| COLUMN |
November 9 2008
History’s losers can emerge as history’s winners. This is especially true in American politics. John F. Kennedy lost the 1956 contest as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee but his televised concession speech helped propel him into the White House just four years later.
The ultra-eloquent Adlai E. Stevenson of Illinois lost the presidential race twice, and yet is well remembered in our political history as a giant of a figure. As a first-term governor of Arkansas, William J. Clinton lost his bid for re-election — but rose from those ashes to become the 42nd President of the United States. John McCain, at age 72, has no such comeback in his future. But in facing off against Barack H. Obama, he seemed less a loser than a winner. His concession speech on Tuesday night in Arizona was luminously graceful and stirring. It’s a paradox that this Republican rose to the occasion only after the decisive moment of the occasion had risen against him: the vote.
But as second under the wire on Tuesday night, the former Prisoner of War in Vietnam seemed notably comfortable in his own skin. His body language was that of relief rather than of recrimination. His oral language seemed personal and direct, there was little stuttering, and there was no discernible posturing or insincerity.
There is a reason for this. Yes, the obvious reason is the talented Barack H. Obama. As Kantathi Suphamongkhon, the incisive former foreign minister of Thailand, put it at an election-night party here, “Barack Obama has made history; John McCain is history.”
But a further thought might be added: McCain’s heart was just not into beating Obama. A true American patriot, the septuagenarian did not want to stand in the way of history. To turn the Thai diplomat’s thought on its head, the Arizona Senator felt he was not history in the sense that the African-American Senator from Illinois surely was.
Age can become a man when he accepts what age has to offer him. At 47, Obama would seem to have almost everything that life offers, from looks to brains to judgment. But no one who has lived less than seven decades can truly see and feel such a span of history. My sense is that McCain ran for the office because he believed, as did many Republicans (not to mention Bill Clinton) that he was the only Republican who could possibly win. But when the American economy all but collapsed in September, McCain realised that for this election, no Republican could win, not even he.
Warriors fight gallantly even as the odds mount against them overwhelmingly. In America’s Wild West lore, the iconic Davy Crockett and company held onto the Alamo fort as long as they could before their positions were overrun. In this campaign, McCain’s policy positions were overrun by the inescapable reality of the economy, of the Iraq and Afghan war, and of the shadow of George Bush. The floundering incumbent American president hung over his campaign like the ghost of Shakespeare’s Banquo.
In a sense, this presidential campaign was John McCain’s second longest imprisonment. The first, of course, was the enforced residency at the so-dubbed Hanoi Hilton. This lasted five-and-one half years. The imprisonment of being the Republican Party’s standard-bearer lasted less than half as long - but one senses it was a torture.
Having to represent the Republican rightwing, McCain was hemmed in by ideology; thus came his controversial selection of Sarah Palin. As the world was to learn, the mind of the Governor of Alaska is an exceptionally blunt instrument. Most — though not all - of the American women I know regarded her as an embarrassment to the gender. By contrast, Obama, though half-white, was anything but an embarrassment to the other — more evident -half of his ethnicity.
Losing to Obama would, for some white men, be a humiliation. But not for McCain: As he said on Tuesday night, it was an honour to have run against him. What this unusual, non-cookie-cutter Republican did not say was that it was also an honour to go down in history as the white man who lost to him. Thanks largely to McCain this was not a racist election. Moments of infelicity and personal character-attacking were not avoided, to be sure; McCain’s political jailers would not let him think publicly outside of the conventional box, as McCain famously does privately. As time went on, the real McCain receded and a politically reconstructed Republican candidate was cobbled together.
The problem was that not enough American voters found the new McCain believable; McCain himself surely found his new image hard to believe. And so when this honourable man lost the election to Obama, he became a happy man again. He knew the country was making history in the right way; and he knew he was getting his true self back. In America, we call that a win-win situation. That’s why McCain’s heart was never really in it. We should salute a man who became a winner by losing. Yes, he was shot down - but under honourable circumstances.
Prof. Tom Plate, a member of the Pacific Council on International Policy, is founder of the Asia Pacific Media Network.
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