Looking back, there are arguably hundreds of little things that derailed the Straight Talk Express, and quite a few big things as well. But one moment, one sentence out of tens of thousands, stands out as the metaphor for who John McCain was, what is wrong with the Republican party and, ultimately, why he lost.
It came late in the campaign, when McCain's campaign inexplicably seized on an obscure, unvetted, American whom McCain--urged on by irrational rightwing radio hosts--dubbed Joe the Plumber, a blue-collar man who stood everything to gain from voting for Obama, but stubbornly clung to the Republican Party that had eviscerated his very financial future for the past eight years. His loyalty obviously had nothing to do with economics; with Republicans it never is.
At a campaign rally, McCain introduced Joe to a roaring crowd. "An American hero," McCain acclaimed him. "Joe's my role model." In a campaign that had many jaw-dropping moments, this one went largely unnoticed. But let us examine the etiology of this moment and the absurdity it--and by example the whole Republican ideology--represented.
An American hero. Ah, where does one start? Let's start with the idea of American hero. What does that conjure up? The Founding Fathers. Betsy Ross. Abe Lincoln. Harriet Tubman. Florence Nightingale. The Wright Brothers. Thomas Edison. Babe Ruth. Walt Whitman. Teddy and Franklin Roosevelt. Audey Murphy. Dwight Eisenhower. Satchmo. Mickey Mantle. Frank Sinatra. Martin Luther King. Bob Dylan. Bill Gates. All, individuals who were extraordinary Americans. But McCain, unilaterally and without any further knowledge of him except that he fit into a hastily concocted gambit, declared to a crowd and an American television audience that Joe the Plumber was an American hero. In fact, Joe was an ordinary man who did nothing special except ask a candidate an innocuous question the answer to which rabid rightwing radio hosts attached sinister motives. McCain, kowed into following their lead, tried to turn Joe into a hero the same way a desperately lonely man tries to turn a blow-up doll into a human lover.
That Republican crowds went along with this absurdity said much about McCain and Republicans in general: to wit, they are willing to live in a fantasy land, where Republican leaders claim to be fiscal conservatives but spend the country into massive debt while enriching themselves and their puppetmasters; where their party panders to vehement Christian ideologues while claiming to be strict Constitutionalist; where a party that says it is for individual liberty barges through home and bedroom doors without knocking; where the party of Lincoln and Eisenhower became the party of Thurmond and Wallace. And they did it by borrowing a time-honored method of tyrants everywhere: they demonized innocents, preying upon the basest of human frailties, creating boogeymen. They constructed a myth of their own superiority by constantly pointing to those whom they labeled inferior, and then they crowned people heroes who were not heroes at all.
He's my role-model. Absurd? Or closer to the truth than we could have imagined? Either it was a throw away line or the truth. Either way, it described the real John McCain. Why did John McCain, around which a myth of greatness had been carefully nurtured over decades of political posturing, decide to link his reputation to that of Joe the Plumber, a man whom he knew nothing about, a man whom the campaign picked up off the side of the road? It was because McCain was grasping at authenticity, or what he imagined it to be.
McCain's inexplicable and instransigent opposition to the Martin Luther King national holiday spoke volumes about how inauthentic he was. He withstood ridicule and an assault on his own decency to do one thing: please his racist bosses. Then he nearly lost his entire career in politics to Charles Keating's cuckolding. Ultimately, he sold what little soul he had left to Karl Rove and William Kristol in a last desperate attempt to be president. All authenticity had been drained from him, and he knew it. He grasped at something, anything, to fill the void. Enter Joe the Plumber. Of all Americans, John McCain's role model. Really? A vaccuum will suck up anything close; it does not discriminate. In reality, McCain's role model was not Joe the Plumber. It was a lie, masquerading as truth. It was the Republican party.
In time, Joe the Plumber, Sarah and Todd Palin, and the rest of that failed campaign will recede into the darkest shadows of history. And it will not be the last time that an American political party puts forth a hollow man, and it won't be the last time that a large segment of America fails to notice. This is a lesson to Democrats for all time. This time America dodged a political bullet, but only because the hollow man's opponent was a solid man.