The longer this theory bounced around in my head, the more the particles collided, bursting into the energetic revelation that John Sidney McCain III has perfectly executed a brilliant plan to destroy the autocratic, authoritarian, even fascist wing of the Republican party. Barack Obama has had a lot to do with it, by offering a "post partisan" brand that has been brilliantly marketed and executed. Obama has run the most organized political campaign in modern history. But, the natural inclusiveness of the Obama Way would have juggernauted past the scattered wreckage of the Bush administration, leaving fetid pools of the worst slime to reassemble itself.
John McCain saw what needed to be done to that slime. He has ingeniously helped ostracize, ridicule, belittle, bash, discredit, and marginalize the Bush-Cheney wing of the Republican party. George Bush and Dick Cheney had a lot to do with their own implosion, but McCain has now born the standard, enthroned a more religious, less-informed Bush as his running mate, exposed the underbelly of dark-skinned (non-Christian) fear, hatred, immigrant bashing, skin-heads, secessionists, militia members, uber-nationalists, assorted xenophobes, and the other divisive elements of the GOP. When a person at one of his rallies screamed "terrorist" in response a question about who the real Barack Obama was, McCain knew he had tapped into a very deep vein, and his campaign bled the ugliness straight into "the tubes." McCain was showing his own party, and the rest of the world, what is wrong with it. Ted Stevens, Jack Abramoff, Karl Rove, and Dick Cheney tossed the lead-ins and highlight reels. Joe the Plumber made the celebrity list of Fox News. McCain gave the wing-nuttery of his party a well-lit, over-hyped, and ulta-spun soap box. He let the dogs out.
The voters had already seen every possible episode. What more could the Republican party do after Iraq, Katrina, Wall Street, and Recession? To really drive home the point that the world needed a president Obama, McCain didn't just jump the shark, he put it in a barrel and shot it.
While McCain probably believed in Greenspan's Randian deregulation boondoggle that led to this cancer-ridden capitalism, he knew about some facts. He could at least, in some cases, see the obvious. He understood the science behind global warming, although he, like many others, may have led themselves to believe we had more time to solve it. He worked with Senator Russ Feingold on campaign finance. Realists and pragmatists could find common ground with him. He understood the give and take that led to each side addressing the other's legitimate concerns over policy. He was not a Bushian or Rovian. He did not have an over-arching ideology that spit out what he should think and say, like some punch-card shooting out Dr. Strangelove's computer. John McCain understood that the world was a complicated place that needed competent people making decisions of planetary importance. He was more pragmatic and less ideological, at least on domestic policy.
And then, in 2000, he watched all that ripped away from him in South Carolina, where Karl Rove ran racist ads about McCain's adopted daughter.
Revenge, the Italians say, is a dish best served cold, and I'm pretty sure McCain has read Machiavelli. For the last 8 years, he has carefully orchestrated a take-over of the GOP. He began by endorsing Bush, which must have been hard for him (as parodied by Robert Smigel on Saturday Night Live in a 2004 Fun With Real Audio, "Apocalypse Now"). He backed almost every play from the Bush White House. By the time the 2008 Republican primaries were under way, John McCain had moved so far to Cheney's right that the base had to love him. There were rumors that he started fights in the war room! He joked about bombing Iran. The old man had finally come around, deserving the nomination of his party.
He sure showed them.
On the stump, McCain has seemed to be intentionally giving his old friend Jon Stewart easy material. His senior moments, (aka "Mr. Puddles," wandering around the stage, losing his trains of thought) have focused more scrutiny on Governor Palin, who is a caricature of all that is worst (lack of intellectual curiosity, disdain of science, yee-haw foreign policy) in the Bush/Cheney wing of the Republican party. McCain hired the same people who Roved him with racist robo calls in South Carolina's 2000 primary, only to expose them as incompetent tacticians with no strategy. He has put another nail in the coffin that was the Lee Atwater toolbox. Perhaps we have finally seen the termination of the line of ideological descendants from Nixon's USC Mafia.
Surrounding Governor Palin with the most incompetent staff in Vice-Presidential History was just icing on a sponge cake from the Theocratic wing of the party. To say that Jeremiah Wright was off limits, and then pick a running mate who's preacher is a witch doctor, is lasagna layers of ironic funny. Palin's religious ties make George W. Bush look agnostic. John McCain has reminded the world how close the Christo-Military Complex is to the button by putting an evolution-denying, rapture-ready, privacy-intruding, anti-constitutionalist just 270 electors and a 72-year-old heartbeat from the Oval Office. At this point in history, that may have been the best way to say "Vote Obama!"
McCain ran an awful a campaign without making it obvious. Every single blunder, erratic tactic change, communication breakdown, mumble, misstep, missed cue, upstaging, and excursion into the DMZ of indecency seems lurching, unplanned, and clumsy. Hidden in that dazed stagger, like the ignored grumblings of a drunk just up out of the gutter, lies the brilliance in the strategy. John McCain could have simply lost after a conventional campaign. At this moment in history it's doubtful any Republican could have won. But he went much further. John McCain has helped turn over the ugliest rocks on his side of the street. A lot of very scary vermin are running for cover. And McCain made it look like he fell into that gutter because of incompetence--a kind of political stupor. Plausible deniability. Brilliant.
I'm on to you, John McCain. Bush and Cheney splattered a mangled heap of fresh GOP road kill onto the highway of history, gasping for its last breath, twitching and bleeding. You put a bullet in its head. You put that steroid-raged, deregulation-powered, religiously-infused, ideology-driven, military-engorged, unitary-executive, torturing wing of the GOP out of its, and our, misery. I hope.
For that, I thank you, Senator.