The maverick.

As I write these words, Senator John McCain, F.O.B. (Friend of Bush) is delivering his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul. (I think I hear him yelling "Fight with me!" - watch out!) I have to say, just having had a good look at his audience, that is one of the whitest gatherings of people I have ever seen, and I grew up in the suburbs. After listening to bits and pieces of what has been said over the past few days, I'm getting a pretty good feel for what will be the overriding themes of the G.O.P. general election campaign. A bit different from 2004, it seems. That year, "service" was largely vicarious - i.e. honoring our people in uniform in the abstract (from 5,000 miles away) while denigrating the service record of the opposing party's nominee quite shamelessly (recall the band-aids with purple hearts printed on them being sported by the smirking manatees on the convention floor, almost none of whom had ever heard a shot fired in anger).

This year it's different - the veteran is on the G.O.P. ticket, and there'll be no diminishing his war record. In fact, there will be very little scrutiny of McCain's general attitude towards war as it relates to his worldview and his vision for American power in the coming decade. Judging by his past statements, McCain feels bitterness over the U.S. defeat in Vietnam. He has expressed the opinion that the failure of U.S. policy resulted from lack of resolve on the part of our political leaders, particularly L.B.J. (McCain is a little less hard on Nixon, whom he credits for bombing North Vietnam more relentlessly.) If this sounds at all familiar, it should: this has been the dominant conservative assessment of America's failure in Vietnam since the end of that war. McCain and other high profile P.O.W.'s have been at the core of that revisionist project from the very beginning, ever since the Nixon administration first demagogued on the P.O.W./M.I.A. issue during the war.

To say the least, this should probably be a point of some concern to voters. We're talking about a guy who believes in his heart that, if we had just bombed a little harder, we could have won the Vietnam war. Based on his perspective as a prisoner in Hanoi, McCain feels that Nixon's bombing drove North Vietnam to the bargaining table. And yet it is demonstrably true that the Paris Peace Accord signed in early 1973 was in essence the same as the agreement that could have been had in October 1972, prior to the massive U.S. terror bombing of Hanoi/Haiphong around Christmas of that year. Moreover, the accord reflected terms at least as favorable to Hanoi if not more so than those that had been put forward for many years prior to that - certainly more favorable than what the "Vietcong" (NLF) had offered in the early 1960s. All of the death, destruction, massive bombing, appalling chemical defoliation (that still kills today, incidentally)... all of that was for nothing. So... we should have bombed more? We dropped many times more bombs on Indochina than in all theatres of World War II combined, with most ordinance falling on South Vietnam, our supposed ally. Sorry, but the suggestion is simply bizarre and obscene.

This is the "maverick" we want making decisions that affect millions of lives? I think not... even if he brings a caribou-hunting evangelist back to Washington with him.