, the chrysalis of a broader regulatory agenda.

But to complain that Elizabeth Drew has written a book dealing with none of this is to fall into the reviewer's trap of criticizing an author for writing the wrong book. In fairness to Drew, she doesn't have a flair for the dramatic -- she once wrote a tome called Washington Journal: The Events of 1973-1974 -- so she intended to write the most boring book possible about McCain. Drew should be granted this: She succeeds in chronicling what McCain said at various press conferences about such things as the "rule" in the House determining how proposed amendments to the campaign-finance bill would be voted on. Perhaps this is a service to history, but, then again, a fair amount of this material would be picked up in a Nexis search.

Even on her own terms of rendering the campaign-finance debate, Drew's book is incomplete. She never talks to anyone on the other side, perhaps because for Drew there isn't another side. It is taken for granted that American politics has been corrupted by big money, and that campaign-finance reform will fix it. Perhaps Drew thinks she has already established the desirability of reform in her imaginatively titled books, Politics and Money: The New Road to Corruption and The Corruption of American Politics. But, even so, some people persist in thinking that, rather than corrupt, American politics is perhaps as clean as it has ever been. (Since any corruption will immediately get relentlessly recounted in Elizabeth Drew books, there isn't much leeway for Huey Longs these days.)

Drew has no time for such views, or for criticisms of McCain. She fawns over her subject, making it seem as though he is the first politician ever to use humor to put people at ease. She writes, in a typical passage, "Beneath the cheerful scamp, the instinctive and occasionally impulsive . . . pol, the guy who enjoys a good political fight, was a man thinking through his role in American politics. It was something bigger and more thoughtful than figuring the angles on how to become president." John McCain, a man for all seasons. Drew brushes off complaints about his temper, and then, in the most deliciously intriguing sentence in the book, writes that in one tiff with fellow reformer Chris Shays, "[McCain] let Shays know that he didn't care whether or not he attended the press conference." I wonder: How exactly did McCain let him know?