My John McCain Problem

I'm going to make a strange admission. Particularly strange, coming from me. You may not even believe it -- especially if you've been reading this blog for the past three-and-a-half years. But I swear to you that it's true.

I like John McCain.

I know -- isn't that weird?

Weird but true. This is the first presidential election since 1976 where I didn't loathe the Republican nominee (with the possible -- no, make that probable -- exception of 1996). I watched McCain on Saturday Night Live last night and I thought -- I like this guy. You have to admire a guy who knows he's going to lose, might even go down to a humiliating defeat, and who can make fun of his own campaign on national television.

That doesn't mean I want him to win. I want that noted for the record. But I like John McCain.

Tuesday is going to start a new era in this country. We're going to start digging out from under the mountain of debt and bullshit that the Bush Administration has poured on us, and life will start slowly getting better in this country for the majority of Americans.

But I suspect that, after the euphoria of Tuesday night, as we move into what looks almost certain to be an Obama Administration, the first people who are going to be disillusioned with Barack Obama are going to be the very liberals who worked so hard to get him into office. They're going to expect a great progressive agenda and there isn't going to be one. The New Deal Part Deux just isn't going to happen.

We'll get out of Iraq, either more or less messily. We'll start to put our fiscal house in order, with all the attendant pain that implies. We'll repair our standing in the world. But people who are expecting (or fearing) a socialist utopia in the United States are going to find out very quickly that there isn't the money to do the kind of things they want done. And they're going to blame Obama for not doing what can't be done.

In the meantime, John McCain will go back to the Senate, knowing that his dream of becoming president of the United States will never come true. And even though I'm not going to vote for him, I can't help feeling that he might, in another time and under different circumstances, have made a good president. After all, how many presidential candidates have read Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire even once? McCain's read it twice.

McCain is a tragic figure -- undone by how own ambition and the compromises that his ambition led him to make on his way to the nomination. And I suspect he'll spend some time in the next few months wondering what could have been. Maybe we should, too.