When Personality Morphs Into Policy

McCainism starts with patriotism. We're all patriotic, but for McCain it is at the center of his life. He titled his memoir "Faith of My Fathers"--America is his faith-based institution. On the stump, he describes his book as the story of three flawed individuals (his grandfather, father and himself) who found "redemption" in service to a cause larger than themselves: their country. Note the religious language. McCain, like the rest of us, is always struggling with selfishness. Patriotism is his antidote. This has policy implications. In fact, it leads to the four pillars of McCainism:

1. Use government to confront selfish interests. If you look back over his public career, you see that it is a series of confrontations with groups who, McCain feels, have put their own selfish interests above the national interest. He attacked the tobacco companies because he thought they were poisoning kids, lying to Congress and putting their own profits over America's needs. For similar reasons, he attacks the "special interests" in Washington, the ethanol subsidizers and the congressional pork-barrelers. When he got caught up in the Keating Five scandal a few years ago, he found himself succumbing to the temptations of the system. That fired his combative zeal.

President Theodore Roosevelt, McCain's hero, used to go after the "malefactors of great wealth," but the living politician McCain most resembles is New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, whose career is also a series of confrontations. As in Giuliani's case, this method is confusing when judged by the normal ideological categories. Sometimes the targets of McCain's attack are on the right, sometimes they are on the left. Sometimes he is better at identifying targets than crafting legislative remedies. But if he were president, this is how he would use the power of his office. He would attack selfish interests (as he saw them), whether lobbyists or teachers unions or pork-barrelers.

2. Reform government to combat cynicism. The central sentence of the McCain campaign was in a speech at Johns Hopkins last year: "We have a new patriotic challenge for a new century: declaring war on the cynicism that threatens our public institutions, our culture and, ultimately, our private happiness." That is why he is so obsessed by campaign-finance reform. He thinks Americans will never be good citizens if campaigns are sleazy. That's also why McCain wants to use so much of the surplus to pay down the debt rather than cut taxes. He argues that government made promises to future retirees, and if people are to believe in government, it must keep its promises. "You might think people would say about the surplus, 'Give me my money back,' " McCain says, "but people like you say we have an obligation to the next generation of Americans. Let's pay down the debt. . . . It's a sense of unselfishness."