When Personality Morphs Into Policy

3. Reform the welfare state and the regulatory bodies to keep America forever young. As a member and then chairman of the Commerce Committee, McCain has created a distinct style. Half the time he will be bashing businessmen for acting selfishly. But the other half he will be bashing regulators for stifling innovation or exercising anti-democratic power. McCain constantly invokes Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and, occasionally, John F. Kennedy. These were all vigorous men, who used government to help create a more vigorous country. He is a staunch deregulator because he believes only a lightly regulated economy will be vibrant. He supports legal immigration because immigrants invigorate the nation. He is not well-versed in most domestic-policy reforms, but he has staked out aggressive positions on school choice and Social Security privatization as ways to break up sclerotic systems and replace them with youthful, vigorous ones.

4. Use American might abroad to champion democracy and freedom. McCain loves talking about foreign affairs. In many ways, he clearly longs for the days of the Cold War, when the presidency was a foreign-affairs-dominated institution, when leaders were called on to play power politics to a great extent. He has a lofty and somewhat grand vision of the job.

Those days of nuclear brinkmanship are over, but still, more than the other candidates, he embraces America's role as a superpower. He rails against what he calls social-policy foreign policy, such as our intervention in Haiti, but, as in Kosovo, he believes in using U.S. might to confront enemies who threaten American values. Even in the debate in South Carolina, where there is much isolationist sentiment, he promoted a policy he calls "rogue-state rollback." He believes it is not enough to just try to contain dictators like Iraq's Saddam Hussein and Milosovic. The U.S. should actively support indigenous forces to undermine their regimes. Here, too, he is following his hero, Roosevelt, who believed in using American might to defend Judeo-Christian values.

For the past few years, conservatives have been trying to remoralize American culture. McCain has a similar goal but a different approach. The conservative establishment has, since the emergence of the Christian conservative movement, used religious language on moral and cultural matters. Its great foe is sin. McCain openly confesses his own sins, especially during his first marriage. Instead, he uses patriotic and secular language on moral and cultural issues. His great foe is selfishness. He doesn't talk much about the Monica S. Lewinsky scandal, but he always mentions Clinton's renting out of the Lincoln bedroom, and the rest of the 1996 fund-raising scandals.

He has found a way to talk about morality that doesn't make him seem censorious or prudish. In doing so, he has found--or perhaps it is more accurate to say stumbled onto--a policy approach that would project his personal character onto the national character.