It was obviously a slip of the tongue, but it was a gaffe that underscored an important point: John McCain seems to think he’s already the president.
Standing behind a lectern in Michigan this week, with two trusted senators ready to do his bidding, John McCain seemed to forget for a moment that he was only running for president.
Asked about his tough rhetoric on the ongoing conflict in Georgia, McCain began: “If I may be so bold, there was another president …”
He caught himself and started again: “At one time, there was a president named Ronald Reagan who spoke very strongly about America’s advocacy for democracy and freedom.”
Another president? As in
, President McCain harkening back to one of his presidential predecessors?
Now, truth be told, I don’t much care about a verbal slip-up like this. The point, however, is that, after weeks of palaver about Barack Obama being “presumptuous,” John McCain has taken this week to play Pretend President, in large part because he felt like the conflict in Georgia gave him a good excuse to do so.
In this case, it goes well beyond referring to himself as the president, and includes near-constant direct discussions with a foreign head of state during a military conflict, and dispatching campaign surrogates to a war zone.
“We talk about how there’s only one president at a time, so the idea that you would send your own emissaries and really interfere with the process is remarkable,” said Lawrence Korb, a Reagan Defense Department official who now acts as an informal adviser to the Obama campaign. “It’s very risky and can send mixed messages to foreign governments…. They accused Obama of being presumptuous, but he didn’t do anything close to this.”
The extent of McCain’s involvement in the military conflict in Georgia appears remarkable among presidential candidates, who traditionally have kept some distance from unfolding crises out of deference to whoever is occupying the White House. The episode also follows months of sustained GOP criticism of Democratic Sen. Barack Obama, who was accused of acting too presidential for, among other things, briefly adopting a campaign seal and taking a trip abroad that included a huge rally in Berlin. […]
But McCain and his aides say his tough rhetoric on the Georgia crisis, along with his personal familiarity with the region, underscores the foreign policy expertise he would bring to the White House.
But does it underscore policy expertise? There’s a difference between being engaged and being knowledgeable — McCain is working the phones and pretending to be a head of state, but what is it, exactly, that he’s contributing to the diplomatic process? He can exclaim, “We’re all Georgians now,” but is the depth of his understanding of the geo-political dynamics? McCain can probably find Georgia on a map, but what has he done this week that suggests he knows what he’s talking about?
Josh Marshall made the case the other day that this argument is largely backwards. McCain is proving himself a leader; he’s proving himself a presumptuous nut who longs for the days of Cold War simplicity.
[W]atching John McCain speak about the Georgian crisis … should deeply worry anyone interested in a sane US foreign policy — or the safety of their children. One arch joke from the earlier part of this decade was that the one good thing about the neocons obsession with getting into a war with Iraq was that it distracted them from their much bigger obsessions — ratcheting up Cold Wars with China and/or Russia.
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/208137.phpThe people that are pulling McCain’s strings are the people who want to push us into a new Cold War with the Russians — and ironically and a bit improbably with the Chinese too. But the Russians are probably more willing to oblige us since their power remains limited to oil reserves and military power. In other words, they’re people McCain’s folks can understand and vice versa.
McCain is going out of his way to cast this as a replay of 1938 and 1939. Is it really in our interest to get into a renewed Cold War with Russia right now? Do we have the military resources for a proxy/advisor war in the Caucasus at the moment? Should we find ourselves in the situation where the Russians want to reassert their sway in Eastern Europe, we would have some very serious and consequential decisions to make. But this just is not that. The key is that McCain, both in terms of policy and temperament, wants to court that result.
It’s sort of funny when he’s just an unhinged senator. But think for a moment where we’d be if this man were president right now, as he may well be in six months. This man takes the counsel of the people who got us into the Iraq War. On foreign policy, he is in league with the people who were so extreme they’ve now largely been kicked out of the Bush administration. People like John Bolton and others like him.
It’s beyond Obama or political strategy or dinging McCain on this or that policy.
This man is simply too dangerous and unstable to be president.